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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