Posts Tagged ‘STEM’
We want people to get jobs. No doubt about it. To get jobs these days, people need both broad learning and practical skills. In this series of posts, I have been presenting exemplars among community colleges of programs that accomplish these goals and connect K-12 and college learning, all with the intention of increasing people’s success in getting jobs. These civically minded colleges are taking their place as centers for learning aligned along the continuum from school to college to university in their communities. From these highly responsible and resilient institutions, I am learning a thing or two about a blended model of liberal education as practical education—a robust model of what sustainable learning for employment ought to be in the twenty-first century.
A recent visit to Oxnard College, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Ventura County, California, has helped me articulate what it means for a college to invest deeply in the vitality of its community. Oxnard fosters applied learning in the arts and sciences, and liberal education in career and technical education (CTE). It is a thing of beauty. Driving to Oxnard, you traverse vast strawberry fields; you’re near the Pacific coast and the Channel Islands National Park. The massive agricultural enterprise abutting the coastal sanctuary reminds me how challenging it is to negotiate across different worlds within higher education, but also how urgently we need future generations of students to be ready for stewardship and civic responsibility as well as for workforce success.
By: Michael Kerchner
Undergraduate research experiences have proven themselves to be transformative to students’ development and are widely implemented in the form of ten-week summer internships hosted on the home campus of faculty principal investigators. Some of the projects in these summer internships have outcomes with clear global relevance – e.g., strategies to assist in the eradication of pandemic disease outbreaks in Africa and elsewhere on the planet. Yet, arguably, these experiences’ global relevance may be diminished if students and faculty have no opportunity to immerse themselves in a culture that is unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Now, some institutions of higher learning are expanding the scope of undergraduate research to feature cross-cultural immersion as a mechanism for insuring that a truly transformative learning outcome is achieved.
Several institutional programs were featured in a session at the AAC&U 2011 Annual Meeting. One originates from the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO). The experience begins with a weeklong introductory element on the UCO campus. During the following weeks, a group of students and faculty travel to Greece and Turkey and visit historical and cultural sites to obtain a “boots on the ground” perspective of the region and its peoples. For the latter portion of the summer, faculty and student teams work on different research projects in collaboration with teams from the host institution: Uludag University in Bursa, Turkey. While the research progresses during the week, there are opportunities in the evenings and weekends for continued cultural explorations in the surrounding region.
By: Susan Elrod
Friday morning of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting, a panel of experts in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning and assessment was convened to present different tools and resources for assessing learning in the STEM disciplines. The focus was on interdisciplinary learning, and the room was filled with an enthusiastic crowd of 150 people.
Charlie Blaich (Wabash Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, Wabash College) emphasized that good assessment starts with knowing who your students are from the very start. In other words, what experiences, knowledge, and expectations do they bring to your institution as first-year students? Charlie presented results from a STEM-focused analysis of data from the Wabash National Study, which utilizes multiple metrics to analyze the critical factors influencing liberal arts education. Here are a few highlights:
By: Susan Elrod
On January 21st, a panel of leading experts in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education set the stage for a conversation with academic leaders regarding the key leverage points and critical questions Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) should be focusing on as we formulate an action agenda for the next five years. Dan Sullivan, president emeritus at St. Lawrence University and a major player in creating the PKAL-AAC&U alliance, introduced Peter Bruns (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Jim Gentile (Research Corporation), Shirley Malcom (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), and Cora Marrett (National Science Foundation), who provided their perspectives on the current state of undergraduate STEM education reform. Read the rest of this entry »
