THE WIT, THE WILL ... AND THE WALLET
Supporting Educational Innovation, Shaping our Global Futures
AAC&U Annual Meeting
January 20-23, 2010
Washington, DC
Call for Proposals
AAC&U invites proposals of substantive, engaging sessions that will raise provocative questions, engage participants in discussion, and create and encourage dialogue
– before, during, and after the conference itself.
Deadline: Monday, July 20, 2009
Instructions for Submitting a Proposal
IMPORTANT:
It is possible for you to skip ahead to the “Online Proposal Form,” but we suggest you read through the following information first. Once you have started completing the form, you will not be able to save the data for submission at a later date.
Description of the Meeting
Catalysts for Change
Guidelines for Submitting a Proposal
Length of Presentations
Session Formats
Online Resources
How to Submit a Proposal
Final Reminders
Dates to Remember
If You Have Questions
Online Proposal Form
Description of the Meeting
Today’s economic uncertainties challenge all of us to be creative in meeting our commitments to students. These uncertainties also make even more urgent the need for us to prepare all students to thrive in a turbulent and fluid world.
Now, more than ever, AAC&U members are championing the value of a liberal education for individual students as well as for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. Colleges, universities, state systems and other partners are engaging the public and the academy with core questions about what really matters in college, using new clarity about essential learning outcomes to organize their efforts to pursue educational excellence, assess learning, and align school with college and goals with practices.
Efforts to sustain creative innovation and address the future of liberal learning in a context of dramatic change are evident within all sectors of the higher education community. We invite you to share your best efforts to translate educational vision into concrete practices.
Together, Annual Meeting participants will frankly assess the progress we have made and define the challenges that remain.
We look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC, and welcome your proposals to help us all imagine—and shape—our possible futures.
The Wit
Wit is the flower of the imagination.
~Livy
What Do We Know?
Collectively, we know a great deal about advancing liberal education outcomes – what works, what does not, and why. Robust educational innovations exist in pockets on all of our campuses. In a time of financial uncertainty, we must not allow the progress we have made fall victim to austerity. Instead, now is the time to gather our wits and focus with calm and purpose on the aims of education in our time.
- What do we know about creating and supporting campus innovation?
- What are the implications of these innovations and what is their potential to transform institutions and practices within them?
- Are we assessing our own innovations?
The Will
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
~Goethe
What Do We Do?
We need practical and replicable strategies for institutionalizing our best practices—our most visionary and transformational work. We need models for sustaining innovation and for learning from both successes and failures.
- How are we connecting and integrating the pockets of excellence and innovation that currently operate as laboratories for transformative practice?
- What are the sources for your campus innovation? How do we create and nurture them?
- How do we move from ideas to practices? What obstacles stand in our way? Where do we lack the will?
The Wallet
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
~Tagore
What Can We Do?
Financial uncertainty characterizes the day, but for higher education, issues of the wallet are perennial. What are the implications of this period of financial uncertainty for student learning and for liberal education?
- How do questions of affordability and cuts in public funding affect mission and democratic promise?
- Are faculty—the majority of whom are contingent—stretched to breaking?
- Does a corporatized higher education need restructuring?
- How are our educational priorities shifting in the face of economic uncertainty?
- How are colleges and universities enmeshed in a new world of finance and investment? What are the costs and benefits of new financial models for learning and institutional support?
SESSION PRIORITIES
Below are several “Catalysts for Change” we invite you to address in your proposals. We welcome compelling session proposals on other issues as well. However, we ask that all proposals demonstrate the creative convergence of your wit, your will, and your wallet.
Catalysts for Change
Making Learning Outcomes Count—Within and Beyond the Academy
Seventy-eight percent of AAC&U members report that they have a common set of intended learning outcomes for all their undergraduate students. The skills most widely addressed are writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, oral communication, intercultural skills, information literacy, and ethical reasoning. The knowledge areas most often required are humanities, sciences, social sciences, global cultures, and mathematics.
How do we ensure that such a framework truly counts, by encouraging purposeful changes within the academy to ensure all students reach these goals? How do we advance these goals through attention to real-world problems beyond the academy? How do we better integrate the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences?
“Re-Tuning” the Disciplines—Re-Framing the Bologna Process in an American Context
While many institutions define learning outcomes across undergraduate programs, the Lumina Foundation is working with selected states to create benchmark learning outcomes for specific disciplines. Clifford Adelman argues “U.S. colleges and universities . . . do not typically state what students with the degree should know and be able to do in ways that employers, policymakers, and the public can immediately understand. We need to embrace a more comprehensive approach to defining the learning that degrees represent or risk falling further behind our global counterparts.”
What would such an approach look like? Is this the direction we are heading? How does the American model of education change how a “Bologna-like” process might work here?
Investing in High-Impact Practices that Support Student Success
High-impact educational practices work, and they are especially effective for students who enter college behind in terms of test scores. Seventy-eight percent of members report that they are placing more emphasis on undergraduate research; 73% are placing more emphasis on first-year experiences; and 52% are placing more emphasis on learning communities. However, we still reach only a fraction of students with these types of practices.
What can we do to ensure that all students have access to high impact practices? How can we ensure that these practices are implemented in the most effective and efficient ways?
Making Civic and Global Engagement a “Signature” of Liberal Education
The full range of liberal education outcomes includes personal and social responsibility. Attending to these outcomes is essential for both the public and the personal purposes of higher education. Campuses are helping students explore questions of ethical responsibility to self and others in a diverse democracy and an interconnected world. They are also aiming to reclaim and revitalize the academy’s role in fostering students’ development of personal and social responsibility by creating learning environments that prepare students to fulfill their obligations in an academic community and as global and local citizens.
How can we work more intentionally with our communities—local and global—to fulfill the public purpose of liberal education? How do we ensure that responsibility for such efforts is shared across science, social science, arts, and humanities?
Inventing Assessments that Deepen Higher Learning
To achieve a high-quality education for all students, valid assessment data are needed to guide planning, teaching, and improvement. Colleges and universities are seeking to foster and assess a wide array of learning outcomes, not just those addressed in currently available standardized tests. Good practice in assessment requires collection of data at multiple points over time. Well planned electronic portfolios provide opportunities to collect data from multiple assessments across a broad range of learning outcomes while guiding student learning and building self-assessment capabilities.
Are we assessing what our students really need to know? How are we using the results? Which kinds of assessment provide useful data but also deepen students’ learning?
Helping Every Student Take Responsibility for Learning
One critical element of AAC&U’s agenda is the determination to help all students internalize new standards for what matters in college. Naming learning outcomes help make this transparent, but only if students understand them. Among those institutions with common learning outcomes who responded to our recent survey, only 5% think most students understand their institutions’ intended learning outcomes; another 37% believe that a majority of their students understand them.
How can we improve these numbers? What are the proven strategies for communicating with students about what matters in college? How can we help students take responsibility for their own learning even as we support them?
Nurturing Curricular Vitality
While the public and the media are focused primarily on cost issues in higher education, colleges and universities are in the midst of a significant reinvention of the undergraduate curriculum. They are changing their curricula to meet the needs of a changing world, as more and more campuses are focusing attention on providing students with integrative and engaged forms of learning. More than two-thirds of institutions, for example, now use a general education model that combines course choice with other integrative features like learning communities or thematic required courses. Those institutions using a model that includes integrated features (e.g. learning communities, first-year seminars, etc.) are much more likely to have stated learning outcomes for all students, to report greater integration of general and major requirements, and to use capstone or other high-impact practices.
How do we sustain this rich curricular experimentation in the face of real economic pressures? With decades of innovation in science teaching behind us, what are the most promising avenues for raising the quality and level of students’ engagement and achievement in science and scientific research?
Rethinking Transfer
Students are moving back and forth from two-year to four-year institutions, from four-year to four-year institutions, and from four-year to two-year institutions. Such multidirectional student flows have profound implications for the ways we think about transfer, the relationship between institutions—in systems and across the academy – and shared responsibility for student learning outcomes.
How are our institutions – including state systems and schools – adapting to how students pursue higher education? What will be the path to a college degree in ten years?
Unlocking the Reward System—and Supporting Our Faculties
The success of an ambitious educational agenda depends upon a well-supported faculty with regular opportunities to develop their talents as teachers and scholars. We are rich in creative and imaginative leadership, but existing systems do not recognize and reward the full range of engagement we expect for excellence. Who are today’s faculty members? What do they seek in their careers? How are they employed? As institutions struggle to adapt to the changing economic environment, we need to think hard about faculty roles and the faculty reward system.
How do we view faculty members’ responsibilities? How do we professionally support and develop today’s faculty? How will our institutional choices today affect the quality of undergraduate education?
Guidelines for Submitting a Proposal
We encourage proposals that raise provocative questions, engage participants in discussion, and create and encourage dialogue ¾ before, during, and after the conference itself.
All proposals should reflect current work, recent findings, and/ or new perspectives.
- Session proposals should link the work of multiple institutions and illustrate diverse perspectives. We particularly welcome student perspectives.
- AAC&U is committed to presenting an annual meeting at which sessions and participants reflect the pluralism of our campus communities. Proposals for sessions with diverse presenters are especially welcome.
- We encourage proposals that address the challenges encountered – not just the successes. As noted in a recent meeting evaluation: “I appreciated hearing about how well a new program was working, but I found it more valuable to hear about some of the challenges that were eventually overcome.”
