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Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to focus on diversity and inclusion to increase access, close equity gaps, and increase completion rates. Reaching these goals--and others central to institutional missions--requires collective efforts by faculty, staff, administrators, and students. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to engage faculty in institutional improvement efforts, because this work is often under-recognized and under-rewarded. Inspired by Boyer's (1990) multiple categories of scholarship, the authors propose a new, crosscutting one--the "scholarship of mission" (SOM)--to establish a context and case for valuing scholarly work that improves institutional effectiveness in benefiting society. Greater faculty involvement in SOM could lead to improved understanding of the problems of higher education, more robust solutions, and greater opportunities for advancing institutional goals. This in turn will support the development of better policies and practices to support SOM.

In organizations, a common cultural practice is to recognize individuals who have contributed to the overall mission and goals, particularly those that have been consistently excellent. In addition to recognition, organizations engage in the work of appreciation, acknowledging that people play a central role in the work of the enterprise. In this article, the authors explore the experiences of faculty and staff, who diligently work for colleges and universities but feel their hard work is not acknowledged. The authors know some campuses--often smaller campuses--can have a very different feel, and people do feel celebrated, appreciated, recognized, and rewarded. Although some environments may make this easier, size and bureaucracy accounts for only some of the experiences of the three individuals above. They suggest aspects of academia's culture are responsible for why celebration, appreciation, and recognition are so hard to come by in higher education, and they offer suggestions for ways college and university leaders can create a culture where positive affirmation is more commonplace.

The article focuses on the development and implementation of a Change Leadership Toolkit (CLT), aimed at guiding leaders in higher education through strategic and context-based approaches to achieve meaningful systemic change. It addresses the multifaceted challenges facing institutions, exacerbated by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic pressures, and demographic shifts.

Many major funding organizations, policymakers, government agencies, and other higher education stakeholders want higher education to encourage interdisciplinary learning so that students graduate with the requisite skills to take on complex jobs in science, policy, business, and industry. Calls for this kind of change have been most urgent within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields; they are key to America's capacity to maintain its global economic position, yet their enrollments have been shrinking in recent years. Studies have demonstrated that students with exposure to interdisciplinary learning experiences tend to be retained as majors, as well as gaining preparation for successful careers and life in the 21st century. Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) has been looking at systemic ways to create interdisciplinary teaching and learning environments. Like the National Academies report, PKAL thinks that campuses across the country have not created environments hospitable to interdisciplinarity. In this article, the authors highlight research conducted on one of the major projects facilitated by PKAL: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Learning (FIDL), funded by the W.M. Keck foundation. This project is among the largest to examine the facilitation of interdisciplinary learning. The authors report on the lessons learned from this initiative in how to bring interdisciplinary learning to scale. First, they briefly review the institutionalization theory that they used to frame their findings. (Contains 1 figure.)

It has been over twenty years since the publication of reports calling for increased efforts to reform undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. There are more STEM classrooms today that utilize "pedagogies of engagement" than there were twenty years ago; however, these kinds of learning environments are still not as common as they should be given the overwhelming evidence of their positive outcomes. Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL), because of its track record in highlighting and addressing issues in STEM higher education and its new partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), is uniquely situated as a national, cross-disciplinary, undergraduate STEM education organization to address these challenges. Since its founding in 1989, PKAL has been pushing the frontiers of innovation in STEM pedagogy and faculty development, leadership capacity building, and network creation among its cross-disciplinary membership. As PKAL formulates its next-generation agenda, it does so within the context of a new formal partnership with AAC&U. In January 2010, PKAL formally joined forces with AAC&U to advance and amplify the work of both organizations with respect to transforming undergraduate STEM learning, teaching, and leadership. With AAC&U as an active partner, PKAL now has even greater potential to expand the number of faculty, administrators, and institutions involved in its programs and networks. PKAL is committed to working within existing and new AAC&U programs on general education and assessment, global learning, public health, and inclusive excellence in order to deepen the attention paid to STEM learning. (Contains 2 figures.)

Amidst exponential growth of knowledge, student insights into the knowledge creation practices of the scientific community can be furthered by science faculty collaborations with university librarians. The Literature-Based Scientific Learning model advances undergraduates' disciplinary mastery and information literacy through experience with primary literature research practices and scientific scholarly communication traditions.

For the past twenty years, countless reports have been issued calling for change and reform of undergraduate education to improve student learning, persistence, and graduation rates for students in STEM; [...]

Interdisciplinary learning is a twenty-first-century imperative. We are continually faced with societal and global challenges that require interdisciplinary thinking to identify suitable solutions, such as finding new energy sources, dealing [...]

We live in an age where vast amounts of information can be accessed on the Internet. Much of this information is quantitative in nature and students (and adults) must be [...]

The national conversation on undergraduate research is gaining momentum, in part because of its identification as one of the ten high-impact educational practices identified in an analysis of data from [...]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Veterinary Research / Revue Canadienne de Recherche Vétérinaire is the property of Canadian Veterinary Medical Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With a new wave of national reports and recommendations regarding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education recently hitting the Internet, we are again reminded of the imperative to improve [...]

The article discusses the reform in undergraduate science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in terms of engaging pedagogies, peer learning, and student support structures. It states that the reform changes the lecture-based pedagogy into an active and engaging pedagogies, such as problem-based learning or peer instruction to improve the learning of the students. It highlights several factors of leadership skills including communication, work-life balance and diversity in teams.

The article focuses on the National Research Council's 2012 report on Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER), which provides a summary of research findings from across education in the science. It is stated that the DBER report asserts that it may have served mostly to raise awareness of the field while some translational research has been occurring.

The meeting "Conceptual Assessment in the Biological Sciences" was held March 3-4, 2007, in Boulder, Colorado. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and hosted by University of Colorado, Boulder's Biology Concept Inventory Team, the meeting drew together 21 participants from 13 institutions, all of whom had received National Science Foundation funding for biology education. Topics of interest included Introductory Biology, Genetics, Evolution, Ecology, and the Nature of Science. The goal of the meeting was to organize and leverage current efforts to develop concept inventories for each of these topics. These diagnostic tools are inspired by the success of the Force Concept Inventory, developed by the community of physics educators to identify student misconceptions about Newtonian mechanics. By working together, participants hope to lessen the risk that groups might develop competing rather than complementary inventories.