Past Faculty Learning Communities

ACTIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS: WHERE TO GO

Facilitated by Justin Ingels

Are you interested in learning more about active learning? Are you interested in connecting with faculty at different stages of transforming their courses using active learning approaches? Are you interested in connecting active learning in the classroom to other aspects of your career, including service and research? This FLC will connect and support faculty interested in adopting the best active learning strategies in their classrooms to meet the learning needs of their students. In doing so, our goal is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of instructional faculty to support one another in developing and improving active learning strategies by discussing what is working for them in the classroom, ideas they are trying to bring to the classroom, challenges they are having in implementing activities in the classroom and brainstorming about how activities or classroom time could be enhanced.

ADVANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP & PRAXIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE MENTORING

Facilitated by Bethany Bagwell

Join this FLC for opportunities to share and discuss evidence-based mentoring best practices, continue our ongoing project of developing and launching a mentoring badge for faculty and staff, and to generally foster a culture of mentoring across the university. Our goal is to provide resources and best practices in support of mentorship across UGA, and we welcome all who share this general interest with us to join!

CAPSTONE COURSES ACROSS CAMPUS

Facilitated by Jorge Rodriguez

Do you teach a project-based course? Are you eager to integrate real-world applications into your students’ learning experiences? Interested in exploring the impact of such classes? Join our FLC! The Capstone Initiative brings together instructors and coordinators involved in the capstone projects for various majors/degree programs across the University of Georgia to help develop an understanding of the various upper-level project-based courses offered at UGA and identify and promote best practices amongst the group. By understanding how each of the capstone/project-based courses is run, we work on establishing best practices for running and teaching these types of courses, as well as identifying pathways for collaborations between programs. The discussion of this FLC promises to enhance the student experience in these capstone courses and enable UGA to solicit larger / multidisciplinary projects for them by leveraging the expertise of not only a particular college or major but also the entire university.

DEVELOPING DIALOGIC CLASSROOMS TO STRENGTHEN LEARNING AND BUILD COMMUNITY

Facilitated by Brandy Walker & Don Nelson

Authentic learning happens best when students are engaged in learning environments that foster reflection, purposeful dialogue, and the ability to ask questions of genuine inquiry. This FLC seeks faculty interested in investigating research and practice of developing dialogically organized instruction and dialogic teaching across subject areas and within different class size environments. Faculty from all disciplines are invited to join the discussion. FLC meetings will include professional development, as determined by participants, on the practical application of dialogic elements in pedagogy as well as the exploration of literature on dialogic practices in higher education, and the development of a research agenda around the topic.

DEVELOPING SOFT SKILLS ACROSS SCALES

Facilitated by Sonia Hernandez

This FLC invites faculty across campus who want to delve into how content-independent skills (e.g., public speaking, informal writing, networking, interpreting verbal and non-verbal communication, empathy, conflict resolution, cohesive teamworking, collegiality, forecasting, time management etc.) make the difference for students between “getting a job” and “keeping a job” or ascending in the workplace. This FLC will also explore the forces in today’s society that interfere with or impair the development of these skills (e.g. the move towards more online communication). FLC participants will discuss, list and prioritize soft skills that can applied cross disciplines, and also discuss how these skills are developed – with a focus on identifying instructional activities that highlight the importance of soft skills and allow students to practice them. Our ultimate aim will be to provide recommendations for skills that can be integrated into courses and develop an outline for an abstract or manuscript on the topic.

CONNECTING COLLEGE & CORRECTIONS: TEACHING WITH JUSTICE-INVOLVED COMMUNITIES

Facilitated by Sarah Shannon & Jean Martin-Williams

Have you ever taught in correctional settings (e.g., prisons, jails)? This FLC is for faculty with a strong interest in (and/or experience) teaching justice-involved people. This year we will build on previous work to create new and strengthen existing prison education programming at UGA. Our work will include generating a proposal to expand programming, identifying sources for financial support, forming / strengthening partnerships with correctional agencies, and providing education to the broader UGA community about the benefits of prison education. More information is available at our website: https://ctlsites.uga.edu/collegeandcorrections/.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Facilitated by Adrian Burd, Gaylen Edwards, & Sarah Robinson

In this FLC our goal is to bring together faculty for relaxed discussions about teaching, using James Lang’s “Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning” as our guide. With support and encouragement through this FLC, participants will focus on their own teaching and course, and implement at least one small change in their classroom to enhance student learning and up their teaching game. All are welcome!

FACULTY FOR IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Facilitated by Inseok Song & Nandana Weliweriya

Rapidly advancing immersive technologies (e.g., virtual reality [VR], augmented reality [AR], mixed reality [MR], extended reality [XR], etc.) bring opportunities for digital transformation in research and education. Our goal in this FLC is to bring together practitioners from across campus, promoting interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration on the use of immersive technologies for teaching and research. Our FLC will serve as an opportunity for conversations about best practices, state-of-the-art software, hardware, and our experiences, while also collaborating on the implementation of immersive technologies (e.g., VR headsets) in different contexts.

FOOD, FARMING, AND RURAL LIFE

Facilitated by Bram Tucker & Pablo Lapegna

Are you among the many instructors interested in food, farming, and rural life, and how these themes are related to issues of sustainability, diversity, and inequality? Join us to discuss courses you are currently teaching or planning to teach. We will meet periodically to share the outline of our courses, and discuss what readings, activities, speakers, and materials work best in class. The plan is to identify themes, overlaps, and redundancies, so as to develop a coursework road map for students interested in these issues. We will also use the time to discuss new and exciting books, articles, and films.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

Facilitated by Jonathan Haddad & Morgan Taylor

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. This FLC is an opportunity for faculty of all experience levels to expand their skills through exposure to improvisational theatre, while exploring how the theory and practice of improvisational skills apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Julie Grainy & Nicole Jones

Are you a non-tenure-track faculty member at UGA? Then this is the FLC for you! This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, librarian, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, building community, supporting a mentoring program, coordinating dossier writing groups, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, and providing relevant and up-to-date information at https://nontenuretrack.uga.edu/.

PEER COACHING: A COLLEGIAL APPROACH TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT IN TEACHING

Facilitated by Terri Dunbar & Peggy Brickman

Peer coaching offers a collegial way to accelerate the adoption of new instructional strategies and improve the culture toward teaching in a department. In peer coaching, two or more instructors collaborate to navigate the challenges of teaching and learning together. Through this process, instructors explore innovative teaching techniques, observe peers in the classroom, provide constructive feedback to peers, and reflect on their teaching practice. Participants of this FLC will have the opportunity to practice peer coaching in a supportive learning environment with an interdisciplinary group of faculty. Together, we will explore models of peer coaching drawn from various fields (e.g., teacher education, workforce development), develop peer coaching partnerships, conduct peer observations of teaching, engage in dialogic feedback and reflective inquiry, and navigate coaching challenges. Participants will be encouraged to apply the insights gained from this FLC within their department to foster peer coaching relationships with colleagues.

REACTING TO THE PAST: A BEST PRACTICE IN ACTIVE LEARNING

Facilitated by Naomi Norman, Montgomery Wolf, & Andrew Oswiak

Reacting to the Past is an award-winning pedagogy for engaged learning based on immersive role-playing. The intended purpose of this FLC is to create a community for instructors from all disciplines who may be interested in using Reacting in their classroom. Led by faculty who have used Reacting games within their disciplines, this FLC will provide a community that shares resources and techniques to support using Reacting games most effectively.

REIMAGINING WORLD LANGUAGE TEACHING & ASSESSMENT

Facilitated by Lou Tolosa-Casadont

Are you ready to dispose of your grammar-based approaches to world language teaching and assessment and embark in a more communicative way of teaching and assessing language? If so, come join this group of like-minded individuals. During our FLC meetings we will 1) brainstorm communicative approaches to enliven our novice language courses and help learners engage in more meaningful ways with the language, culture, and each other, 2) put them into practice, and 3) share reflections about outcomes observed as a result of implementing these new approaches in our classes. An additional goal of this FLC is to increase the number of students who minor and major in the languages we offer.

SERVICE-LEARNING RESEARCH & SCHOLARSHIP

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The goal of this FLC is to bring together a group of faculty to design and undertake a scholarship of teaching and learning project focused on academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Together we will identify a research question and pursue a research project together – submitting the results for presentation at a national service-learning conference. For 2024-25, we will likely be continuing a focus on how service-learning supports student resilience, but may also take on additional research questions.

STEM FOR ALL: TOWARD INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE IN SCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

Facilitated by Tatiane Russo-Tait & Jenn Thompson

This FLC is designed to support science faculty in learning about and promoting inclusive excellence and equity in STEM education. Our learning community will explore key concepts, engage in critical self-reflection, develop critical self-efficacy, and learn practical strategies that will empower members to engage in critical action that leverages students’ assets and supports students from all backgrounds to thrive in science classrooms, labs, and departments.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Facilitated by Tyra Byers & Jason Roberts

This FLC will bring together interdisciplinary faculty to explore sustainability education including teaching with the Sustainable Development Goals. We will use our own courses as examples and opportunities for curriculum development and piloting new strategies and share lessons learned through the team-taught freshman odyssey course developed the previous year. The group meetings will emphasize the sharing and development of resources, opportunities for collaboration, local application of global challenges, and different ways of learning and knowing.

TEACHING TAS HOW TO TA 102

Facilitated by Kelly Ford

Do you help train TAs in your department? Do you supervise their instruction in some way? Do you just want to support their teaching development??? This FLC will create multi-disciplinary resources to support instructors and departments in fostering the instructional development of TAs. We will discuss the relevant training and support TAs need to become successful teacher-scholars and draft a set of (pedagogical) competencies that can be applied in multiple settings.

UNGRADING: ASSESSMENT BEYOND SCORES

Facilitated by Jerry Shannon & John Maerz

Have you been using non traditional assessment tactics (colloquially referred to as “ungrading”)? In this Faculty Learning Community, we will work with faculty already using alternative assessment to help refine, rethink, and document alternative methods of assessing student work in the classroom. Ungrading is an umbrella term that comprises several different methods of student assessment including Self-Assessment, Contract Grading, Specifications Grading, Peer Review, and Labor-Based Grading. FLC members will workshop their syllabi and refine their practices to think through methods of grading that are not A-F or 0-100 and find ways to give students more agency in the classroom. We will also consider opportunities and challenges for integrating ungrading into a higher education system based on grades and quantitative assessment.

ADVANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP AND PRAXIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE MENTORING

Facilitated by Kristy Farner & Bethany Bagwell

The purpose of the faculty learning community is to build on the foundation from previous years related to developing and launching a mentoring certificate for faculty / staff to advance their learning related to mentorship. The goal is to provide resources to develop best practices and support for mentorship across the University.

CAPSTONE COURSES ACROSS CAMPUS

Facilitated by Jorge Rodriguez & Kevin Wu

The Capstone Initiative brings together instructors and coordinators involved in the capstone projects for various majors / degree programs across the University of Georgia to help develop an understanding of the various upper-level project-based courses offered at UGA and identify and promote best practices amongst the group. Furthermore, we would like to explore the opportunity of forming collaborative projects between the different capstone programs. Industry demands that our students communicate and collaborate with people of different backgrounds and expertise. As a leading university dedicated in providing relevant experiential learning opportunities for its students, we want to emulate the experience of working on a project in industry, where individuals are expected not only to work within their expertise / area, but also collaborate and coordinate with teams working on other facets of the project to ensure a successful overall outcome. Through understanding how each of the capstone / project-based courses are run, we work on establishing best practices for running and teaching these types of courses, as well as identify pathways for collaborations between programs to allow our students to tackle broader-scoped projects and gain experience not only working on a large project within their area of expertise, but also in coordinating and collaborating with students from dissimilar backgrounds and approaches on piecing together a finished product. The discussion of this FLC promises to enhance both the student experience in these capstone courses, as well as enable UGA to solicit larger / multidisciplinary projects for the capstone courses by leveraging not only the expertise of a particular college or major, but of the entire University of Georgia.

CONNECTING COLLEGE & CORRECTIONS: TEACHING WITH JUSTICE-INVOLVED COMMUNITIES

Facilitated by Sarah Shannon & Jean Martin-Williams

Are you curious about teaching in prisons or jails? Do you have experience teaching with justice-involved communities? If your answer to either question is yes, then this FLC is for you! The goal of this FLC is to create a community of faculty from around the university who are either interested in or well-skilled in a variety of approaches to teaching in correctional settings. We will learn about successes and challenges in starting and sustaining such programs. Because teaching in correctional facilities has unique benefits and challenges as compared to college-based classrooms, this FLC will offer opportunities to learn about what has been successful for faculty who have experience teaching behind bars, as well as opportunities to explore existing or new models for this kind of teaching practice for those who are interested but not experienced. Our work together will culminate in a toolkit of resources for faculty who are interested in starting or strengthening their teaching with justice-involved communities.

EXPLORING THE SUSTAINABILITY CURRICULUM THROUGH INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

Facilitated by Tyra Byers & Jason Roberts

This FLC will bring together interdisciplinary faculty to explore teaching sustainability with the goal of developing a team-taught freshman odyssey course with a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration. We will use our own courses as examples and opportunities for curriculum development and piloting new strategies, while broadening our own understanding of education and sustainable communities. We will emphasize the sharing and development of resources, opportunities for collaboration, and local application of global challenges.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHERS & LEARNERS

Facilitated by Morgan Taylor & Jonathan Haddad

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. Not surprisingly, these same communication skills are essential to the work of the student as well. Improvisational theatre is an approach that has been used in many settings to promote and improve robust communication skills. This FLC will provide an orientation for improv techniques for faculty new to improvisational theatre as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to expand on their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational skills apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

INNOVATING WITH AI: IN AND BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Facilitated by Kimberly Van Orman, Holly Marie Gallagher, Lindsey Marie Harding, & Aaron Meskin

This FLC invites faculty from across campus to explore generative AI (i.e., ChatGPT, DALL·E2, etc.) and the opportunities we might create—in and out of the classroom—to employ these new digital tools to create, investigate, question, and innovate. As faculty in a variety of disciplines are thinking about the potential use and limitations of AI for all sorts of academic activities (assignments, research, communication, etc.), we will consider benefits, challenges, and approaches to using (or not using) AI. We plan to address what AI is, what ethical factors we should reflect on, and how AI skills and experiences may empower students in their future studies and careers. In addition, the group will experiment with generative AI and explore academic research, public writing, and media around it. The FLC will work together to develop AI-related resources and engagement opportunities.

NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Julie Grainy

This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, librarian, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, building community, supporting a mentoring program, coordinating dossier writing groups, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, and providing relevant and up-to-date information through the website, nontenuretrack.uga.edu.

SERVICE-LEARNING SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Scholarship and Research FLC supports faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Participants should have experience with service-learning / community-engaged teaching. FLC participants will help identify a research question relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution) which can be undertaken as a team research project, and will be submitted for presentation at a national service-learning conference. For 2023-24, we will likely be continuing a focus on how service-learning supports student resilience but may also take on additional research questions.

