Introduction: Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL)

Graduate students at research universities will shape the future of STEM undergraduate education in the United States. The graduate students trained at approximately 100 research universities will flow into the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculties of all undergraduate institutions, dispersing among more than 3,500 research universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. Equally important, future STEM faculties will be increasingly engaged in all forms of STEM education for diverse audiences, including higher education, K-12 pre-service preparation, distance learning, and informal education. Thus, the graduate schools of research universities are a critical leverage point for national reform of STEM education.

We propose to create a professional development program in teaching and learning that will prepare graduate students, and with them post-doctoral researchers and current faculty, to meet the future challenges of national STEM higher education. Our program will be designed to overcome the demonstrated resistance to education reform at research universities (Eiseman & Fairweather, 1996; Menges & Austin, 2001). This resistance derives in part from the perception of STEM faculty that the teaching process is orthogonal to the research process, and that research is more interesting and more valued (Fairweather, 1996; Massy, Wilger, & Colbeck 1994). We assert that successful development of STEM graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty as educators will be advanced by the combination of (a) a fundamental transformation in conceptualization of the process of teaching and (b) the creation of learning communities favorable toward that transformation.
The new conceptualization of teaching is grounded in the idea of teaching-as-research. From this perspective, STEM educators will engage in their teaching in the same way they engage in their research—by hypothesizing, implementing, observing, analyzing, and improving. This approach to teaching aligns with the skills and inclinations of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty at research universities (hereinafter graduates-through-faculty) and promotes their investment in teaching reform. Equally important, teaching-as-research leads directly to ongoing improvement in STEM undergraduate education. The nation must develop STEM faculties who themselves continuously inquire into their students’ learning.

Furthermore, development of graduates-through-faculty in teaching and learning will be best achieved in a collaborative environment that actively engages all participants, much like STEM laboratories and research teams. We will create graduate-through-faculty learning communities where growth in teaching skills occurs through collaborative relationships and activities and where the shared identity rests on values of learning, teaching, and professional development. Such learning communities have proven successful at aligning participants with institutional goals and values and developing the networks necessary for institutional change (Gabelnick, MacGregor, Matthews, & Smith, 1990; Shapiro & Levine, 1999). Moreover, successful learning communities recruit participants who are interested in but not yet committed to change.
We combine these two powerful ideas in this proposal. Specifically, we propose to create, implement, and transfer on a national scale an interdisciplinary program of graduate-through-faculty professional development in STEM higher education, founded on teaching-as-research activities implemented within learning communities. Our program will prepare graduate-through-faculty to teach diverse student audiences in all forms of STEM higher education. Our work will build on the strong STEM higher education capabilities of the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW), Michigan State University (MSU), and the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). We will use UW as our laboratory for the development, implementation, and evaluation of tools and strategies. We will then establish a national network of 10 diverse research universities and develop methods for transferring the successes in the UW laboratory to research universities throughout the nation.
The whole of this initiative will constitute the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL).