Blog
Change Topics (Working Groups)
Target Audience
- College/University Staff 53 matches
- First Generation College Students 1 match
- First-year College Students 2 matches
- Graduate Students 16 matches
- In-Service K12 Teachers 6 matches
- Institution Administration 54 matches
- Non-tenure Track Faculty 53 matches
- Post-doctoral Fellows 19 matches
- Pre-Service K12 Teachers 2 matches
- Teaching/Learning Assistants 8 matches
- Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty 58 matches
- Transfer Students 1 match
- Undergraduate Majors 2 matches
- Undergraduate Non-Majors 2 matches
- Underrepresented Minority Students 2 matches
Announcing the Curated Teaching Evaluation Change Initiative Repository
Target Audience: Institution Administration, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Course Evaluation, Institutional Systems:Incentive/Reward Systems, Evaluating Teaching, Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion
The Aligning Faculty Incentives with Systemic Change Working Group is excited to report we havecurated a repository of teaching evaluation change initiatives to support national efforts at the systemic change of faculty teaching evaluation. Teaching evaluation is an area of critical focus for systemic change efforts to align undergraduate students' experience in STEM courses with best practices for inclusive learning (NASEM, 2020; Boyer 2030 Commission, 2023). Since the academy is deeply resistant to change (Wise et al., 2022), it is critical to share innovations that have successfully impacted teaching evaluation with the systemic change community (e.g., Simonson et al., 2023). We have created the Curated Teaching Evaluation Initiative Repository to meet this need. For the repository, we define an initiative as a concerted program or set of related efforts that have been undertaken to change the policies, processes, or practices around teaching evaluation. These initiatives are not limited to resources for individual faculty to change their teaching practices but instead describe efforts that have been successful in creating systemic change. More
Creating space for critical conversations in chemistry: Lessons Learned from organizing DEIJR Symposia at national meetings of the American Chemical Society
Target Audience: Institution Administration, Post-doctoral Fellows, Graduate Students, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Underrepresented Minority Students, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Accessibility, Institutional Systems:Evaluating Teaching, Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Outreach:Presentations/Talks
Creating space for discussions and presentations about issues of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Respect (DEIJR) is a means of building momentum for systemic change in discipline-based education research (DBER) communities. In this two-part blog, I, Guizella Rocabado, and co-organizer Stephanie Feola, will share the lessons we've learned throughout this change process. In this first installment, we will describe the lessons learned from instituting the change of creating a space for DEIJR research and conversations during the American Chemical Society National Meetings. In the second installment, we will share how the focus of the presentations, the nature of the discussions, and theorizing about DEIJR have changed since we began organizing the symposium in 2019 and draw implications for systemic change. More
2023 Transforming Institutions Conference Takeaways
Target Audience: Post-doctoral Fellows, Graduate Students, College/University Staff, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Institution Administration, Teaching/Learning Assistants
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Institutional Systems:Incentive/Reward Systems, Supporting Students:Learning Communities, Professional Development:Accessibility, Supporting Students:Student Engagement, Institutional Systems:Evaluating Teaching
The 2023 Transforming Institutions Conference was held June 12-13, 2023, in Minneapolis, MN. With this most recent convening, we are proud to have brought together change researchers and change agents for 12 years. The meeting was made possible by the efforts of a conference planning committee consisting of 10 change agents convened by NSEC (Network of STEM Education Centers) and ASCN (Accelerating Systemic Change Network), supported by 40 reviewers from the systemic change community. Now that the dust has settled, we would like to share some key takeaways, attendee feedback, and future conference plans to continue to build momentum for our community to thrive with change. More
Learning from Change Leaders: Reflections from the 2023 Transforming Institutions Conference
Target Audience: Post-doctoral Fellows, Institution Administration, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, College/University Staff, Non-tenure Track Faculty
Program Components: Institutional Systems:Interdepartmental Collaboration, Incentive/Reward Systems, Strategic Planning
The Change Leaders working group led a workshop and hosted a breakfast conversation to bring together emergent and established change leaders at the 2023 Transforming Institutions Conference in Minneapolis, June 12-13, 2023. At the workshop, we met change leaders who are hard at work on their campuses in roles as faculty members, post-docs, educational technology staff, center for teaching and learning staff, STEM center staff, and university administrators. More
From Civic Engagement to Civic Courage—Science Education's Next Chapter
Target Audience: Graduate Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Pedagogical Training, Supporting Students:Student Engagement, Outreach:Inter-Institutional Collaboration
It is hard to escape the fact that the relationship of evidence-based or scientific thinking to civic life in a democracy--which had been acknowledged by the science advocacy community for over a century--has attained a new urgency in the age of fake news and alternative facts. Recently a colleague remarked that the project I helped found and now lead, Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) "was ahead of its time," and I've been reflecting on that idea. Historians love to quote the philosopher Kierkegaard who observed, "we live forward, but understand backward." And I've spent a lot of time this year trying to "understand backward" the broader cultural and educational context that produced SENCER to consider whether SENCER was indeed "ahead," or more accurately an embodiment of the best thinking available in its own time.[1] I'm especially concerned with considering what elements of our collective past can support a future of civically and socially-engaged learning in science, despite a dramatically altered academic landscape. This changed landscape includes the precarity of faculty status and autonomy, the contraction of institutional finances, unprecedented student needs and expectations, and frankly, the decline of administrative leadership in the face of political pressure, which has provided much less space for creativity and academic innovation. More
