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As LaGuardia joined the Integrated Learning Project, the LaGuardia Center for Teaching and Learning was not only leading the College's ePortfolio initiative and supporting the First Year Academies, it was also providing a range of faculty development programs supporting faculty innovation and enriched student learning. As the Center website suggests, the Center's faculty-led programs addressed a range of pedagogical issues such as inquiry learning with new technologies, writing in the disciplines, experiential education, and critical thinking. An emphasis on reflective practice, on the classroom as a site for faculty learning, was common across all Center programs. Collaboration with the Integrative Learning Project strengthened this unifying theme, helping to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning at LaGuardia. The Center's prior collaboration with the national Visible Knowledge Project had introduced a handful of LaGuardia faculty to the language of the scholarship of teaching and learning. The ILP built upon this momentum and spurred this work forward. As a result, the Center created two complementary vehicles designed to help LaGuardia faculty engage in this new form of scholarship: In Transit, The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning and theCarnegie Seminar on Inquiry and Scholarship. The Center also took major steps to spur a CUNY-wide conversation about integrative learning and new forms of scholarship generating new possibilities for the nation's largest system of urban public higher education. In May 2005, the Center for Teaching and Learning invited LaGuardia faculty to submit articles to a new campus-based journal, focused on the classroom and highlighting innovations such as learning communities, interdisciplinary connections, and effective pedagogies for the use of new digital technologies. The first issue of In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning was published in December 2005, featuring articles by more than 20 faculty. A second issue was published in June 2006. (Both issues are available on line, at the In Transit website.) And two dozen faculty are already at work on articles for the third issue, focused on the theme of "Crossing Borders." The first issue of In Transit, ably edited by Prof. Gail Green-Anderson, Bill Seto, and Dr. Michele Piso, was launched with seed money from the Visible Knowledge Project. The College's embrace of the scholarship of teaching and learning led it committ funding for continuation of the journal. In his "Introduction" to the second issue of In Transit, LaGuardia's Provost, Dr. Peter Katopes, wrote: At LaGuardia we teach and learn for the public good. We are committed to the belief that the transformative and regenerative power of reasoned learning, critical analysis, and human connection will inevitably result in an evolutionary ideal of compassion, justice, and understanding. Therefore we boldly proclaim our roles as public intellectuals, proudly making the fruits of our research and teaching accessible to an audience that extends beyond the the sometimes limited boundaries of our disciplines and professional societies. This journal will speak to those who have enthusiastically embraced the new discipline of teaching and learning, a discipline that is inclusive and expansive, democratic and alive with possibility and promise. While launching In Transit, the Center also piloted the Carnegie Seminar on Inquiry and Scholarship, a year- long professional development seminar on the scholarhip of teaching and learining. Conceived as an interdisciplinary forum for faculty to think about concrete classroom practices in relation to wider institutional values, the seminar began in its first year serving a cohort of 16 faculty all of whom were in their second or third year at LaGuardia. Over the course of the year, these faculty, who came from 7 different departments, examined individual teaching pedagogies, designed and shared syllabi and specific assignments, visited each other's classes and reflected on assessment of "artifacts" of student learning. Drawing from seminar projects and teaching practices, each faculty member developed a course portfolio for purposes of documentation, reflection, and research. Interdisciplinary cohorts of faculty presented and reviewed portfolio contents, sharing goals and envisioning cross-disciplinary workshops in best practices, integrative studies, and assessment efforts. Sample faculty course portfolios, can be accessed here. As a community of thinker/practitioners, participating faculty addressed the underlying educational assumptions and perspectives of the college's array of signature programs and pedagogies, including ePortfolio and learning communities. Faculty formed relations within and across departments, strengthening the context for sustained conversation about pedagogy, outcomes, and institutional change. Inquiries in the scholarship of teaching and learning, initiated in the seminar, were further refined for possible publication in In Transit. Four articles in the second issue of In Transit were prepared by Carnegie faculty, and six more Carnegie faculty are part of the cohort developing articles for the upcoming Crossing Borders issue. Meanwhile, a new cohort of faculty -- a heterogeneous mixtue of junior and more senior faculty -- have applied to and been accepted into next year's Carnegie seminar. More broadly, faculty leaders for all the Center's seminars are exploring the idea of using course portfolios to deepen faculty reflection and faculty learning. The Carnegie Seminar and In Transit together signify LaGuardia's commitment to exploring the intersections of teaching, learning and scholarship as a way of addressing the many changes shaping classroom dynamics across the college. Coming from across the world and crossing borders national, personal and intellectual, our students and faculty offer diverse and sometimes competing perspectives that challenge and expand the frontiers of disciplinary and cultural knowledge. The scholarship of teaching and learning at LaGuardia creates a living public record of the educational complexities and transformations taking place across our campus. Articulating and carefully studying key questions about teaching and learning in our changing classrooms will not only help us advance our individual and collective practice, but will also connect LaGuardia to some of the most exciting work taking place in higher education nationwide. In Transit and the Carnegie Seminar are important vehicles for strengthening this connection. As a part of it's ILP work, LaGuardia was also able to introduce the concept of integrative learning and the practice of the scholarship of teaching to a significant audience of faculty and upper level administrators across the City University of New York. Unfolding over time, this process has opened exciting possibilities for on-going collaboration: In January 2005, the Center lauched a six-month seminar on integrative learning for 20 faculty development leaders from across CUNY. Using articles by Huber, Hutchings, and Schulman, as well as the Integrative Learning snapshots, the seminar examined the concept of integrative learning and its relevance to the nitty-gritty realities of urban public higher education. In May 2005, the Center and the CUNY Task Force on General Education co-sponsored the highly successful conference, Making Connections: A CUNY General Education Conference on Integrative Learning, drawing hundreds of faculty and educational leaders from across the university. Lee Knefelkamp keynoted the conference, which was widely hailed as one of CUNY's most successful and meaningful conferences in many years. (Click here to visit the conference website, including the detailed program.)In follow-up discussions with CUNY Central administrators during the summer and fall of 2005, the LaGuardia ILP team suggested a CUNY-wide effort around the scholarship of teaching and learning. This spring, CUNY submitted a successful proposal for such a program to the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. If properly supported and carefully led, this project has significant potential for advancing the discussion and the practice of integrative learning for hundreds of faculty and tens of thousands of students university-wide.
Center for Teaching and Learning
In Transit
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