Graduate Education and Research: The Integrated Passion
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Dr. Joseph Bordogna
Deputy Director
Chief Operating Officer
National Science Foundation
Biography
Remarks, Opening address to CIRTL Forum
University of Wisconsin-Madison
November 5, 2003
See also slide presentation.
If you're interested in reproducing any of the slides, please contact
The Office of Legislative and Public Affairs: (703) 292-8070.
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Good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation to inaugurate your
first CIRTL forum with this address. I intend to take this opportunity to encourage
you to be provocative with your efforts in integrating research and education,
to back you up—so to speak—as you take risks in provoking change in academe.
But first, Dean Cadwallader's kind introduction gives me an opening to mention
that as I was preparing for today's talk, one of my NSF colleagues, Lynn Simarski,
exclaimed as she recognized Martin Cadwallader's name on today's agenda. Lynn
told me that, twenty-five years ago, as a geography student here at U.W., she
was facing the required statistics course with considerable dread. However,
Dean Cadwallader's teaching of introductory statistics turned out to be so
brilliant that Lynn still credits him with a "true epiphany" in her understanding
of statistics. The wisdom of good teachers and mentors marks us for life—truly
a core reason to make teaching and learning an integral and explicit part of
graduate education.
It is a special pleasure to chat here this morning with folks committed to
the integration of research and education. The journey you have begun is aligned
with one of NSF's strategic intents, along with investment in intellectual
capital and promoting partnerships. NSF's strategic plan and our investment
portfolio, available on our website, give valuable context for how your activities
reverberate in, and receive whole-hearted support from, NSF. We urge you to
see your work in the context of how important it is in helping to drive NSF's
strategic envelope.
Collectively, you are at the forefront of implementing NSF's strategic intents—all
three of them. I'm delighted to be part of the foment around how we can enable
current and future faculty to engage in education with the same passion as
they engage in research.
Since we're meeting here at Wisconsin, I'll draw upon a local example of a
faculty member who embodies the principle of research and education being two
sides of the same "integrated" coin. U.W. plant pathologist Paul Williams invented
what are called "Fast Plants"—these go from being a seed to producing seed
in just 35 days. Fast plants were first developed as a research tool for biologists,
but have come to be used in science classrooms around the globe. Because the
plants grow and develop so fast, students can study the plants' genetic changes
over a semester. Professor Williams says fast plants "became part of a larger
sea-change in the way biology is taught. We measure our success," he says, "by
how much our ideas are adopted and adapted." What a glowing example of integrating
education and research!
Throughout my own career, I have had a passion for the integration of teaching
and learning with research, within both undergraduate and graduate education.
Educating engineers has occupied the greater part of my life. While I was Dean
of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, we experienced the usual
challenges in supporting our graduate students financially as well as intellectually.
One mechanism of financial support, still ubiquitous across academe, was to
appoint first-year graduate students as Teaching Assistants (TAs), a kind of
itinerant labor, performed ad-hoc for pay, and rarely integrated within the
students' research activities. This practice fosters the attitude among students
that teaching is some sort of "add-on", not part and parcel of their doctoral
education.
However, our Department of Chemical Engineering implemented quite another
approach—to support all first-year graduate students fully the first year,
with stipend funds drawn primarily from departmental general funds contributed
by the Dean, industry and endowment income. Then, around each student's third
year, he or she would undertake a teaching practicum—first, being given preparation
on how to teach and, second, teaching undergrads as a component of the doctoral
curriculum.
When I tried to institutionalize this paradigm across the school, one argument
posed against it was that since the graduate students were partly supported
by industrial monies, industry would not want their investment used for a teaching
practicum. So, I canvassed a group of CEOs--and 100% of them said they'd love
to hire PhDs with both teaching training and experience!
Indeed, graduate students today may follow ever more diverse pathways, yet
all will need the skills of teaching and learning, whether they end up as professors,
practicing in industry, or serving in government.
Another memory from my career related to your Forum's topic is from the mid-1980s,
when I served as Chair of the first NSF Committee of Visitors (COV), for the
Presidential Young Investigators program. The NSF program officers had the
wonderful idea of conducting a workshop the day prior to the start of the COV
work. This workshop was peopled with a pack of PYIs and a bunch of vice provosts
and vice presidents of research. As the workshop got underway, the PYIs strongly
expressed their frustration with their department chairs and faculty mentors,
who had told them that since they had five years of robust financial support
from NSF, they should forget teaching, and focus only on research. What an
anti-education signal that gave during a pre-tenure period! This "fracas" eventually
caused the PYI program to morph into NSF's current program for early career
development for faculty, known as CAREER (I'll return to CAREER a bit later
on).
Attitudes about what a graduate education means have thankfully evolved, and
you are all in the vanguard of that evolution. Yet, our work is not about taking
a broken model and trying to fix it—far from it. Our graduate schools are the
envy of the world, drawing students from every nation to our shores. But we
also look to interact with cultural change in academe in the sense that H.L.
Mencken spoke about culture as "neither education nor law-making" but "an atmosphere
and a heritage" –that is, a solid past wrapped up in a contemporary atmosphere
that fosters flexibility and innovation.
