A. CIRTL: The Big Picture

 The mission of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) is:

To develop a national faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse student audiences as part of their professional careers.

The strategic leverage point of CIRTL is graduate education. 80% of U.S. Ph.D.’s are granted at only 100 doctoral universities. Many of these graduates disperse among the faculties of several thousand institutions of higher education, and they become the engine of STEM undergraduate education in the United States.

Three core ideas form the foundation of all that CIRTL does: Teaching-as-Research, Learning Community, and Learning-through-Diversity. When doing teaching-as-research, STEM faculty engage in their teaching as they engage in their research - consider prior work, hypothesize, implement, collect data, analyze, and improve. This work is fostered in interdisciplinary learning communities that bring together those doing teaching-as-research. These learning communities promote understanding of learning-through-diversity, the idea that learning of all students is enhanced as teachers draw on their diversity. (www.cirtl.net/pillars)

The CIRTL Network connects universities building on the CIRTL ideas to prepare the national STEM faculty. Shared ideas among Network universities allow each institution to more rapidly advance opportunities and effectively use resources. Shared learning of Network graduate students better prepares them for the diverse teaching and research settings that they will encounter in their careers. And shared action better positions Network universities for funding and national impact.

Each university in the CIRTL Network develops, implements, and evaluates a local learning community and associated programs for future faculty on its campus. These learning communities all share the CIRTL core ideas, but each is uniquely innovative in ways that reflect the wide variety of campus cultures, missions, students and circumstances. (www.cirtl.net/coreinstitutionalmembers)

Each university also contributes to a cross-Network learning community. These programs allow the graduate students on every campus to draw on the rich diversity of the other Network universities. Much of this cross-Network learning community happens on-line, and we envision steadily expanding connectivity of CIRTL Network future faculty to the entire landscape of undergraduate institutions. (www.cirtl.net/cafe)

In 2011 we will expand the CIRTL Network from 6 to 25 universities. We are seeking new partners committed to preparing future faculty who are both superb researchers and excellent teachers. We also seek partners whose graduates will play a significant role in the future national STEM faculty. Finally, the strengths of new partner universities should complement and expand the strengths of the current Network.

The CIRTL Network and its core ideas align well with other STEM reform efforts taking place throughout the country (www.cirtl.net/CIRTLoutcomes). As we expand the CIRTL Network, we expect many interested doctoral universities to have programs that share common elements with CIRTL, although these programs may use other language such as scientific teaching, scholarly teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning and the like. We look forward to joining with and learning from such diverse future faculty preparation initiatives. We also anticipate that each new partner in the CIRTL Network will find resonance in the core ideas of CIRTL, and will be able to use these ideas to adapt and enhance future faculty preparation in ways uniquely their own.

[3] By future faculty” we mean graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. While CIRTL learning communities have always been welcoming to post-doctoral researchers, more recently CIRTL has begun to expand its focus to include programming specifically for post-doctoral researchers.