SENCER Collaborating Partner one-pager
Our Mission
SENCER courses and programs strengthen student learning and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by connecting course topics to issues of critical local, national, and global importance.
Students and faculty report that the SENCER approach makes science more real, accessible, “useful,” and civically important.
SENCER improves science education by focusing on real world problems, and extends the impact of learning across the curriculum to the broader community and society. We do this by developing faculty expertise in teaching “to” basic, canonical science and mathematics “through” complex, capacious, often unsolved problems of civic consequence. Using materials, assessment instruments, and research developed through SENCER, faculty members design curricular projects that connect science learning to real world challenges.
SENCER uses methods and strategies derived from existing knowledge concerning undergraduate STEM education to ensure both STEM learning and curricular reforms are durable. John Bransford, a member of the Board on Science Education of the National Academies and Mifflin Professor of Education at the University of Washington, claims that SENCER is “bringing to life the recommendations we made in How People Learn.”
What We Offer
SENCER promotes work that increases the STEM knowledge base and broadens the impact of campus work. We support a community of transformation by offering faculty development programs through regional symposia and our annual summer institutes, and supplement those interactions with a collection of resources, including field-tested and emerging course models, backgrounder papers, and bi-weekly eNews updates. We also encourage and participate in the development of assessment strategies and tools that help educators better evaluate and promote student learning and engagement, and support advanced research in these areas.
Our Background and Intellectual Traditions
SENCER was initiated in 2001 under the National Science Foundation’s Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement national dissemination track. Since then, SENCER has established and supported an ever-growing community of faculty, students, academic leaders, and others to improve undergraduate STEM education by connecting learning to critical civic questions.
SENCER is the signature program of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement. The National Center was established in affiliation with Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, a comprehensive, STEM-focused institution that links learning and research to practical outcomes.
SENCER’s particular origins can be found in a course developed at Rutgers University that focused curricular resources on the HIV epidemic. Using the HIV epidemic to teach biological concepts increased student learning. Other faculty members using similar approaches to teaching reported similar results in learning. Discussions of the “genealogy” and the philosophy of SENCER can be found in “Knowledge to Make Our Democracy” and “Reflections on the Premises, Purposes, Lessons Learned, and Ethos of SENCER.”
SENCER’s work is informed by the National Academies’ commissioned reports on learning, notably How People Learn and Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Since the original pilot project to link biology education to an emerging disease, the SENCER ideals have been applied to develop field-tested courses for many disciplines on a broad range of topics from brownfield reclamation to natural catastrophes, and nanotechnology, the mathematics of secrecy, water quality, tuberculosis, diabetes, and obesity, to name just a few.