Preparing for Impact: Embedding Social Responsibility in University-level Science, Math and Stats

Description:

There is a “third mission” for universities in the context of undertaking work that sustains, but ideally, benefits, their respective communities, and nations. If we look at this through the lens of democratic civics and citizenship education, we can conceive of an aspiration of all campuses to foster social responsibility in their graduates. Still using the aforementioned citizenship lens, it is widely held that social responsibility exists along a spectrum of engagement, beliefs, and actions. The implications for teaching academics, as disciplinary experts both in terms of content knowledge and skills, are what we are investigating with the focus being the teaching of undergraduate-level science, mathematics, and statistics. In this presentation I will present what results we have to-date from our mixed-methods project. We have surveyed and interviewed New Zealand, Canadian and Australian academics as to their conception of a socially responsible disciplinary graduate, what value they put in embedding social responsibility in their teaching, what are-or what they expect to be-the barriers and challenges in embedding social responsibility in STEM curricula and their experience of any such embedding. I am looking forward to this opportunity engaging with colleagues on what we have uncovered so far.


Bio:
David undertook training and work as a laboratory scientist in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. He completed a PhD in free radical biology and undertook postdoctoral bench-type cardiovascular research at an Australian medical research institute. Since August 2000, he has been a health and biomedical science lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney. As an academic in the UTS Faculty of Science he has previously served as Internship and student global mobility coordinator, undergraduate program director and faculty academic liaison officer for Indigenous scholars. He has contributed to several publications on physiology teaching practice (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7768-8662). He is currently undertaking a part-time MA, by research, on practitioner inquiry. It is this last work that he will be presenting.