Professional Societies and the Faculty Scholar mono6x.htm

Professional societies serve as the principal community of faculty scholars in a highly mobile, telecommunicating, scientific professoriate. They serve as the major source of professional development and success, providing peer review, opportunities for leadership, social networks of friends with shared interests, advocacy groups for intellectual causes and funding priorities, and open fora for exchanges of controversial and new ideas. Of the last-named, some historians of science have argued that controversy is the lifeblood of science, and societies that not only tolerate, but openly promote, flexible discourse of ideas are most likely to foster the creativity that we so dearly associate with research and academic freedom.

On the other hand, the recent clarion call for reform from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Shaping the Future: New Expectations for Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology, notes that students often view professional societies as unrelated and distracting, if not adversarial, to the needs of undergraduate students [5]. The report covers the development of exemplary teaching in science as well as the results of an extensive research study of students who have left science, mathematics, and engineering majors:

These perceptions may or may not reflect the values of most members of professional societies, but the stereotype is all too familiar. Hence, professional societies have not only the challenge to address this (mis)conception, but the obligation as well. Professional societies can play enormous roles in the support and development of excellent teaching, the reform of undergraduate education, and the advance of free and democratic societies.

At the same time, faculty scholars are espousing new views that place additional demands upon professional societies. In "Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude" [6], Lee S. Shulman says: "we celebrate those aspects of our lives and work that can become, as we say in California, 'community property.'" He then suggests three specific strategies:

Faculty scholars who are developing, testing, promoting, and/or publishing ideas and materials for the transformation of education within the province of professional disciplines hence need the same types of validationsC recognition, tenure, promotion, funding, and leadershipCthat are typically associated with peer-reviewed and rewarded research.

Dr. John R. Jungck (third from left) and other officers at the 1997 meeting of the Association of College and University Biology Educators (formerly the Association for Midwestern College Biology Teachers). Pictured (l to r) are: Dr. Marc Roy, Beloit College (Beloit, Wis.); Dr. Karen Klyczek, University of Wisconsin-River Falls; Dr. Jungck, Beloit College (Beloit, Wis.); and Dr. Donald “Buzz” Hoagland, Westfield State College (Westfield, Mass.). Dr. Jungck is a member of the CELS Steering Committee and editor of The BioQUEST Library. He is the former editor of Bioscene - Journal of College Biology Teaching. Currently, Dr. Jungck is the education editor of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, book and software editor of BioScience, and the biology editor for the Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

If we agree that meeting these two challenges of low student expectations and different personal and institutional models for faculty scholarship is a worthwhile goal, how can it be pursued? Some steps have already been taken. First, CELS was founded explicitly to address these challenges. Any member society can easily benefit from the experiences of the numerous biological societies that have joined in this communal effort for the past seven years.

Second, major private and public investment has led to the development of a corpus of significant resources and literature aimed at educational reform. This has funded a community of scholars dedicated to teaching and learning and capable of providing leadership within a variety of professional societies. Among those contributing to this effort are the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Biological Science Education Program and various federal agencies in life science education such as the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) and the U.S. Department of Education (DEd) Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).

Third, the technological transformations of inexpensive and rapid international travel, phones, faxes, express mail, and Internet services have made it far easier than before to share and evaluate the results of individual reform efforts. Consider that NSF has established "collaboratories" for research communities needing access to critical tools such as synchrotrons for X-ray crystallography determination of the three-dimensional structure of proteins or radio telescopes for astronomers studying the origins of our universe. By analogy, we could develop educational "collaboratories" which could serve the needs of faculty scholars and their students who also need access to the pedagogical tools of transformation of our disciplines.

Some members serve as presidents and other officers, serve as editors or editorial board members, and/or receive the accolades of professional recognition in terms of major awards. The vast majority of members of most professional societies do none of these within a given calendar year. They do, however, identify with the professional society by paying dues, listing their membership within their curriculum vita, and regularly reading the society's literature such that they are conversant and up to date with developments in their field. All members share a pride in their profession that is defined by an ongoing participation in maintaining quality in their individual and collective efforts. Hence, the group is able to review and evaluate significant research, new ideas, and viable contributions to the promotion of their discipline.

We now need to bring pedagogical activities into this realm and create a professional social network for determining quality. Peer review, which has been the cornerstone for establishing the credibility of scientific research, seems highly appropriate as the review process for legitimating, developing, and assessing pedagogical knowledge production and practices.