SLOW LOOKING: OBSERVATION AS ARTFUL INQUIRY

Facilitated by Melissa Freeman

There is a cross-disciplinary movement afoot to slow down and take note of the overlooked, the mundane, the aesthetics in the everyday. This FLC will try out several established observational approaches aimed at deepening our abilities to attend closely to the particularities of what or who we are seeking to engage with. The group will start with educator Patricia Carini’s (1927-2021) Descriptive Processes which she developed and refined over decades as co-founder of the Prospect School, an alternative school in North Bennington, Vermont. In her 1975 monograph, Observation and Description: An Alternative Methodology for the Investigation of Human Phenomena, Carini articulates several processes that bring into visibility an event’s or person’s interdependence with a constituting and ever-changing environment. According to Carini, a phenomenon, person, or place under observation is meaning-fully inexhaustible. This is because all observations involve immersion, entanglement of observer and observed, and creativity in processes of description. The function of recording, for Carini, “is to intensify the inquirer’s participation in the observed event” (1975, p. 21). Furthermore, every observer brings a unique point of view which is always limited, highlighting certain facets of a phenomenon while overlooking others. The importance of sharing one’s observations with others, then, becomes a crucial part of learning to see otherwise. Thinking with others intensifies the movement of reciprocity that flows through the “multiplicity of meanings” (Carini, 1975, p. 30) emanating from living and learning together. While Carini’s work focused on the longitudinal documentation of children as learners and makers, her approach transcends school contexts and is generative of deep questioning about the role of the observer, the observed, and the aims of observation and description for understanding and inquiry. Her work is significant for its prescience of the ontological turn in the social sciences and the current emphasis on the importance of describing and attending to particularities found in texts such as Shari Tishman’s (2017) Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning through Observation, Alexandra Horowitz’s (2014) On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation, Arden Reed’s (2019) Slow Art: The experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, or Andrew Light & Jonathan Smith’s (2005) edited book, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Readings like these will be brought into dialogue with Carini’s approaches as faculty in this FLC learn with and from each other the slow arts of observation and consider their relevance to their own pedagogical and inquiry practices.

TEACHING TAS HOW TO TA

Facilitated by Kelly Ford

Do you help train TAs in your department? Do you supervise their instruction in some way? Do you just want to support their teaching development??? This FLC will facilitate interdisciplinary discussions among faculty so that we may identify what TAs across campus need to know before assuming their roles and taking on classroom responsibilities. We will also discuss the relevant training and support they need to become a successful TA. According to UGA TA Policy, all graduate students with instructional duties must complete an introduction to college teaching course (i.e., GRSC 7770 or departmental equivalent)—unless exempt—prior to or concurrent with the start of their TAship. With this in mind, we will collaborate and develop multidisciplinary resources to support instructors and departments in their ability to teach this course effectively and foster the instructional development of TAs.

UNGRADING: ASSESSMENT BEYOND SCORES

Facilitated by Elizabeth Daviews & Jerry Shannon

Have you been using nontraditional assessment tactics (colloquially referred to as “ungrading”)? In this Faculty Learning Community, we will work with faculty already using alternative assessment to help refine, rethink, and document alternative methods of assessing student work in the classroom. Ungrading is an umbrella term that comprises several different methods of student assessment including Self-Assessment, Contract Grading, Specifications Grading, Peer Review, and Labor-Based Grading. FLC members will workshop their syllabi and refine their practices to think through methods of grading that are not A-F or 0-100 and find ways to give students more agency in the classroom. We will also consider opportunities and challenges for integrating ungrading into a higher education system based on grades and quantitative assessment.

USING PEER OBSERVATION TO ENHANCE ACTIVE LEARNING TEACHING STRATEGIES

Facilitated by Jusin Ingels & Mumbi Anderson

This FLC is aimed at faculty interested in adopting the best active learning strategies in their classrooms to better meet the learning needs of their students. Our goal is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of instructional faculty to support one another in developing active learning strategies and provide feedback and critique for one another. We plan to develop peer observation procedures that build upon existing guidelines, specifically focusing on the observation and evaluation of active learning. Peer observation is a great way to receive detailed feedback on your classroom techniques and build a portfolio built around teaching effectiveness to be used during annual evaluation, promotion, and tenure. One component of this FLC will focus on reviewing resources available through CTL and short readings that can provide a focus for informal discussion and idea sharing. The second component will include developing comprehensive active learning strategies for a particular course. Instructors will create pairs or small groups to conduct a peer observation process to review these course activities to continue refining the strategies. Those instructors working in a department with formalized peer observation will be encouraged to take their developed observation template back to the department to engage others in this beneficial evaluation process.

ADVANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP AND PRAXIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE MENTORING

Facilitated by Brandy Burgess & Sherry Clouser

The purpose of this faculty learning community is to explore models of mentoring that improve capacity- building mentoring relationships by utilizing proven strategies that encourage buy-in, engagement, and growth. The group will continue work done in previous years, exploring opportunities to support effective mentoring relationships across campus.

ARE THEY EVEN READING? STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT STUDENTS AS READERS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Facilitated by Ingie Hovland & Jodie Lyon

This FLC is for faculty members who wish to support their students’ reading skills and reflect on the place of reading in their classes. We will discuss a range of issues related to student reading at UGA, such as student motivation for reading, how to teach discipline-specific reading skills to undergraduates, the interface between reading and writing, how to choose texts for reading, how to assess reading, and how to encourage a class to become a reading community. We will form our own supportive reading community in the FLC: we will read short articles on undergraduate reading, discuss them, and choose some ideas to try out in our own classes.

BECOMING THE BEST RESEARCH MENTOR

Facilitated by Leslie Gordon Simons & Laura Bierema

This FLC will focus on strategies to implement mentorship training for faculty interested in mentoring student research using theoretically grounded, evidence-based, and culturally responsive practices. We will implement an interactive mentor training curricula that engages participants in collective problem solving and connects them with resources to optimize their mentoring practices. We will also engage in learning communities through activities, assignments, case studies, and facilitated discussions to solve mentoring dilemmas and share successful mentorship strategies.

CRIT CLUB

Facilitated by Benjamin Britton & Mark Callahan

Critique is an established part of arts and design education, but its effectiveness is often unexamined in proportion to its widespread application. “Crit Club” is an initiative at the School of Art where faculty study and practice artist-centered critique methods based on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. The Crit Club FLC will continue this work by inviting as many educators as possible to investigate and practice methods where we can give and receive more useful, honest, and constructive critical feedback. Members of Crit Club will have the opportunity to present and respond to works-in-progress, improving critique by workshopping various problems that arise in the process, and addressing the practicalities of using critique in their classes.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Facilitated by Adrian Burd, Gaylen Edwards, & Sarah Robinson

This FLC is aimed at faculty who wish to develop course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), either as a new course or as part of an existing course. Studies have shown that course-based research experiences improve self-confidence in discipline-specific thinking (e.g., Brownwell et al., CBE Life Sciences Education, 14(2), 21, 2015) and application, as well as increase inclusivity for under-represented populations (e.g., Bangera and Brownwell, CBE Life Sciences Education, 13(4), 602, 2014). There are two components to this FLC. The first involves regular relaxed discussions of ideas and with other faculty in FLC meetings using short readings to provide focus for these discussions. This year, we will mainly use the primary literature, including case studies, such as the references listed above, as a starting point for these discussions. The second component is the individual course development of each member of the FLC in which they will develop a course-based undergraduate research component for one of their courses and contribute their experiences to a document that can be disseminated to the larger UGA faculty. Although CUREs are normally associated with STEM disciplines, we warmly welcome faculty from other disciplines who want to expand the opportunities available to their undergraduate students.

HIGH-IMPACT PRACTICES: LEARNING THAT PACKS A PUNCH

Facilitated by Lindsey Harding, Maria Navarro, & Naomi Norman

This FLC will bring together faculty from across campus who are interested in learning about high impact practices (HIPs). According to the AAC&U’s website on HIPs, these practices offer “significant educational benefits for students who participate in them—including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education.” Faculty may be interested in any of the 11 HIPs: Capstone Courses and Projects, Collaborative Assignments and Projects, Common Intellectual Experiences, Diversity / Global Learning, ePortfolios, First-Year Seminars and Experiences, Internships, Learning Communities, Service-Learning, Community-Based Learning, Undergraduate Research, and Writing-Intensive Courses. In addition to discussing the benefits, challenges, and approaches to HIPs, faculty will have the chance to develop / revise plans to implement HIPs in a class / program of study. As well, we will consider the availability and accessibility of HIPs in UGA’s undergraduate curriculum—and develop strategies and resources to help faculty and students learn more about and engage more with HIPs across campus. While the facilitators will bring expertise in First-Year Seminars, Writing-Intensive Courses, Service-Learning Courses, and Undergraduate Research, we welcome participants with an interest in and expertise related to the other seven HIPs, as well.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS

Facilitated by Jonathan Haddad & Edwin Sperr

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. Not surprisingly, these same communication skills are essential to the work of the student as well. Improvisational theatre is an approach that has been used in many settings to promote and improve robust communication skills. This FLC will provide an orientation for improv techniques for faculty new to improvisational theatre as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to expand on their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational skills apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Julie Grainy & Paul Matthews

This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, librarian, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, building community, supporting a mentoring program, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, disseminating data and information on best practices for NTT faculty support, and providing relevant information more strategically to department heads and other campus leaders, including through the website, nontenuretrack.uga.edu.

SERVICE-LEARNING SCHOLARSHIP & RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Scholarship and Research FLC supports faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Participants should have experience with service-learning/community-engaged teaching. FLC participants will help identify a research question relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution) which can be undertaken as a research project, individually or as a team, and likely will be submitted for presentation at a national service-learning conference.

SLOW LOOKING: OBSERVATION AS ARTFUL INQUIRY

Facilitated by Melissa Freeman

There is a cross-disciplinary movement afoot to slow down and take note of the overlooked, the mundane, the aesthetics in the everyday. This FLC will practice and discuss several established observational approaches aimed at deepening our abilities to attend closely to the particularities of what or who we are seeking to engage with. The group will start with educator Patricia Carini’s (1927-2021) Descriptive Processes, which she developed and refined over decades as co-founder
of the Prospect School, an alternative school in North Bennington, Vermont. In her 1975 monograph, Observation and Description: An Alternative Methodology for the Investigation of Human Phenomena, Carini articulates several processes that bring into visibility an event’s or person’s interdependence with a constituting and ever-changing environment. According to Carini, a phenomenon, person, or place under observation is meaning-fully inexhaustible. This is because all observations involve immersion, entanglement of observer and observed, and creativity in processes of description. While Carini’s work focused on the longitudinal documentation of children as learners and makers, her approach transcends school contexts and is generative of deep questioning about the role of the observer, the observed, and the aims of observation and description for understanding and inquiry. Her work is significant for its prescience of the ontological turn in the social sciences and the current emphasis on the importance of describing and attending to particularities found in texts such as Shari Tishman’s (2017) Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning through Observation, Alexandra Horowitz’s (2014) On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation, Arden Reed’s (2019) Slow Art: The experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, or Yuriko Saito’s (2017) Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Readings like these will be brought into dialogue with Carini’s approaches as faculty in this FLC learn with and from each other the slow arts of observation and consider the irrelevance to their own pedagogical and inquiry practices.

TEACHING WITH THE UN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGS)

Facilitated by Tyra Byers & Cecilia Herles

This FLC will bring together interdisciplinary faculty to explore teaching with the UN Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on using the campus and community as a living laboratory for experiential learning. We will particularly investigate the intersection of equity with the other global goals and how to enhance diversity and inclusion in our classroom as we engage with sustainability topics and action. Faculty will use their own courses to pilot new strategies and investigate student engagement, share best practices, and broaden our own understanding of sustainability education. We will emphasize the sharing and development of resources, opportunities for collaboration, and local application of global challenges. The UN Sustainable Development Goals “provide a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future… They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go together with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.” There are opportunities for every discipline to engage with these goals.

UNGRADING: ASSESSMENT BEYOND THE SCORES

Facilitated by Jerry Shannon, Shira Chess, & Elizabeth Davis

Are you questioning the efficacy of traditional grading techniques? Tired of students focusing on GPAs and arguing gradebook points over learning? In this Faculty Learning Community, we will study an alternative form of assessment called ungrading. Ungrading is an umbrella term that comprises several different methods of student assessment including Self-Assessment, Contract Grading, Specifications Grading, Peer Review, and Labor-Based Grading. Each session will feature a different faculty member presenting their practices, advice, and pitfalls for different methods of ungrading. Additionally, sessions will allow for opportunities to workshop ways to make ungrading work for your classes and syllabi and help your students feel more comfortable in a system without points. We will also consider opportunities and challenges for integrating ungrading into a higher education system based on grades and quantitative assessment.

ADVANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP AND PRAXIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE MENTORING

Facilitated by James Anderson, II & Jeremy Daniel, with financial support from Faculty Affairs

The purpose of this faculty learning community is to explore models of mentoring that improve capacity-building mentoring relationships by utilizing proven strategies that encourage buy-in, engagement, and growth. Rooted in motivational, transformational leadership and mentoring theories, we will have critical discourse around topics that address larger, campus-wide questions around cultivating an ecosystem of mentoring at the University. If you’ve ever thought, “How can I reach this person and get them to buy into the vision?” or “How can I get my direct report(s) to be more independent and reach their fullest potential?” or “How can I help this graduate student develop critical thinking skills?” This FLC is for you!

ARE THEY EVEN READING? STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT STUDENTS AS READERS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Facilitated by Ingie Hovland & Jodie Lyon

This FLC is for faculty members who wish to support their students’ reading skills and reflect on the place of reading in their classes. We will discuss a range of issues related to student reading at UGA, such as student motivation for reading, how to teach discipline-specific reading skills to undergraduates, the interface between reading and writing, how to choose texts for reading, how to assess reading, and how to encourage a class to become a reading community. We will form our own supportive reading community in the FLC: we will read recent research articles on undergraduate reading, discuss them, and choose some ideas to try out in our own classes.

BOOKS AS THINGS

Facilitated by Sujata Iyengar

Books as Things considers the material affordances of books and book-like objects – from clay tablets, papyrus fragments, and parchment codices to sculptural, moveable, or altered books including the first alphabetic scratches to twenty-first-century artists’ books. Participants choose a text to discuss each month or an exhibit or lecture to attend and share their own work in progress about material texts and technologies. We welcome scholar-teachers from all disciplines and backgrounds.

COORDINATED AND LARGE ENROLLMENT COURSES

Facilitated by Jennifer Royal & Ann Massey

Coordinated and large-enrollment courses are spread throughout the University, but many course coordinators are unique within their departments. This FLC will provide networking and support for course coordinators, lab coordinators, instructors of large-enrollment courses, and others interested in coordinated and large-enrollment courses. The purpose of this FLC is to build and maintain a community focused on coordinated and large-enrollment courses. We will share resources for coordinated courses, including syllabi and best practices. During the 2021-2022 year, we will focus on grad student/TA development and the transition to in-person instruction.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK: UTILIZING COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM

Facilitated by Adrian Burd & Gaylen Edwards

This FLC is aimed at faculty who wish to develop collaborative learning components of their classes, whether online or face-to-face. The design of the FLC involves two components. First, regular relaxed discussions of ideas and with other faculty in FLC meetings using short readings to provide focus for these discussions — this year we will use of the book Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty by Barkley, Major, and Cross as a starting point. Second, each member of the FLC will develop and implement in their courses at least one idea employing collaborative learning techniques. In addition, participants will contribute to a document describing these ideas, their implementation, and a reflecting on its effectiveness; this document will be made publicly available.

