PULSE: Helping Departments to Transform Undergraduate Education

Interested in improving "student success"? ... providing environments in which students learn skills for career success? ... deepening DEI efforts? ... working towards your vision and assessing your progress? The Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE), a national network of university faculty and administrators, can help. PULSE began as a collaboration between the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to stimulate department-level implementation of the recommendations in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. For more than a decade, PULSE has helped STEM departments at all types of higher education institutions to align with national education initiatives to develop inclusive, student-centered, evidence-based practices to graduate more students who are workforce ready and reflect the diversity of American society. The department is PULSE's focus because it is there that many curriculum and pedagogy decisions are made. For departments to change, they must engage in a cycle of continuous, data-driven self-assessment and improvement.

We will provide an overview of PULSE, including our Theory of Change, key programs, and website resources. Additionally, we will illustrate how PULSE's Recognition and Ambassadors programs and regional institutes/workshops support departmental dialogue to achieve key goals. The PULSE Recognition Program provides tools for self-assessment, including the PULSE rubrics, and collaborative strategies that foster cycles of improvement. Recognition visits provide feedback on departments' alignment with national education initiatives. The PULSE Ambassadors Program deploys teams of trained facilitators to guide a department in crafting a shared vision and action plan for undergraduate education.

This poster is intended for faculty members and institutional change makers (e.g., chairs, vice provosts, teaching-and-learning leaders, etc.). Although PULSE's focus is on STEM fields, our activities can assist all disciplines, particularly those considering and implementing change to address issues of DEI. Our programs focus on department-level change through a collaborative process that meaningfully engages all faculty members. Our poster will help attendees understand how those programs effectively use the PULSE Rubrics to enable departments to determine the extent of their implementation of evidence-based practices and actions to promote teaching excellence and students' learning, identify inequities in the education of Persons Excluded due to Ethnicity or Race (PEERs), and work collaboratively to outline plans and develop strategies to transform their curricula. We will share perspectives about the usefulness of the PULSE Rubrics to engage institutions and advance DEI work.