Today, the amazing transformations that new knowledge and constantly changing
research and education tools continuously trigger in our contemporary world
propel education and research squarely into each other's arms. We might use
Daniel Boorstin's phrase, the "Fertile Verge," to describe the dynamism and
creativity that result when education and research encounter each other.
When I think about the rationale for what we are trying to do, I like to use
an analogy from the architect Eero Saarinen who designed Dulles Airport and
the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. He was fond of quoting the advice of his
father Eliel, also an architect of great distinction: "Always design a thing
by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a
house, a house in an environment, and environment in a city plan." This type
of outlook carries over to designing education for the future. As the world
changes we are compelled to look at educating for the next expansive context,
and that context today grows in scope and morphs faster than ever before.
We need a model of graduate education suitable to a new world in which change
and complexity are the rule, a world that is globally linked, and growing in
myriad dimensions, on scales ranging from the nanoparticle to worldwide virtual
networks. This is the larger context within which we must redefine our vision
of graduate education.
No matter the discipline, such an education must inculcate the skills that
the 21 st century requires, and we need to engage in some radical rethinking
about how to transform it. We need to take the best of what graduate education
offers—and there is a great deal of that—and reshape it to foster adaptability,
to impart skills to students who will experience a number of crisp iterations
in their career paths over their lifetimes, and to bring graduate education
more in synch with our world. This is the rationale not for reinventing the
wheel but for educating students who will chart new territory.
Scientists and engineers of the future will process unprecedented amounts
of information. They must adopt a sense of continuous learning to remain scientifically
and technologically astute long after completing their formal degrees. They
will especially need to know how to work across boundaries, for the nature
of how research is done and how knowledge is created is becoming more complex,
requiring more intimate connections and more robust collaborations.
Graduate education simply cannot be considered in isolation. As we weigh the
balance between continuity and reform, let us consider how we can work towards
a system of education that will be a seamless route of advancement for students
from K-12 through post-doctoral levels. There is one particular divide that
I would like to highlight--the divide between K-12 "teachers" on the one hand,
and college and university "faculty" on the other. We need to move toward recognizing
the entire spectrum of our educational professionals as "faculty." Early learning
is as important to individual development, and to long-term social progress,
as is a higher degree. We will only be able to design seamless learning paths
for students when we recognize our common ground as faculty in a seamless educational
community. This attitude is fostered both in NSF's new Math and Science Partnerships,
and in its Faculty for the Future investment in the Workforce for the 21 st
Century priority area, and I urge you to look at these in NSF's FY 2004 budget
request.
[slide NSF priority areas]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
In terms of my earlier remarks urging you to see your work as an important
driver of NSF's strategic envelope, I turn now to some specific NSF constructs
and programs that manifest this theme and help to support your work in graduate
education. This slide lists what we call our "priority areas"--areas of exceptional
promise to advance knowledge in science, engineering and society that we have
singled out for special investment, over and above our ongoing investments
in core disciplines. I cite the priority areas not so much for their own sake,
however, but because they embody a way of thinking and an impetus for change.
They are not just examples of cross-boundary research—they capture the frontiers
of the moment, which then dissolve to give way to new frontiers. They are not
just about encouraging collaboration, but are about elevating capabilities
across the disciplines, enriching all of NSF and changing us as an institution.
Our priority area most recently in gestation is Human and Social Dynamics,
an effort to jumpstart efforts already underway to transform understanding
of our societies, our institutions and ourselves. Too often, exploration of
the implications of new knowledge and technology comes as an afterthought.
The social sciences are critical to accelerating research progress and will
surely continue to transform how we teach and learn. I am convinced that our
success with Human and Social Dynamics will be complete only when no one needs
to be told to take human beings and our institutions into consideration at
the front end of our collaborative research and education endeavors.
Our earliest priority area, now five years old, is Information Technology
Research (ITR), selected based on the rationale that information technology
has transformed the very conduct of research—helping us to handle the complexity
as well as quantity of data, enabling new collaborations around the globe and
stunning new ways to visualize in many disciplines. In fact, grantees from
the ITR priority area have returned to change NSF itself; after experiencing
ITR boundary-crossing awards, PIs complained that our structure was too "stove-piped" to
handle their creative new collaborations. Now, our Computer and Information
Sciences Directorate is reorganizing itself to better serve the new community
that the all-NSF ITR investment engendered.
[slide not available]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
Another way we encourage more holistic thinking is with what many of you will
know as NSF's "broader impact criterion." Here we ask all proposers to designate
the broader impacts of the proposed activity—and the very first example under
this criterion is this: "How well does the activity advance discovery and understanding
while promoting teaching, training and learning?" Here is a compelling piece
of the context and support for the changes you are all trying to make in graduate
education.
There are other NSF focused programs that are symbiotic with your CIRTL work.
I'll quickly cite four that dovetail nicely.
[slide IGERT]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
The Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program
is NSF's flagship initiative for graduate education. In six years we have funded
approximately 100 institutions to reshape graduate training programs in order
to create a fertile environment for cross-boundary, collaborative research
and education.
