Recent decades have seen increasing attention to and progress in research in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, making it time to initiate a STEM-wide and STEM-focused researcher network. The Breaking the Boundaries in STEM Education Conference will bring together scholars in discipline-based education research (DBER) and in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to enable these researchers to learn from and collaborate with each other. The conference will:
- bring together undergraduate STEM faculty from Southern California interested in transforming their classrooms with DBER and SoTL, with a particular focus on increasing the number and diversity of students in STEM pathways and improving students' skill sets that can be utilized in all STEM disciplines and careers.
- facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and learning from each other among current DBER, SoTL and education faculty in different departments and on different campuses in the Southern California area.
- serve as a catalyst for future projects that may be submitted to the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program for funding, in particular among faculty who are new DBER and SoTL researchers.
Building on the goal of increasing the number and diversity of undergraduate students in STEM pathways as well as improving those students' skill sets, the conference will be organized around three timely and important themes in STEM education:
- Equity,
- Problem Solving, and
- Computational Thinking.
Questions? Email BreakingBoundaries@lmu.edu