This faculty development project, by its emphasis on action at an institutional level, is enhancing the capabilities of groups of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) faculty on over 1,200 campuses to strengthen undergraduate student learning. Building from the current base of 642 campuses that have been actively engaged with PKAL over the past five years, this project is doubling the number of colleges and universities actively working to develop STEM faculty so as to strengthen student learning. Activities include a series of workshops and events designed to help build and expand the community of professional organizations, universities and colleges, and faculty engaged in promoting excellence in undergraduate education in STEM. In addition to proceedings focusing on effective ways to change campus and departmental approaches to undergraduate education, this series of workshops is providing the information necessary to build action plans and prototypes for: a STEM Faculty Development Handbook; an interactive web presence that will serve to foster the development of these social networks and to disseminate the Handbook and other materials developed for the project; and a research agenda for following the course of change on campuses and determining effective change agents.
The intellectual merit of this project is its explicit connection at the institutional level between what undergraduate STEM students should know and be able to do and what their faculty should know and be able to do. The project adapts research-based, real-world, active-learning pedagogical practices in constructing faculty development activities and is developing a research component that seeks to determine the effectiveness of these strategies, and the critical role that social networks play in promoting and achieving meaningful change.
The broader impact of this project is that it moves the locus of transformative change from the single STEM faculty member or department to the institutional, state, and national level. By partnering with regional institutional networks, such as the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, as well as with national organizations, such as the Association of American Colleges & Universities, the Council on Undergraduate Research, the Mathematical Association of America, and others, the project pushes discussions of goals for student learning beyond those concerned with individual classes or courses of study, involving a wide range of stakeholders in the work of setting these goals and ensuring that students achieve them. It leverages the work of faculty members through their disciplinary societies, giving them the support to take risks in their efforts and providing professional recognition for their work. This model of diffusion builds on the work of Everett Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations, 2003, Free Press) whose research on the diffusion of innovations indicates the value of building and leveraging networks that include people who "share common meanings, beliefs, and mutual understandings" and those that span "sets of socially dissimilar individuals in a system".
