Trinity University of San Antonio, TX is awarded a grant to support the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). PULSE will bring together 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows in a year-long, facilitated effort to identify the environment necessary for constant and robust evolution in undergraduate life science education in response to the call for action articulated in the Vision and Change report published in 2011. Fellows will be selected from among our nation's most driven, passionate, and accomplished chairs, former chairs, and deans - people in a position to initiate and sustain change. The process starts with a workshop to identify approaches and coordinate efforts. It is followed by an intense period of "field work" where initial ideas are tried, assessed and refined. And it culminates in a second workshop aimed at refining thinking, tools, documents, and approaches. The goal is to understand and establish an environment in departments and institutions that has the right selective pressures to foster the constant evolution of learning approaches for undergraduate life science education.
The PI team from Trinity University proposes to support this complex, year-long activity by serving as mentors for the Fellows and by coordinating communication and logistics between NSF and KnowInnovation (KI). KI will play a crucial role in overall project oversight, PULSE website development, and assistance in selecting the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows. The website, in particular, will be the location for announcing the PULSE project, collecting application information in collaboration with the American Institute for Biological Sciences, and facilitating communication during the eight month fieldwork period via discussion groups, blogs, file sharing, social networking between the Fellows and between Fellows and the life sciences community at large. The Project Manager at KI will be responsible for the day-to-day oversight of this effort and for coordinating communication among the PULSE partners. The experience of KI is a strong addition to this unique and exciting program designed to mobilize change in undergraduate life sciences education. The award fits the EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) because of its high potential for producing an implementation framework for transforming biology departments within the nation's colleges and universities.
The results of the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows project will move institutional reform efforts forward. Fellows will be a diverse group of leaders from research universities, comprehensive/public universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. The proposed activities are expected to make a significant contribution to an unprecedented transformation of the undergraduate biology education community's understanding of institutional barriers to change and of strategies for overcoming them. It is possible that the focus on department chairs for catalyzing educational reforms in biology might be a model for other disciplines as they work on issues of attracting and retaining undergraduate students in STEM disciplines.
This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to support Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.
Over the past decade numerous funding agencies and professional societies have called for the reform of undergraduate life science education to better prepare students for the demands and challenges of the 21st century. The publication Vision and Change in Undergraduate Life Science Education: A Call to Action (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011) provided a compelling set of recommendations focusing on learning objectives and competencies for life science curricula. With the help of program officers from The National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIH), the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) community of scientists was launched to promote department-level implementation of Vision and Change recommendations at the national level. This particular NSF-funded project enabled a group of 40 PULSE Leadership Fellows to meet, discuss, and field-test strategies designed to stimulate systemic changes within biology departments at all types of undergraduate educational institutions across the country. One of the fundamental tools produced from this project is the PULSE Framework for Vision and Change (see attached figure and www.pulsecommunity.org/page/pulse-framework). This Framework provides for an iterative, flexible plan for departmental and institutional change and is supported with a set of tools and mechanisms that aid departments as they move along the change continuum. The tools produced include a Vision and Change Online Toolkit for strategic planning (www.callutheran.edu/Academic_Programs/Departments/BioDev/PULSE/resources.html) and a Vision and Change Rubric (www.pulsecommunity.org/page/v-c-certification) that allow departments to evaluate their level of adoption of Vision and Change recommendations to ultimately seek Vision and Change Certification. PULSE Fellows also established the PULSE Ambassadors Program (www.pulsecommunity.org/page/ambassador-program) to provide advice, guidance, and resources to help departments to advance Vision and Change implementation. Lastly, this funding resulted in numerous regional groups of PULSE educators that are meeting regularly and holding workshops to advance the implementation of Vision and Change nationally.
