Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Thoughts from a National Conference

I’ll be attending this national conference on Friday and Saturday this week, and am pretty excited to tell you about the interesting things I’m sure to discover there.

The conference in downtown Minneapolis is “Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments.” It’s sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

I’m pretty excited about the subject matter, and there are many interesting session topics -- ranging from service learning and community engagement as part of the curriculum, and motivating students toward responsibility, to creating a culture change among students and faculty. Maybe most interesting of all the topics, for me, might be the sessions about how we can assess the changes and programs we create on campus about personal and social responsibility.

Faculty and staff members from Minnesota are presenting, too: from Winona State University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Hamline University, Augsburg College, Macalester College, Concordia University, and the University of Minnesota.

Stay tuned over the next few days as I tell you my thoughts about this important topic!

Chemistry Discipline Workshop

The 185th 2YC3 Conference and MnSCU CTL Chemistry Discipline Workshop was held at Rochester Community College on September 25 - 26, 2009.

I attended for a half day and had a grand time seeing the chemistry faculty from Century College - they were ALL there! There were also faculty from Anoka-Ramsey, Inver Hills (great to see colleague Judy again!), Minneapolis, MSU Mankato, Rochester, Saint Paul, and Winona. PLUS other 2 year and 4 year from the mid-west region. Kudos to the planners (Jason Jadin, Heather Sklenicka, and Teresa Brown) for the organization and sessions.

There were several sessions about teaching chemistry online. Attendees seemed open and accepting to this mode of teaching. There are different models of handling the lab - from labs on campus, kitchen labs, and simulation labs. Each has benefits - and in each case the faculty made sure that the student was gaining critical thinking skills. No matter the method of doing the lab, there would be no sloughing off for the students.

Rehka Ganagamur did a nice job of laying out the factors a college needs to consider when launching an undergraduate research program. The benefits to students are many but there are some challenges. One of them stems from the MSCF contract which does not have language about work load issues for faculty that supervise research done outside of the classroom. Deans and faculty have to work together to figure out a fair solution. It's a challenge but shouldn't stand in the way if a department is truly committed AND the dean is truly supportive. I would love to see this happen at Century.

I also went to session that reminded me of the National Science Digital Library. What a great resource!! I'm not going to try to describe - you just have to click on it and discover for yourself!

The sessions and conversations reminded me again of the importance of being supportive as a dean. Encourage your faculty to try new ideas, to share their successes, to attend workshops.

STEM Student Summit

Metropolitan State University hosted a Student STEM Summit on September 25, 2009. Students from Century College and Saint Paul College were also invited to attend. I was only able to attend the keynote and wish I could have stayed - I missed the wind turbines, figuring out how much work I could generate, detecting an earthquake, programming a robot, and watching the bomb show.

The keynote was by Liesl Chatman, Director of Professional Development at the Science Museum. She gave an unconventional keynote but then, she's an unconventional person - a maverick as she would say. She told her story of how she became a STEM professional. It was NOT a straight, direct path. She presented the opposite of the school of thinking in which you have career plans, 5 year plan, steps to take, etc. Instead, her path involved a deeper reflection about who she is and what her skills are. I asked her where she thought she would be in 5 years - alive, camping, riding motorcycle.

Liesl had 4 main points:

• there are many paths to STEM careers
• the way you were taught science probably doesn't reflect what science really is
• STEM habits of mind will help you in life
• STEM literacy is a moral imperative for our time

What has been my path? Where is my path leading me? What got me excited about science? How are my children learning about science - inside and outside of school? How can we look at STEM education from a whole school systems approach? How can we get people out of their discipline and start integrating ideas?