Centering Centers

Dr. Liza Bolitzer is an experienced researcher, teacher and project manager dedicated to advancing teaching and learning in higher education. She uses qualitative methods to study how college faculty, institutional leaders, and higher education professionals can advance college students' academic learning. She has shared her work in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, the Review of Higher Education, the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice and The Journal of Faculty Development.

As an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Kean University, she teaches graduate level courses on qualitative methods and educational leadership and collaborates with her faculty colleagues on advancing support for doctoral students.

Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. Dr. Kezar holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in higher education administration from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at USC in 2003 after serving at the University of Maryland and George Washington University as a faculty member.

Dr. Kezar is a national expert of change and leadership in higher education and her research agenda explores the change process in higher education institutions and the role of leadership in creating change. Adrianna’s change and leadership research has been used by government agencies, accreditation bodies, foundations, state systems, consortium, and individual campuses to forward change agendas and initiatives and me leadership research has been used to design leadership development among national associations, consortium of colleges, and campus-based leadership programs. She also regularly consults for campuses and national organizations related to her work on diversity/equity/inclusion, non-tenure track faculty, STEM reform, collaboration, and governance. She is an international expert on the changing faculty and she directs the Pullias Center’s Delphi Project on the Changing faculty and Student Success.

She is regularly quoted in the media related to her research including: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, PBS, NPR (national and local stations), Al-Jazerra, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, among others. Kezar is a national expert on change, governance and leadership in higher education.

Dr. Kezar is well published with 25 books/monographs, more than 130 journal articles, and over 100 book chapters and reports. Recent books include: Shared Leadership in higher Education: Responding to a Changing Environment (2021) (Stylus Press); The Gig Academy (2019) (Johns Hopkins Press), and Administration for Social Justice and Equity (2019) (Routledge).

She has acquired over $22 million dollars in grant funding and has worked on grant-funded projects exceeding $35 million dollars on a variety of projects to fundamentally improve higher education.  She is currently principal Investigator for the PASS Project: A mixed methods study of a comprehensive college transition and success program for low income students funded by The Buffett Foundation.

She is an AERA fellow and has received national awards for her editorial leadership of the ASHE-ERIC report series from ASHE, for developing a leadership development program for women in higher education from ACE, and for her commitment to service learning from the National Society for Experiential Learning.

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Today’s episode features Jane Hammons (The Ohio State University), who talks about her recent To Improve the Academyarticle, “Academic librarians as educational developers: Overview, case study, and discussion.” An academic librarian who offers faculty-facing information literacy workshops, Hammons argues that educational developers may have untapped allies in instructional librarians. Her article offers an example of one such partnership and a robust discussion of how identity can impact how educational developers and librarians conceptualize these partnerships.

This is the third episode of the partnership between To Improve the Academy and Centering Centers. We hope to pull back the curtain on the journal for our listeners, especially about our authors' research and experiences publishing in our journal. We look forward to bringing you regular conversations with our authors, reviewers, editorial team, and board members.

Visit us at TIA: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/

And the article we discuss today at: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/4263/

Today’s episode was hosted by Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Liz is co-editor-in-chief of To Improve the Academy, along with Megan Robertson (Simon Fraser University) and four assistant editors: Ebony Aya (Macalester College), Anna Bostick Flaming (University of Iowa), Will Hennessy (Algonquin College), and Jessi Hill (Worcester Polytechnic Institute).

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For some, artificial intelligence represents the latest development in an age-old series of fantasies about escaping our vulnerable, imperfect, animal bodies. Humans have continuously developed tools to boost our capabilities; in the case of AI, we’re amplifying the speed of cognitive processes. But what capacities remain distinctively human?

