Seminar: Alma Mat(t)ers: Leveraging current undergraduate experiences to change the future of higher education

About the event

The Transformative Change Initiative (TCI) invites all members of the WSU community to join them for a seminar entitled “Alma Mat(t)ers: Leveraging Current Undergraduate Experiences to Change the Future of Higher Education” by Dr. Dan Grunspan.

Reforming university instruction to align with evidence-based practices is a critical, time-sensitive goal across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Unfortunately, achieving scalable change has proven difficult. In this seminar, Dr. Grunspan will describe a cultural evolutionary model for pedagogical change that stresses how individuals and their ideas flow between universities. This flow determines the trajectory and frequency with which pedagogical practices are used by faculty. Using a novel dataset of more than 7000 physics faculty from nearly 600 institutions—including where they received their undergraduate degree—Dr. Grunspan will show that the flow of individuals between institutions is currently imbalanced: only about 20 percent of all universities train 70 percent of physics faculty. Although this imbalance may be historically responsible for a stasis of teacher-centered pedagogies, it can also create opportunities for large-scale pedagogical reform.

Originally from Western New York, Dr. Grunspan earned a PhD in Biocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arizona State University in the Center for Evolution and Medicine.  Dr. Grunspan is now at the University of Guelph as an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology.