Workshop Reports and Proceedings
Order Code: WR7
Synthesis of the Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Graduate Education Forum
Terrence S. Millar,
Sarah A. Mason, Ramona L. Gunter,
& Susan B. Millar
Preface
This Synthesis is intended as a contribution to our
understanding of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET)
graduate education. Over the last 100 years, the United States has created the
premier graduate education enterprise in the world. Graduate education is part
of an information- and research-driven cultural transformation that rivals the
industrial revolution. This distributed pluralistic collage of learning,
research and professional development interacts with numerous other driving
forces of our time in ways that are diverse in dimension and scale. The
resulting complexity makes understanding graduate education difficult—it has a
robust, creative, fractal nature.
Over the past three decades, numerous meetings, studies,
and reports have focused on issues of graduate education. The National Institute
for Science Education Forum and the Synthesis follow this tradition, affirming
the reflective nature of the graduate education enterprise. The Forum had
traditional “linear” elements such as sequential panel speakers addressing
issues at higher levels of abstraction. However the organizers also fostered
“parallel distributed” interactions among participants, drawing on their
particular experiences. These interactions took place in simultaneous
presentations by subsets of the 45 Forum Featured Practices and in written
feedback by all participants during small group breakout sessions. In addition,
the organizers provided participants, in advance of the forum, with Descriptions
of Programs and Strategies for Change (DPSC),
a document designed both to introduce the featured practices and to provide a
resource for use after the forum.[1]
We hope that this Synthesis and the DPSC will assist the reader in better understanding the forces at play in the domain of graduate education and the innovative ways programs from around the country have responded to those forces. We resist the impulse for an “Executive Summary” because the fractal nature of the patterns argues against such an exercise. We aim instead, to borrow a phrase from Clifford Geertz, for a thick description.[2]
[1]. National Institute for Science Education, Descriptions of programs and strategies for change: Strengthening graduate education in science and engineering (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998).
[2]. Geertz, C., The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-32.