September 2017
Hello!
This is the e-portfolio home of a large-scale faculty-centered professional development project. The project began in fall 2014. It will run through fall 2017. We intend through this project to launch sustainable work in the participating states and state systems. The work is sponsored by AAC&U, with support from Lumina Foundation.
There is a printable flyer below with more info. The project rubric is above.
If you are a participant in the project, you might want to jump over to Faculty Collaboratives News, indexed on the left--for project updates.
If you are new, please have a look at the video just below and then scroll down for more information and our Twitter feed. We also have a Storify from early in the project here: https://storify.com/Salbertine/faculty-collaboratives
Images in the video include segments from AAC&U's Centennial Video. With thanks to Melissa Gray, Gillian Carey, and 4Site Interactive Studios--and Kathy Wolfe for cameo appearance!
September 28, 2015
If you are just discovering this project, please be welcome and start here:
What is the Faculty Collaboratives project? Why is AAC&U leading it?
It's the biggest faculty development project I ever had a chance to join, much less lead.
It's all about collaboration--welcoming more and more colleagues into engaged teaching and learning for student success--more than we have been able to reach yet through AAC&U's LEAP initiative. (If you want to know what LEAP is, see the page index link to the left.) It's about sharing faculty resources focused on student learning and success.
It's a big, ambitious, and hopeful faculty leadership and learning project involving networks of faculty in a number of states, starting with California, Indiana, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. Next we start outreach in Kentucky, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oregon, and Virginia.
Here is how our friends in Texas describe the project:
Texas is one of five states participating in the first phase of the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) Faculty Collaboratives project. The Faculty Collaboratives project is intended to engage educators in adapting and applying educational practices that have been encouraged by AAC&U and other nationally recognized groups. These practices have been developed and vetted by faculty across the nation, but their practical application is dependent on the work of educators in their own settings. The Faculty Collaboratives project is designed to help educators leverage their work by building collaborative networks of users who can share ideas, assignments, and practices as they employ and customize them, as well as established state-wide conversations about assessment and the Texas Core Objectives and applying the related VALUE Rubrics.
Let me add a personal take on the project.
I've been thinking of it this way:
What if this were my last big project?
What if it were my capstone?
What would be different?
- It would be dedicated to faculty leadership and learning for student success—using high-impact work that AAC&U has been gathering with our members for years.
- It would define educators as broadly and inclusively as possible--full-time, part-time, instructors, tenure-track, grad student, student affairs.
- It would define student success in a learning-centered, equity-minded way—reaching all students, multicultural and diverse as they are.
- It would nurture collaboration and networking among states and consortia. It would support campuses in using tools and frameworks to align their work and help growing numbers of students to thrive.
- It would not need a new acronym.
- It would share good things we have already learned.
- It would invite innovation on a large scale.
- It would be sustainable, using digital tools and platforms to support high-impact student and faculty learning in a life-purposeful way.
Why? Because learning is our passion and the thriving of our beautiful students the best we can hope.
If you want to know more about this wonderful collaboration, please start here http://www.aacu.org/faculty
I am going to use this folio space to blog about the project and to reflect on what it is accomplishing.
Personally, I have a stake in it: I started teaching in 1971 at a free school in Ithaca NY. That’s me in the shopping cart. It was a proto-service learning project, cleaning Cascadilla Creek. That began a career in English language, literature, literacy, middle school to college to university, to academic leadership, and finally national work at AAC&U. I’ve devoted my life to mind-liberating and horizon-expanding education for all students--to liberal education.
I hope this project makes for playful and serious boundary crossing. I hope it is dedicated to heartfelt community engagement with the love of learning. If I had my dream, it would be a big community organizing project for educators who care about liberal education for all students--a learning community the lives up to the values of a pluralistic and highly diverse democracy, that cares about liberating minds, and that sees education as a great social good.
The Faculty Collaboratives Rubric
We developed a rubric for faculty teams to use. The rubric will help the team align their work with LEAP and DQP outcomes, and with LEAP States activities. The rubric is based on the Integrative Learning VALUE Rubric, which allows it to be a flexible and adaptable tool.