An award has been made to Washington State University to organize and conduct a workshop in support of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). This workshop is scheduled for February 22-24, 2013 in Seattle, WA. Last September, the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH, and NSF) 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 members? 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 in Seattle, WA for six of the Leadership Fellows from a variety of institution types located within the Pacific Northwest. At least one of these Fellows is a member of each of the larger PULSE working groups. The beginning of the workshop on February 22 will coincide with the regular meeting of the Biology Education Research Group at the University of Washington that serves institutions in the Puget Sound area. The major goal of this workshop is to plan a regional conference on adopting the Vision and Change recommendations that will include students, faculty, and administrators. Institutions in the Pacific Northwest have a strong history already of working together on a variety of educational reforms and regional educational networks. This regional conference will expand the impact of PULSE by reaching out to institutions from states such as Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho that are currently not represented by the PULSE Leadership Fellows. This regional network will be a "laboratory" for testing the resources being developed by the four PULSE working groups, and the regional focus of this workshop is expected to serve as a model for meetings of other groups of Fellows with members of the life sciences community. Results from the workshop and the larger conference will be shared with the life sciences community, primarily via the www.pulsecommunity.org website.
The goal of the PULSE initiative is to catalyze systemic change in undergraduate Biology education throughout the country. Adoption of the Vision and Change principles will lead to 1) increased student learning, 2) an increased number of students that enter and are retained in undergraduate biology programs, and 3) increased retention rates for students from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in biology. These systemic changes in biology education are necessary to provide the educated workforce that the United States will need to continue to be the world’s center of scientific innovation in the 21st century. Funds from this grant were used to support a planning meeting in February 2013 attended by the Northwest PULSE Leadership Fellows. The primary goal of this project was to design and implement the First Annual Northwest PULSE Workshop held in October 2013. The purpose of this Workshop was to catalyze the adoption of Vision and Change in Departments and Institutions across a broad, diverse set of schools ranging from Community Colleges to Research 1 Universities, spread over an extended geographical area encompassing the states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. The Intellectual Merit of our project is that the Northwest PULSE Leadership group has developed one of the first major efforts to arise from the PULSE project. During our October 2013 event and subsequent 9 months of engagement with the resulting Northwest Community of Practice, we successfully applied the tools developed by the PULSE workgroups to affect the adoption of Vision and Change across 17 institutions. The Broader Impact of this project is that the Northwest PULSE Regional Network is serving as a model for developing similar PULSE networks in other regions of the country, including the Southwest, Southeast, Midwest and Great Plains, and Western New England. Further, our project has created synergy between multiple Life Science Educational networks in the Northwest as we collectively work towards Departmental and Institutional transformation using Vision and Change.
