Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education

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Winter 2011

In This Issue:

Second Issue: Winter 2011

I. From The Advisory Board, in which Peter Felten, Assistant Provost, Associate Professor of History, and Director, Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, Elon University, and 2010-2011 President, POD (Professional and Organizational Development in Higher Education), discusses the challenges faculty members and student consultants face in taking up this collaborative work in reflections he calls “Monet Moments and the Necessity of Productive Disruption.”

II. Introduction, in which Alison Cook-Sather, Editor, and Coordinator of the The Andrew W. Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute, links tenets of Thiessen’s notion of a pedagogy of mutual engagement to the contributions to this issue and in which Guest Student Editor Sarah Brown describes her experience of working in the TLI.

III. A Semester In the Life, which traces a faculty member’s reflections over the course of a semester: Theresa Tensuan, Assistant Professor of English, includes the next installment (a total of four reflections) from her weekly blog entries about the joys and challenges of a semester in which she explored how to create a more culturally responsive classroom.

IV. Meditations on “A Taut but Happy” Class, in which Bret Mulligan, Assistant Professor of Classics, uses the metaphor of “a taut but happy ship” to analyze his work as a teacher and to frame a visual and text-based representation of the revisions he made to one of his courses in partnership with his student consultant.

V. Disrupting Traditional Student-Faculty Roles, 140 Characters at a Time, in which Margaret A. Powers, a 2010 graduate of Bryn Mawr College and former student consultant, and Howard M. Glasser, Postdoctoral Fellow in Science Education at Bryn Mawr College, describe how their use of Twitter radically altered their roles as “student” and “faculty member,” positioning them instead as commensurate learners and collaborators.

VI. Teaching and learning Insights, in which faculty members and student consultants describe two interrelated sets of understandings and practices derived through their work together: (1) gaining perspective and (2) engaging in more intentional communication.