| Meetings and Institutes
Spring 2012 General Education and Assessment Conference, Proposals to Present Due June 1
AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal Conference, General Education and Assessment: New Contexts, New Cultures, will be held February 23-25, 2012, in New Orleans, Louisiana. AAC&U invites proposals that focus on general education reform, curriculum design, implementation, and meaningful assessment. Learn more about this conference and the call for proposals online. Proposals are due June 1, 2011. We look forward to reading your proposals.
Fall Network for Academic Renewal Meetings to Address Personal and Social Responsibility and Arts & Humanities
AAC&U’s first meeting of fall 2011 will be in Long Beach, California, October 13-15, and will address Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility. It will feature speakers including Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, and Brian Murphy, president of DeAnza College. On November 3-5, 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, AAC&U will sponsor a meeting, Arts & Humanities: Toward a Flourishing State?, that presents an overview of the state of the arts and humanities in higher education and new models for ensuring its continued vitality and relevance in the twenty-first century. Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, will deliver the keynote address and David Scobey, Executive Dean, The New School for General Studies and Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy will address the political and cultural contexts in which the arts and humanities now find themselves.
AAC&U’s 2012 Annual Meeting
The 2012 Annual Meeting will be held January 25-28, 2012, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC. The meeting will feature a pre-conference Symposium Wednesday, January 25, on “Civic Learning and Democracy’s Promise” and an all-day E-Portfolio Forum on Saturday, January 28. The Call for Proposals will be available June 1 with a deadline of mid-July. Please check AAC&U’s website throughout the spring for more information. We look forward to seeing you in January.
2011 General Education and Assessment and STEM Conference Resources Now Online
Speaker resources from AAC&U’s spring Network for Academic Renewal Conferences are now available online.See PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and links to other resources from General Education and Assessment 3.0, held March 3-5 in Chicago, Illinois, and Engaged STEM Learning, held March 24-26 in Miami, Florida.
Campuses and State Systems from 106 Institutions, Thirty-Six States, and Four Countries To Attend AAC&U 2011 Summer Institutes
AAC&U recently announced the colleges, universities, and state systems sending teams to its 2011 summer institutes. Teams of five or more from 106 institutions will attend one of three summer institutes: the Institute on General Education and Assessment at San José State University in San José, California (June 4-8, 2011); the Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont (June 14-18, 2011); and the Engaging Departments Institute at The Hotel at Turf Valley in Ellicott City, Maryland (July 13-17, 2011). All AAC&U institutes offer campus teams a time and place for sustained collaborative work on a project of importance to their campus. For a complete list of participating campuses for each institute, see the press release.
LEAP News
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New Publication Presents LEAP Vision and Overviews of Research on High-Impact Practices and Employer Views |
The LEAP Vision for Learning brings together multiple strands of LEAP work. It includes an executive summary of College Learning for the New Global Century; summaries of research about high-impact educational practices and learning outcomes; summaries of trends in curricular, assessment, and general education reform; and data about the outcomes that employers value in the college graduates they hire and promote. This publication is ideal as an introduction to the LEAP initiative and its research for use with internal and external advocates of educational reform, including with curricular and student success committees, boards of trustees, and regents.
PKAL News & Meetings
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Apply to Attend PKAL Upper Midwest STEM Leadership Workshop |
The 2011 PKAL Upper Midwest STEM Leadership Workshop will be held June 10-12, 2011, at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. This weekend seminar is for mid-career faculty in STEM departments from upper Midwestern colleges and universities who are moving into leadership positions (chair, program director, or principal investigator). Participants will learn more about the dimensions of leadership required to build and sustain excellence in undergraduate STEM programs. More information and instructions on how to apply are online.
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Faculty Workshop Will Explore Discovery-Based Learning in Neuroscience |
The 2011 Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) workshop will be held, in partnership with PKAL, July 29-31, 2011, at Pomona College in Claremont, California. At this workshop, participants will explore more laboratory experiences featuring discovery-based learning, and will examine the interdisciplinarity of neuroscience education as well as the new directions neuroscience is headed. More information and instructions on how to apply are online.
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New STEM Education Essays Posted Online |
More PKAL “twentieth anniversary” essays on STEM education have been posted online. The two most recent essays posted include “From Partnership Projects to Blueprint Design: Enhancing Teaching and Learning in Psychology” from the American Psychological Association and “From Transforming the Curriculum to Tackling Global Grand Challenges –The Role of Undergraduate Research in the 21st Century” from the Council on Undergraduate Research.
