These minutes are a composite of three Reinvention Center regional network meetings: Mid-Atlantic-DC area (April 4, 2003), West Coast-Berkeley (April 25, 2003), and Midwest-Chicago (June 6, 2003)

Goals of the meeting

The Reinvention Center is now three years old, and the regional networks have been meeting for two years. This was the fourth round of meetings. While the first three rounds consisted mostly of discussion of broad issues central to undergraduate education at research universities and the various roles the Reinvention Center and participating universities could play in promoting change, there was a general sense that it was now time to begin translating some of the ideas that had been set forth into meaningful action. To begin this process, we organized this last group of meetings around three areas that are integral to research universities and in which the Center and interested campuses might undertake experimental projects.

The goals were to enable campuses to share what they have been doing with regard to these elements and to learn from their colleagues, to use this information to discern patterns that may help individual campuses with their own efforts, and finally, to go beyond the individual campus level and consider multi-campus approaches to these topics in order to foster collaboration and collective action and leverage resources and funding.

Funding agencies, which are increasingly moving to consortial patterns of funding, are encouraging the Center to take the lead in organizing multi-campus projects that address the interests and priorities of the Center's constituents. They would like to see different campuses tackling the same issue or working to achieve the same broad goals, but tackling those goals in their own ways and informing one another. Dr. Katkin asked the group to think about what is common on their campuses and how the challenges might be collectively addressed.

The meetings began with a brief summary of current Center activities, including the outcomes and recommendations from the conference.

1. Conference Outcomes and Recommendations

2. Current Center Initiatives

Jodi Wesemann of the ACS noted that the best way to tap into disciplinary societies in any discipline is to involve the faculty who govern them and constitute their membership. Members of a society's education committee may be able to initiate discussion and action on a topic. Several faculty suggested that the best approach might be to start with content and do things within the venue of the society's education committee or program, bringing in larger groups of faculty from research universities. Faculty want to hear about things that are working in environments that are similar to the one in which they work. Together, the Center and faculty, can help associations figure out how to talk about education beyond the syllabus level. They might address such questions as: how do you bring research generally and your research in particular into the classroom? how do you institutionalize undergraduate research? what does it mean to do undergraduate research 1) within your discipline; 2) across disciplines? how can your own research benefit from having undergraduates participate? how do you mentor undergraduates so that they develop "life" skills as well as skills specific to their area of research. Having such discussions within the context of disciplinary association forums also has the potential to promote strong networking.

3. Potential Funding Opportunities

For the Center

For Your Campus

It was recommended that the URCs be funded at $100,000-$500,000 per year, preferably up to five years. Proposals from allied areas such as molecular biology and materials science will be welcomed. A handout summarizing the main points of the initiative was distributed. Check the NSF Web site for more information on this initiative.

The Reinvention encourages campuses to consider ways in which the Center can help them to develop and implement educational outreach, assessment, and dissemination activities in conjunction with grant-funded programs. The NSF, for instance, requires all proposals to explicitly address the "Broader Impact" of the funded activity, including the integration of research and education. The Reinvention Center can:

CAMPUS REPORTS AND BREAKOUT SESSIONS

Each campus was asked to briefly describe one or two initiatives related to the topics around which the meeting was organized: integrating graduate and undergraduate education; forming partnerships with key campus units and taking advantage of the wealth of resources; and transforming large lecture courses. Following the reports, participants divided into breakout groups to address these issues in greater depth. Each breakout group was asked to identify one or two promising practices that can be used and built upon, and to identify areas on which further initiatives -- that go beyond what is currently done and move existing practices to the next level -- should focus, especially with an eye toward multi-campus projects.

A number of common themes were raised in the group discussion. Expanded enrollments have put pressures on virtually all the campuses, as have diminished resources. As faculty at all three network meetings pointed out, campuses are trying to build a culture that values undergraduate education, but it cannot be done for free and resource issues always come to the fore.

Summaries combining the reports of the breakout sessions at all three network meetings, are described below, along with a small number of especially innovative practices. Many other noteworthy initiatives however were also presented. We would also like to include links to these initiatives, as well as other effective programs on your campuses, on the Reinvention Center Web site. We invite you to send us the following information on all initiatives you would like referenced on the Web site:

-Name and brief description (1-3 sentences)
-Contact person's name, title, email address and phone no.
-Web site address

I. Integrating Graduate and Undergraduate Education

Linking graduate and undergraduate education is a new priority on several campuses, in part because campuses are increasingly aware that many of their doctoral students will go on to careers at primarily undergraduate institutions and therefore need teaching experiences and training to help develop them as "future faculty." Promoting this linkage requires a partnership between a central authority (i.e. the Graduate School, the Office for Undergraduate Education) and the discipline. On more and more campuses, teaching resource centers, schools of education, and individual departments are working together to provide teaching practica for graduate students. Many campuses now hold "learning" forums in which graduate students and faculty share best practices within and across disciplines.

