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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University will re-establish the School of Education as a separate entity on campus and develop plans that will make it more accessible to students, more useful to schools, businesses and communities, and more important to Oregon policy makers.

This week, the university tapped highly regarded Sam Stern to lead that effort, naming him dean of the newly reorganized school.

In addition to programs in elementary education, secondary education, adult education, community college leadership and counseling education, the new OSU School of Education will include the university's College Student Services Administration (CSSA) program and the 4-H Youth Development program.

Stern said OSU has several existing strengths in education and those tend to be programs that creatively are "out there on the edge." Among them, he said, are the off-campus Community College Leadership Program, Portland-based inner-city student internships, the nationally recognized CSSA program, and statewide 4-H youth development programs.

All involve partnerships and new ways of delivering programs to students.

"Within a year, I would like us to be able to say we have 10 high quality programs out there on the edge instead of three or four," Stern said. "OSU will become a destination for teachers and prospective teachers who are willing to try something different and to be creative in meeting the major educational challenges of our time.

"And though we will emphasize K-14 education," Stern added, "we also will work to prepare people to 'make a difference' in teaching and learning in communities and workplaces."

During its most recent meeting, the Oregon State Board of Higher Education gave OSU approval to move ahead with plans that developed out of an education design group that worked for several months on an education vision for the university. The design group, chaired by OSU professor George Copa, included superintendents Jerry Colonna (Redmond), Jim Ford (Corvallis); Geoff Brooks of Portland's Franklin High, a member of the OSU President's Board of Visitors for Minority Affairs; Julie Quaid, director of Warm Springs Confederated Tribe Early Childhood Education; business leaders Jim Johnson (formerly of Intel) and Paula Kanarek (Hewlett Packard); and leaders from several community colleges, in addition to nearly two dozen faculty, students, staff and administrators from around the university.

Among the group's recommendations:

• OSU needs to expand its view of education beyond traditional categories and levels;
• OSU should become influential on a state and national level in areas of developing educational policy;
• The School of Education should develop a series of effective and visible external partnerships to help focus its efforts on quality, service, and expanding the number of students served;
• The school should build upon OSU's technology infrastructure and build a cross-disciplinary network of education support throughout the university.

"The design group did a marvelous job of articulating a new vision for education at OSU and for that we are indebted," said Tim White, the university's provost and executive vice president. "This was kind of a grass-roots effort to return Oregon State University teacher education to prominence and now Sam Stern can lead it to the next level. He wrote the book on creativity - literally."

A professor of education at OSU, Stern is an internationally recognized expert in organizational creativity. In 1998, he co-wrote a book called "Corporate Creativity" that has been translated into 10 languages and was one of the most highly acclaimed business books of the year. An OSU faculty member since 1981, Stern has taught at junior and senior high schools, community college apprenticeship programs, universities on three continents, and in numerous companies and organizations.

Stern brings to the dean's position experience in both international and interdisciplinary work. He has taught in the MBA program at the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration in Greece and at the Department of Economics at Harvard. In 1990, he became one of the first non-Japanese educators to occupy an endowed professorship at a Japanese university when he was appointed the Japan Management Association Professor of Creativity Development at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Stern says education has a "bright future" at OSU.

"To reach that future, we will need to emphasize four elements," Stern said. "To develop new programs of high quality, we will need a focus on creativity - doing new things, and doing some old things differently. It's also important for our programs to have connectivity, both on and off campus, as we seek partnerships that allow us to expand our capacity.

"Technology is a third area of emphasis," Stern added. "OSU has been a pioneer in web-based educational delivery and there is a lot of potential to use technology to make teacher education more dynamic, innovative and accessible. And most importantly, the new School of Education will focus on culture and cultural competence. We will prepare teachers to teach and work with people from diverse backgrounds."