Engaged Graduate Education: Seeing with New Eyes. PFF Occasional Paper Series

This paper presents a vision of what disciplinary societies can and should do to support the Preparing Future Faculty Program (PFF) and similar educational reform agendas at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The main thesis is that college and university initiatives to improve the quality of education should be reinforced by comparable initiatives in the disciplinary societies. Improvements in the quality of education are most likely to come about, the essay asserts, by changing both campus and disciplinary cultures. The PFF program was launched in 1993 to develop new models of doctoral preparation for a faculty career by including preparation for teaching and academic citizenship as well as for research Through national competitions, grants have been awarded to 43 doctoral producing universities to develop and implement model programs to bring expectations for undergraduate professors into the graduate preparation of future academics. Since 1998, PFF has developed partnerships with 11 professional societies in academic disciplines. The change advocated in this document asks for the development of a substantive vision for each of the disciplines to show how each can best engage the needs of students and society. The disciplines need to develop a passion about the vision, and then they must commit to action, with public engagement and accountability. (SLD)