Faculty Learning Communities are groups of 6–12 faculty who meet about once a month throughout an academic year to explore a topic connected to teaching, learning, and pedagogical innovation.
2021–2022 Call for Proposals Opens Soon!
Do you have an idea for a topic you'd like to explore with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues? Propose it as a Faculty Learning Community topic!
If your proposal is selected, you will facilitate the FLC with the support of a member of the SAS Teaching and Learning team.
Facilitators:
- Are not teaching the FLC and do not need to be experts in the topic! The ideal facilitator is someone who’s curious and interested in learning more about the topic.
- Work with a SAS OUE Teaching & Learning team member to identify potential readings and topics
- Facilitate synchronous meetings
All TT, NTT, and PTL instructors teaching in SAS are eligible to serve as FLC facilitators.
A member of the SAS Teaching & Learning Team participates in each FLC and assists facilitators with planning, scheduling, and other administrative components of the FLC.
Participants:
- Connect with colleagues about teaching, within and across disciplinary boundaries
- Explore and adopt new, innovative approaches to teaching
- Help choose specific topics and readings within the overall theme
- Commit to meeting about once a month during the 2021–22 academic year
- Work toward an individual or group goal, to be completed by the end of the academic year
2020–21 Topics
- Teaching Difficult Topics
- Remote Teaching
- Fostering Inclusive Classrooms
- Teaching Scholars Learning Community for Early-Career Faculty (cohort-based: for faculty, including teaching faculty in their first 6 years of teaching)
- Learning Community for Undergraduate Leaders (cohort-based: for current Undergraduate Directors/Undergraduate Chairs)
Specific topics, readings, and goals are set by FLC members, aided by a peer facilitator.
In recognition of the current moment of reckoning with racial injustice in America, the Office of Undergraduate Education will encourage each community to spend some time discussing issues of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism as they relate to the FLC topic.
2019-2020 Topics
Students in Transition
Students arrive at Rutgers from myriad educational systems and learning experiences. Whether from a New Jersey high school, a community college, or a secondary school in another country, our students must complete a challenging transition into a new learning environment rich in differing terminologies, course structures, and academic goals.
If you're a faculty member who teaches, mentors, or advises students transitioning to Rutgers, this Faculty Learning Community will connect you to colleagues with similar experiences and goals to understand what others are already doing, to consider scholarly research on student transition, and to explore the best use of student support services and programs. We hope you will join so that we might work to share and align language, learning goals, and instructional approaches to simplify and support student transition to Rutgers.
The community will be facilitated by Dr. Gregg Transue, Director of Introductory Biology Programs in the Division of Life Sciences (including General Biology and the Gateway course Preparation for General Biology). Gregg oversees the instruction of more than 2,000 new students each semester. He is a seabird ecologist who has been involved with introductory biology students and courses at Rutgers since 1982.
Writing in the Disciplines
Writing remains a challenge, even for many of our best students. As students advance in a discipline, this challenge grows: in addition to the mechanics of writing and basic critical thinking skills, students must master discipline-specific conventions for writing and reasoning, integrate what they’re learning, and understand how to reach the academic or professional audience they’re writing for.
Facilitated by Professors Kristen Syrett and Crystal Akers of Linguistics, this Learning Community will bring together a diverse group of faculty to explore the variety of approaches taken at Rutgers to teaching disciplinary writing; identify research-based strategies for developing students’ disciplinary writing skills; and think about how and when to incorporate disciplinary writing into program curricula.