HONING SKILLS AND COMMUNICATING STRENGTHS: PREPARING STUDENTS FOR POST-UNDERGRADUATE SUCCESS

Facilitated by Maggie O’Brien, Sarah Shannon, & Justin Burnley

You know that your students develop important skills in your classroom – skills like critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, global fluency, and proficiencies in specific technologies. But do your students recognize that they are in fact honing these skills in your courses? Do they know how to articulate to others that they have developed these skills? In this FLC, we will explore ways for you to help your students recognize that they have these skills and how to present them on graduate school, professional school, and/or job applications.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS

Facilitated by Edwin Sperr & Jonathan Haddad

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. Not surprisingly, these same communication skills are essential for student success as well. Improvisational theatre is an approach that has been used in many settings to promote and improve robust communication skills. This FLC will provide an orientation for improv techniques for faculty new to improvisational theatre as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to expand on their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational skills apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by John Brocato & Paul Matthews, financial support from Faculty Affairs

This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, librarian, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, building community, supporting a mentoring program, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, disseminating data and information on best practices for NTT faculty support, and providing relevant information more strategically to department heads and other campus leaders, including through the new website (nontenuretrack.uga.edu).

SERVICE-LEARNING SCHOLARSHIP & RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Scholarship and Research FLC supports faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Participants should have experience with service-learning / community-engaged teaching and ideally should have a research question in mind relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution) which can be undertaken individually or as a team, with FLC support. The FLC will also collaborate on piloting the assessment instrument (Service-Learning Quality Assessment Tool) being developed for national dissemination.

SUSTAINABILITY FLC

Facilitated by Tyra Byers & Malcolm Adams

This FLC will bring together an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the integration of sustainability concepts into our classrooms. Using primary literature as a launching off point, we will discuss value systems, inclusion strategies, world views, and different ways of knowing and learning. Using our own courses as examples and opportunities for piloting new strategies, faculty will investigate student engagement while broadening our own understanding of education and sustainable communities.

TALKING THE TALK AND WALKING THE WALK: REVOLUTIONIZING COURSE DESIGN USING DEI PRACTICES

Facilitated by Ashley Harlow & Leslie Gordon Simons

Our hope with this FLC is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of faculty to reflect on inclusivity in the classroom. We will explore the relationship between assignments and syllabus design within the context of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Members of this FLC will reflect on their syllabi and course assignments, working toward refinements that increase inclusion and move toward decolonization. We will also consider developing templates of syllabi and assignment ideas that may be used as resources for the CTL.

WRITING STUDIES: SCHOLARSHIP, METHODOLOGIES, RESEARCH DESIGN, AND COLLABORATION

Facilitated by Lindsey Harding & Sara Steger

This FLC will create a community of faculty members interested in researching writing practices and pedagogy. Together, we will discuss research design, methodologies, qualitative and quantitative data sources, and existing studies. Participants will be encouraged to 1) develop research projects, 2) collaborate on projects in development, 3) share projects in process, and 4) peer review study materials, proposals, and manuscripts drafts throughout the year. As a group, this FLC will establish a research agenda to investigate writing in and beyond the classroom and support university initiatives to strengthen UGA’s writing curriculum. Though the research agenda will be driven by participants’ interests, possible research topics might include student engagement with written feedback, integration of no-stakes writing in large lecture courses, benefits of peer review in STEM courses, best practices in assessment, and others. In addition, this group will consider and compile information on funding for writing-related research, such as local and federal grants. Ultimately, members of the FLC will be invited to bring their research projects and ideas to be shared and discussed with the goal of moving these projects along into journal article manuscripts and/or conference presentations by the end of the year. Progress on this body of research will be showcased on write.uga.edu to document the group’s interests and accomplishments and help recruit interested faculty and graduate students to join a research group the following year.

ADVANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP AND PRAXIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE MENTORING

Facilitated by James Anderson, II & Jeremy Daniel, with financial support from Faculty Affairs

The purpose of this faculty learning community is to explore models of mentoring that improve capacity-building mentoring relationships by utilizing proven strategies that encourage buy-in, engagement, and growth. Rooted in motivational, transformational leadership and mentoring theories, we will have critical discourse around topics that address larger, campus-wide questions around cultivating an ecosystem of mentoring at the University. If you’ve ever thought, “How can I reach this person and get them to buy into the vision?”, “How can I get my direct report(s) to be more independent and reach their fullest potential?”, or “How can I help this graduate student develop critical thinking skills?”… then this FLC is for you!

BUILDING A CULTURE OF WRITING: WRITING INSTRUCTION, SUPPORT, AND PROGRAMMING ACROSS CAMPUS

Facilitated by Lindsey Harding & Sara Steger

This FLC will create a community of faculty members interested in supporting and improving their students’ writing and communication skills, and the development of their own writing assignments, instruction, and feedback – for face-to-face and online delivery. In addition, this community will consider opportunities to foster a culture around writing that is inclusive and accessible to all students and faculty, at all levels, and in every field, in any learning environment. Together, we will discuss a range of issues related to student writing in the classroom at UGA, such as teaching writing effectively in large classes and facilitating the transfer of writing-related knowledge and skills throughout a program of study. In addition, this group will consider writing at UGA more generally, working to identify roadblocks and opportunities when it comes to delivering a comprehensive writing curriculum and supporting writing across such a large and diverse campus. Ultimately, this group will collaborate on 1) a digital platform highlighting collaboratively created campus resources related to writing and teaching writing and 2) an event to foster UGA’s culture of writing as part of Write@UGA 2021.

CELEBRATION OF DIVERSITY THROUGH COURSE DEVELOPMENT: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Megan Brock

With an increasingly diverse population of college students on the horizon, conversations including terms like inclusivity, universal design, and cultural awareness frequently enter course design discussions. Moreover, rates of retention of students of color are increasingly troubling and faculty note several barriers to proper pedagogical supporting of students of color (Ribera, Priddie, & BrackaLorenz, 2018). Faculty lack training to support students of color who choose to attend predominantly white institutions, or to support retention of these students. The purpose of this FLC is to explore the scholarship concerning culturally responsive teaching this conversation in higher education. Moreover, we will discuss culturally responsive teaching and brain development, culturally relevant pedagogy, universal design, and more.

COORDINATED COURSES

Facilitated by Jennifer Royal

The purpose of this FLC is to create a community focused on coordinated courses across campus. We welcome participation by those interested in coordinated courses; we also encourage participation by faculty who run large enrollment courses while supervising teaching assistants. We will create a repository of resources for coordinated courses, including documents focused on best practices for course coordination, assessment in coordinated courses, and a snapshot of current practices across coordinated courses on campus.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK: ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH SIGNIFICANT LEARNING EXPERIENCES

Facilitated by Adrian Burd & Gaylen Edwards

This FLC is aimed at faculty who wish to improve the effectiveness of their teaching and the quality of student learning in face-to-face, online, and remote classes. The design of the FLC involves relaxed discussion of ideas with other faculty (using short readings as a focus for those discussions), and participants implementing some of these ideas as part of their existing classroom activities. This year, each member of the FLC will develop and implement at least one idea to enhance student engagement using significant learning experiences in their teaching. In addition, participants will contribute to a document describing these ideas, their implementation, and a reflection on its effectiveness.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS

Facilitated by Jerry Gale, Ruth Harman, & Edwin Sperr

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment and think on their feet. Not surprisingly, these same communication skills are essential to the work of the student as well. Improvisational theatre is a discipline that has been used in many settings to promote and improve robust communication skills. This FLC will provide an orientation to improv technique for faculty new to improvisational theatre as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to expand on their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational theatre apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

MOTIVATION: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MOTIVATED, AND HOW CAN WE MOTIVATE OUR STUDENTS?

Facilitated by John Morelock & Nicki Sochacka

This FLC will allow participants to learn about a variety of theories, strategies, and tools for motivating students in the (physical and virtual) classroom. Student motivation has been a topic of educational research for over 50 years, with several theories emerging that describe different kinds of motivation for different purposes, and myriad strategies for promoting each. Incorporating these many theories into a broader discussion about student motivation will allow the FLC to draw out several best practices in student motivation by integrating the lessons learned from each theory. Accordingly, we will cover a broad range of theories, including but not limited to: (1) the MUSIC Model of Motivation; (2) Expectancy-Value Theory; (3) Self Determination Theory; (4) Expectancy-based theories such as self-efficacy, self-concept, and self-worth; (5) Goal-oriented theories; (6) Interest theory; (7) Flow; (8) Attribution Theory; and (9) Self-Intelligence theories (particularly mindset). Discussions of each theory will include reading key literature, discussing the goals and situations to which each theory is best suited, and surveying tools available to promote and assess student motivation. The community will discuss how each of these theories can help keep our students motivated in the context of hybrid and online teaching models encouraged in response to COVID-19.

NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Paul Matthews & John Brocato, with financial support from Faculty Affairs

This ongoing FLC continues to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track (NTT) roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new NTT faculty, implementing a mentoring program, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, disseminating data and information on best practices for NTT faculty support, and disseminating relevant information more strategically to department heads and other campus leaders.

SERVICE-LEARNING SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Scholarship and Research FLC focuses on supporting faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Participants should have experience with service learning / community-engaged teaching and should have a research question in mind relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution). The FLC will also collaborate on piloting the assessment instrument (Service-Learning Quality Assessment Tool) being developed for national dissemination.

SUSTAINABILITY, RESILIENCE, AND COVID-19

Facilitated by Tyra Byers & Malcolm Adams

COVID-19 has disrupted life as we know it, laying bare many of the flaws in our current systems, from waste and inefficiencies in our food system, to a lack of affordable housing, to minimal access to health care. However, despite the devastation, there have been silver linings including cleaner air, fewer green-house gas emissions, and enhanced habitat for non-human species. We have an opportunity now to reflect and move forward with intention as we determine what the new normal will look like. How can we use the lessons we’ve learned to enhance the sustainability and resilience of our communities, country and the world? How can we capitalize on the generosity and sacrifice for the common good built during this time? How can we continue the environmental gains? And how can we rebuild economies and communities that are regenerative and equitable. This Sustainability FLC will explore how the COVID-19 global crisis dares us to re-envision our future with a focus on the 17 UN Global Goals developed in 2015 to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change. Particular attention will be given to developing curricula that engages students and connecting interdisciplinary faculty research to these topics.

ARE THEY EVEN READING? STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT STUDENTS AS READERS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Facilitated by Ingie Hovland and Lindsey Harding

This FLC will create a community of faculty members interested in supporting and improving their students’ reading skills and their reading assignments. Together, we will discuss a range of issues related to student reading at UGA, including the interface between reading and writing, student motivation for reading, how to teach discipline-specific reading skills to undergraduates and graduate students, how to choose texts to read, how to assess reading, and classes as reading communities. Ultimately, this group will collaborate on a digital resource to share strategies for supporting students as readers with UGA faculty and a wider audience of teachers online.

COLLECTING AND ANALYZING DATA ON STUDENT LEARNING IN ACTIVE LEARNING CLASSROOMS

Facilitated by Colleen Kuusinen and Toyin Alli

The goal of this FLC is to identify and analyze acceptable evidence of student learning (knowledge, skills, habits of mind, values) in our classrooms. For many, this is a start to SoTL and to showing the impact of their redesign work to a broader audience; for others, they just want to use data to improve their courses once they’re implementing them.

CRITICAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Facilitated by Elliot Kuecker and Emily McGinn

Digital Humanities has intersections in research methodologies, data ethics, computational strategies, computer science, and philosophy. Many faculty are interested in integrating it into their own research or want support assisting their undergraduates and graduates with DH methods. This group will be a space for open discussion and practical advice. Given that DH practitioners are already a small subset of the humanities, supportive groups like this have tremendous positive effects. We would welcome dabblers and experts– no coding nor experience necessary.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)

Facilitated by Gaylen Edwards and Adrian Burd

This FLC is aimed at faculty who wish to improve the effectiveness of their teaching and the quality of student learning. The design of the FLC involves a) relaxed discussion of ideas with other faculty using short readings as a focus for those discussions and b) participants implementing some of these ideas as part of their existing classroom activities. This year, as our project we aim to produce two or three short (5-7 minute) videos that describe, explain, and provide concrete examples of some of the teaching techniques discussed by the group. We aim to make these videos available to all faculty at UGA as a tool to introduce these techniques and provide inspiration for incorporating them into a wide variety of classroom settings.

IMPROVISATION FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS

Facilitated by Jerry Gale and Edwin Sperr

To be effective, educators must not only master their discipline, but must also learn how to communicate with their students. They must deeply listen, engage appropriately, participate in the moment, and think on their feet. Not surprisingly, these same communication skills are essential to the work of the student as well. Improvisational theater is a discipline that has been used in many settings to promote and improve robust communication skills. This FLC will provide an orientation to improv technique for faculty new to improvisational theater as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to expand on their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational theater apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

INTERSECTIONS OF ACADEMIC SUCCESS AND WELLBEING IN LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Facilitated by Beate Brunow, Jennifer Hester, and Liz Prince; sponsored by Student Affairs

Student well-being is directly linked to success in the classroom and beyond and plays a critical role in retention, progression, and graduation. The most common wellness barriers to student success nationally are stress, anxiety, sleep difficulties, depression, concern for a friend / family member, finances, illness and relationship difficulties (American College Health Association national survey 2017). Seven of the top ten academic disruptions are health / mental health/wellness related issues. This FLC will take a deep dive look at the intersection of wellness and academic success with the goal of developing a toolkit of classroom interventions for faculty.

LABORATORY TEACHING

Facilitated by Kristen Miller and Ann Massey

Meetings will center on discussion of a pre-determined topic that is common to teaching in laboratory environments (e.g. safety concerns, scheduling). The goals of each meeting are to identify current practices used by faculty and staff that teach laboratory classes that address the topic; to discuss those useful practices (and those that are problematic); and to generate and collect ideas and resources that address problematic issues or practices. These ideas and best practices will be compiled and made accessible to UGA faculty and staff.

METACOGNITION: LEARNING TO HELP OUR STUDENTS LEARN HOW TO LEARN

Facilitated by John Morelock and Nicki Sochacka

This FLC will allow participants to explore the educational concept of metacognition: That we can promote student academic success by intentionally helping students learn how to learn most effectively depending on context. There are a plethora of existing metacognition-promoting tools instructors can leverage that build upon common classroom tasks to help students become more effective learners (e.g., exam wrappers to help students process their exam study habits), and learning about these techniques can make an important difference in creating more success-oriented and equitable classrooms. Participants in this FLC will learn about key facets of metacognition as a concept and helpful classroom tools for promoting metacognition and have opportunities to apply and process results from metacognition-promoting tools in their classrooms under the wing of a support community of colleagues.

NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Paul Matthews and Clair McClure; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

This ongoing FLC is sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs, and is continuing to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new non-tenure track (NTT) faculty, implementing a mentoring program, reviewing relevant UGA and USG policies, disseminating data and information on best practices for NTT faculty support, and disseminating relevant information more strategically to department heads and other campus leaders.

RESOURCES FOR DIVERSE FACULTY RETENTION

Facilitated by Megan Brock; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

Faculty diversity has been discussed at length for years (Taylor et al., 2010). Researchers argue that (beyond the need for faculty demographics to reflect the increasingly, culturally diverse U.S. student population) universities should be striving to integrate diverse perspectives that reflect the global community within our classroom. However, once welcomed on campus, institutions face another challenge: retention. In particular, researchers note that retention rates of ethnic minorities at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) are lower than national retention rates (Whittaker, Montgomery, & Acosta, 2015). Furthermore, researchers report that female faculty (in STEM fields in particular) were less likely to be promoted in 6 or 8 years in comparison to men and more likely to leave their institutions without tenure (Gumpertz et al., 2017). In this faculty learning community, faculty with interest in supporting faculty members who belong to underrepresented groups will explore research-based interventions and resources that cultivate resilience and promote retention rates at the University of Georgia.

SERVICE-LEARNING SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Scholarship and Research FLC will focus this year on supporting faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy and related forms of community engagement. Participants should have experience with service-learning/community-engaged teaching and should have a research question in mind relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution). The FLC may also collaborate on addressing larger, campus wide questions around teaching and learning via academic service-learning.

SPACES FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND COLLABORATION

Facilitated by Brandy Burges and Anne Gilbert

Whether we are preparing to teach a course or writing a manuscript, it can be a challenge to protect time on our schedules to be productive. This FLC is designed to discover physical places and create intellectual space to work on individual projects while keeping one another accountable and sharing tips, tricks, tools, and practical application of pedagogy. The FLC will meet in different locations around campus and Athens to explore places suitable for out-of-office work, including meeting with students, grading, writing, and collaborative meetings. During each meeting, we will set aside time for members to gain feedback on projects, learn about teaching / research skills or pedagogical tools / strategies for productivity, or collaborate on projects; the majority of each meeting will be set aside as productive time for individual projects. Once a semester the FLC will devote one meeting for a professional development training based on the interest of the group that help further collaboration and productivity across teaching and research.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULA: UN GLOBAL GOALS AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD

Facilitated by Tyra Byers and Ron Balthazor

Sustainability education requires us to cross disciplinary divides as we teach students to integrate social, economic and environmental concerns to address the grand challenges of our time. The Sustainability across the Curricula Faculty Learning Community functions as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. This year the FLC will focus on the new Foodshed UGA Project through the lens of the 17 UN Global Goals. These goals were developed in 2015 to end poverty, fight inequality and stop climate change. Foodshed UGA emerged out of last year’s FLC’s focused on Global Goal #2: Zero Hunger, to engage campus and community in sustainability and innovation through food. In the 2019-2020 FLC, faculty will explore how their courses and research intersects with each Global Goal in relation to our food system.

USING WRITTEN REFLECTION TO EVALUATE STUDENT LEARNING

Facilitated by Rebecca Atkins and Alison Farley

We have been exploring means of assessing creative student work and are specifically interested in the use of written reflection to document student learning. We are in the midst of a data collection to understand the use of this practice at UGA and will use these data to develop a report on how to continue or enhance this practice in the classroom.

ASSESSMENT IN CREATIVE DISCIPLINES

Facilitated by Alison Farley and Rebecca Atkins

This FLC will explore opportunities to authentically assess creative output in disciplines that are not easily assessed through traditional methods. Specifically, this FLC is interested in how self-evaluation, reflection, critique and peer feedback might be used as evaluation tools.

COLLECTING AND ANALYZING DATA ON STUDENT LEARNING IN ACTIVE CLASSROOMS

Facilitated by Colleen Kuusinen

The goal of this FLC would be to identify and analyze “acceptable evidence” of student learning (knowledge, skills, habits of mind, values) in our classrooms. For many, this is a start to SoTL and to showing the impact of their redesign work to a broader audience; for others, they just want to use data to improve their courses once they’re implementing them.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)

Facilitated by Gaylen Edwards and Adrian Burd

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from education research publications to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes, large or small, in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. This year we propose to delve more deeply into active learning by discussing the physiological, cognitive, and psychological basis for learning and devoting a large portion of the FLC to how learning works. This will evolve into projects focused on how to better engage students with active learning practices that should result in better retention and understanding of class material. The proposed outcome for the FLC is that each participant will develop new teaching activities designed to promote metacognition and active learning and implement them in their course(s). Each participant will be asked to prepare and share with their colleagues a 2–3-page description of the challenges that were faced and include some assessment of the activity’s effectiveness. These projects will be documented and presented at the conclusion of our FLC.

HYBRID COURSE DEVELOPMENT

Facilitated by Meg Mittelstadt and Steve Balfour

The Hybrid Course Development (HCD) faculty learning community is designed for faculty who are new to hybrid learning and interested in implementing a hybrid course module in an upcoming academic year. HCD participants will explore the theory and research behind hybrid course design, discuss how hybrid course design can be leveraged for optimal student learning, and meet with faculty who are experienced hybrid teachers to discuss effective practices in the implementation of a hybrid course. Participants will also get an introduction to the Media Cooperative, a partnership between the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Online Learning.

IMPROVISATION, CREATIVITY, AND CRITICAL THINKING FOR ENHANCED LEARNING AND TEACHING

Facilitated by Jerry Gale and Edwin Sperr

This FLC will provide an orientation to improv technique for faculty new to improvisational theatre as well as giving more experienced faculty a forum to develop their skills. As a locus for both experiential work and discussion, the FLC will explore how the theory and practice of improvisational theatre apply to pedagogy, critical thinking skills, and creativity.

INTERSECTION OF ACTIVE LEARNING, STUDENT DEVELOPMENT, AND STUDENT SUCCESS

Facilitated by Beate Brunow and Kara Fresk; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

Numerous studies indicate that active learning, which is broadly defined as engaging students in their learning, enhances students’ academic performance (Prince, 2004). Other studies demonstrate the need to consider student characteristics to promote student success (Tinto, 2006). This FLC will explore active learning, student development theory, and the emerging profile of UGA students in order to design pedagogical approaches and strategies that promote student learning, development, and success. Participating faculty must be interested in exploring the intersections of learning and development and infusing active learning strategies into a course. Participating faculty members agree to participate in an assessment of the course as it is currently designed and in an assessment of the course upon revision.

JUNIOR FACULTY – SPONSORED BY FACULTY AFFAIRS

Facilitated by Susanna Calvert and Adam Milewski; sponsored by Faculty Affairs.

Given the limitations of doctoral education, getting started as a new faculty member in a new organization with a multitude of new roles requires that each person “reinvent the wheel.” The purpose of the Junior Faculty Learning Community is to help new faculty smoothly integrate into their new roles of research, teaching and service, and to do so with the support of a peer community and the appropriate support personnel on campus. This FLC is open to faculty within three years of starting their first faculty position. Though the FLC is open to new faculty of all ranks, the emphasis of the FLC will be those who are involved in teaching and/or research.

NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Paul Matthews and Clair McClure; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

This ongoing FLC is sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs, and is continuing to work on action items supporting faculty in non-tenure-track roles (e.g., lecturer, academic professional, clinical faculty, public service, research scientist, etc.). Building on prior years’ work, the FLC will focus this year on topics including supporting new non-tenure track (NTT) faculty, enhancing mentoring, disseminating data and information on best practices for NTT faculty support, and developing information for department heads and other campus leaders.

SERVICE-LEARNING RESEARCH

Facilitated by Paul Matthews

The Service-Learning Research FLC will focus this year on supporting faculty participants to understand, design and undertake scholarship of teaching & learning projects around academic service-learning pedagogy. Participants should have experience with service-learning / community-engaged teaching and should have a research question in mind relating to the pedagogy (e.g., impacts on students, community, faculty, or institution). The FLC may also collaborate on addressing larger, campus-wide questions around teaching and learning via academic service-learning.

SPACES FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND COLLABORATION – SPONSORED BY FACULTY AFFAIRS

Facilitated by Kristi Farner and Don Chambers

Whether we are preparing to teach a course or writing a manuscript, it can be a challenge to protect time on our schedules to be productive. This FLC is designed to discover physical places and create intellectual space to work on individual projects while keeping one another accountable and sharing tips, tricks, tools, and practical application of pedagogy. The FLC will meet in different locations around Athens to explore places suitable for out-of-office work, including meeting with students, grading, writing, and collaborative meetings. During each meeting, we will set aside time for members to gain feedback on projects, learn about teaching / research skills or pedagogical tools / strategies for productivity, or collaborate on projects; the majority of each meeting will be set aside as productive time for individual projects. Once a semester the FLC will devote one meeting for a professional development training based on the interest of the group that help further collaboration and productivity across teaching and research.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULA

Facilitated by Tyra Byers and Ron Balthazor

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned to the grand challenges of our time. The Sustainability Across the Curricula Faculty Learning Community will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. This year the FLC will focus on UN Global Goal #2 – Zero Hunger – exploring food sustainability in various forms. In addition to the UN Global Goal website and targets, we will use the book Project Drawdown, and network with the UN Regional Center for Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development Greater Atlanta. Faculty will explore how their courses and research intersects with Global Goal 2 and how individual disciplines can contribute.

CRITIQUE, CREATIVITY AND ASSESSMENT IN ART AND DESIGN FIELDS

Facilitated by Colleen Kuusinen

This FLC is focused on developing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects related to critique, creativity and assessment in art and design fields. Last year, the FLC read “Assessment in Creative Disciplines” (Chase, Ferguson & Hoey, 2014). During 2017-2018, we will refine our research questions with the goal of implementing SoTL studies in our classrooms during Spring 2018. Members may collaborate to develop a study or work on their own, but the group will support each other through the processes of design, implementation and submission to conferences and/or journals. Current members include faculty from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, College of Environment and Design, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, School of Education, the Department of Dance, and College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Faculty from diverse UGA departments who are interested in studying processes of teaching and learning in design-based courses, seminars, and studios are welcome.

DRONES INTEREST GROUP (DIG)

Facilitated by Sherry Clouser

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, also known as drones, can provide valuable data and imagery for research, teaching, marketing, storytelling, and many other purposes. In this faculty learning community, topics for discussion may include legal, ethical, and technical issues to consider when using drones for research or when teaching students about drones in our respective fields.

EARLY CAREER STEM FACULTY: STRENGTHENING INSTRUCTION

Facilitated by Julie Luft and Alice Hunt

As part of an institutional focus on STEM student success, early career faculty from across the STEM disciplines are invited to participate in a year-long FLC designed to support the use of active learning instruction. Early career faculty are faculty / lecturers / instructors in STEM areas with three or less years of teaching experience. Active learning instruction focuses on planning, instructing and assessing students. This FLC addresses the problem that most university faculty have not formally studied how to best support student learning. While this problem is not unique to the sciences, it is particularly important that STEM faculty adopt instructional practices in teaching to address challenges associated with student retention in STEM fields and the demand for a STEM prepared workforce.

EPORTFOLIO INTEREST COMMUNITY (EPIC)

Facilitated by Sherry Clouser

The ePortfolio Interest Community (EPIC) may choose to explore a number of issues surrounding the use of ePortfolio here at UGA. These may include using ePortfolio for facilitating integrative learning, assessing learning outcomes, encouraging reflection in experiential learning activities, supporting career development, and more.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Facilitated by Gaylen Edwards and Meg Mittelstadt

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from education research publications to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes, large or small, in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. Topics could include course design, alternative pedagogies (e.g. team-based learning), innovative teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THE FOXFIRE WAY

Facilitated by Janet Rechtman and Kathy Thompson

In this FLC, we hope to create a community of practice that can generate, support and sustain collaborations between and among UGA departments, programs and units that apply the Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning or other forms of community-engaged pedagogy at UGA. Because incoming university students are required to engage in experiential learning prior to the completion of their studies at UGA, it is incumbent on faculty to provide the kinds of hands-on experiences that enhance learning and position students for success after graduation (http://www.experienceuga.com/). Such experiential learning is doubly effective when conducted through authentic engagement and service to an outside community. Foxfire’s emphasis on authentic learning experiences is just one example of how community engaged learning provides opportunities for student leadership, ownership of learning, and connecting students’ work with an audience far beyond the classroom (http://www.foxfirefund.org/about.html). This FLC will build on the current Foxfire-focused FLC to aid in UGA’s effort to “create and expand strategic faculty development opportunities and resources” related to the experiential learning initiative (http://www.experienceuga.com/facultyfaqs/). Faculty members engaged in this FLC will continue to work with the Foxfire Core Practices (http://www.foxfirefund.org/teach.html) while broadening the scope to include other forms of and scholarship on community-engaged pedagogy, to implement and model various types of community-engaged pedagogy in courses and programs, and to develop collaborations to research the implementation and outcomes of community-engaged pedagogy in varied disciplines.

EXPLORING ENGINEERING SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) HABITS OF MIND

Facilitated by Nicola Sochacka and Siddharth Savadatti

This FLC will leverage on-going efforts by the recently established Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) to build capacity and social capital around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) and educational research in the College of Engineering. The purpose of this FLC will be to collectively explore the notion of SOTL as a set of “habits of mind”. We will do this by engaging with relevant literature and sharing efforts to improve our teaching practices. The goal of the group will be to articulate a discipline-specific understanding of SOTL habits of mind, and to provide examples of them from our shared practice. We will aim to publish our process and findings in a conference paper and/or journal article. The long-term goal of the FLC is to lay the foundation for a College-wide transformation to a culture of SOTL.

EYE TRACKER RESEARCH GROUP

Facilitated by Rebecca Atkins

This FLC will help connect UGA researchers who use eye tracker technology to answer questions about teaching and learning within their specific discipline. This group would also act as a starting place for researchers interested in learning about using an eye tracker in their own research. The group may create an interdisciplinary research project using the eye tracker.

IMPROVISATION: STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!

Facilitated by Ruth Harman and Aliki Nikolaides

Improvisation fosters spontaneity and creativity in our teaching, research and outreach engagements. Informed by Keith Johnstone’s book on improvisation, our group will engage in improvisational structures that foster creative relationships to enhance our sense of spontaneity, narrative storytelling and embodied performances. Our group activities will explore our individual and collective creativity, relationship building and occupying a sense of place in ways that stretch us. We will also learn to reflect on everyday performances, such as local theater events or coffee shop interactions, to think about how improvisational play can inform how we respond to everyday challenges.

JUNIOR FACULTY

Facilitated by Susanna Calvert and Adam Milewki; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

Given the limitations of doctoral education, getting started as a new faculty member in a new organization with a multitude of new roles requires that each person “reinvent the wheel.” The purpose of the New Faculty FLC is to help new faculty smoothly integrate into their new roles of research, teaching and service, and to do so with the support of a peer community and the appropriate support personnel on campus. This FLC is open to faculty within three years of starting their first faculty position. Though the FLC is open to new faculty of all ranks, the emphasis of the FLC will be those who are involved in teaching and/or research.

