Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference

The American Association of Colleges and Universities has taken a bold stance in ensuring that the future of US STEM higher education remains promising. Today, AAC&U and its Project Kaleidoscope invite all true reformers to join us for the next, fully virtual installment of the Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference where we will lean into the uncertainty of recent setbacks in undergraduate STEM education and reaffirm our commitment to the unfinished work that still lies ahead. 

This Ain’t Over” is more than a catchy phrase or slogan. Rather, it is our refusal to settle for less when it comes to the students we educate and train, the content we teach, and the quality of life we desire for ourselves, our colleagues, and our leaders. It is also a call for us to reframe the realities we now face as an opportunity for capacity building, an invitation to be bold in centering justice and courage in our problem-solving, and a reminder that progress is not linear.

This conference brings together one of the nation’s largest gatherings of STEM faculty, administrators, higher education researchers, and policy leaders from all disciplines and institution types to ask harder questions, embrace discomfort, and imagine better strategies and approaches to undergraduate STEM teaching, learning, leadership, and academic lifestyle. It has been designed this year with the reformer in mind. Keen attention has been paid to every keynote, concurrent presentation, workshop, and breakout session. Attendees can expect to learn from and contribute to discussions that span a broad and blended range of topics from asset-based pedagogy and artificial intelligence to the impacts of the re-prioritization federal funding and the growing mistrust of scientific truths.

Transforming STEM Higher Education is both a conference and a commitment…because our work requires more than a typical one-and-done approach. Instead, our work demands what Frederick Douglass once noted as “patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable effort into which the whole heart is put.” We hope you will join us as we tackle the task of integrating rest (yes, rest), self-reflection, critical examination, disciplinary introspection, and social consciousness into a conference platform that emphasizes a different way of knowing, understanding, and advancing undergraduate STEM teaching, leadership, policy, and research.

The AAC&U Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference is a professional development experience that advances undergraduate STEM education reform by providing a national platform for the diverse perspectives and experiences of STEM faculty, particularly those from historically marginalized groups and institutions, to be inserted into national STEM reform discourse. This conference offers attendees a chance to disseminate curricular innovations, build community, co-learn, and gain capacity for manipulating the many levers of change that can positively influence institutional and individual transformation.