- Sessions should engage participants in thinking about how they might translate and adapt this research or project/model/innovation to their own institutions or professional settings. Feedback from last year’s meeting included this: “Presenters should compress the remarks they make about their institutions. A brief introduction is fine, but audiences want to hear about programs, data, etc. We want to learn how to apply this work to our own institutions.”
- Make it interactive! Please do not read your paper at the Annual Meeting. This is the top complaint from audience members each year.
Length of Presentations
NOTE: Most sessions will be 60 or 75 minutes long, with a very limited number of 90-minute sessions. All sessions must include ample opportunities for dialogue with participants.
Session Formats
Panel Presentation
Traditional format with presentation(s) followed by discussion with the audience.
20/20 Session
This format was created in response to those who want practical “how-to” information – and want the information quickly. The 20/20 sessions are intended to be energetic and creative, compressing what might have been a 75 minute session into a crisp, dynamic delivery of that session’s core points. Please note:
- 20/20 sessions are 60 minutes long and comprised of two, separately submitted 20-minute presentations (on similar or compatible topics), each followed by a 10-minute discussion.
- All 20/20 Sessions will have an AAC&U moderator to ensure that time limits are followed.
- We suggest that 20/20 sessions have no more than two speakers for each 20-minute presentation.
- This format is one of the few for which single-speaker presentations are accepted.
- A proposal for a 20/20 session is for one 20-minute presentation.
Research Session
Presentation of findings, works in progress, or new methodologies pertaining to teaching and learning.
Discussion Session
Brief presentation(s) with the primary focus on discussion and/or small-group exercises.
Homepage Session: A Focus on Technology
Presentation of curricular models or programs that use new technologies to enhance teaching and learning.
LEAP Presentations
The 2010 Annual Meeting will highlight the innovative work of colleges and universities that are members of the LEAP Campus Action Network * – colleges, universities, and organizations committed to liberal education and working to ensure that all students achieve essential liberal education outcomes. LEAP sessions can be scheduled throughout the meeting, but we will focus exclusively on the LEAP Initiative on Thursday evening and Saturday morning. We invite members of the LEAP Campus Action Network–and those who would like to join the Network–to submit proposals for one or both of the following:
Thursday Evening: LEAP Roundtable Discussions
Following a brief introduction, participants will break into informal roundtable discussions highlighting the work of LEAP Campus Action Network members. Conference participants will be able to focus on one roundtable or they can circulate among many.
Saturday Morning: LEAP Sessions
We also invite proposals from LEAP Campus Action Network members for sessions on Saturday morning. All formats are welcome – panel presentations, 20/20 sessions, research presentations, or roundtable discussions.
* Don’t know if your institution is Campus Action Network member? Find the list here or learn how to become a member of the Network.
Online Resources for your Session
Supplemental Material Available on the Web
If your proposal pertains to a project, program, course, writings, or other feature for which there is (or could be) descriptive material on the Web, please provide the URL address with your proposal. AAC&U’s Web site will include these links when we post the online conference program in the autumn.
Advance Readings
We encourage you to make available advance readings that participants will find useful for your session. We ask that you send us these documents (in PDF files), and we will post them with the online conference program. If these readings are already posted, just send us the link and we will include that.
How to Submit a Proposal
Electronic Submission: Please submit your proposal electronically as directed on the form. If you need assistance, please contact Suzanne Hyers at hyers@aacu.org or call 202-387-3760.
Deadline: Please submit your proposal on or before Monday, July 20, 2009.
Notification: You should receive an automatic message indicating receipt of your proposal when it is submitted. If you do not receive this message, please send an e-mail to Suzanne Hyers at hyers@aacu.org.
Acceptance: You will be notified via email by September 30, 2009, regarding the status of your proposal.
Registration Fees:
All presenters at the Annual Meeting are responsible for the appropriate registration fees. Please be sure all presenters submitted in your proposal have this information. Registration materials will be available online beginning September 14, 2009.
Final Reminders:
Please complete all fields, including information pertaining to all additional speakers.
Please include links to supplemental materials, if available.
By submitting a proposal, you agree to:
Register and pay fees, if the proposal is accepted.
Inform your co-presenters about the proposal’s status and the need for all presenters to register and pay fees.
Dates to Remember:
July 20, 2009: Proposals due to AAC&U
September 14, 2009: Registration materials available online
September 30, 2009: Acceptance (or rejection) of proposals sent to all Contact Persons
If You Have Questions or Need Additional Information
Please do not hesitate to contact us at meetings@aacu.org or to call AAC&U at 202-387-3760. We look forward to receiving your proposal.
To Go to Online Proposal Form
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