Dear Charlene and other Ecologgers..<:)
I"m really very sorry to hear of this decision coming at a time when
there has been such a movement to integrate teaching and research and
to provide credible, peer-reviewed publication venues for exchange of
pedagogical advances, teaching practices, and research on what works
and doesn't work in the classroom.
My hope is that others who have used this resource will speak up,
that the responses will be read by the governing board, and that
somehow through ESA and its governing board, or endowed contributions
to ESA, that some of this valuable resource can be continued without
interruption. If you teach any course, and you've not yet looked at
TIEE, I suggest checking out the website while you can. It includes
some real gems as the Publication Committee apparently has already
noted.
Finally, I don't think that an all volunteer effort should be
expected or is realistic for TIEE--we certainly don't do that for
important research journals that are highly rated/cited. ESA has an
enviable record of supporting high quality, peer-reviewed papers, and
it takes at least a minimum of resources to accomplish that well. I
have not submitted papers to TIEE but I've certainly seen it's
visibility and presence and I suspect it's been valuable for high
school as well as college level educators. This means it's
potentially a recruiting tool for future ESA members, as is the SEEDs
program as well.
Thanks to all those who created this resource and have contributed so
much to it.. let's hope we can find a way to support this through
ESA. I've been a very long time member and was impressed by this
initiative when it began. Moreover, although I joined ESA as a PhD
student, and not for pedagogical reasons, I do think TIEE has drawn
in many of today's educators and teacher-scholars who would have
never joined ESA otherwise and were not much a part of the ESA
membership in the early days.
Best to all
Susan
Dr. Susan R. Kephart
Dept of BIology
Willamette University
Salem, OR 97301
503 370-6481
On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Charlene D'Avanzo wrote:
For 5 years Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) has
been supported by several NSF grants to me and Bruce Grant. As
many ecology faculty know, TIEE is a peer reviewed publication of
the ESA designed to help ecologists teach well; it also supports
college ecology Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Last
year the TIEE editors submitted a request to the ESA Governing
Board for ESA to assume publication of TIEE as a once-a-year
electronic journal. Twice the Governing Board sent this request to
ESA's Publication Committee, which was very impressed by TIEE's
quality and depth. Twice this committee strongly recommended that
the Board vote to move forward with TIEE as an electronic ecology
education journal, in part because the fairly small cost (about 20%
of the Education Coordinator's salary) would be so well spent. I am
very sad to report that in May the ESA Governing Board decided not
to accept this committee's recommendation to publish TIEE in the
foreseeable future. Therefore, we will no longer be accepting
submissions for TIEE.
A main reason why TIEE is so exceptional is because it is peer
reviewed. Although the V.P. for Education. Meg Lowman, has no
written outcome of the meeting, I understand that the Board
generally did not view peer review as necessary for ecology
education resources like TIEE. Many people, including grad
students, have been able to use TIEE as a SoTL venue because it is
peer reviewed. For education journals published by all the main
professional biology societies peer review insures the
publication's excellence - just as it does for scientific journals.
This summer I reviewed education proposals for NSF. One sad irony
of TIEE's demise is that nearly every ecology proposal I read
referred to TIEE. At last weeks AAAS "Vision and Change in
Undergraduate Biology Education" meeting, college biology teaching
informed by research, assessment, and knowledge about 'how people
learn' was seen as vital for the future of biology education. This
is what TIEE embodies.
Those of you unfamiliar with TIEE can go to tiee.ecoed.net to see
what it is. There you will find Experiments for lab, Issues for use
in lecture, genuine (e.g. LTER) Data Sets, and research papers
written by about 75 authors and published in 6 volumes since 2004.
All are peer reviewed and are based on contemporary, researched-
based understanding about the most effective teaching practices.
--
Charlene D'Avanzo
Professor of Ecology &
Director, Center for Learning
Hampshire College
Homepage: http://helios.hampshire.edu/~cdNS/
TIEE: http://tiee.ecoed.net/
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