This is the third program that the GLCA has created with funding from the Teagle Foundation. The first of these, the GLCA Pathways to Learning Collegium, provided support for faculty members through competitive proposals to design an alternative pedagogy to a course they had taught, incorporating principles from cognitive research and gauging the impact on student learning.
The second GLCA program responded to a Teagle Request for Proposals on the theme of “Faculty Work and Student Learning in the 21st Century.” Our program created a series of Campus Colloquies – in which two faculty members, each from a different college, visited a third GLCA college to convene discussions about teaching and the environment of support for effective teaching that faculty experienced among their colleagues at colleges like their own. While we learned many things from these visits, a recurrent theme was the desire for a more robust support for effective teaching. To a remarkable degree, faculty of our colleges expressed the wish for a campus center for teaching learning. Some colleges had them, others were seeking to create them.
This desire for a stronger, more extensive system of support for effective liberal arts teaching was the germ of this program – to create a GLCA-GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning, not to substitute for the resources that exist on individual campuses, but rather to supplement that local support with linkages to faculty and resources available across the colleges of our consortium.