IGERT is not about demanding that our students learn more and more basic knowledge,
or delve deeper into a specialty. These are good things to do, but knowledge
is changing so rapidly at the boundaries of disciplines that sticking to such
paths alone may not fully enable a student's capability to meet the responsibilities
of a contemporary career.
IGERT is about providing students with additional capabilities that will enable
them to work at and across boundaries, to handle ambiguity, to integrate, to
innovate, to communicate and to cooperate. These are components of a holistic
education that not only suits the science and engineering of our times, but
also thrives on diversity.
[slide CAREER]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
Our CAREER program—the Faculty Early Career Development Awards--similarly
isn't support for young investigators alone, so much as it is an investment
in producing a set of holistic leaders of academe for the next generation,
who unconsciously integrate research and education.
[slide not available]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
Similarly, our ADVANCE program is much more than support for women's advancement
in science and engineering, a worthy objective on its own; rather, it is an
investment to institutionalize the presence of women in academe, along with
NSF investment for underrepresented minorities and persons with disabilities.
Moreover, it's not about the total number of engineers and scientists the nation
may or may not need. More and more frequently we seem to be stymied and distracted
from our diversity goals by questions about trends and statistics, like whether
we really need more scientists and engineers. This is a blind alley.
ADVANCE IS about the need to include a larger proportion of women, underrepresented
minorities and persons with disabilities in the science and engineering workforce,
no matter what the total number. Whatever the total numbers of scientists and
engineers turn out to be, we need a robust and varied mix, and that means expanding
diversity.
This program is also about fully developing our domestic talent. In our knowledge-intensive
society, we need to capitalize on all available intellectual talent, not only
to advance but also to keep our nation humming. We need to understand that
diversity is an asset and dissimilarity a valuable component of progress.
[slide GK-12]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
"GK-12" is the moniker for another NSF experiment in integrating teaching
and learning with a graduate education. However, this program is emphatically
not about graduate students bringing the greater wisdom from on high to classrooms
and force-feeding it to teachers. The graduate students themselves actually
learn in the process that being an expert in a specialized field does not necessarily
guarantee one's ability to communicate that knowledge.
A hallmark of GK-12 is that rivulets of learning flow in all directions, among
the graduate student, the classroom teacher, the K-12 students, the graduate
student's mentor, and everywhere in between.
One striking outcome already appearing from GK-12 is the strong partnerships
and learning communities being established as a result of the interactions
fostered by the program. Related to their GK-12 effort, for example, Duke University
has received over $320,000 in outside support from Burroughs Welcome, the GE
Fund and the Dean of Engineering to support an increase in the computer literacy
of local teachers.
As you all know, CIRTL was born out of our program for Teaching and Learning
Centers—as such, it aspires to reconceptualize teaching as a research process
and to create supportive learning communities.
Contrast this to our Science of Learning Centers, which step up to the very
frontiers to probe the fundamentals that underlie all the territory I have
covered this morning.
[slide Science of Learning]
(Use "back" to return to the text.)
The question might well be asked, "Why do we need a science of learning?" Well,
it is an attempt to credibly understand how people think and learn. It is an
attempt to weave an integrated web of seemingly diverse scientific streams.
The social sciences investigate the nature of perception and memory, and the
role of motivation and emotion in learning. Biosciences cover the gamut from
molecular to behavioral foundations of learning. Cognitive neuroscience brings
us insight into the neural basis of learning in humans and other species. The
physical and information sciences and engineering are now creating machines
that learn. Educational sciences cover pedagogy from schools to colleges to
lifelong learning.
Components of learning operate at every scale from genetic to digital to societal.
To truly investigate learning, we must integrate insights from every level
through multi-faceted, boundary-crossing collaborations. Such research builds
the basis for the "classroom" of the future, even the foundation for learning
beyond the classroom, and for educating our future workforce.
I'll summarize my message now quite simply: developing disciplinary and organizational
skills in teaching, communication, multi-tasking and cross-boundary approaches
are as integral to today's graduate student experience as are research skills.
It is exciting that this is already happening in your institutions; as put
by one of our NSF division directors, Art Ellis (incidentally, from the University
of Wisconsin): "Ten years ago, at least at some institutions, you ran the risk
of being ostracized if you tried to integrate teaching and learning into graduate
education; we've come a long way, and now it's politically acceptable to experiment
with it."
It is very clear that CIRTL and indeed, all of you gathered here, are a living
embodiment of NSF's strategic intents, which I cited early on—investment in
intellectual capital, integration of research and education, and promoting
partnerships. In the midst of roiling change, you are making these things happen,
and transforming graduate education to meet the future—a future in which success
is defined in a new way, a future in which every graduate student makes a committed
investment to developing teaching and learning skills in synch with a complex
and multidisciplinary world.
Now, to practice what I preach, I am very much looking forward to learning—that's
the best part of this visit—from our dialogue about the challenges and successes
you have encountered in integrating teaching and learning into graduate education.
I invite your comments and questions. Thank you.
Return to a list of Dr. Bordogna's speeches.
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