PERFORMING IDENTITY: RACE, GENDER, ETHNICITY IN THE PERFORMING ARTS

Facilitated by Fran Teague

In the performing arts, scholar-practitioners have to navigate issues of race, ethnicity, culture, diversity, inclusion, etc. For example, when should a production (of a ballet, opera, or play) use color-blind casting, and when is such a policy inappropriate, even offensive? Can we use the same policy to produce Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess? Do we cast Hamlet the same way we cast Othello or Death of a Salesman and Fences? One recent study of the issues involved is Angela C. Pao’s No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2010). According to Amma Y Ghartey Tagoe Kootin, “The book is not a manual for best practices but at least contextualizes major approaches.” We will begin with Pao’s book, and then solicit suggestions for other reading from participants. While faculty in the performing arts would be the primary audience, any faculty interested in the shifting contours of America’s racial landscape are welcome. The goal of this community would be, first and foremost, to talk about the way that the performing arts play with diversity. A secondary goal would be to take insight back to our respective programs, making the theoretical practical. A third goal would be to continue and extend such discussion to other areas: gender, for example, or religious faith.

PLASMA (PEER LEARNING ASSISTANTS: STRATEGIES, MANAGEMENT, AND APPLICATION)

Facilitated by Tim Burg

Starting in Fall 2016, several partner STEM departments began developing and implementing Peer Learning Assistants (PLAs) in gateway courses. The PLAs facilitate discussions among groups of students in a variety of classroom settings that encourage student engagement and responsibility for learning. The PLAs are undergraduates who previously successfully completed the courses they support. They are provided pedagogical training and content preparation throughout the semester during which they serve as PLAs. A nationwide Learning Assistant Alliance, maintained by the University of Colorado at Boulder and comprising over 70 institutions, promotes these practices and has shown that such programs positively impact students in PLA-supported courses, also showing substantial benefits to students who serve as PLAs as well as faculty.

PEER OBSERVATION OF TEACHING IN A CLINICAL DEPARTMENT

Facilitated by Jo (Anne) Smith and Karen Burgh

Professional track curricula provide a wide range of delivery opportunities and challenges. Courses can vary in length, from weeks to months, and can vary in environment, from classroom to clinic, making a “one-size fits all” observation-feedback-improvement cycle unrealistic. Classroom approaches, which typically involve larger student numbers, are likely not readily transposed to a clinical setting with small student numbers and short courses. Accordingly, expertise from human medicine and pedagogical best practices from traditional degree tracks will be leveraged by way of discussion starting point to address the following questions:

• What are the different goals of peer observation of teaching in a professional degree setting?
• What different methods are used for peer observation of teaching, which methods might be most applicable to professional degree didactic and clinical settings?
• How can student input be captured and used to make real-time course delivery improvements?
• How can instructors handle unexpected clinical variability given defined teaching outcomes?
• What type of peer observation do we want/need for Small Animal Medicine & Surgery?
• How can peer observation be helpful to improving clinical rotations of few weeks duration?
• How can we most efficiently train a cohort of peer observers within the Small Animal Medicine & Surgery faculty?

RECRUITMENT, PREPARATION, AND RETENTION OF STEM SECONDARY TEACHERS

Facilitated by Paula Lemons and Julie Luft

This FLC will create a collaborative faculty team who will consider how to better recruit and prepare STEM teachers. The FLC members will discuss current recruitment, preparation, and retention practices at UGA and in the surrounding area. These discussions will involve the examination of data and talking to professionals in the field. By the end of the year, we will write a short document suggesting how we can better recruit, prepare, and retain STEM teachers at UGA and in the region.

RESEARCH ON SERVICE-LEARNING AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Facilitated by Paul Matthews and Shannon Wilder

Service-learning is a “high-impact pedagogy” that allows students to learn material more deeply by applying their academic skills and knowledge to a real-world, community-identified need or issue, and is a key part of UGA’s experiential learning initiative. This FLC, facilitated by the Office of Service-Learning directors, supports faculty who have experience in teaching using service-learning and now want to learn about, develop, and implement research (individually or collaboratively) investigating service-learning or community engagement topics, including for instance student-related learning outcomes (academic, civic, personal) from their service learning courses; scholarship of teaching and learning with service-learning; impacts on the community; institutional variables (e.g., retention); or other, related topics.

SUPPORTING UGA’S NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Leslie Gordon

The purpose of this FLC will be to explore the current opportunities and challenges facing non-tenure track faculty at UGA. Policies and practices regarding NTT faculty nationwide will also be studied. The FLC will extend the activities of previous years to explore and implement ways to support NTT faculty as integral members of the UGA community.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: RESILIENCE

Facilitated by Tyra Byers and Ron Balthazor

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum.

This year, the FLC will once again focus on resilience “the ability of a system or community to survive disruption and to anticipate, adapt and flourish in the face of change. We will particularly look at how to engage many disciplines and courses in resilience planning.

ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

Facilitated by Laura Crawley

Learning outcomes assessment is integral to knowing steps one should take to improve the quality of instruction, courses, and programs, and there are a range of practices that can be employed to determine if students are achieving your program’s student learning outcomes. This FLC provides an interdisciplinary opportunity for faculty, administrators, and assessment specialists to ask questions and share best practices regarding learning outcomes assessment with colleagues across campus who are engaged in similar work. Topics will likely include how to write measurable learning outcomes, strategies for performing assessment in programs of varying sizes, how grades are different than outcomes assessment, creating rubrics and using other measurement instruments, statistical topics (such as inter-rater reliability), and how to make the most of your findings.

DON’T BE PREPARED: IMPROVISATIONAL PLAY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Facilitated by Ruth Harman and Aliki Nicolaides

Improvisation fosters spontaneity and creativity in our teaching, research and outreach engagements. Informed by Keith Johnstone’s book on improvisation, our group will engage in improvisational structures that foster creative relationships to enhance our sense of spontaneity, narrative storytelling and embodied performances. Our group activities will explore our individual and collective creativity, relationship building and occupying a sense of place in ways that stretch us. We will also learn to reflect on everyday performances, such as local theater events or coffee shop interactions, to think about how improvisational play can inform how we respond to everyday challenges.

(E)PORTFOLIO INTEREST COMMUNITY

Facilitated by Sherry Clouser

The ePortfolio Interest Community (EPIC) may choose to explore a number of issues surrounding the use of ePortfolio here at UGA. These may include using ePortfolio for facilitating integrative learning, assessing learning outcomes, encouraging reflection in experiential learning activities, supporting career development, and more.

EXAMINING GENDER IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Anne Marcotte; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

This FLC continues the thoughtful discussions of a 2015-2016 FLC by addressing gender as one of several interrelated personal characteristics that affect academia as a workplace. One focus for 2016-2017 will be that academia, on the whole, is fighting an out-of-date fight: We still question the presence or the influence of differences between men and women or wonder how male-female issues can be resolved for academia, but gender and other personal characteristics are no longer binary. Today’s high-school students refer to a single known specific friend as a “they,” because choosing “he” or “she” for a single person is no longer necessary for them. “Diversity” for today’s university student means a depth and breadth of personal experiences, assumptions, and relationships that is unimaginable to older faculty members who still use “diversity” to mean “African American.” Some faculty members insist that gender, age, and family / racial / ethnic background are not or should not be relevant to how we assess our students’ academic achievement; some faculty members insist that such variables cannot be separated from academic achievement; and, all the while, we all remain very much afraid to discuss gender, sex, age, or any other personal characteristic, for fear that we are somehow violating EOO requirements by even raising the questions. In such a multi-dimensional and continually changing atmosphere, how can UGA faculty address such questions as gender equity in salaries, gender balance among administrators, and gender-based assumptions in everything from what we expect of our students and how we write our tests to why we volunteer for committees and how we judge each other to be worthy of promotions or tenure?

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THE FOXFIRE WAY

Facilitated by Kathy Thompson

This FLC focuses on the Foxfire approach to teaching and learning. In 1966, Foxfire began when a teacher and his students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Northeast Georgia conceived a new approach to teaching and learning that was student-focused, authentic, and connected to community issues. This year, the Foxfire Fund celebrates the 50th anniversary of that breakthrough moment. In fall 2016, incoming University students will be required to engage in experiential learning prior to the completion of their studies at UGA. As a result of this new requirement, it will be incumbent on faculty to provide the “kinds of hands-on experiences that enhance learning and position [students] for success after graduation” (http://www.experienceuga.com/). Foxfire’s emphasis on authentic learning experiences provides opportunities for student leadership, ownership of learning, and connecting “students’ work with an audience far beyond the classroom” (http://www.foxfirefund.org/about.html). This FLC will aid in UGA’s effort to “create and expand strategic faculty development opportunities and resources” related to the experiential learning initiative (http://www.experienceuga.com/faculty-faqs/). Faculty members engaged in this FLC will explore how to implement the Foxfire Core Practices (http://www.foxfirefund.org/teach.html) in their courses and programs and how to engage in research related to the implementation and outcomes of experiential learning. While UGA faculty from various disciplines / units on campus, including the Department of History, the College of Education, the UGA libraries, and the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, have been associated with Foxfire throughout the years, participants in this FLC can be from any discipline and need no prior training in the Foxfire approach to teaching and learning.

ISSUES FACING FACULTY IN NON-TENURE TRACK ROLES

Facilitated by Elizabeth Osborn-Kibbe and Leslie Gordon; sponsored by Faculty Affairs

The 2015-16 Non-Tenure Track FLC continued to build on survey data of UGA’s non-tenure track faculty on issues relating to hiring, promotion, climate, and other topics, garnering nearly 350 responses from lecturers, academic professionals, clinical faculty, and public service faculty. The 2016-17 FLC will continue ongoing work to implement recommendations based upon the data from this survey, in order to tangibly support the working conditions, experiences, and professional development for other faculty in non-tenure track positions. Other topics we might explore could include maintaining active research agenda, researching funding available to our particular professional community, grant writing and funding application processes; collaborating with other non-TT and TT faculty on research and teaching projects; applying to and interviewing for tenure track positions; developing a pedagogical philosophy, and forming a community to provide pedagogical feedback.

NEXUS CLASSROOM: WHERE TEACHING AND RESEARCH COALESCE

Facilitated by Andrew Owsiak and Jennifer Birch

The relationship between teaching and research is one of the perennial issues in contemporary American higher education. This FLC continues a project began during 2015-2016 to explore both the incredible potential that rests at the nexus of teaching and research and how the interaction of research and teaching can enhance student learning inside and outside the classroom at the University of Georgia. The FLC’s examination of the “nexus classroom” calls on members’ experiences in both teaching and research, ultimately considering many experiential learning issues such as: integrating (independent) research into courses; designing student-driven data generation and analysis projects; creating learning opportunities outside the classroom (e.g., community experiences or work through the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities); bringing technology-enhanced research into the classroom; incorporating a variety of active-learning exercises into courses, and; any other themes arising from member’s individual or collective interests. In 2015-2016, the FLC designed and piloted a student survey, which we expect to give us additional insight into how students experience the research process in their courses (if at all). The students’ experience might involve topic selection, writing / making arguments, the use of methodological tools, and the presentation of results, as well as how they engage with and integrate existing research into their projects. Our ultimate goal is to understand how the research experience affects inquiry / analysis, critical and creative thinking, written communication skills, problem solving, and information and methodological literacy. In 2016-2017, we plan to finalize the survey instrument, gain IRB approval of it, and administer it to an initial wave of respondents. Our ultimate goal is to general scholarship on the research and teaching nexus.

RECRUITMENT, PREPARATION, AND RETENTION OF STEM SECONDARY TEACHERS

Facilitated by Julie Luft and Paula Lemons

This FLC will create a collaborative faculty team who works to identify the current and potential barriers and affordances at UGA to the recruitment, preparation, and retention of STEM students into secondary teaching. With barriers and affordances identified, we will create a plan that bridges among stakeholders and conceptualizes a new or revised program that increases the number of STEM majors who are prepared to teach. This plan may include recruitment initiatives, courses, or faculty development programs.

RESEARCH ON SERVICE-LEARNING AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Facilitated by Paul Matthews and Shannon Wilder

Service-learning is a “high-impact pedagogy” that allows students to learn material more deeply by applying their academic skills and knowledge to a real-world, community-identified need or issue and is a key part of UGA’s experiential learning initiative. This new FLC, facilitated by the Office of Service-Learning directors, will support faculty who have experience in teaching using service-learning and now want to learn about, develop, and implement research (individually or collaboratively) investigating service-learning or community engagement topics, including for instance student-related learning outcomes (academic, civic, personal) from their service-learning courses; scholarship of teaching and learning with service-learning; impacts on the community; institutional variables (e.g., retention); or other, related topics.

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING IN DESIGN

Facilitated by Colleen Kuusinen

This FLC is focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in design fields. Collectively, we will consider how creativity and critique are taught and assessed in higher education learning environments, and how we can systematically study this process. Long-term goals include development of a tool that can be used in interdisciplinary SoTL studies undertaken by members of the FLC and leading to publication(s). The FLC has just begun reading “Assessment in Creative Disciplines” (Chase, Ferguson & Hoey, 2014), purchased with funds provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning. Current members include faculty from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, College of Environment and Design, and College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Faculty from diverse UGA departments who are interested in studying processes of teaching and learning in design-based courses, seminars, and studios are welcome, as membership in this group remains open.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: RESILIENCE

Facilitated by Tyra Byers

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. This year, the FLC will focus on resilience – the ability of a system or community to survive disruption and to anticipate, adapt and flourish in the face of change. We will discuss how components of resilient cities (flexible, inclusive, resourceful, reflective, integrative and robust) apply to UGA, ACC and our own research and teaching. All disciplines welcome.

TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Facilitated by Emily McGinn

This FLC will serve as community for faculty interested in digital humanities, but who perhaps don’t know where to start. With UGA’s DIGI undergrad certificate launching officially this fall, this FLC will explore ways to integrate Digital Humanities (DH) methods and tools into the classroom, not just using technology to deliver content, but using technology to create and analyze content. We will examine how to scaffold and integrate DH assignments into existing classes or to create new classes around digital projects. Topics could include defining DH, particularly in relation to New Media and Instructional Technology; introduction to basic web tools; and an introduction to DH methods and to the DH community.

BEST PRACTICES IN CALCULUS INSTRUCTION

Facilitated by Malcolm Adams

One of the seven main recommendations of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) publication, Insights and Recommendations from the MAA National Study of College Calculus, is the coordination of instruction, including the building of communities of practice. This Faculty Learning Community will meet weekly to develop the base of a community of practice for teaching calculus at the University of Georgia. Instructors of Calculus will discuss details of the course syllabus, interpretation of learning goals, and pedagogical strategies with a goal of building a library of course resources shared with all calculus instructors.

