STEM Education Scholars Program Earns Excellent Reviews
Katherine Friedrich

80 percent of the new faculty and graduate students who participated in CIRTL’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Education Scholars Program at Howard University on June 27-30 rated their experience as excellent. The program demystified teaching-as-research and emphasized active learning.

Faculty “do not need to do anything more than they used to do” to practice teaching-as-research, said professor Folahan Ayorinde, Director of Graduate Studies at Howard’s Chemistry Department. Instead, he said, faculty need to be more conscious of what to measure to assess student learning effectively.

The STEM Education Scholars program builds on the success of the 2005 edition hosted by John Wise and colleagues at The Pennsylvania State University.  Under its previous name, SEESP (Science and Engineering Education Scholars Program), this conference took place at various universities, including the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.  

Working together with colleagues including Sandra Courter, Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Engineering Learning Center, Ayorindedesigned the conference to be highly interactive, informative and practical. Presenters discussed and demonstrated active learning, techniques for involving students, and ways to encourage students to take responsibility for their education.

Attendees enjoyed the talk given by Diane Ebert-May, Professor of Plant Biology at Michigan State University. Ebert-May “demonstrated bringing creativity to the classroom,” said Patrick Cunningham, a newly-hired faculty member in mechanical engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.   

Cunningham said the conference helped him “think about… teaching at a deeper level.” He also gained appreciation for “backwards design” – the principle that one should start planning a course with the final objectives in mind, and let these goals determine daily assignments and projects.

This year, the conference focused much more on the CIRTL pillars – teaching-as-research, learning communities, and learning-through-diversity. Ayorinde believes that these concepts are relatively new to the higher education community. When he was in school, Ayorinde said, educators were still unaware of the implications of diversity in learning styles.

Adekemi Taylor, a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at The Pennsylvania State University, spoke vividly about her learning experience at the conference. “It helped me because I might have been a little clueless about how to get students to learn,” she said. Rather than using a teaching model of “pouring stuff into [students’] brains [and having them] regurgitate it,” she said, the conference taught her to “think out of the box.”

Taylor particularly appreciated the session on learning-through-diversity, as did many other participants. A number of people requested that more time be devoted to this topic next year. One of the presenters, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Judith Burstyn, said the comments on her feedback forms were very positive.

Ayorinde plans to host the conference again in 2007. He said he intends to bring faculty from departments of education to describe “philosophies of teaching, learning styles, [and] critical thinking.” He also said he plans to expand the section on diversity and to bring in more science, technology, engineering and mathematics faculty to give concrete examples of teaching innovations.

CIRTL
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
ph.: 608.263.0630
fax: 608.265.0538