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. Each FLC is facilitated by an SAS faculty member or instructor who's passionate about the topic.
All T/TT, NTT, and PTL instructors teaching in SAS are eligible to participate in FLCs. All meetings in Fall 2021 will be held virtually.
FLC sign-ups are now closed. Check this space in Spring 2022 when we will be issuing a call for proposals for 2022–23 FLCs!
2021–2022 Faculty Learning Communities
Creating Opportunities for Under-Resourced and Post-Traditional Students
Any course at Rutgers is likely to include students from a wide variety of under-resourced and non-traditional backgrounds, including transfer students, students resuming their education after a gap or beginning their studies later in life, veterans, and students with children or other dependents.
This learning community will explore ways to identify and address the learning needs of these diverse student groups: What programs at Rutgers exist to meet their needs? How can we collaborate to create opportunities for students who follow a non-traditional path to higher education? And how can we undo the deficit model of student learning and recognize the value of a more diverse path to education?
As a participant, you will:
- Identify social and academic obstacles to graduation for under-resourced and non-traditional students.
- Connect with colleagues from other departments and programs to share resources and learn about best practices for mitigating barriers to learning.
- Learn about existing programs addressing the needs of particular populations
- Explore ways to institutionalize relationships between academic departments and campus opportunity programs to provide targeted and proactive support to help students graduate.
This community will be facilitated by Lynda Dexheimer, Executive Director of the Rutgers Writing Program, and Ana Pairet, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director of the French Department. Click here to apply!
Return to Campus and Building a Resilient Learning Community
In September many of us will return to campus for the first time in 18 months. We will have undergraduate students who have never set foot on campus—even though they may have been enrolled for more than a year. While we manage that transition, we will continue grappling with the uncertainty generated by the rise of the Delta variant.
As faculty, we will learn along with our students how to best teach and learn in person in this new environment. Simultaneously, some of our colleagues will continue to teach remotely. And we will all carry forward our experience from the last year and a half of re-thinking what, why, and how we teach.
Join this supportive community of fellow instructors to discuss questions like: How do we and our students adjust to this new normal? How can we best accommodate students that are not new to Rutgers but new to our campus? What can we draw from our experiences over the past year and a half? And how can we remain resilient through whatever COVID sends our way next?
This community will be facilitated by Lena Sandberg-Golden, instructor in the Rutgers Writing Program. Click here to apply!
Faculty Learning Community for Undergraduate Leaders
This cohort-based Learning Community is specifically designed for current SAS Undergraduate Directors and Vice Chairs. In this group, you will:
- Connect with a supportive group of peers navigating a complex academic year
- Share wisdom, experiences, and challenges
- Engage in timely discussions of topics of interest to Undergraduate Directors/Vice Chairs, including:
- Community-building and inclusion across ranks
- Best practices for peer review of teaching
- PTL Development and Support
Past Faculty Learning Communities
2020–21 Faculty Learning Communities
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 Faculty Learning Communities
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.