As of January 2010, Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) joined forces with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) where PKALs work in advancing what works in undergraduate STEM education is continuing to thrive and grow. PKALs work on learning spaces has emerged from this transition into the PKAL Learning Spaces Collaboratory (PKAL LSC) where attention to planning learning spaces is continuing and expanding.

For current information about PKAL news, events, and programs, please visit PKALs new website at www.aacu.org/pkal.

Susan Elrod, Executive DirectorProject Kaleidoscope may be contacted at 202/884-7439; you are also invited to the AAC&U offices at 1818 R Street, NW in Washington, DC. Other opportunities to keep up-to-date on PKAL activities include:

• Signing up for email updates on the all-pkal listserv
• Following PKAL Conversations on Twitter
• Joining the PKAL Facebook community at Facebook
• Reading the PKAL blog.

For information about news, events, and programs in 2011 orchestrated by the PKAL Learning Spaces Collaboratory, your attention is directed to the new PKAL LSC web presence at www.pkallsc.org.

Jeanne L. Narum, PrincipalPKAL LSC may be contacted at 202/232-1300 or pkallsc@pkallsc.org; you are also invited to the PKAL LSC offices at 1730 Rhode Island Ave. NW, # 409. Other opportunities to keep up-to-date on PKAL LSC activities include:

• Participating in the feedback loop of LSC conversations, reviewing and responding to questions posed to and from the community: www.pkallsc.org/resources/questions
• Joining the LSC Facebook conversations at: www.facebook.com/pages/PKAL-Learning-Spaces-Collaboratory.

One of the highlights of the workshop was a session lead by MaryAnn Baenninger, President of The College of St. Benedict, in which she elaborated on her views of leadership. From her perspective, a key aspect of leadership is about building and nurturing communities focused on common goals. One way that faculty members can be leaders even without a formal title is to lead up. What does this mean? It means, in part, that faculty members understand the work of administrators, their real constraints and pressures (including budgets!), and the language they use in their administrative culture. More concretely, faculty should think about how what they are doing connects to the campus strategic plan, how resources are allocated (and ask if you dont know), and how to coordinate and leverage with other projects. Also, being a solution, as opposed to another problem, will make conversations with chairs, deans and senior leaders about support and resources more fruitful. One of the key issues we have been discussing as part of the Keck/PKAL Facilitating Interdisciplinary Learning project is how to connect the leadership of faculty more intentionally with the institutional mission and leadership. Leading up is certainly one effective grassroots strategy.

As we move forward together, PKAL is planning more leadership workshops in partnership with existing and emerging regional PKAL networks around the country. Also, these kinds of conversations were part of PKALs Summer Leadership Institute on July 17-22.

Stay tuned for more perspectives on leadership here and on PKALs blog Through the Kaleidoscope.

Campus teams representing a broad spectrum of institutional types from liberal arts, research and technical colleges to both the public and private sectors. Their IDL projects span the STEM disciplines with several campuses focusing on environmental programs, neuroscience, interdisciplinary STEM concentrations, assessment of IDL, teacher education, undergraduate research, new buildings, general education courses, campus culture, first-year experiences and more.

Key questions we have been addressing are:

• How do we create robust interdisciplinary learning experiences that intentionally help students synthesize and integrate their knowledge across these boundaries?
• How will we know when students can effectively integrate and apply their knowledge?
• What campus infrastructures need to be revised or invented to support these experiences?
• What role do campus and national leaders play in facilitating IDL?

As part of this project, we held a Leadership Roundtable on April 9-11, 2010 in Baltimore, MD to begin to synthesize the recommended goals and strategies from the collective experiences of the participating campuses. At this Roundtable, representatives from campus teams worked in teams organized around the questions above to begin to synthesize recommendations from their collective work. Several critical advisors, who have experience in IDL, assessment and leadership, were on hand to provide expertise outside the project and to get us thinking in new ways (which we did!). The results are being processed now and will form the framework for a National Colloquium on Interdisciplinary STEM Learning to be held in Washington, D.C. in October 2010. More on this meeting and the final recommendations to come.