DEFINING AND EVALUATING LEARNING OUTCOMES IN PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS

Facilitated by Michael Fulford

Professional schools increasingly are being called upon to set out with greater clarity the learning outcomes, they expect from their students, and to ensure that their teaching and evaluation methods are advancing their articulated goals. This can be uniquely challenging in professional schools, in which the educational goals include not just a transfer of knowledge and measurable skills, but also the inculcation of students into the norms of a profession (such as how to “think like a lawyer”). This FLC would build on the work done in last year’s “Learning to Assess Learning” FLC, but with a particular focus on the unique challenges professional schools face in designing and implementing these types of assessment methods. The goal of the FLC would be to help educators within professional schools learn from each other about how to better incorporate these methods into their courses and institutions.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Facilitated by Tom Reichert

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from the rich well of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes” large or small” in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. Topics could include course design, alternative pedagogies (e.g. team-based learning), innovative teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more.

EXAMINING GENDER IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Sarah Covert

This FLC will read and discuss recent scholarship that addresses gender balance in the workplace, with the goal of producing some recommendations for the Provost and President on gender balance by the end of the academic year. One book that the FLC might consider is Bridging the Gender Gap: Seven Principles for Achieving Gender Balance by Roseberry and Roos (Oxford University Press).

GREENLEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Claiborne Glover and Ron Balthazor

Ecocriticism is the study of the confluence of nature, literature, and culture, and the insights inspired by such study are increasingly important. The best ecocritical conversations span academic disciplines in complex ways. This FLC will function as a forum for ecocritical thinking that we hope will attract the entomologist and the political scientist, the evolutionary biologist and the literary critic, for conversations that range from compost to Whitman’s “This Compost,” from sustainable agriculture to Wendell Berry’s “Home Economics,” from E. O. Wilson to Barbara Kingsolver, from Frankenstein to factory farming. The conversation will be a relaxed exchange prompted by short ecocritical writings, and the conversation will by design be free ranging.

ISSUES FACING FACULTY IN NON-TENURE TRACK ROLES

Facilitated by Paul Matthews and Elizabeth Osborn-Kibbe

The 2014-15 NTT FLC surveyed non-tenure track faculty on issues relating to hiring, promotion, climate, and other topics, garnering nearly 350 responses from lecturers, academic professionals, clinical faculty, and public service faculty. The 2015-16 FLC will work to develop and implement recommendations based upon the data from this survey, in order to tangibly support the working conditions, experiences, and professional development for other faculty in non-tenure track positions. Other topics we might explore could include maintaining an active research agenda; researching funding available to our particular professional community; grant writing and funding application processes; collaborating with other non-TT and TT faculty on research and teaching projects; applying to and interviewing for tenure track positions; developing a pedagogical philosophy and forming a community to provide pedagogical feedback.

MINDFULNESS AND MEDITATION FOR EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND PERSONAL BENEFITS

Facilitated by Jerry Gale and Janette Hill

How to use mindfulness in the classroom. Mindfulness for personal and relational benefits of the faculty / staff and for students. Research on meditation. Have an on-going meditation group meeting every two weeks at the GMOA which will be open to the University community. The FLC would help do this group, and we will have our own meetings separately about once a month.

NEXUS CLASSROOM: WHERE TEACHING AND RESEARCH COALESCE

Facilitated by Andy Owsiak and Jen Birch

The relationship between teaching and research is one of the perennial issues in contemporary American higher education. This FLC explores both the incredible potential that rests at the nexus of teaching and research and how the interaction of research and teaching can enhance student learning inside and outside the classroom at the University of Georgia. The FLC’s examination of the “nexus classroom” calls on members’ experiences in both teaching and research, ultimately considering many experiential learning issues such as: integrating (independent) research into courses; designing student-driven data generation and analysis projects; creating learning opportunities outside the classroom (e.g., community experiences or work through the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities); bringing technology enhanced research into the classroom; incorporating a variety of active-learning exercises into courses, and; any other themes arising from member’s individual or collective interests.

ONLINE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE PEDAGOGY

Facilitated by Jonathan Baillehache

The growing number of classes of foreign languages and literature being taught online call for a renewed pedagogy that reconcile the oral- and interpersonal-driven approach of language pedagogy with the capabilities of networked computers. We believe that this renewed pedagogy should rely on a creative collaboration between established faculty, who benefit from a long experience in teaching foreign languages and literature, and younger faculty and students, who benefit from a know-how and curiosity for the newest capabilities of networked computers. The goal of the monthly meetings of this FLC is to share our experience in online teaching and supervise a workshop series on online language and literature pedagogy open to both faculty and advanced graduate students. In addition to its workshop series, the FLC will share the transcripts of its workshops as well as tutorials on specific online pedagogical tools through its website.

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING FOR FACULTY

Facilitated by Lindsay Coco

Most of us engage in scholarly teaching; we evaluate and reflect on our teaching and interactions—adjusting, modifying, and changing—in an attempt to improve learning. When we transform that informal reflection to a systematic study of learning, we move from scholarly teaching to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). SoTL is the systematic study of teaching and learning; it involves asking a question, gathering evidence, drawing conclusions based on that evidence, and making those findings public for the benefit of others through publications or presentations. The members of this community will decide the direction and goals of the community, but a general plan will be to design a SoTL research project in the fall, and to gather data during spring semester.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: AN EMPHASIS ON WATERSHED UGA

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. This year, the FLC will participate in Watershed UGA (http://www.watershed.uga.edu/), a campus stream restoration initiative to create a transformative experience in sustainability for all UGA students.

TEACHING WITH SIMULATIONS AND GAMES

Facilitated by Joel Lee

The FLC would be an opportunity for faculty to share experience in the use of computer and non-computer simulation and gaming as a tool in the classroom. The focus would be on use of simulations and games as an effective method to engage students, enable them to apply and test course content, and test strategies in a simulated environment. Many faculty have explored simulations and gaming and the FLC would be an opportunity to learn from each other about successes and failures to improve our skills in using these strategies for student collaborations, problem solving, group work, decision-making, real-life problem solving, etc. Topics might include: -Creative Problem Solving and Innovation through Games and Simulations -Use of Scenario-based Simulations -Use of paper-based simulations -Use of case studies -Evaluating simulations and games -Use of computer simulations -Demonstrations -Evaluating effectiveness of games and simulations.

WHAT ARE THE BEST, MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO TEACH DIVERSITY CLASSES AND ISSUES?

Facilitated by Melissa Landers-Potts

Many departments on campus require that students fulfill a diversity course requirement. This is an important endeavor because many of our UGA alumni will graduate and move into positions of power and influence in society, so a lofty goal of these diversity courses is to give these future leaders practice and skills for flexible thinking that will allow them to question the stereotypes that are part of the fabric of society. From the perspective of faculty on campus who teach these courses, or courses that incorporate diversity elements, these issues are often difficult to teach and discuss. Students’ couch some diversity issues in moral terms, and we all come to the table influenced in various ways by the majority culture and by images in the media that further entrench stereotypes of different groups of people. Students sometimes become defensive, and some research has shown that faculty who teach diversity courses are given lower evaluations–again, due to the lightning-rod properties of the course content. The FLC that I am proposing would therefore learn and talk about the most effective, impactful and engaging strategies for discussing issues of diversity and privilege. What works? What approaches make people more receptive to being self-critical rather than becoming defensive? What can we do to make students more receptive to self-examination? Also, while we tend to think of these courses as creating more cognitive flexibility and understanding among those who belong to advantaged groups, it would also be beneficial to discuss the aims of these courses for people who are members of marginalized groups. How do the courses directly benefit these students (ideally there are indirect benefits through societal change) and what is the responsibility of faculty in protecting them from the potential dangers of dwelling on the injustice that they already know exist in the world and may be trying to ignore as a coping mechanism?

BUILDING UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIPS TO ENHANCE LEARNING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Facilitated by T.W Cauthen and Sylvia Hutchinson

How can faculty and Student Affairs leaders collaborate to provide outside-of-class learning opportunities for students? This FLC will discuss the following topics (based on facilitator prompts, faculty experience, and readings): 1. The identification of current learning partnerships between academic and student affairs (possibly canvassing or surveying campus), 2. The development of effective channels through which campus units can exchange ideas for learning outside the classroom, and 3. The consideration of future initiatives, partnerships, or support programs for the campus.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Facilitated by Tom Reichert and Paul Quick

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from the rich well of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes “large or small” in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. Topics could include course design, alternative pedagogies (e.g. team-based learning), innovative teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more.

GREENLEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Claiborne Glover and Ron Balthazor

Ecocriticism is the study of the confluence of nature, literature and culture, and the insights inspired by such study seem more important than ever. The best ecocritical conversations span academic disciplines in complex ways. This FLC quite simply will function as a forum for ecocritical thinking that we hope will attract the entomologists and the political scientist, the evolutionary biologist and the literary critic, for conversations that range from compost to Whitman’s “This Compost,” from sustainable agriculture to Wendell Berry’s Home Economics, from E. O. Wilson to Barbara Kingsolver, from Frankenstein to factory farming. The conversation will be a relaxed exchange prompted by short ecocritical writings, and the conversation will, by design, be free ranging.

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Facilitated by Denise Domizi and Judy Milton

Two learning communities offered in the 2014-2015 year will focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL); one for faculty members, and one for graduate students. SoTL is the systematic study of teaching and learning; it involves asking a question, gathering evidence, drawing conclusions based on that evidence, and making those research findings public for the benefit of others. The members of these communities will decide the direction and goals of the community, but a general plan will be to design a SoTL research project in the fall, and to gather data during spring semester.

MINDFULNESS FOR EDUCATIONAL, RESEARCH, AND PERSONAL AND RELATIONAL BENEFIT

Facilitated by Jerry Gale

We are developing a web site for the University and Athens Community promoting mindfulness and other practices of meditation for the benefit of students, faculty and staff. There is an abundance of research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for psychological benefit as well as educational benefit. There are also increased funding opportunities to develop research proposals incorporating meditation. A number of universities around the country already have resources on their website pertaining to meditation. We want to develop and promote mindfulness practices for the university community. This FLC first came together in 2013 and we have started developing a web site. This group also shares in discussing (and practicing) ways to incorporate meditation in our classes and research, as well as for our own benefit.

NEXUS CLASSROOM: WHERE TEACHING AND RESEARCH COALESCE

Facilitated by Chase Hagood and James (Jeb) Byers

One of the perennial issues in twentieth and twenty-first century American higher education has been the relationship between teaching and research. This FLC will explore the incredible potential that rests at the nexus of teaching and research and how their interaction can enhance student learning and classroom engagement, particularly at the University of Georgia. The FLC’s examination of the “nexus classroom” will call on members’ experiences in both teaching and research, guest discussants including administrators and students, as well as common readings like The University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries (2008) and Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide (2006).

NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Melissa Kozak

This FLC will offer Non-Tenure Track Faculty (such as lecturers, academic professionals, public service representatives, research professionals, clinical faculty, etc.) a community to discuss issues unique to our roles across the university. Topics of discussion might include teaching awards, guidelines for promotion, utilizing new/existing technology, balancing multiple departmental roles, actively engaging students and other teaching issues, as well as topics of interest to the community. We will learn from each other to improve our teaching and service to the university and provide professional development by peer-reviewing each other’s teaching. This FLC may choose to work towards an outcome related to developing a website for resources, Teaching Portfolios, compiling departmental policies, or developing a workshop for new / existing Non-Tenure Track Faculty. This FLC will be capped at 10 participants.

ONLINE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE PEDAGOGY

Facilitated by Jonathan Baillehache

The growing number of classes of foreign languages and literature being taught online call for a renewed pedagogy that reconcile the oral- and interpersonal-driven approach of language pedagogy with the capabilities of networked computers. We believe that this renewed pedagogy should rely on a creative collaboration between established faculty, who benefit from a long experience in teaching foreign languages and literature, and younger faculty and students, who benefit from a know-how and curiosity for the newest capabilities of networked computers. The goal of the monthly meetings of this FLC is to share our experience in online teaching and supervise a workshop series on online language and literature pedagogy open to both faculty and advanced graduate students. In addition to its workshop series, the FLC will share the transcripts of its workshops as well as tutorials on specific online pedagogical tools through its website: http://ugaonlinepedagogy.wordpress.com

PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON TEACHING

Facilitated by Peggy Brickman

College administrators currently assess good teaching largely through student evaluations and the occasional peer-teaching observation. These two measures often fail to encourage active, outcome-oriented, inquiry-driven curriculum because of their focus on accurate delivery of content and perceived student satisfaction. In addition, these measures are often biased by characteristics like instructor likability or use of undemanding assessments. Because they are not designed to recognize the use of methods that maximize active student learning, these measures serve as a major obstacle to their adoption. Building from literature on the role of feedback in K-12 teacher education and the general workforce, I would like our learning community to try a peer coaching model for providing individualized formative suggestions for improving teaching.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor and Tyra Byers

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. This year, the FLC will use the UNESCO Sustainability Teaching and Learning resource as a framework (unesco.org/education/tlsf/) for our discussion. Our conversation will range from the theoretical to the practical, from the basics of sustainability to examples of effective sustainability curriculum.

BOOKS ABOUT TEACHING

Facilitated by DeLois Wenzel Hess and Sherry Clouser

In this FLC, participants will choose 2-3 books about teaching and learning to read and discuss. Examples of possible titles include “Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice” by Maryellen Weimer, “Learner Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning into Practice” by Terry Doyle, and “The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning” by James Zull.

CONFRONTING THE GREAT DIVIDE: AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS AND THEIR PROFESSORS

Facilitated by Thomas Chase Hagood

As with other social institutions, the ongoing revolutions in technology, media and communication have challenged the American university system and its ideals. Significantly, such rapid changes in connectivity and information-sharing have transformed universities’ students who came of age in the 2000s. Interestingly, however, these revolutions have had limited influence on pedagogy or on the professional practices of many American professors, especially in disciplines with more traditionalist approaches to teaching and learning. Meeting throughout the 2013-14 academic year, the FLC: “Confronting the Great Divide” will engage the challenges and complexities of two areas of concern expressed in the recent CTL@UGA survey of faculty: Today’s Students and Engaging Students. Drawing on both scholarship as well as personal experiences, FLC members will be able to participate in a constructive dialogue about the sometimes confusing, sometimes adversarial relationships that develop between students and professors. These dynamics, often propelled by generational differences, can stymie individual learning or, worse, create a seemingly unconquerable divide between the two constituencies at the heart of higher education: teachers and students. It is the design and purpose of this FLC to explore these dynamics as well as solutions.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, CONT.: EXPLORING TEACHING TOPICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Tom Reichert and Paul Quick

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from the rich well of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes “large or small” in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. Topics could include course design, alternative pedagogies (e.g. team-based learning), innovative teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more. Tom Reichert (Reichert@uga.edu) is an Advertising professor and Department Head in the Grady College whose teaching specialties include an array of advertising courses. Paul Quick (pauquick@uga.edu) is the Coordinator of TA Development and Recognition in the Center for Teaching and Learning, has taught in the Department of English, and will join us in the spring semester.

