Join the Reinvention Collaborative for a Town Hall with Michael Dennin, Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning, and Richard Arum, Dean, School of Education, University of California, Irvine. One of the major challenges facing U.S. colleges and universities is doing the hard work of self-evaluation to identify, and address, institutional racism within the undergraduate educational experience. The implicit nature of much of structural racism presents a significant challenge for identification, especially by those who are effectively privileged by many of these structures. Despite the challenges, a number of core features of the undergraduate educational experience are worth careful study and interrogation. Specifically, it is worth highlighting the university’s role in enforcing “standards” with respect to gatekeeping elements of the curriculum, institutional approaches to academic integrity, and the role of high-stakes assessments. At UCI, we are encouraging faculty to engage in a meaningful discussion of these issues that embraces the need to broaden, without lowering, our understanding of academic standards and to more fully consider student experiences and outcomes. This conversation is enhanced by a robust approach to leveraging an increasingly broad range of student data, from standard student information system data to regular surveys of students to the rich, learning management system data. Integrating these diverse data streams allows one to identify more accurately diverse undergraduate student experiences and outcomes. These findings are being used to inform data-driven institutional improvement efforts, advance educational equity and demonstrate the value of educational experiences to a broad set of stakeholders. Thanks to funding from the Mellon Foundation, we are engaged in campus-wide efforts that bridge from fundamental research to implementation.
Richard Arum is dean of the School of Education and professor of education and (by courtesy) sociology, criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. He recently served as senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-2015; and director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council from 2006-2013, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools. He is author of Judging School Discipline: A Crisis of Moral Authority (Harvard University Press, 2013); coauthor of Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011); as well as coeditor of Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessment for the 21st Century (Jossey Bass, 2016), Improving Learning Environments: School Discipline and Student Achievement in Comparative Perspectives (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007). He received a Masters of Education in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Dennin has been Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCI since 1997, and is now the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Dean, Division of Undergraduate Education. His research focuses on the dynamics of foams and modeling of ice mélange in fjords. He has won numerous awards for research and teaching, and is passionate about public outreach in the area of science –including co-teaching an open course based on the AMC television program The Walking Dead. He has appeared on numerous television programs – including Science of Superman, Spider-man Tech, Batman Tech, Star Wars Tech, and Ancient Aliens. You can find Prof. Dennin in the YouTube series Fascinating Fights (http://bit.ly/1GDKVex) debating the outcome of battles between pop icons. In addition, Prof. Dennin serves as an expert on the podcast Fascinating Gadgets, Gizmos, and Gear-Based Technologies where he explains how to make fictional technology a reality (http://fgggbt.com). Recently, he published a science outreach book on the intersection between science and faith: Divine Science: Finding Reason at the Heart of Faith, from Franciscan Media.