Description of the Program

CSIE has broadened the way the department of chemistry thinks about instructional development. In 2003, every significant curriculum or instructional project being developed in the University of Michigan department of chemistry is being done by regular faculty members who are leading "research groups" of chemistry students (undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral), all of whom are adding work in chemical education to their laboratory research education.

We use a training grant model to integrate teaching and research in the department of chemistry. Since 1998, 12/39 faculty members have worked with 40 regular chemistry PhD students to add instructional development and educational research to the chemistry thesis work of these students, all of whom have an interest in pursuing academic careers. Structurally, the department has used a training grant model in order to support this work with over $3 million in funding, mainly from the U.S. Department of Education. In May 2003, the first two PhD students who added this work graduated (both at 4.75 years), and both presented theses that included additional chapters on their educational design and research projects.

Philosophically, we have drawn strongly from the work on understanding the scholarship of teaching and learning in a PFF (preparing future faculty) context. In both "Scholarship Reconsidered" and "Scholarship Assessed," we are charged with broadening our concept of scholarship. As a part of his work with the Carnegie Foundation, 1998 Carnegie Scholar and UM Professor Brian P. Coppola has constructed a program that treats future faculty development as a broadening of the existing infrastructure that already does an excellent and efficient job of transforming high school graduates into creative, informed, energetic, and independent scholars within a 10-12 year period of time, namely, during the highly integrated education of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students.

Outcomes of the Program

While undergraduate through post-doctoral students are involved in this work, the CSIE Graduate Fellows are Chemistry PhD students in our program who are interested in adding an education in future faculty development to their graduate work. CSIE Fellows are otherwise indistinguishable from other students in the department; they most closely resembling the other graduate students participating in training grant programs (NSF-IGERT and NIH-CBI). Each year, 8-12 entering students from our usual class of 45-60 are awarded CSIE fellowships that usually begin in the middle of their first year and extend to the middle of their second year. These students continue to participate in aspects of the program throughout their graduate career. It is not necessary for students to be supported by fellowships in order to participate.

In 2003, we collaborated with the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Post-Secondary Higher Education to collect evaluation data on the impact of various aspects of CSIE on the chemistry program (43% of faculty and 43% of graduate students responded to a survey, which was followed up with semi-structured interviews of selected respondents).

Student respondents agree that CSIE (a) enhanced the attractiveness of the department to prospective graduate students, (b) created new opportunities to interact with faculty and graduate students around the issues of teaching, (c) produced new opportunities to interact with faculty around career-related issues, and (d) increased networking with people with similar interests within and outside of the University of Michigan . According to student respondents, the major strengths of CSIE lie in the involvement of students in CSIE decisions, flexibility of the program, networking, and opportunities to learn about teaching. To varying degrees, the program influenced the change in career interest in a third of student respondents. When change in career interests did occur, it was marked by a shift from the focus on exclusively business and industry or exclusively on academia to combinations of the two.

The primary impact on faculty who attended the Seminars has been increased knowledge of higher education issues, interests in and knowledge of instructional design, and connections with others who share interests in college science instruction. When they addressed questions about the impact of CSIE on the chemistry department, faculty tended to underscore its positive effects on prospective students' decisions to attend Michigan, networking among faculty and students in the department around higher education and teaching and learning - related issues, and the career preparation of students. As one might expect, faculty with different interests and at different points in their careers found different ways to engaged in CSIE. For example, junior faculty found it a convenient setting in which to find colleagues to talk about teaching. They had less time for Instructional/Curricular Projects, a facet of CSIE in which the more senior faculty engaged. Suggestions about how to achieve greater integration and continuity included shifts in organizational structures and processes that would strengthen senior faculty members' investment in instructional change and encourage input into CSIE decisions by a group representing the range of specializations. Another area of concern was the demands on students. However, while some faculty believed CSIE took away from traditional core activities, others believed CSIE initiatives complimented traditional activities.

In its 2002 5-year planning document, the department of Chemistry listed three target priority areas; the second of these was to "Increase the number of graduate students and post-doctoral associates in our ranks who seek academic careers."

1. Expand and advertise our very successful "Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education (CSIE) program and use this program to help recruit the very best undergraduates intent on pursuing academic careers.
2. Add a second faculty member with research emphasis in the area of teaching and learning who will be associated with CSIE and who will further aid recruiting efforts.
3. Increase the number of activities that will educate graduate and post-doctoral students on key components of academic life.

Implementation of the Program

Three units (the department of chemistry at the University of Michigan , the College in which it sits, and the University) have all recognized the scholarship of teaching and learning as an emergent sub-disciplinary area. At the College level, this decision is extended to in any academic domain. In the department of chemistry, the kinds of resources needed to develop this area are familiar because chemistry has treated the emergence of "discipline-centered teaching and learning" in the same way we have treated bio-related and materials sciences. In order for colleagues at another university to consider whether they would pursue this route, this large, philosophical issue must be addressed: Is teaching and learning an emergent area that can be treated according to the precepts of scholarly practices? Coupling future faculty development to this through broadening undergraduate to post-doctoral education is a tactical decision we made that is based on understanding how research gets done in chemistry, and, by extension, most STEM fields.

Identification and integration of new sub-disciplinary areas occurs regularly in STEM fields, so the strategies for how to develop them follow familiar blueprints, namely, to identify the things we do for students already and then broaden these activities to the new one. In this case, broadening our scope to include teaching and learning has meant:

1. a dedicated faculty line in the teaching and learning area (or an existing faculty member who has developed this expertise) with the intent of asking the ultimate question: how many such lines are needed to sustain this area in the department;
2. that unlike many new sub-disciplinary areas, teaching and learning cuts across a department's existing areas equally, so a critical mass of faculty who agree to this mission is necessary because they are the project leaders for instructional research and development projects (in our model, this is the normal work of the faculty in teaching and learning that they may now assemble groups of students to pursue);
3. cooperation with Schools of Education and other departments (such as Psychology or Education Psychology) are needed because of (1) course offerings that need to be modified to be inclusive of STEM graduate students and (2) collaborations on educational research projects;
4. fellowship support that permits students to add this work to their PhD programs