I started this site 13 August 2021 to help organize my diffuse interests, expertise, and experience. I crafted the tagline, “innovative stewardship in science, practice, and higher education” to represent the diffusion. This highlights the stewardship theme that runs throughout my work. A steward of the discipline was originally defined as a person to whom “we can entrust the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field (of research)”. More specifically, the steward was originally conceptualized as “someone who will creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application”1. In the original formulation, “we” represents both the public and the discipline in which a steward is trained. These definitions were originally applied to “scholars first and foremost” and doctoral education. However, in 2019 the construct was expanded so that it can also be applied to non-academic practitioners in any field, and can be initiated earlier than doctoral education2. Expanding the definition of stewardship to encompass both professional practice and academic engagement in a field was innovative. This collaborative project was incredibly rewarding to me as a curriculum developer and evaluator in higher, graduate, and post-graduate education (some of what I do “for fun”). The stewardship project was going on simultaneously with two other curriculum development projects, one in bioinformatics and one for nurse practitioners. These three initiatives, 2016-2018, led me to write a book about curriculum and instructional development tools which will be published in 2022 (hopefully!) and a web page I am developing now. The projects and the book represent my efforts towards innovative stewardship in science and higher education.
I am a practitioner of statistics, science, and measurement, both for my “real job” and for fun. I apply these practices across many domains – always striving to promote stewardship across the multi-disciplinary teams I collaborate on. A core of my stewardship of statistical and scientific practice is in promoting ethical statistics and data science. I also wrote two books about ethical reasoning for everyone who works with data, no matter how much or little; and also for those who do, or intend to, practice statistics or data science. These two books will be published in 2021 (hopefully!) and are the topics of another web page I am developing now.
“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”
-MK Ghandi, 1913
This quote from 1913 is argued to be most/some of the origins of the bumper sticker, “be the change you wish to see in the world” (see this awesome “quote investigator” essay about it!! )
1964, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XII, April 1913 to December 1914, Chapter: General Knowledge About Health XXXII: Accidents Snake-Bite, (From Gujarati, Indian Opinion, 9-8-1913), Start Page 156, Quote Page 158, The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi at gandhiheritageportal.org)
By being stewardly, and promoting stewardship, I am trying to change the tendencies in the world towards ethical practice, stewardly science, and stewardship in higher education.
- CM Golde & GE Walker (Eds.). (2006). Envisioning the future of doctoral education: Preparing stewards of the discipline. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
2. Rios CM, Golde CM, & Tractenberg RE. (2019). The preparation of stewards with the Mastery Rubric for Stewardship: Re-envisioning the formation of scholars and practitioners. Education Sciences 9(4), 292; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9040292 Original published on SocArXiv 7 jan 2019, DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/vw7j5.