My Interest in ASCN: Cathy Manduca

Carleton College
Science Education Resource Center (SERC)
Director

Prior Organizational Change Work

I have been involved in leading change in the geoscience community as a PI with Heather Macdonald on the On the Cutting Edge professional development program for geoscience facutly and the lead PI for Building Strong Geoscience Departments and the InTeGrate STEP center. All of these efforts used a combination of face to face and virtual interactions to share ideas and resources across a community of 200 to 2000 people.

As the Director of SERC, I've explored the use of online resources to support change. This is a form of asynchronous networking and self-guided learning.

Lastly, I've spent a lot of time on boards and committees for professional societies in various parts of STEM including working with two societies as they overhauled their society governance structures. This provides a different view of organizational change than either the grass roots view afforded by my work with the geoscience community or the view I have of institutional change from inside Carleton.

How ASCN Can Contribute to my Work

In my mind, ASCN's strength is in its connection to the research base and the research community -- I'm very excited to both learn from this community and contribute through partnerships. I have also been involved in collecting and analyzing data on the outcomes of our work in geoscience both through workshops and the website, and would like to connect this to a broader understanding of theory and to research on faculty learning and change.

How I Can Contribute to ASCN

I bring a long history of on the ground, practical experience in supporting grass roots change efforts, as well as quite a bit of organizational leadership experience. This kind of annectdotal experience can be helpful in testing research ideas or plans at their early stages and I really enjoy this kind of brainstorming. I also have a lot of practical experience on information sharing via the web informed by many hard knocks regarding virtual networking and community contributions to resource collections.