Several institutions offer certificates in college teaching to graduate students who complete a training program. Some institutions participate in the Preparing Future Faculty program in which their students also receive experience teaching at institutions other than research universities. In addition to classroom experiences, graduate students - especially in the sciences -- often mentor undergraduates informally in vertically-integrated lab teams that include faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates and in summer REU programs. Service learning offers new opportunities as well. Campuses hope to expand and formalize these opportunities.

Promising Practices
The breakout groups identified a number of promising practices, though noted that in many cases they are easier to implement in the sciences than in the humanities, and in some cases science graduate directors are not willing to give up their graduate students to let them teach. The practices described here fall into four broad areas:

Graduate Students as Research Mentors

Graduate Students as Peers in Courses and in Informal Settings

Professional Training

Graduate Students as Advisors on Career and Graduate School Choices

An unusual example of a collaborative project in the humanities that involves both graduates and undergraduates is the University at Buffalo's 'LiTgloss' project (http://wings.buffalo.edu/litgloss/), designed to facilitate English speakers' reading of texts in other languages with which they have some familiarity. 'LiTgloss' is an online collection of texts from languages ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese (with most texts drawn from French, German, and Spanish), presented in their original language with annotations, translations, and (in some cases) sound recordings that are revealed by clicking on the word or phrase in question. The project draws on the expertise of foreign-speaking graduate students as well as on that of advanced undergraduates who are majoring in a foreign language.

Areas for Future Development
The DC group was asked to develop areas for a proposal to the NSF for an assessable multi-campus 'intervention' aimed at integrating graduate and undergraduate education. The following ideas were put forth, ranked in order of their feasibility and assessability on multiple campuses:

  1. Educating graduate students (and their disciplinary directors) on the value of undergraduate education so they can be enticed out of the lab.
  2. Raising awareness among graduate students of relevant research on learning, including cognitive science and applications to teaching.
  3. Connecting science to other disciplines, including training both graduate and undergraduate students in the sciences to be able to communicate their discipline to others.
  4. Educating faculty about the value of mentoring undergraduates, so they will support graduate students doing so.

Recommendations

II. Forming Partnerships with Key Campus Units and External Organizations

Partnerships with units such as the university libraries, academic support and instructional technology departments, teaching resource centers, offices that coordinate undergraduate research, writing centers, service learning units, academic advising centers, and student groups, can promote and enhance undergraduate education. There are a number of good examples of such partnerships.

Promising Practices

Some universities draw on resources unique to their location:

Universities are increasingly endeavoring to coordinate activities among the multiple units on their campus that have responsibility for aspects of undergraduate education.

Areas for Future Development: Recommendations

The Center would like to follow up on this recommendation immediately and is looking for good models. If your campus has one, please send us the Web address.

III. Transforming Large Lecture Courses

The large lecture format is a given at research universities, particularly in lower-division courses, but there are ways to re-conceive these courses to emphasize experiential and inquiry-based learning and engage the full range of students. Faculty need to re-think the goals of these courses, to determine what students should take away from them, rather than focus on "what should I teach." On many campuses, teaching research centers offer services -- such as grants for innovation, workshops, and technological support -- to both faculty and graduate teaching assistants in order to improve the quality of instruction in large lecture (and other) courses.

Promising Practices

Challenges
We cannot assume that all large lectures are bad and all courses taught in small sections are good. We need to know what we are doing now, articulate what we want to do, and compare them, to determine the extent to which we are achieving our goals. But what are the measures of success? How can we measure what we are currently doing? How do we know what we are assessing? How can we measure new innovations? We have to consider large lecture courses for themselves as well as in the context of the larger educational package.

Instead of the traditional model whereby freshmen enroll in enormous lecture courses and upper-division students attend small seminars, campuses should consider capping first-year courses at a low number, especially in order to address the variations in entering students' preparation. It was noted, however, that upper-division courses in popular majors such as psychology and the life sciences are often quite large as well.