Centering Centers

What is the role of a graduate student in a center for teaching and learning? Does it vary by institution or are there predictable patterns that we as educational developers can use to craft job descriptions, direct projects, and provide opportunities for growth through assessment and reflection?

This episode is hosted by Laura March and Yianna Vovides from CNDLS and features interviews with:

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Following the Covid-19 pandemic, faculty and students alike have experienced burnout, stress, and disengagement with professional activities. For educational developers, this can show up as dwindling numbers of participants in our programs and services. As developers we know our job is to make our programs relevant and impactful to our academic communities, but how do we re-engage them in ethical, sustainable, and meaningful ways? In this episode, Chris Adamson from Dakota State University and Tara Harvey an educational developer and founder of True North, an educational development company focused on supporting intercultural teaching and learning discuss the challenges, opportunities, and innovative approaches they are using to solve this challenge.

*This episode is another installment of our PODFest series which was recorded December 1, 2022.

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What is the journey to educational development like? What are the challenges and opportunities that come with starting out as a new faculty developer? This episode is another installment of our PODFest episodes featuring a conversation between April Tallant, Senior Educational Developer at Coulter Faculty Commons at Western Carolina University; and the POD Network's DRI Committee Co-Chair, Yianna Vovides, Senior Director, Learning Design & Research at Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS).

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How do we make SoTL accessible (and not scary) to new faculty?

This episode features a lively and engaging conversation between Maria Gallardo-Williams of North Carolina State University, Nancy Chick of Rollins College, and Erin Garcia of Auburn University on the topic of introducing faculty to SoTL. It was recorded as part of the PODFest event hosted by the DRI committee on December 1st, 2022.

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Professors are expected to have extensive expertise in their fields of study in order to qualify to teach at the post-secondary level, but can graduate coursework in quantum mechanics or X-ray crystallography prepare you to be a supportive advisor and an inclusive educator?

Ashley McNeill, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Springfield College in Springfield, MA, and Elizabeth McDonald, Instructional Designer at The University of Alabama, discuss faculty preparedness for teaching (or lack thereof) for new STEM educators. It’s important for new faculty, particularly in STEM, to be introduced to Centers and other resources intended to help them navigate their new roles as educators, mentors, and academic advisors. Traditional training in a STEM PhD program famously lacks opportunities to be exposed to this aspect of a professor’s work, particularly at large R1 institutions where many graduate students receive their training from professors whose responsibilities largely focus on grant writing and research. Ashley and Elizabeth review several approaches to learning more about student needs in the classroom, course design, and adapting assignments to classrooms of different sizes. Perhaps even more importantly, Ashley and Elizabeth spend some time talking about connecting with your students and teaching them to engage meaningfully in their STEM education.

A PODFest Collaboration

Host, Ashley S. McNeill, Springfield College

Elizabeth McDonald, University of Alabama

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Is it time that your teaching center started its own podcast? That’s the question that brought four POD Network colleagues together in a breakout session at PODFest 2022 to talk about teaching center podcasts. What goals might a teaching center podcast have? How would you know if you were meeting those goals? And how would your center go about planning and producing a podcast? This episode features a lively conversation between two teaching center podcast producers, Derek Bruff of the University of Mississippi and Tom Pantazes of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and two colleagues interested in starting new podcasts, Karen Skibba of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jasmine Parent of McGill University. They discuss podcasting as an educational development tool as well as practical strategies for starting and sustaining a teaching center podcast.

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

--Wallace Stevens, "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

In this season of Centering Centers, we are speaking with educational

 Today we are speaking with Robert Gray, an Associate Professor

Resources Mentioned:

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In this episode of Centering Centers, guest host Derek Bruff talks with Jessica Riddell, professor of early modern literature and the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada. Jessica is also the executive director of the Maple League of Universities, which is not, in fact, a group of Canadian super-heroes, but rather a consortium of four small universities that have banded together to support quality undergraduate education. Jessica shares her journey into the field of educational development, how collaboration across institutions can support the missions of those institutions, what she’s learning in her new position on the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and how she manages to get so much stuff done in her week.

https://www.jessicariddell.com/

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“I want my people to look like the experts they are, because I want them to be treated as colleagues, even though we are a service organization.”

In this episode of Centering Centers, guest host Derek Bruff talks with Shawn Miller, director of Learning Innovation at Duke University. Shawn’s unit combines faculty development, instructional technology, online program management, and more. Shawn shares how Duke Learning Innovation came to be and how the unit continues to integrate these different functions, and he provides strategic advice for centers for teaching and learning who are navigating the academic technology landscape.

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/

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In this episode of Centering Centers, we are concluding our trifecta of episodes on the AI disruption by sharing a specific example of how one center is responding to the challenge. Many of us have been benefitted from sharing examples of policies, statements, assignments, and ideas online through the AI for Educators Google group and pod listserv, in that spirit, I wanted to share out through this platform how my colleagues and I are working through these challenges.

My guests are my colleagues, Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center, and Shawndra Bowers, who is, like me, an Associate Director in the Biggio Center, but whose focuses on learning experience design and online course production.