Follow this link to learn more about this meeting, including the meeting agenda and notebook.

• Developing and embracing a culture across campus in which faculty collectively and collaboratively explore innovative approaches to shape robust STEM learning environments.
• Creating and communicating institutional structures and rewards that sustain such a culture over the long-term.
• Understanding the drivers for change, given your institutional context and circumstance.
• Setting clear, measureable, and actionable outcomesat the level of the learner as well as of the institution.

Over the past twenty years, the community that is PKAL has shaped a kaleidoscopic set of visionary statements about what works. Each of these individual visions builds from and reflects the founding vision of PKAL about the value of undergraduate natural science communities. In looking toward the future, engaging the partnership between PKAL and AAC&U, the focus will increasingly be on what lasts, signaling that the challenge today is for academic leaders to extend and enhance the capacity of their institution to offer an educational program of distinction for years to come.

What works today may work less well in tomorrows circumstances. What lasts must be viewed in the context of an ever-changing world. What works is thus a continual questioning about what lasts that takes account of the present and envisions the future. Such questioning, and the process of engaging communities in framing questions and generating answers, is the work of todays leaders as they move forward, shaping their future.

Some contemporary questions about the future were explored at two PKAL sessions at the 2010 AAC&U annual meeting focusing particularly on questions regarding the role of the introductory course in engaging learners and the impact of institutional culture in building and sustaining an engaged and engaging STEM learning environment.

A Kaleidoscope of Perspectives on Institutional Transformation, STEM & Beyond

Some lessons learned from past PKAL activities about fostering informed conversations include:

• Focus on things that matter to those involved. Take advantage of real problemsthose that are real now, at the campus level and at the national level.
  
  
• Understand the institutional culturehow and where decisions are made, plans implemented, and take care to respect traditions in a time of transition.
  
  
• Be aware of the complexity of the process of change and of the time it takes to deal with that complexity, and that for every complex problem there is a simple solution and it is wrong.
  
  
• Bring all the stakeholders to the table in a meaningful and timely manner, and recognize that the best advice comes from the most unexpected places. (Stakeholders are all those [individuals, groups, organizations, or systems] who can affect and/or be affected by the actions of the larger community, are those who are actively involved in the project and/or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project.)

Our challenge, as PKAL moves into the partnership with AAC&U, is to broaden the community of engaged stakeholders, shaping connections and conversations across the PKAL and AAC&U communities in order to leverage our individual work for the collective good.

Conversations Current and Emerging within the PKAL Community

• How can colleges and universities develop the nimbleness to adjust to the accelerating changes within our 21st century global society, in the context of shaping and reshaping their undergraduate STEM learning environment?
• How can learning in STEM fields be seen as a mode of civic engagement within our 21st century global community?
• How do you bring together a critical mass of leaders (reform-minded faculty and administrators) to take responsibility for meaningful and sustainable change on an individual campus and how do you connect campuses in ways that accelerate the spread of reform initiatives having documented success?
• What can we learn from research in cognitive science and in social change that can advance our work in engaging undergraduate learners in STEM fields?

These questions emerged from the PKAL Forum held during the 2010 AAC&U annual meeting, an afternoon in which 150 leaders from the nations colleges and universities and national professional and disciplinary societies gathered to begin the process of identifying key questions that the PKAL community should be addressing in the coming months and years. This gathering questions process reflects PKALs modus operandi since 1989, working from the premise that effective change begins with identifying the question and then analyzing the problem in the pursuit of responses to those question.

Each of the PKAL sessions at the meeting also emphasized other drivers for PKALs work over the past twenty years:

• Having a diversity of people at the table in the process of question posing and problem-solving whether the challenge is facilitating interdisciplinary learning, reshaping introductory STEM courses, or working toward structural institutional change.
• Taking the kaleidoscopic perspective in the process of exploring, distilling, and disseminating emerging answers to the question of what works?

Welcome to PKAL: 2010 and Beyond: A Letter from Susan Elrod

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Evolve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. Harvard Business School Press, 2001.

