An Invitation to Participate in CELS

Louise W. Liao

The Coalition for Education in the Life Sciences (CELS) is a national coalition of professional societies dedicated to improving undergraduate biology education. We invite you to participate in this remarkable alliance, which draws the life sciences community together to address, collectively, the critical issues in biology education at our colleges and universities.

Particularly, we invite you to contribute your distinctive expertise to this shared goal through your professional societies. Indeed, because of the increased participation of talented individuals and the professional societies they represent, the life sciences community has both the opportunity and the capacity to speak with a unified voice on behalf of undergraduate education.

The subdisciplines in the life sciences are extraordinarily diverse and populous, and this is reflected in our professional societies. While our faculty colleagues in chemistry, physics, engineering, and mathematics are represented by only one or two dominant professional societies in their respective disciplines, the life sciences faculty are represented by scores of societies. This narrow focus by biological subdiscipline serves our traditional research endeavors very well. In fact, professional societies excel in promoting and encouraging the discovery and exchange of information on focused, subdisciplinary research.

As a counterbalance to our highly specialized content areas and journals, many professional societies host joint meetings to foster multidisciplinary exchange, recognizing that the combined expertise of a broad-based life sciences community is needed to solve many contemporary issues. Notable examples of alliances among societies are the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).

Dr. Louise W. Liao, Program Director for the Coalition for Education in the Life Sciences, stands with a CELS exhibit at a professional society’s annual meeting. CELS is housed within the Center for Biology Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To foster the improvement of undergraduate biology education, professional societies in the life sciences have come together to create the Coalition for Education in the Life Sciences (CELS). Embracing a shared vision to enhance and vitalize biology education for all undergraduate students, these societies are bringing their expertise, infrastructure, and culture to support their members' initiatives to improve teaching and learning. Through the development of a coalition, these societies are building a national infrastructure to produce models for effective undergraduate reform. This monograph, Professional Societies and the Faculty Scholar: Promoting Scholarship and Learning in the Life Sciences, is one way for CELS to showcase successful models, based on the wisdom and experience of individuals working within their professional societies. These models should stimulate additional planning, creativity, and adaptation by professional societies, creating an ever-expanding reform effort throughout the nation.

Nurturing the faculty scholar

The context for CELS arises from two chief roles of professional societies. One charge is to nurture the professional and scholarly development of their members. Certainly, societies have a long tradition of excellence in encouraging research scholarship. Within the last decade, disciplinary societies are also assuming active responsibility for nurturing teaching scholarship. Several societies have emerged as innovative leaders in helping faculty appreciate the great importance of scholarly teaching. As a professional, the faculty member is encouraged to exhibit scholarship in the approach to teaching, which may include defining objectives, monitoring student learning, gathering and responding to feedback, measuring, publishing, and presenting findings at professional meetings.

The second major role of professional societies is to disseminate knowledge about their discipline to advance humanity and instill harmony with our environment. Through this role, many societies foster the realization that research, teaching, and service are not separate endeavors, but part of the same effort to understand the world around us. Research and service inform education; in turn, education drives research and service. Moreover, professional society members are increasingly cognizant of their responsibilities for not only training the next generation of professionals in the discipline, but also for educating the next generation of citizens who will make personal and communal decisions about how the life sciences affect their lives.

Professional societies and their members recognize that students at colleges and universities will face social, economic, and technical challenges profoundly different from those faced by earlier generations. Today's faculty and students need to obtain the skills, knowledge, and attitudes for addressing those challenges wisely. The vast majority of today's students will not pursue our narrowly focused disciplines, and they will need a broad understanding of the life sciences. Thus, the life sciences community is joining together to bring greater congruence, integration, and articulation to the diverse array of topics and approaches to undergraduate biology education.

Faculty in the life sciences are educating at least three distinctive student populations: our future life scientists; the non-scientists who will participate in democratic decision-making; and our future teachers, who will foster lifelong attitudes and beliefs about science in their classrooms. The importance of teaching has led CELS to focus its current efforts on the role of professional societies in nurturing the faculty scholar. Professional societies already play a pivotal role in defining the academic culture of the life sciences community. As professional societies become more involved in promoting the scholarship and professional nature of teaching among their members, then educational reform will become durable and widespread. Faculty scholars will become increasingly involved and effective in developing curricular materials. Faculty will become increasingly familiar with pedagogical research and acquire teaching expertise that fosters student learning through collaborative, hands-on, inquiry-driven approaches. And, importantly, faculty and their professional societies will have a coherent voice in determining the current and emerging educational issues in undergraduate biology education in the United States.

CELS, a coalition of professional societies, provides an infrastructure for educational reform at a national level. CELS can facilitate the diffusion of successful reform efforts that originate in isolated classrooms, institutions, and professional societies. Through this monograph and other activities, CELS offers an opportunity to unite the life sciences community, through our professional societies, to improve undergraduate biology education. Certainly, we celebrate the diversity of the life sciences as reflected by our professional societies. Just as certainly, we should be willing to bring coherence to our wide-ranging disciplines so that all students, especially those who will not pursue our disciplines professionally, will become equipped with respect and understanding for the nature of the life sciences.