Nothing Stays the Same: Reflecting on, Reckoning with & Re-Engineering Undergraduate STEM Education

Everything must change, but has it?

The 1970s jazz hit made famous by singer and songwriter George Benson provided us with a mental framework and strategic plan for shaping the reform of STEM higher education. But the chaos of COVID has interrupted the logic of that framework, shifted our planning in significant ways, and convinced us that we are now obligated to pursue undergraduate STEM reform outside of known frameworks and with “unremitting and indefatigable effort into which our whole hearts are put.”

Overview

AAC&U and its Project Kaleidoscope invite you to join us for a virtual conference as we continue grappling with the undeniable truths, paradoxes, and peculiarities of what is at the core of undergraduate STEM reform and its potential for impact—us. This year of reflecting on and reckoning with ourselves—and the myriad ways in which science disparately influences our lives and those of our students—has set in motion a daring course of action for re-imagining and re-engineering not only what STEM reform must achieve, but also how soon and for whom it must be achieved.

Everything must change
Nothing remains the same
Everyone must change
No one and nothing remains the same

-Bernard Ighner

The AAC&U Conference on Transforming STEM Higher Education uses its convening power and mission-level commitment to quality and inclusive excellence to advance undergraduate STEM education reform. By foregrounding diverse disciplines, perspectives, worldviews, voices, needs, and desires—especially of those who have been historically marginalized from STEM—this conference gives rise to a deeper understanding of institutional levers of reform and outlines a national agenda for manipulating those levers to drive discovery, innovation, and social change in STEM higher education. With our attendees, we give voice, not just sound; demonstration, not just intent; and purpose, not just a plan for co-creating reform strategies that can accelerate the reform of undergraduate STEM education practice, research, and policy in ways that advantage all and disadvantage none.