Dr. Susan Hrach is the author of the 2022 Silver Nautilus Award-winning book Minding Bodies: how physical space, sensation, and movement affect learning (WVU Press, 2021). As an undergraduate, she spent a year studying at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria, which shaped her lifelong interests in world literature, translation studies, and global education. Her international teaching experiences inform her on-going research and practice. In 2022-23 she served as Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Currently Director of the Faculty Center and professor of English at Columbus State University in Georgia, Dr. Hrach has been recognized by the University System of Georgia with a statewide Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award; she has also served as a scholar for the USG’s Executive Leadership Institute. She is a member of the International Coaching Federation and provides executive coaching within and outside of higher education, incorporating embodied strategies to support mental and physical wellbeing.

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 Kelly Ferris Lester, Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, received her

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In the second of our new To Improve the Academy (TIA) partnership episodes on Centering Centers, Associate Editor, Liz Norrell (Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi), Marina Smitherman (Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Dalton State College in Northwest Georgia and Editor in Chief of TIA) and Megan Robertson (Educational Developer at Simon Friesen University in British Columbia, Canada, and Associate Editor with TIA), speak about

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Chris Hakala talks with Dr. Leslie Alvarez about her move from psychology to educational development. Dr. Alvarez recounts her work with marginalized students and its impact on her path to faculty development, highlighting the role of equity in teaching. She discusses building a faculty development program and her transition to a director role amid the pandemic. Dr. Alvarez's experience underscores the importance of teaching centers in promoting inclusive education and meeting academic challenges.

Transcript & AI Generated Episode Summary

Today’s episode features Jovan Groen (Western University), Carolyn Ives (Thompson Rivers University), and Veronica (Roni) Bamber (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh), who talk about their recent To Improve the Academy article, “Evidencing the value of educational development: Charting a course on the waves and winds of change,” which they wrote with coauthors Carolyn Hoessler (Thompson Rivers University), Corinne Laverty (Queen’s University), and Klodiana Kolomitro (Queen’s University). This international group traces its roots back to a Canadian group of educational developers. They wanted to keep working and writing together, and eventually invited in Roni Bamber from Scotland. Their piece provides a RUFDATA-inspired framework for evidencing the value of centers for teaching and learning.

This is the first episode of our new partnership between the journal and Centering Centers. We hope to pull back the curtain on the journal for our listeners, especially about our authors' research and experiences publishing in our journal. We look forward to bringing you monthly conversations with our authors, reviewers, editorial team, and board members.

Visit us at TIA: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/

And the article we discuss today at: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/1715/

Today’s episode was hosted by Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Liz is also an associate editor of To Improve the Academy, along with associate editor Megan Robertson (Simon Fraser University) and editor Marina Smitherman (Dalton State College).

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Chris Hakala and JT Torres talk about operating a center with very limited human resources. JT is a center of one, and in that role, he is working to build relationships, create educational development opportunities and support faculty and student teaching and learning. He does this by developing relationships. In the episode we discuss how JT is able to be so successful in an environment that is different than many in the higher ed world. 

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In this episode, Liz Norell shares her educational developer journey and discusses plans for the forthcoming partnership between Centering Centers, a POD Network podcast, and To Improve the Academy, its flagship peer-reviewed journal.

Dr. Liz Norell is Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Prior to joining UM, Liz spent more than two decades in higher education as an instructor and (for a brief time early in graduate school) working as a digital communicator in a university marketing office. She spent more than a decade working as an adjunct instructor at a variety of institutions in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and in middle Tennessee before spending seven years in a tenure-track role at a Tennessee community college. During that time, she developed a strong interest in pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is the author of the forthcoming book from the new OU Press series edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller, The Present Professor. In her role at UM, she'll be working with faculty to design, execute, and publish their own SoTL projects, as well as engaging with the breadth of teaching center activities (workshops, book clubs, consultations, etc.). She divides her time between Oxford, Miss. and Monteagle, Tenn. Her partner teaches math and computer science at the University of the South (Sewanee). They have two kids, two dogs, and a very calm existence. Liz reads voraciously and loves to travel.

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