Page 149 - International Journal of Process Educaiton (Special Issue)

Academy of Process Educators
The Academy of Process Educators is a professional learning community that promotes
engagement, support, and collaboration among educators who are focused on transformational
change in education based on Process Education principles.
Getting to the Beginning
During the second annual Problem Solving Across the
Curriculum (PSAC) conference in 1991, there were several
discussions about formalizing collaboration among the
participating institutions. That same year, as part of the
first Teaching Institute, an evening was set aside to discuss
the possibility of starting a non-profit corporation for
inter-institution collaboration, the Institute for Innovation individuals who had been involved with PSAC and the
in Instruction. While there was a push to recruit members
during the 1992 PSAC conference, (Beery & Beyerlein,
1992), the effort did not come to fruition. The desire for
increased collaboration remained, however, and the idea
continued to percolate within the PSAC community
through the rest of the 1990s (Dan Apple, personal
recollection).
In June of 2000, Stony Brook University hosted and
led a Faculty Development Consortium Exploratory
Meeting on their New York Campus in which 17 colleges
participated (Stony Brook University, 2000a). The
participants collaborated on and published a white paper
outlining a Faculty Development Consortium (Stony
Brook University, 2000b). This white paper was used for
the next meeting of the Consortium in the Adirondacks
in January 2001 (Stony Brook University, 2001). The
effort focused on gaining commitment from institutions
to write and submit a five-year grant to meet the following
objectives:
1. Help new faculty members in higher education
become very effective in teaching, mentoring,
researching, and serving their communities.
2. Improve the mentoring skills of faculty and staff
to facilitate the successful transfer of first-year
and transfer students from previous educational
environments into their institution and culture.
3. Develop the faculty development skills of a team of
faculty from the Consortium who wanted to serve
higher education by facilitating change at member
institutions.
The Consortium was never formalized, but it did lead to
additional discussions about a Process Education-driven
Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Technology (SMET)
Consortium (Western Michigan University, 2002).
International Journal of Process Education (February 2016, Volume 8 Issue 1)
CS
The Association of Research-Based Practitioners
in Process Education
In 2003, focus shifted to a major scholarship project:
The Faculty Guidebook. Between 2003 and 2007, under
the leadership of Steve Beyerlein and Carol Holmes,
four editions of the Faculty Guidebook were produced
(Beyerlein, Holmes, & Apple, 2007), with many of the
Consortium authoring and collaborating on Guidebook
modules. A face-to-face authoring event occurred annually
during semester breaks in January and it was through these
collaborations that the desire to have a formal community
of Process Educators was rekindled.
The community was initially formed when participating
faculty members shared scholarship during a conference
at Elmhurst College, June 28–29, 2004 (ARBPPE, 2004)
under the guise of the Association of Research-Based
Practitioners in Process Education (ARBPPE; see Figure
1). A planning meeting followed at Elmhurst, in December
2004, and the Association held a Process Education
Research Conference in July, 2005 at Madison Area
Technical College (MATC) in Madison, Wisconsin. This
conference established a blueprint for the combination of
active learning plenary and workshop sessions which has
characterized all Process Education conferences since then.
The First Process Education Conference
Institutions and individuals who were interested in
creating a more formal community of Process Educators
met on February 11–12, 2007 at MATC and planned the
first Process Education conference to take place July 11–
13, 2007 at the University of the District of Columbia.
The conference theme was to be Student Success Through
Faculty Success. The program cover is shown in Figure 2.
During the two days following this conference,
participants developed the initial Academy bylaws and
strategic plan; they agreed on the structure and the name
of the organization, and determined a six-month action
plan, culminating in a January 2008 meeting at Brevard
Community College in Florida. Joann Horton and Jackie
El-Sayed spearheaded this effort.
The Strategic Plan 2007–2012 (Academy of Process
Educators, 2008) was adopted at this meeting; it outlined
the core values, vision, and mission of the Academy and
set out the following goals:
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