An award has been made to California Lutheran University to organize and conduct a workshop in support of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). This workshop is scheduled for March 1-3, 2013 in St. Louis, MO. Last September, the PULSE partners appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in the undergraduate life science education community. All Fellows met in October, 2012 and have since organized into four working groups to address different challenges to reforming how biology is taught at all types of undergraduate institutions. The Vision and Change Leadership Fellows are focusing on how life science departments can encourage and reward faculty member?s efforts to improve undergraduate life sciences education. Such improvements should increase student learning, should increase retention rates for students in the sciences, and should prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens.
The current award is to fund a workshop for twelve of the Leadership Fellows who are part of the "Spreading the Pulse" working group. This group has the overall goal of determining how to assist those departments that request help in implementing recommendations made in the Vision and Change report. The working group will engage the entire pulse community to identify, train, and deploy teams of Ambassadors who will visit different departments over the next year. The Ambassadors will help departments evaluate their progress so far, then provide guidelines, resources, planning recommendations, and assessment rubrics being developed by the other working groups. Therefore, representatives from the other three working groups will be invited to the workshop so that the activities of all four working groups can be better coordinated throughout this fieldwork phase in advance of a second meeting of all the Fellows in June, 2013. The guidelines from this workshop will be shared with the life sciences community, primarily via the www.pulsecommunity.org website.
PULSE is a joint effort launched collaboratively by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health/NIGMS (NIH/NIGMS) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in 2012 in order to stimulate systemic changes within biology departments at all types of post-secondary educational institutions. The effort is based upon the findings from the 2011 Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action and other similar calls for transformation of undergraduate life sciences education. Forty PULSE Fellows were charged with developing a framework for V&C implementation at the department level, nationally. During the 2012-2013 academic year, the Fellows used meetings, conference calls, advice from the PULSE steering committee, and input from the PULSE community to develop the PULSE Framework for V&C Change. One of the Fellows working groups (designated Spreading the PULSE or StP) is devising a program to recruit, train, and organize a group of facilitators, called V&C Ambassadors, to assist departments in instituting curricular change. The award, Meeting of PULSE Leadership Fellows - Spreading the PULSE Subgroup, was used to provide a face-to-face meeting of the StP group of PULSE fellows in order to develop plans for our Ambassador Training Program and to plan for future funding initiatives to launch pilot versions of PULSE Ambassador visitations to interested institutions. Also, the meeting allowed us to plan and refine the PULSE Online Toolkit, a collection of resources that Ambassadors and departments can use in promoting Vision and Change reforms.