What is to be peer reviewed? By whom? For what purpose? Herein we propose and ask each professional society to consider 10 different components:

First, many professional societies have responded to the challenge by encouraging the publication of pedagogical articles in their research journals. Genetics, for example, has already published several articles on the pedagogical value of using different strains and experiments of yeast and drosophila in undergraduate genetics education. In 1996, HortTechnology, from the American Society for Horticultural Science, identified "UIPLANTS: A Software Program for the Landscape Industry and Horticultural Education" as the best educational article in any of the profession's journals.

For highly specialized communities, the only peer group that can even appreciate the power of ideas resident in a particular innovation is likely to be the members of a professional society representing that discipline. In the past, however, few faculty scholars have had access to the primary journal of their discipline, and specialized journals such as Biochemical Education have very few subscribers compared to the number of teaching biochemists.

Second, some societies organize symposia, special sessions, or poster sessions at their annual meetings devoted to education in their discipline. When education receives the attention of presidential addresses and symposia scheduled in the principal meeting hall at prime times, you know that a professional society is valuing this endeavor. Some societies such as the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) have scheduled teaching conferences to meet separately before the main meeting. Some have changed the rules of participation; instead of being limited to one poster, members can submit both a scientific research paper and a pedagogical one.

Because participation at a professional meeting is often tied to receiving local support from home institutions for travel, housing, and registration, these openings have allowed faculty scholars to attend who otherwise could not have afforded such expenses. If pedagogical papers are peer reviewed, judged for acceptance, and critiqued in a society's session, they are afforded more value with respect to a faculty scholar's professional development and application for reappointment, promotion, or tenure.

Third, many societies have developed or re-activated their education committees, and some have even helped develop specific materials (as discussed later in this monograph). The Animal Behavior Society, for example, has published a series of lab activities, and the Society for Developmental Biology has released A Dozen Eggs: Time-Lapse Microscopy of Normal Development, a series of 12 films on early embryogenesis in a phylogenetically diverse group of organisms [7].

These instructional materials were quickly and widely adopted for classroom use, and, more important, the materials' developers were recognized for providing important service to their professional society. Quality assurance is thus enhanced when these materials are officially peer reviewed and recommended by a particular professional society.

Fourth, some societies have accepted the review of print, software, and web-based materials as part of their professional mission. One is the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), which is again reviewing textbooks and multimedia in its journal, BioScience. Textbooks frequently reflect and define a discipline. In the history of microbiology, for example, the adoption of Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology [8] by nursing and medical technology educators as the standard for learning laboratory identification of pathogens largely settled the debate amongst researchers about competing identification approaches. In the historical area of embryology, the current dominance of Scott Gilbert's text Developmental Biology [9] has redefined undergraduate studies from classic vertebrate embryology to a developmental biology which is not only more molecular than its classic relative, but which legitimates the use of a much vaster phylogenetic array of species. In the 1960s, Lehninger's Biochemistry [10] lent substance to a problem-solving approach that has been widely used ever since.

Such educational materials not only matter greatly to the discipline involved, but weigh upon the individual member's understanding of potential recognition for scholarship. Writing a textbook requires a scholar to:

Electronic materials developed by faculty scholars are often large software projects involving millions of lines of code. These can be major long-term research projects employing multidisciplinary teams, and updates go beyond issuing multiple new editions because operating systems change. A faculty scholar's decision to proceed with that endeavor should not be driven principally by the potential for economic success, but should also be integral with their affiliation with associated professional societies.

Professional societies should desire to see that their discipline has not been watered down, misrepresented, or misappropriated simply for widespread adoption. The role of professions must change as well, because so much is being produced and particularly because of changes in the publishing industry, where it is less likely that Ph.D.'s are serving as developmental editors with authors. With the enormous volume of materials appearing on the World Wide Web, almost all of it unrefereed, there is an onus of responsibility upon professional societies to evaluate materials such that their members are saved time and assured of a diversity of high-quality materials. Hence, reviews of textbooks, software, and multimedia belong in the professional journals alongside reviews of research monographs.

Fifth, while the issue of evaluating actual classroom and laboratory education seems most awkward to professional societies, a variety of "products" of actual classroom and laboratory education are easily shared and amenable to evaluation. Many professors have been posting syllabi, labs, problems, bibliographies, student projects, software, illustrations, images, data sets, etc. These are frequently invaluable resources for colleagues. Some societies have developed educational web pages that direct members and others to such materials with links and annotated reviews.

Clearinghouses for societies will enhance their value only if they serve a larger role in quality assurance of these resources. If users are inundated with unsatisfactory materials, such collections will soon have only marginal, if not negative, value.

