Community College Biology Education Research Meeting

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The University of Texas at Austin and De Anza Community College will be addressing the dearth of discipline-based education research, particularly Biology Education Research (BER), at the nation's community colleges. The project team will convene a meeting of national leaders in BER, community college biology teaching, action research, and community-based participatory research. The meeting will characterize the state of community college BER, including what issues or topics have been studied and where gaps exist. Further, it will generate a plan to identify constraints and affordances community college faculty encounter when conducting and publishing Biology Education (Bio-Ed) studies and a plan to identify support strategies that will enhance the number of faculty conducting and publishing community college Bio-Ed studies. Finally, the meeting will nucleate a network of individuals interested in conducting or participating in community college Bio-Ed studies.Participants will represent diverse theoretical, practical, and institutional perspectives important to fostering BER in community colleges and will include journal editors, BER scholars, and community college faculty. The meeting will also include experts in the variety of research traditions that ensure active involvement of the community being studied and equitable consideration of community interests. The project will have three outcomes: 1) a meeting report that will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and a complementary set of editorials and letters to editors of other STEM- and Bio-Ed journals to draw attention to the report; 2) a set of plans for a collaborative research project to identify factors that enable or limit community college faculty in conducting and publishing BER; and 3) a network of individuals dedicated to fostering BER in community colleges and accomplishing emergent meeting goals. The meeting will also serve as a foundation for generating evidence-based strategies to address the dearth of BER at the community college level.