FLC FOR FYO

Facilitated by Melissa Harshman

Are you teaching a First-Year Odyssey seminar this fall or next spring? Are you excited about working with first-year students? If so, this Faculty Learning Community is for you! We will discuss issues that relate to the pedagogical needs of first-year students and brainstorm ideas to facilitate the goals of the First-Year Odyssey seminar program as well as successful teaching techniques. Participants will help determine other topics of interest the group may want to explore in more depth. Our goal will be to work collaboratively to generate helpful ideas and strategies around teaching an FYO seminar and to share this information with colleagues.

GREENLEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Claiborne Glover and Nathan Camp

Ecocriticism is the study of the confluence of nature, literature and culture, and the insights inspired by such study seem more important than ever. The best ecocritical conversations span academic disciplines in complex ways. This FLC quite simply will function as a forum for ecocritical thinking that we hope will attract the entomologists and the political scientist, the evolutionary biologist and the literary critic, for conversations that range from compost to Whitman’s “This Compost,” from sustainable agriculture to Wendell Berry’s “Home Economics,” from E. O. Wilson to Barbara Kingsolver, from Frankenstein to factory farming. The conversation will be a relaxed exchange prompted by short ecocritical writings, and the conversation will by design be free ranging.

“IN-BROAD” EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING FLC

Facilitated by Barbara McCaskill

This FLC group is open to a maximum of ten (10) Humanities faculty, who will gather approximately every three weeks during AY 2013-2014 in order to design resources for classes to feature short educational trips specifically in and around the US mainland: to other cities in Georgia, and/or other states. This year-long conversation and planning seeks to catalyze subsequent internal and external funding of these experiential learning trips, including (but not limited to) topics such as civil rights and human rights; religion and philosophy; American literature, history, art, film, and music; and the environment and the Humanities. We will compose such items as assignments, itineraries, maps, grading rubrics, and best practices for safety and civility, designed to integrate course objectives successfully with such trips. Faculty who already have included experiential travel in their courses, and/or who have developed study abroad programs, will be invited to share the benefits and challenges of such initiatives, and to advise the group as they compose these resources. As a collective FLC Project coming out of this year’s meetings, the information that the group has gathered and composed will be posted on the Center for Teaching and Learning website to share on an ongoing, long-term basis with the teaching and learning community within and beyond UGA.

INTERNATIONALIZATION OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Facilitated by Kavita Pandit

The integration of international experiences and knowledge into the curriculum is increasingly seen as an important way to foster intercultural awareness and develop global competencies. Indeed, according to Jane Knight (1994), the curriculum can be regarded as “the backbone of the internationalization process” (Knight, 1994, p. 6). Discussions in this learning community will revolve around questions such as: what do we mean by intercultural awareness / global competency? How can we prepare our students with the skills necessary to thrive in an international and multicultural environment? We will also examine a range of curriculum internationalization strategies: the use of technology to create global classrooms, fostering greater interaction between domestic and international students, and tapping the experiences of returned study abroad and exchange students. Participants will take turns in developing topics and leading discussions.

LEARNING TO ASSESS LEARNING

Facilitated by Leslie Gordon

What is learning outcomes assessment? How are you supposed to do it? What does it do for you? Join other faculty members to explore learning outcomes assessment and to find out how it can be done in order to benefit the teacher, the learner, and the program. Members of this FLC will work through the assessment cycle, from clearly defining outcomes statements to collecting evidence to using assessment to improve teaching and learning. At regular intervals participants will apply group discussions to advance their own course or programmatic assessment efforts. Faculty with all levels of assessment experience are welcome.

MEDITATION FOR PERSONAL, RELATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL ENHANCEMENT

Facilitated by Jerry Gale

There has been an abundance of research on meditation in the last decade. Personal, relational, and clinical benefits have been clearly demonstrated. Additionally, benefits for enhancing learning for students as well as improving practice skills of professionals (physicians, attorneys, therapists, educators, athletes, etc.) have been found. The purpose of this group includes learning (and sharing) meditation practices, discussing the research literature about meditation and discussing ways of how meditation can help in the classroom (and even in conducting research). Discussion on different understandings of meditation (based on spiritual and secular traditions), and on different forms of mediation will be discussed. Likely we will read and discuss particular books and/or articles. A final goal of this group (FLC Project) might be to develop a proposal for how meditation practices can be expanded on campus and made available for faculty, staff and students (or another project decided by the group). The group will be for both beginner and experienced meditators and will be collaborative in process.

MENTORING STRATEGIES FOR FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENTS

Facilitated by Gary Green and Denise Domizi

One of the most important steps that graduate students encounter is selecting a faculty mentor that reflects and fulfills their mentoring, teaching, and/or research needs. Conversely, many new faculty often struggle with how to provide graduate students with the best guidance and advice during their studies. Hence, this FLC will strive to identify the issues and challenges that graduates and faculty encounter in terms of receiving and giving mentoring. It is hoped that this FLC will result in two mentoring handbooks and/or resources, one for grad students and one for faculty, providing initial strategies, advice, and/or thoughts on mentoring skills and techniques. Ideally, faculty seeking to join this FLC will have an invested interest in learning about mentoring skills and strategies, or be established faculty with a history of strong mentorship and guidance in regards to their graduate students.

NEW COLLABORATIONS: INCORPORATING SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESOURCES INTO THE CLASSROOM

Facilitated by Jan Levinson and Jill Severn

In February 2012 the University of Georgia dedicated the new Richard B. Russell Building for Special Collections Libraries. This facility, designed to help preserve and share the University’s rarest and most treasured materials, houses three archives that document the history and culture of the state of Georgia: The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, and The Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies. Equipped with reading rooms, exhibit galleries, classrooms and event spaces, the Special Collections Building offers a variety of access points for visitors to engage with history and knowledgeable and convivial team of archivists and librarians eager to collaborate with instructors. In the last year, many UGA faculty members have worked with special collections archivists to integrate this rich array of material into their teaching in exciting and productive ways. This faculty learning community would examine ongoing collaborations and create a space for imagining new ways to engage with the collections, staff, and spaces of the Special Collections Building to enrich educational opportunities at UGA. Initially, FLC facilitators will introduce participants to the primary content areas of the three special collections libraries and resources of the Special Collections Building. Subsequent sessions of the FLC will welcome faculty and archivists who have experience with developing specific assignments and courses that incorporate primary materials from UGA special collections in sustained and creative ways. These opportunities to know more about what is available and how it might enrich the learning processes of students will prime FLC participants to embark on their own explorations of this valuable campus resource and its potential to enhance their own teaching and learning. This Faculty Learning Community will be co-led by archivists Jan Levinson and Jill Severn of the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies.

NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Melissa Scott Kozak

This FLC will offer Non-Tenure Track Faculty (such as lecturers, academic professionals, public service representatives, research professionals, clinical faculty, etc.) a community to discuss issues unique to our roles across the university. Topics of discussion might include appointment and promotion guidelines, balancing multiple departmental roles, actively engaging students and other teaching issues, as well as topics of interest to the community. We will learn from each other to improve our teaching and service to the university. This FLC may choose to work towards an outcome related to Teaching Portfolios, compiling departmental policies, or developing a workshop for new / existing Non-Tenure Track Faculty.

PRESENTATION VISUALIZATION

Facilitated by Mark Johnson

Sometimes it feels like teaching needs to be reduced to “Short Attention Span Theater” segments. How do we keep our students engaged? How do we prevent them from tuning out as we click to PowerPoint slide number 37, the 23 most important bullet points of this segment of the lecture? This FLC will explore the different methods of visual presentations used in classrooms and attempt to develop a set of best practices and examples to be shared across the campus. We’ll look at the most successful presentations each member has in their repertoire, critique them, and help them build better ones. From formatting to content to presentation style to software options, we’ll look at how we direct the student’s attention to the material and keep them engaged.

SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor

In order to achieve a healthy, equitable society while maintaining earth’s basic systems, we as educators must cross disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC quite simply will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. We will discuss readings, create and share assignments, bounce ideas off of one another, bring in other sustainability scholars and professionals, and try various classroom tools. The discussions will range from the theoretical to the practical, from the basics of sustainability to examples of effective sustainability curriculum.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY IN THE CLASSROOM

Facilitated by Marianne Shockley

As more students, faculty, staff, and organizations use social media to promote their programs, products, and services, there is potential to use these technologies to synergistically complement existing courses and programs. This FLC will allow faculty to delve deeply into how such tools can be successfully utilized in a wide range of higher education contexts. Topics may include ideas for using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in the classroom for assignments, measuring impact, tracking students, outcomes assessments, and program promotion. Scholarship regarding how these tools have been successfully used for these purposes will be an integral part of this FLC. Additional topics of interest and relevance to the group will also be discussed.

CAREER TRACK FACULTY

Facilitated by Melissa Kozak

This FLC will offer Career Track Faculty (such as lecturers, academic professionals, public service representatives, research professionals, clinical faculty, etc.) a community to discuss issues unique to our roles across the university. Topics of discussion might include: appointment and promotion guidelines, balancing multiple departmental roles, actively engaging students and other teaching issues, as well as topics of interest to the community. We will learn from each other to improve our teaching and service to the university.

REFLECTIVE WRITING

Facilitated by Elizabeth Davis and David Noah

Reflection is increasingly being valued as an integral part of thinking and learning. The “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” describes meta-cognition as “the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge”. It is one of the eight key habits of mind essential for successful college level writing (Council of Writing Program Administrators). The concepts of reflective writing practice and experiential learning have been adopted by professionals in a wide variety of fields (education, health, public administration, etc.) as part of the on-going process of understanding and improving the way knowledge is mobilized and put to use. Reflection can help us instill habits necessary for self-directed and lifelong learning in our students. As part of our own professional practice, reflection can also help us analyze our teaching, research, professional, and/or clinical practices in order to become better practitioners ourselves. This FLC will explore how written reflection might be integrated into our classrooms and assignments in ways that are connected to course goals and objectives. We will discuss different methods for prompting reflection and explore how it can help students articulate what they know and what they need to learn. We will also apply reflective practice to our own courses in order to identify areas for change and improvement.

RESEARCH MENTORING STRATEGIES

Facilitated by Brian Cummings

This learning community focuses on faculty approaches for mentoring students in research. Discussions will center on how didactic training in the classroom can be re-enforced by research and how to design research experiences to help students become life-long learners? The group will place special emphasis on having faculty share their own mentoring approaches and styles. Our goal is to have core-group of 8-12 faculty made up of all ranks that deal with mentoring in several disciplines.

PRESENTATION VISUALIZATION

Facilitated by Mark E. Johnson

Sometimes it feels like teaching needs to be reduced to “Short Attention Span Theater” segments. How do we keep our students engaged? How do we prevent them from tuning out as we click to PowerPoint slide number 37, the 23 most important bullet points of this segment of the lecture? This FLC will explore the different methods of visual presentations used in classrooms and attempt to develop a set of best practices and examples to be shared across the campus. We’ll look at the most successful presentations each member has in their repertoire, critique them and help them build better ones. From formatting to content to presentation style to software options, we’ll look at how we direct the student’s attention to the material and keep them engaged.

GREEN LEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor and Paul Quick

Ecocriticism is the study of the confluence of nature, literature and culture, and the insights inspired by such study seem more important than ever. The best ecocritical conversations span academic disciplines in complex ways. This FLC quite simply will function as a forum for ecocritical thinking that we hope will attract the entomologists and the political scientist, the evolutionary biologist and the literary critic, for conversations that range from compost to Whitman’s “This Compost,” from sustainable agriculture to Wendell Berry’s “Home Economics,” from E. O. Wilson to Barbara Kingsolver, from Frankenstein to factory farming. The conversation will be a relaxed exchange prompted by short ecocritical writings, and the conversation will by design be free ranging.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, CONT.: EXPLORING TEACHING TOPICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Tom Reichert and Paul Quick

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in improving their teaching and student learning through discussion with other faculty. Using short readings from the rich well of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to prompt discussion, the Teaching FLC will provide a relaxed and informal forum for participants to explore their teaching practice and will encourage participants to consider and implement changes—large or small—in their teaching with the support and feedback of other participants. Topics could include course design, alternative pedagogies (e.g. team-based learning), innovative teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more.

LEARNING TO ASSESS LEARNING

Facilitated by Leslie Gordon

Learning outcomes assessment has received increased institutional and scholarly focus in recent years. Have you grappled with assessing student learning outcomes in your classes? Has your department or program struggled with the process? Join other faculty members to explore just what learning outcomes assessment is and how it can be done in order to benefit the teacher, the learner, and the program alike. In this FLC we will consider best practices and explore ways to link assessment practices at the course, program, department and institutional levels. Members will work through their own assessment goals and help others do the same over the course of several meetings.

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) IN FOOD, AGRICULTURAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Facilitated by Jean Bertrand and Maria Navarro

This FLC is designed for faculty interested in collaborative projects to improve teaching and learning in food, agricultural, and environmental sciences. Faculty from any college and discipline are welcome. Our FLC meetings will initially consist of discussions and guest speaker presentations about topics of common interest, to further enhance our practice of and knowledge about excellence in teaching *. After the FLC has established a foundation of knowledge, we will discuss how to best meet the needs of the group. One possibility would be to move toward the development of interdisciplinary curricula; exploration, development, and implementation of SoTL projects; or submission of collaborative grant proposals relevant to teaching and learning in agriculture and related sciences. Some topics of discussion might include: Recruiting millennial students into agriculture and related sciences; examples of outstanding SoTL projects in applied sciences; integrating hunger issues and agriculture across the higher education curriculum; integrating social sciences and humanities into the agricultural and environmental sciences curriculum; developing agriculture case studies; creative ways to evaluate student learning.

GLOBALIZING THE CURRICULUM: TRENDS, DRIVING FORCES, CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGES

Facilitated by Uttiyo Raychaudhuri

The latest statistic offered to us is that only 7% of Americans currently hold passports (the estimated figure is less than that for our elected officials in Congress). A common response to this is that “Americans don’t travel outside the United States – we don’t need to – we have Disney World and Hollywood right here.” With all due respect to Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe, Americans do not need to travel outside of the U.S. to encounter the world. In fact, the world UGA students will encounter in their own backyard is changing – immigration and the development of technology has brought diversity of culture and history to even the most rural of towns in Georgia. Within 50 miles of Athens there are three Islamic Centers. There are over 30 international student clubs, fraternities, sororities, and associations on campus. The numbers of international students and faculty at UGA are also on the rise, increasing the chances of cultural exchange throughout the university, Athens and surrounding communities. Are UGA students prepared to interact and thrive in this new community of diversity?

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS

Facilitated by Denise Domizi

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is the “systematic study of teaching and/or learning and the public sharing and review of such work through presentations, publications, or performances” (McKinney, 2004). This learning community is for graduate students who are interested in designing and implementing a SoTL project. While this FLC is specifically targeted toward graduate students who are pursuing the Interdisciplinary Certificate in University Teaching (who are required to have such a project), other interested graduate students are also invited to join. Graduate students with all levels of experience and at all stages of their projects (from vague ideas to data analysis to writing it up) are welcome.

