by:
  Kris Bulcroft,
  Carmen Werder, and
  Glenn Gilliam

  The Teaching and Learning Academy

Faculty reported on closing surveys that they most appreciated the chance to talk with students and colleagues, especially outside their own departments. One faculty captured this sentiment in saying:

The Carnegie Program has provided the best professional development experience I have had in the fifteen years that I've been at Western…. The resulting dialogue was informing and inspiring. And the chance to interact with students as part of these conversations was important in "reminding" us about what matters to real students.

After working separately to draft individual case studies of their Carnegie programs, the Elon and WWU teams met together to discuss possible future directions and to formulate tentative principles for integrating the student voice into the scholarship of teaching and learning. In that discussion, they noted how their two projects represented complementary strategies for engaging the student voice.

While the Elon initiative centered on the course as its unit of study, the Western initiative focused on the campus-wide Conversations program (Sullivan and Werder, 2000). An emergent principle, then, was the belief that combining both the course and the institutional approaches would best serve any effort to integrate student perspectives into the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Based on this dialogue, Western's team composed a recommendation to implement a new course for students to reflect on their own learning at the same time that they participated as members of the Carnegie Conversations core group, which had by now transformed into a new entity called the Teaching and Learning Academy (TLA).

After returning from the Summer Academy and receiving the Provost's endorsement, the Snowbird team, along with the Special Assistant to the Provost, drafted a curriculum for this new 2-credit course which they titled "Organizing for Learning." They built the course on Peter Ewell's (1997) premise that "to get systemic improvement, we must make use of what is already known about learning itself, about promoting learning, and about institutional change" (3).

Co-facilitated by the Summer Academy team of students and faculty, the course was designed to focus on the teaching and learning dynamics, particularly on analyzing the relationship between effective teaching and successful learning. Students would explore the forces that influence the effectiveness of this teaching-learning nexus at the course and institutional levels, reflect on their own learning, and participate in a university-wide learning enhancement program as part of Western's new Teaching and Learning Academy (TLA).

• Introduction
• Campus Conversation at Western Washington University (Parts I & II)
• Where are the Students?
• Leadership Inside Out
• The AAHE Summer Academy
• A Web of Connections
• The Teaching and Learning Academy
• A New Course on Learning
• Diffuse Leadership
• A Public Rally for Learning
• Lessons Learned from the Students
• References
• print version