The original goals of our project were to a) help faculty learn to become change agents so they might promote a campus-wide commitment to transformational change in life sciences curricula in alignment with the goals of Vision and Change and b) engage the broader life-sciences community in the implementation of this change. To realize these goals, we collaboratively created a three-day professional development workshop that invited teams of faculty and administrators for an in-person workshop each October. When we initially envisioned our project, a systems thinking framework was a novel approach for professional development in the life sciences. Consequently, we recruited systems thinking practitioners to co-create our agenda to include multiple elements of systems thinking in a format that would allow their immediate use and application by faculty and administrators. We successfully brought five cohorts of institutional teams to our fall events to create departmental vision and action plan informed by their own institutional context. The grant also funded participation in follow-up events at a spring conference to discuss successes and barriers to action plan implementation. Sharing leverage points and strategies that had worked at other institutions benefited the entire effort.

Ultimately, with of this RCN-UBE award, the Northwest PULSE Fellows have established a diverse and robust Community of Practice devoted to the transformation of life science curriculum and departmental culture to achieve higher levels of student intellectual achievement and diversity of graduates.  The community now includes 60 unique institutions from the Pacific Northwest (AK, ID, MT, OR, WA, and WY) and three additional institutions (one each from CA, GA, UT) that encompass a diverse spectrum of different institution types in higher education (community colleges, liberal arts, research comprehensive, and research 1 institutions). The Fellows worked with 67 different teams of faculty and administrators over the first seven years of the Northwest PULSE Community of Practice.   According to the work of Charles Henderson (e.g., Henderson et al. J Coll Sci Teaching 2010, 18-25) and other institutional change experts, there are four areas that need to be simultaneously targeted to drive institutional transformation in higher education.  They are:  1) Disseminating curriculum and pedagogy, 2) developing reflective teachers, 3) developing policy, and 4) developing shared vision.  Schools and Departments that participated in NW PULSE activities designed and implemented action plans that covered all four of these areas.  In terms of Intellectual Merit, the Northwest PULSE fellows and their collaborators successfully introduced and leveraged the tools of systems thinking to help these teams achieve success in meeting their transformation goals.  Our broader impacts include the construction of a repository for our Community of Practice’s action plans, vision documents, and project reports on the PULSE-community.org website and serve as a source of inspiration that can help guide other departments towards structures and curricula that benefit all students who take courses, or elect to pursue a degree, in the life sciences.  Further, most of the transformation plans are not specific to the life sciences, which allows for their future application broadly in other STEM programs.  During the final year of funding the Northwest PULSE Fellows devoted significant time and effort to improving the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity practices in our community through virtual trainings for faculty and administrators at institutions of higher education. 

Last Modified: 10/22/2021
Modified by: William B Davis