A STEM Reform Solar System: Academic Departments and Institutional Elements

This interactive session examines the complex institutional environment in which innovations to undergraduate STEM education take place. Our goals are to engage participants in identifying the key findings from the AAU's Leveraging Study, apply them to participants' individual settings, and generate new ideas and strategies for systemic change. Over a two-year period, we conducted multiple site visits at eight AAU public and private universities. We facilitated 222 individual or small group meetings and interviewed 395 unique STEM staff, faculty, chairs, deans, and provosts to better understand what factors influence the implementation, institutionalization, and coordination of multiple reform efforts within a single campus to improve undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.

To visualize the complex institutional environment of undergraduate STEM reform, we imagine a solar system model in which the academic department is the sun, exerting a powerful influence on faculty decisions about teaching and learning through its structures, policies, practices, and in the values of its faculty. We also identified eight key institutional elements that we envision as planets, orbiting around the department, influencing its behaviors and actions. Through a balance of different types of activities (e.g., individual/paired reflection, a hands-on, interactive "mapping" exercise, small and large group discussion) participants are engaged in unpacking the analogy of a STEM reform solar system, applying the findings to their own institutional settings, and sharing strategic approaches for supporting undergraduate STEM education reforms in teaching and learning.