Another lens would be what needs to happen on a campus, when there are people deeply committed to working on a particular problem, intent on shaping something new, because of their commitment to their students, their field, and their institution. Through this lens we can come to understand better the politics and processes of innovation and changewhat leaders need to know and be able to do to catalyze meaningful collaborations.

A final lens would be that afforded by research on learning, which clearly documents that people learn best when they are actively engaged, when they are situated in a social and supportive community, are given opportunity to reflect and build on prior knowledge, involved with addressing problems that are relevant to their lives and their workand when they become deeply engaged, understanding their role within a community of practice.

So, we offer this graphic as a catalyst for greater collaborations at the campus level, as well as within the national disciplinary societies and educational associations whose collective efforts make a difference.

What works: Leadership in Catalyzing Collaborations Toward STEM Reform

From the early 1990s to this time, numerous initiativessmall, medium, and large, discrete and comprehensivehave been directed toward transforming the undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning environment in America. Some of these have had major national and systemic impact on the quality and character of undergraduate STEM learning; some more modest and more localized impact and others have been isolated and ephemeral. Yet, for all these pioneering efforts, the work of transforming the undergraduate STEM learning environment has not yet reached a credible tipping point. The challenge remains to shape sustainably robust undergraduate natural science communities that attract students to STEM fields and motivate them to persist and succeedSTEM learning environments that serve the national interest now and into the future.

These recent decades have been a time of remarkable confluence of contextual influences on the undergraduate STEM learning environment. These influences are opportunity for meaningful change:

• Emerging research-based insights about how people learn confirm previous experience-based insights that what works is giving students ownership of their own learning: that it is when undergraduate learning in STEM fields is imagined as apprenticing, moving learner from novice to practitioner, when learning is contextual and relevant, giving students opportunity to gain the skills, capacities, and understandings needed to address contemporary challenges in the world beyond the campus.
• Increasing diversity of the undergraduate student population, coupled with the growing awareness that deep engagement in STEM learning is the means to prepare all students more effectively and creatively for their responsibilities as citizens of our global community and for the wide range of 21st century careers that call for skills and capacities gained through study in STEM fields as undergraduates, calls the question about the relevance of STEM learning for todays students, science, and society.
• Evolving scientific, engineering, and technological communities of practice are becoming dramatically different, as disciplinary boundaries are morphing and dissolving, technologies are more pervasive and essential tools for STEM research and communication, and S&T challenges and opportunities increasingly must be interpreted and addressed from a global perspective.

The challenge to make STEM learning a deeper and more meaningful learning experience for all undergraduates in our countrys classrooms is now even more pressing. Today, increasing the number and quality of STEM students and majors is essential to address a broader set of national priorities: from preparing the 21st century workforce to equipping all students to be leaders in a 21st century global community in which science and technology have increasing impact. This vision is the driver for the partnership between AAC&U and Project Kaleidoscope.

The AAC&U Partnership with PKAL

This is the time to be both visionary and realistic in your dreaming; the new spaces and structures being considered will serve the institution for many years. Remembering that the goal is to improve learning for students, think about questions such as the following:

• What works in the science and mathematics programs on our campus?
• What kind of spaces are needed for faculty to remain vital as scholars?
• Are there ways, intellectually and physically, that new connections can be made between the sciences, and among the sciences, the humanities, and the arts?
• How will the increasing national attention on developing a science-literate citizenry, transforming the K-12 community, bringing groups currently underrepresented in science, mathematics, and engineering affect our planning, our program, our space?

Such questions will be addressed in more depth during the process of defining the facilities program, after the decision has been made to move ahead with your project.

Answers to these questions will differ campus to campus, as individual institutions explore them in the context of their distinctive identity and mission. However, even if a major facilities project is not anticipated, these are the kinds of questions that must be asked as each academic community prepares to build and sustain strong undergraduate programs in science and mathematics in a changing, challenging world.

PKAL Volume III: Structures for Science, 1995.

Embracing the Right Questions: Planning Spaces for Science

PKAL Facilities Webinars