MAKING THE ACADEMIC MORE THAN ACADEMIC: EXPLORING OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT CLASSROOM LEARNING WITH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Facilitated by Jill Severn and Jan Levinson

Here at the University of Georgia, civic engagement has long been at the core of its educational and outreach mission as a land grant institution. This FLC will explore some new approaches such as National Issues Forums Institute’s deliberative dialogues, Everyday Democracy’s Study Circles, and The World Café model as creative tools for transforming academic learning into lifelong knowledge and engagement with the broader world. The FLC will also evaluate the challenges and implications of this meshing of academic learning with civic engagement for students and for instructors.

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE IN THE HEALTH PROFESSIONS

Facilitated by Ron Cervero and Mark Ebell

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has emerged over the past decade as a critical movement in healthcare education and practice. EBP helps clinicians, patients, and others identify and integrate the best available evidence into health care decisions. This paradigm is central to emerging work in comparative effectiveness research, development of practice guidelines, and quality improvement initiatives. We hope to explore evidence-based practice from the perspective of the learner, teacher, and researcher. It is not limited to those in the health professions, and we hope to encourage dialogue about EBP among scholars in all disciplines.

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Facilitated by David Noah

Emerging technologies are changing our culture, not least in education. Some of these changes, broadly conceived, challenge the stability of institutions of higher education. Podcasting, for instance, might erode the standard classroom experience by offering alternative ways to disseminate information. The democratization of information sources—Wikipedia, bloggers, comment streams—challenges the authority of centralized learning. What could universities look like in 20 or 50 years? What should we be paying attention to today? Is the university on the verge of becoming an educational dinosaur? How do institutions change? In this FLC we will discuss these challenges and consider ways to introduce ideas about institutional change into our own campus discussion.

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) FLC

Facilitated by Denise Domizi and Sherry Clouser

GREEN LEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor and Paul Quick

GLOBALIZING THE CURRICULUM: TRENDS, DRIVING FORCES, CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGES

Facilitated by Uttiyo Raychaudhuri

EDUCATIONAL GAMES

Facilitated by David Noah

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK: EXPLORING TEACHING TOPICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Tom Reichert and Paul Quick

Designed for faculty interested in exploring what other people are doing in their classes to improve teaching and student learning as well as motivation, this FLC will explore topics determined by the group and discussed at meetings with the goal of implementing small or large changes in course design, teaching technique, use of classroom time, teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more. Dr. Reichert is an Advertising professor in the Grady College whose teaching specialties include an array of advertising courses, as well as media sales and political campaign strategy. Dr. Paul Quick is the coordinator of faculty and TA programs at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

FLC FOR NEW DEPARTMENT HEADS

Facilitated by Nelson Hilton

YOUR FIRST FIRST-YEAR ODYSSEY

Facilitated by Leslie Gordon

Are you currently teaching a First-Year Odyssey seminar or planning to teach a seminar in spring 2012? If so, please join us! We will examine a range of topics, from the goals of the FYO seminars to helpful teaching techniques to assessment of student learning objectives. Participants may suggest other areas we might want to explore throughout the year. Our goal is to seize the opportunity to make this unique new experience beneficial for students and faculty alike, and to share our progress with faculty who follow us in the coming years.

BUILDING AND SUSTAINING A QUALITATIVE RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Facilitated by Jerry Gale and Aliki Nicolaides

MAKING THE ACADEMIC MORE THAN ACADEMIC: EXPLORING OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT CLASSROOM LEARNING WITH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Facilitated by Jill Severn and Jan Levinson

Here at the University of Georgia, civic engagement has long been at the core of its educational and outreach mission as a land grant institution. This FLC will explore some new approaches such as National Issues Forums Institute’s deliberative dialogues, Everyday Democracy’s Study Circles, and The World Café model as creative tools for transforming academic learning into lifelong knowledge and engagement with the broader world. The FLC will also evaluate the challenges and implications of this meshing of academic learning with civic engagement for
students and for instructors.

THE STORIES WE COULD TELL: NEGOTIATING SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS ISSUES IN THE ACADEMY

Facilitated by Bob Fecho

THE TEACHING, DOING, AND MENTORING OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH FACULTY LEARNING GROUP 2010-2011

Facilitated by Melissa Freeman and Jerry Gale

STORYTELLING

Facilitated by David Noah

FLC FOR INTERNATIONAL FACULTY

Facilitated by Karen Braxley and Paul Quick

SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) FLC

Facilitated by Denise Domizi and Sherry Clouser

GREEN LEAVES: ECOCRIT CONVERSATIONS

Facilitated by Ron Balthazor and Paul Quick

GLOBALIZING THE CURRICULUM: TRENDS, DRIVING FORCES, CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGES

Facilitated by Uttiyo Raychaudhuri

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Facilitated by Chris Franklin and Mark Huber

MIS As a result of the Spring 2010 Academic Affairs Faculty Symposium at Unicoi State Park, the group tasked with considering the topic of work-life balance in the “New Normal” (doing more with less) recommended that the weekend conversation continue through a Faculty Learning Community. Topics for discussions in this FLC may include setting expectations, improving communication, managing technology, and how the University administration can facilitate balance. Proceedings from the Faculty Symposium will be available on the Teaching Academy Web site.

TEACHING AND LEARNING ONLINE

Facilitated by Sherry Clouser

As online courses become more popular, it is possible that many of us will be asked to teach online in the near future. Are we prepared? This FLC will explore best practices for designing and teaching online courses, including synchronous and asynchronous methods. Experienced online teachers as well as beginners are welcome to join.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK: EXPLORING TEACHING TOPICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by Tom Reichert and Paul Quick

Designed for faculty interested in exploring what other people are doing in their classes to improve teaching and student learning as well as motivation, this FLC will explore topics determined by the group and discussed at meetings with the goal of implementing small or large changes in course design, teaching technique, use of classroom time, teaching and learning activities, active learning, improving assignments and more. Dr. Reichert is an Advertising professor in the Grady College whose teaching specialties include an array of advertising courses, as well as media sales and political campaign strategy. Dr. Paul Quick is the coordinator of faculty and TA programs at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

TEACHING WITHIN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Facilitated by Christen Bradley, Melinda Camus, Nicole Hurt, Lincoln Larson, Matthew Lovelace,
Greg Moss, Luanna Prevost, Nancy Riley, and Denise Domizi.

Given the ubiquity of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, this group of graduate students assisted by CTL faculty member Denise Domizi explored how the type of online forum used affects student participation in online discussion. Our study compares the use of two internet forums for supplemental discussion: a university-distributed learning management system (eLC) and Facebook. Use of a quasi-experimental, mixed-methods design allowed us to investigate how student engagement varies across two sections of the same class. Two introductory courses—Philosophy and Women’s Studies—have been included in the study, and student responses were tracked throughout the spring 2010 semester. Descriptive statistics from a pre-course questionnaire, as well as preliminary findings on student engagement in discussions are presented. Plans for further analyses—both quantitative and qualitative—are ongoing.

ACADEMIC UPCYCLING: IMPROVING STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP THROUGH ASSIGNMENT DESIGN

Facilitated by Caroline Barratt and Nadine Cohen

Today’s undergraduates think of themselves as savvy researchers who can find anything they need using Google or Wikipedia, whether they’re writing a paper or looking for a movie listing. Prying them away from the unmediated Internet and into the realm of serious academic research is one of the important challenges facing pedagogy today. This Faculty Learning Community will explore ways to infuse active-learning research activities into the classroom without necessarily requiring the traditional research paper.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND CRITICAL THINKING: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Facilitated by Denise P. Domizi and Cara Gormally

We often say that we want our students to be “critical thinkers,” but how can we use collaborative learning methods in the classroom to promote critical thinking? This FLC will explore the theory and practice of in-class collaborative learning methods as an approach to promote higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills.

(RE)CREATING COURSES FOR SIGNIFICANT LEARNING

Facilitated by Paul Quick

Consider this FLC the course-design equivalent of “This Old House,” “Extreme Makeover,” or “Field of Dreams.” But if you build it, will they learn? Starting out with the premise that most pedagogical problems and challenges can be addressed through careful course design, this FLC will begin with some reading, discussion, and reflection about what we want our students to know and be able to do after they take our respective classes.

REACTING TO THE PAST

Facilitated by Keith Dix

“Reacting to the Past” is an innovative pedagogy using historical games, which engage students in active learning as they lead each other in explorations of great texts in the history of ideas. The games are appropriate not only for courses in history and Western civilization, but also in anthropology, communications, education, English, history of science, philosophy, political science, religion, and women’s studies. Participants in this FLC will experience Reacting by playing one of the current games. They will explore the use of Reacting pedagogy in a wide variety of courses and classroom settings and the process of creating their own games.

THE SHIFT TO THE VISUAL

Facilitated by David Noah

One hundred and eighty-three years ago there was one photograph in the world.

GLOBALIZING THE CURRICULUM: TRENDS, DRIVING FORCES, CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGES

Facilitated by Uttiyo Raychaudhuri

The numbers of international students and faculty at UGA are also on the rise, increasing the chances of cultural exchange throughout the university, Athens and surrounding communities. Are UGA students prepared to interact and thrive in this new community of diversity? The goal of this FLC is to offer an opportunity for faculty to share their best practices, techniques and resources about how they make their curricula “global” in terms of preparing UGA students for the world within and beyond U.S. borders.

INTERDISCIPLINARY QUALITATIVE RESEARCH WORKGROUP

Facilitated by Corey W. Johnson and Melissa Freeman

Do you love exploring and trying to make sense of the different epistemological and theoretical approaches to interviewing and observing and collecting and analyzing documents and other artifacts? Qualitative research methods, design, and conceptual frameworks draw from all of the academic areas that study human behavior and experience.

GLOBALIZING THE CURRICULUM: TRENDS, DRIVING FORCES, CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGES

Facilitated by Deborah Gonzalez

The numbers of international students and faculty at UGA are also on the rise, increasing the chances of cultural exchange throughout the university, Athens and surrounding communities. Are UGA students prepared to interact and thrive in this new community of diversity? The goal of this FLC is to offer an opportunity for faculty to share their best practices, techniques and resources about how they make their curricula “global” in terms of preparing UGA students for the world within and beyond U.S. borders.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Facilitated by David Noah

“The world is made of stories, not atoms.” The digital revolution is creating new ways to tell stories through the use of graphics, sound, music, animation, and interactivity. This FLC will explore the uses of digital storytelling in the classroom.

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Facilitated by David Noah

The digital revolution is not over. Blogs, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, iTunesU—these new technologies and their uses are changing our culture and changing how we think about teaching and learning. The web, which has become so essential that we can scarcely imagine professional life without it, is changing from a place to get content to a platform for creating it.

TAPPING INTO OUR INTERDISCIPLINARY QUALITATIVE RESEARCH TRADITIONS

Facilitated by Judith Preissle

Learning about the world by listening, watching, asking questions, and collecting things seems simple and easy. Most of us who use and teach these qualitative research methods find them anything but ordinary. Join a group of us who want to share how these extraordinary approaches vary from field to field.

INTEGRATED COURSE DESIGN

Facilitated by Paul Quick

You can consider this FLC the course-design equivalent of “This Old House,” “Extreme Makeover,” or “Field of Dreams.” If you build it right, will they learn more?

FACILITATING CRITICAL THINKING IN LARGE LECTURE CLASSES

Facilitated by Kathrin Stanger-Hall

Many of our students enter the University with excellent memorization skills, but struggle with critical thinking and problem solving. Let’s get our students’ minds working in the lecture hall and aid them in making the transition to critical thinking.

CREATING A CULTURE OF SUSTAINABLE WATER USE

Facilitated by Courtney Tobin and Leigh Askew

This Faculty Learning Community will discuss topics such as: the creation of a culture of students and faculty who think critically and holistically about long-term sustainable water use; the implications of changes in water resource management to various economic sectors of Georgia and beyond; and UGA’s potential role and responsibilities in response to the current water situation.

ACADEMIC UPCYCLING: IMPROVING STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP THROUGH
ASSIGNMENT DESIGN

Facilitated by Caroline Barratt, Nadine Cohen, and Deb Raftus

Today’s undergraduates think of themselves as savvy researchers who can find anything they need using Google or Wikipedia, whether they’re writing a paper or looking for a movie listing. Prying them away from the unmediated Internet and into the realm of serious academic research is one of the important challenges facing pedagogy today. This Faculty Learning Community will explore ways to infuse active-learning research activities into the classroom without necessarily requiring the traditional research paper.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING: CLASS ENVIRONMENTS THAT VALUE COOPERATION OVER COMPETITION

Facilitated by Mark Huber and Rob Shewfelt

UGA undergraduate culture is based on individual performance and competition, but much of life beyond the classroom requires an ability to collaborate. Although Teams are used in many courses, many students get “teamed” out and fail to appreciate the value of working in teams. Constructive or simulated learning environments attempt to create “Real Life” situations that motivate students to go beyond memorization and recitation to application, but assessment of learning is problematical. To this end Mark Huber (Management Information Systems) and Rob Shewfelt (Food Science) have teamed up to organize an interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Community to develop techniques that more effectively use collaborative exercises in courses, apply these techniques in classroom settings of the members of the Learning Community, and assess the effectiveness of these applications in improving student learning.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Facilitated by David Noah

“The world is made of stories, not atoms.”
The digital revolution is creating new ways to tell stories through the use of graphics, sound, music, animation, and interactivity. This FLC will explore the uses of digital storytelling in the classroom.

FEMINIST AND ANTI-RACIST TEACHING AS PRAXIS

Facilitated by Chris Cuomo

This faculty learning community will provide a place to explore the meaning and significance of feminist and anti-racist pedagogies, the relationships between them, and the real possibilities for integration of such teaching and learning methods into courses at UGA. A guiding theme will be the connections between work in the classroom and work in wider communities.

INTEGRATING QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS INTO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND TEACHING

Facilitated by Linda Gilbert

Are you a qualitative researcher? Are you aware of qualitative data analysis software programs – NVivo. Nud*Ist, Atlas-ti, etc. – but haven’t had time to “really get into them”? Are you concerned about supervising graduate students who are learning software on their own? Would you like to find ways to introduce these kinds of software programs into your classes?

SERVICE-LEARNING: SUPPORTING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND FACULTY RESEARCH

Facilitated by Gayle Andrews and Kathy Thompson

Over the past few years, the university has strengthened its commitment to its mission as a land grant institution by providing support for the integration of service-learning into university curricula (e.g., establishing the Office of Service-Learning, providing professional development for faculty, and funding service-learning grants). As a result, more UGA faculty are providing students with opportunities to address community needs, issues, and problems through the application of academic knowledge and skills they gain in their coursework. Yet, even as faculty experience the successful integration of service-learning into their teaching, they may also experience the challenges associated with researching service-learning endeavors. This Faculty Learning Community will explore opportunities for conducting research related to service-learning at UGA. Our work will take place in a collaborative setting that supports shared leadership, focused and productive conversations, and collegial relationships.

VISUAL THINKING: NEW STRATEGIES FOR USING VISUAL MATERIAL IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Facilitated by Emy Decker

Teaching with visual materials has become a very different and much improved endeavor over the past decade. This is attributed to the exponential growth of the Web and the development of common imaging technologies. The “digital age” invites us to improve our methods of teaching by incorporating such modes of visual thinking into disciplines not traditionally thought of as being image based.