Our classrooms are far less isolated than in the past; distance education models and new technologies enable team preparation of courses, collaboration over long distances, and sharing of expertise and tools rapidly, inexpensively, and efficiently. The efforts of multiple professors, teaching assistants, and students can be easily and seamlessly integrated over long distances. Since many professors teach in institutions where they alone teach a particular subject, it is important for them to develop long-term associations with colleagues at other institutions to maintain currency, breadth, and access to important materials.

Sixth, professional societies need to invest in the pedagogical development, mentoring, and support of colleagues and future educators. Hence, workshops on pedagogy, educational reform, use of new pedagogical materials, and disciplinary updates need to be evaluated and, in some cases, supported by professional societies. As long as these activities continue to be marginal, graduate students and post-docs will clearly understand that participation in such activities may detract from or, worse yet, be detrimental to their careers.

Affirmation of quality models for professional development should be of great concern to members of all professional societies.Workshop leaders, for example, should not be praised simply for presenting educational themes; their work must be subject to standards of quality. Peer review has to be rigorous to be widely accepted.

The following three suggestions are not alternative approaches to peer review, but simply reminders of important activities.

Seventh, researchers who have received public support should release data in usable forms for investigation by students. GenBank [11], for example, is an enormous resource that is widely used in under-graduate education.

Many biological researchers, however, retain data for fifty years without making them publicly available. While elementary school students have participated in studies compiling massive data bases on local environmental conditions, there are few examples of making long-term ecological data widely accessible to and analyzable by undergraduates.

With extremely powerful tools available today, many students could participate in original research involved with "data mining" of complex, multivariate data sets. Some journals are publishing raw data on web sites associated with their publishers, some societies have policies for access to data, and some governmental agencies stipulate access as a condition of funding. We still, however, have difficulty finding access to rich collections of data.

Eighth, students need even more opportunities for doing research while they are undergraduates. The earlier they have such experience, the more likely they are to both understand and appreciate science.

Talented people want to participate in the thinking and the doing and not be relegated to years of dishwashing or other trivial tasks until they have taken a particular course. Many societies already actively encourage their members to involve undergraduates as members of their research teams, but this is the exception rather than the rule for most biology majors across the country.

Ninth, professional societies need to help establish funding priorities. The chemistry and mathematics communities have successfully lobbied NSF and established systemic initiatives in reforming education in their disciplines. Each initiative funded several models for science education reform, and total funding of each discipline has exceeded $20 million.

Despite its greater size, the biology community has been unsuccessful in having a systemic initiative designated for us. Furthermore, when NSF closed the education division in the early 1980s, the research community preserved graduate student research support from NSF, but did not come to the rescue of undergraduate science education or educational researchers in various scientific disciplines. The challenge of developing a major effort in biology education is only likely to be mounted when much wider support is generated by a coalition of many professional biological societies.

Tenth, none of the above is likely to happen without a redefinition of what it means to be a professional. We need serious discussions about what we ought to be about.

In Making a Place for the New American Scholar [12, pp. 8-9], R. Eugene Rice listed seven (often troubling) consensus assumptions of what academic professionalism includes:

Rice goes on to say, however, that these assumptions run contrary to another major axis of academic life C some local institutions have tried to change these faculty expectations to accommodate new market conditions. They now want faculty to deal with larger numbers of students, with adult learners who may already be employed and are taxpayers, and with new programs at the margins of colleges and universities. Hence, he concludes, "What is needed are new ideas, fresh conceptions of faculty work, ones that reunite institutional and personal endeavor and bring wholeness to scholarly lives." [12, p. 9]

If professional societies are to honor different ways of scholarship, "the serious intellectual and creative contributions of professors C in a way that cuts across a range of professional responsibilities, . . . [then] it has the potential for being not only extrinsically but intrinsically rewarding" [12, pp. 12-13]. This is particularly important because, as it now stands, several networks of reform do not consider professional societies [13]. Professional societies need to reevaluate priorities and address the challenge Rice raises: "the disturbing gap between what is viewed as scholarship and the pragmatic needs of the larger community" [12, p. 16]. Not only are the careers of the members of these professional societies at stake, but the generations of scholars to come need to be attracted by a comprehensive view of scholarship that they feel relates to their personal, social, and professional lives.

Principally, the values of autonomy and competition need to be situated within a larger commitment to collaborate, serve society, and contribute "to common goals [which] create working environments they [find] both productive and energizing" [12, p. 26]. Donald A. Sch–n summarizes this last need for reform of professional practices succinctly in his article "The New Scholarship Requires A New Epistemology." [14] For better or worse, whether we agree or not, we must consider how professional societies will serve the needs of their members who are being asked locally to define their careers in many new ways.

Professional Biological Societies as Communities of and for Faculty Scholars: Opportunities and Challenges