Synergistic Interactions of K-16 Partnership Work, Research, and Teaching in Higher Education Science Faculty Members

Work between higher education faculty and K-12 schools and teachers is fairly common, sometimes initiated by schools, sometimes designed by science professors under the aegis of broader impact as mandated by the National Science Foundation’s research grant solicitations and most recently mandated by their Math Science Partnership (MSP) solicitations. While most such work is focused on K-12 impact, this series of case studies examines the bidirectional, or “push-back” effects of such work on the professors’ teaching and on their scientific research. The study is informed by and contributes to Ernest Boyer’s (1990) discussion of scholarship in academia. Five of the subjects of this study were engaged in an MSP project and one professor’s work evolved from outreach as part of other research grants. All subjects formed partnerships characterized by mutual commitment, growth, respect and trust. The findings variously and powerfully illustrate interactions between: partnership work and the professors’ teaching, partnership work and research, and teaching and research. It also uncovers factors impacting these interactions. SYNERGISTIC INTERACTIONS OF K-16 PARTNERSHIP WORK 3 Synergistic Interactions of K-16 Partnership Work, Research, and Teaching in Higher Education Science Faculty Members The study examines interactions between a triad of components of professors’ academic work: teaching, research and application, described by Boyer (1990) as that particular kind of service that focuses on the use of knowledge for the public good. The paper focuses on a series of case studies of four professors and one non-academic scientist-educator all of whom were active in secondary science outreach work through a Math Science Partnership (MSP) program funded through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. In addition, the study includes a fifth professor who does a great deal of secondary school partnership work in conjunction with many research grants, none of which are MSPs. The hypothesis driving this study is that K-16 partnerships involving rigorous scholarly work fall within the definition of application in Boyer’s model and may have palpable transformative effects on professors’ teaching, and perhaps either directly or indirectly on their disciplinary knowledge and ultimately their research. The research questions are: Are there interactive effects of partnership work on professors’ academic lives? If so, how are they manifested and what factors contribute to, constrain or otherwise shape them? In addition, could such work be described as rigorous and scholarly? To answer this, a series of case studies was undertaken to examine possible bidirectional impacts between K-16 partnership work and teaching, K-16 partnership work and research, and teaching and research. This study focuses on the impact of such partnerships on the professors themselves, and while not a primary focus of the study, in some cases, impact on the professors’ institutions is implied. While most K-16 partnerships are formed to benefit K-12 schooling, this study explores neither the impact of these partnerships on K-12 students, teachers and schools nor the public SYNERGISTIC INTERACTIONS OF K-16 PARTNERSHIP WORK 4 perception of academia. Rather, its focus is solely on the interactions of partnership work within the scholarly lives of the professors who engage in it. Background The goal of the NSF’s MSP program is increased K-12 student achievement in challenging mathematics and science courses. To this end, NSF charged the MSP programs to focus on the development of an enlarged current and future pool of highly qualified and diverse mathematics and science teachers. To achieve this teacher workforce, MSP programs are designed to enlist professors who are experts in their science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics (STEM) disciplines to work in a variety of ways with practicing and pre-service K12 teachers. NSFs theory of action is that the professors act as “change agents” (Zhang et al, 2009) for K-12 schools and teachers. While never specifically articulated, NSF program officers have described (personal communication) their hopes that by working directly with K-12 teachers, STEM faculty from institutions of higher education (IHEs) might, in turn, gain insights that would be valuable to the professors’ home institutions. This effect might increase the quality of teaching in disciplinary courses attended by pre-service STEM teachers, while at the same time improving general undergraduate STEM instruction. The NSF, its program evaluators, Westat (Zhang et al, 2009), and researchers in MSPs (Pomeroy et al, 2009) have begun to amass evidence of such bidirectional impacts. While the NSF’s MSP programs are not alone in providing exemplars of synergistic interactions of K-16 educational partnerships, research, and teaching in IHE STEM faculty (Pomeroy & Rui, 2009), the MSP program design sets up contexts that maximize the potential to develop and nurture such interactions. This study also includes a non-MSP STEM SYNERGISTIC INTERACTIONS OF K-16 PARTNERSHIP WORK 5 professor who, on his own initiative for over 20 years, formed his own partnerships with secondary teachers and students through the broader impact mandate of numerous research grants he has designed and received. All NSF research grants require proposals to address broader implications. NSF defines broader implications as “To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purposes” (NSF Act of 1950). The broader impacts criterion can be addressed by any of the following questions: • How well does the activity advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning? • How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? • To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks and partnerships? • Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? • What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society? (NSF, 2007) Many research grantees use outreach in K-12 schools as fulfillment of this obligation. In its MSP solicitations, however, NSF made partnership between K-12 schools and institutions of higher education (IHEs) the distinguishing element. While there are many examples of higher education faculty working in K-12 schools or with teachers that fall under the aegis of service, few can really be called partnerships that fulfill the academic role of application as envisioned by Boyer. Service simply demands that one party performs an act for the benefit of the other; examples might be lectures, internships, conducting SYNERGISTIC INTERACTIONS OF K-16 PARTNERSHIP WORK 6 courses, or even developing materials. The salient factor in categorizing any of these as service would be that the professor is perceived as the expert and agent of change; it is a one-way transaction (Gibbons, 1999). Some of these very activities might be categorized as partnerships, however, but only if both parties are committed to substantial learning and growing. While the word partnership can describe a wide spectrum of activities involving two or more parties, the particular MSP which is the focus of this study believed that true partnerships demand and result in substantial bidirectional transformations. Early activities in the five-year MSP project conducted workshops with participating professors to help them form partnerships that require the kind of mutual commitment, growth, respect and trust that can only be established by hard work often involving the restructuring of beliefs and ideas. The non-MSP professor, who expressed very strong similar convictions in relation to his partnership work, was included in this study to explore what this kind of transformative partnership might look like in a non-MSP setting. The notion of bidirectionality, or mutual transformation, in this sense draws from two bodies of scholarship: one very new area is computer science, and the other is social contracts. The contribution in the first area can be drawn from the Grace Report (Czarnecki et al., 2008) which describes a conference of computer programmers from a variety of sub-disciplines in programming. This community addressed bidirectional transformations in programming in terms of operations, data and metaviews. Taking these out of the programming context for the purpose of this study, operations becomes the ways in which A works with B and B works with A, and operations can be transformed through bidirectional interactions. Data becomes the actual knowledge exchange between A and B, and this, too can become transformed as a result of new knowledge. And, finally, the metaview becomes the schema, or organization of ideas and SYNERGISTIC INTERACTIONS OF K-16 PARTNERSHIP WORK 7 constructs both about the different contexts within which A and B work and about the structure of the disciplines of knowledge which are the focus of their interactions. Like operations and data, metaviews are also subject to bidirectional transformation through engaging interactions. Another aspect of bidirectionality is informed by Gibbons’ (1999) argument for the need of transparent and participative interaction between science and society. Gibbons states that it was “assumed that the most important communication was from science to society,” however new and much more robust knowledge can and must develop from the social contextualizing of scientific knowledge and methodologies. Because of this, the traditional way of looking at professors’ work in K-12 schooling is to examine the impact on components of the K-12 system. This study examines such work in terms of the impact on the professors. Gibbons describes evolving societa