Reinvention Center Conference 2010: Tradition, Innovation, and Creativity: Undergraduate Learning in the 21st Century

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The project supported by this award is a two-day conference, "Tradition, Innovation, and Creativity: Undergraduate Education for the 21st Century." The conference will take place in Crystal City, Virginia on November 12 and 13, 2010. It is the fifth national meeting sponsored by the Reinvention Center, a unique educational consortium of research universities committed to improving undergraduate education. The Reinvention Center, housed at the University of Miami, is comprised of 63 dues-paying member institutions, each represented by its Undergraduate Vice President or Vice Provost (UVP). These educators constitute the UVP Network, which is the Reinvention Center's core. An elected Board and an executive director work with the UVP Network to determine priorities and activities. The 2010 National Conference will explore how innovation and creativity, which are both the means and ends of research, are transforming undergraduate education in American research universities. The focus is on state-of-the-art or recently tested approaches to learning, particularly those that have achieved success through new collaborations across and among academic fields and institutions. The conference takes up this theme in three broad educational areas: Science and Technology, Performing Arts, and Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom. The conference agenda emphasizes programs entailing engineering and the performing arts because their pragmatic and experiential approaches are broadly applicable to undergraduate education in general. As part of the Center's ongoing work on assessment, its newly formed Assessment Network will also report on its initial results and accomplishments. Specific conference objectives include promoting innovation and creativity as a means of improving undergraduate education; exploring successful programs of integrated learning, particularly in science and the arts; examining exemplary models of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration in the STEM disciplines, engineering, and the arts; increasing appreciation of the relevance and potential of multimedia and experiential learning inside and outside the classroom for innovating and improving undergraduate education; and exhibiting improvements in assessment practices developed by the Center's Assessment Network, with a special focus on writing as a means of strengthening and assessing learning in STEM and other disciplines. The conference will consist of four plenary and at least 20 topical sessions structured to maximize interaction among participants. By using successful and fresh educational models from diverse fields to illustrate how innovation, creativity, and intellectual integration can improve undergraduate learning, participants will be drawn into the national conversation about intellectual pursuits. The conference will have broad impact because 1) attending UVPs are uniquely positioned to adapt the conference's content to their home institutions, 2) the Center will publish its results in Proceedings and on its website, 3) past conferences have had substantial impact, and 4) subsequent UVP meetings will take up aspects of the program in detail.