With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Project Kaleidoscope is undertaking a major initiative fostering and stimulating wider understanding and implementation of promising practices with documented impact on strengthening undergraduate STEM learning.

This Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) initiative spotlights what is known, from research and practice, about:

• how individual undergraduate faculty in mathematics, the various fields of science and engineering, can transform individual courses and classrooms and laboratories toward the goal of actively engaging students in their own learning
• how leaders of departments and programs in these fields can shape learning experiences through which the students for whom they are responsible are introduced to and socialized into the natural science community on their campus
• how academic deans and other institutional leaders can support the efforts of individual faculty, programs, and departments, helping to shape the intellectual, social, financial, and physical infrastructures essential for undergraduate natural science communities to flourish on their campus.

A Guide to Engaging Learners: Engaged Learning is being developed as a major resource for this NSF-funded PKAL initiative. It is designed as a road-map for those exploring why, who, what, where, and how to implement change at the local level. We present here questions to ask about how to engage learning in formal and informal learning environments and how to support efforts of faculty— as individuals and members of departments and programs— working toward a vision of engaged learners. Further questions addressed are about collective actions needed at the institutional level to support, nurture, and sustain these efforts.

Threaded throughout the Guide are insights that reinforce how efforts of individual and institutional agents of change serve the larger national interest, preparing graduates who are instrumental— as members of the 21st century workforce and as responsible citizens in our 21st century democracy— in shaping the future of our global community.

• Engaging Learners: Engaged Learning - Part I