Project Highlights
Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Initiative Sponsors Five National Roundtables and Gathers Input on Draft National Policy Plan of Action
The Department of Education-sponsored initiative, Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, led by Global Perspective Institute Inc. and AAC&U, sponsored five national roundtables beginning in December 2010 that involved leaders and practitioners from colleges, community colleges, universities, associations, disciplinary societies, and civic organizations. Based on feedback gathered during these events, project leaders are revising a draft policy paper and recommended national action plan. These will be released in fall 2011 and featured at AAC&U’s fall Network for Academic Renewal meetings and January's annual meeting. The Project will also be featured in the fall 2011 issue of Diversity & Democracy. Watch for more news about the project at www.aacu.org; to learn more about the project and those who attended the roundtables, see
www.civiclearning.org
AAC&U Takes the Lead on Making Civic Learning Essential—For All College Students and Our Shared Future
In addition to its ongoing participation in the Department of Education-sponsored initiative, Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, AAC&U is developing resources and sounding the alarm about the dangers of neglecting civic learning as an essential aim of higher education. With leadership from members of the LEAP Presidents’ Trust, AAC&U has developed two sets of PowerPoint slides make the case for civic learning and provide an overview of the evidence of students’ civic learning in college. AAC&U has also created a document, “Higher Education for Democracy,” that lists “the principal goals” of higher education as they were articulated by the Truman Commission in 1947—an era that, as President Carol Geary Schneider points out, “was far more attentive than our own to the role of college in building democratic and global capacity.” AAC&U, along with its partner initiative, Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP), will also address the imperative of civic learning at events throughout 2011-12. BTtoP will be sponsoring a series of civic seminars throughout the year and AAC&U will feature civic learning as a major theme in the fall 2011 Network for Academic Renewal meetings, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility (October 2011) and Arts and Humanities (November 2011), and at a pre-meeting symposium at the 2012 AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC (January 2012). See also reports on civic learning from the Core Commitments initiative.
New Toolkit for Campus Practitioners Highlights Resources from Compass and Roadmap Projects
AAC&U has just launched the LEAP Campus Toolkit, an interactive online library of resources, tools, and models for campus practitioners. The purpose of the Toolkit is to make available campus examples, research findings, and assessment instruments for use by change agents on their own campuses. These materials are presented in a streamlined interface designed to encourage engagement and exploration. The Toolkit content is dynamic, and you will find it easy to leave comments, share your favorite resources with colleagues, and submit your own examples to be highlighted in the Toolkit. To get started, visit the Toolkit dashboard, or dive right into the library of resources.
Other AAC&U News
AAC&U President Champions Continued Importance of the Liberal Arts in Article Critical of National Governors Association Report
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a commentary by AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider titled, “'Degrees for What Jobs?' Wrong Question, Wrong Answers.” In this opinion article, President Schneider notes that the recent NGA Center for Best Practices report, Degrees for What Jobs?, makes “short-sighted policy recommendations [that] would do nothing to meet the nation’s long-term needs for intellectual capital and could well deplete the learning this country needs, both for individual students and the global economy.” Schneider notes that, “the NGA report seems stuck in an obsolete mindset that sees learning in a job-related major as the only goal that matters.” She argues, instead, that employers consistently say that to achieve the outcomes most important in today’s workplace, “students need more liberal education, not less.” See President Schneider’s article, her other perspectives and presentations, and surveys of employers commissioned as part of AAC&U’s LEAP initiative. See also the article on Hong Kong universities’ adoption of “The American Model” of higher education in Inside Higher Ed.
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2011 Summer Institutes
Institute on General Education and Assessment
June 4-8, 2011
San Jose State University, California
Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success
June 14-18, 2011
The University of Vermont
Engaging Departments Institute
July 13-17, 2011
The Hotel at Turf Valley,
Ellicott City, Maryland
Network for Academic
Renewal Conferences:
Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility:
A Twenty-First-Century Imperative
October 13-15, 2011
Long Beach, California
Arts & Humanities: Toward a Flourishing State?
November 3-5, 2011
Providence, Rhode Island
For more
information on meetings, visit www.aacu.org/meetings/index.cfm
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