By all accounts, including those of AIBS Education Programs Manager Susan Musante, the big NSF-funded meeting earlier this month in DC on Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education and Mobilizing the Community for Change was highly successful and is already generating a number of exciting follow-up activities.
The Co-Chairs are:
Carol A. Brewer - Associate Dean of the Colleges Arts and Science and Professor of Biology, University of Montana (and AIBS Board member)
Alan I. Leshner - Chief Executive Officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Executive Publisher, Science
The project's website at www.visionandchange.org includes a growing number of resources, videos, and slides from the meeting's presentations and discussion groups.
The project's Facebook Group, run by Carol Brewer and Yolanda George, Deputy Director, AAAS Education and Human Resources Programs, already has about 100 members and welcomes anyone who is interested in improving undergraduate biology education to become a member of its virtual community and help develop an action plan for moving forward.
To quote from the Group's description:
Both the disciplines of biology and of science education have undergone a revolution. The major focus of the biological sciences - understanding life - remains unchanged, but breakthrough discoveries of the second half of the 20th century have changed the basic nature of the questions asked, while new and emerging technologies are changing the ways key questions are addressed. In undergraduate science education, new approaches and new technologies are also emerging based on evolving theories of learning. New developments in higher education have changed the manner in which people pursue higher education, and there is also a growing appreciation of the need to broaden participation within the sciences by advancing the education of all students, including those from underrepresented groups and those who will enter careers outside of science.
Given the radical changes in the nature of the science of biology and what we have learned about effective ways to teach, this is an opportune time to address the biology we teach so that it better represents the biology we do. The goal of this Facebook group is to provide a virtual forum for interested educators to focus on undergraduate biology education by engaging them in shared, directed, provocative, and ongoing discussions that lead to action in the immediate future.
We will use this site to follow-up on the July 2009 Conference hosted by AAAS. We hope members will post ideas, links to teaching tools and approaches, and alerts for future meetings. Together, we will develop a blueprint for change in biology education and, critically, an action plan.
[Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-0923874]
