The College highlights faculty’s scholarly achievements and provides support for faculty who publish their work. The CTL offers two extensive related seminars, and the opportunity to publish a work in progress in In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning . Both the Carnegie Seminar on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop (FSPW), which supports faculty’s disciplinary-focused research, provide faculty with support structures for at least a full academic year or more. The CTL also connects faculty with related LaGuardia supports, such as the Literacy Brokers, an 8-week session open to anyone working on a piece of writing, and Library workshops on topics like predatory publishing, hands-on practice with new databases, and techniques for researching potential publishers.
Over the years, the CTL has compiled example of faculty’s work with students across a range of activities, such as the DFL Sampler, the Project Quantum Leap Sampler and the ePortfolio Sampler. Each Sampler featured work by LaGuardia faculty and provides useful, engaging activities that others may use or adapt.
IN TRANSIT: THE LAGUARDIA JOURNAL ON TEACHING AND LEARNING, PREPRINTS AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS
Since 2005, In Transit: LaGuardia’s Journal on Teaching and Learning has invited LaGuardia faculty to submit scholarly inquiries into faculty teaching, defined by Pat Hutchings as “the conditions under which [learning] occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it...with an eye not only to improving their own classrooms, but to advancing practice beyond it." Proposals span a variety of methodical approaches, including case studies, empirical research, literature reviews, and reflective essays, address the college’s mission and problem-solving and global initiatives, and define disciplinary-based learning objectives. In Transit publications should demonstrate credible knowledge of the background and purposes of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), as well as faculty awareness of the practical implications of their disciplinary research for the diverse communities and identities of LaGuardia students, faculty, and staff. In Transit themes are summarized below:
- Volume 1, numbers 1—2, Fall 2005 and Spring 2006: Inaugural volume
LaGuardia faculty from across the curriculum offer multi-faceted reflections on the everyday reality of classroom teaching and learning, creating a key first step in the development of SoTL and public scholarship in the two-year college. - Volume 2, Fall 2007: Border Pedagogy
Authors transcend the concepts of demographic or geographic borders to trace the effects of changes in teaching and learning that occur when the limits of preconceptions, misconceptions, and biases are dissolved. - Volume 3, Fall 2008: Work, Class, and Identity in the Classroom
Recognizing the historical and material conditions of the lives of LaGuardia students, authors design and critique pedagogical choices directed toward framing the purposes, demands, and effects of various forms of work---academic, aesthetic, and professional---and the ways these experiences shape identity. - Volume 4, Fall 2009: Reflecting to Learn
Writers inquire into the classroom strategies that help students develop the systematic habits of reflection, and offer their own experiences with creating classrooms designed to strengthen connections between lived experiences and disciplinary ways of thinking. - Volume 5, Spring 2011: Greening the Campus Community
Thirteen authors suggest a “reorientation of the human community,“ each reflecting a unique disciplinary ecological perspective, passion, and desire to “green” the curricula of LaGuardia’s credit and non-credit programs. - Volume 6, Spring 2014: STEMing Inequities
Guided by SoTL values and methodology, STEM faculty examine teaching and learning practices in their classrooms and laboratories with the purpose of sharing with the wider LaGuardia community the skills and forms of collaboration and experimentation necessary to thinking like a scientist, mathematician, or engineer, and argue for equitable opportunities in STEM preparation. - Volume 7, Fall 2016: The First Year Seminar as a Whole-College Approach to First-Year Success
As students enter their first year of college, many experience an intense, sometimes disorienting process of change. This volume presents research the ways First Year Seminar (FYS) faculty facilitate the new student’s transition to academic work and culture, and also describes a parallel quest, that of the FYS instructor who has left the familiar world of own academic disciplines to venture into a different kind of teaching. - Volume 8, Fall 2017: LaGuardia’s Prison-to-College Initiative
This issue of In Transit takes as its subject a special learner: the person who has been incarcerated. At LaGuardia, classroom practice is informed by the identities and experiences of our students—who they are now, in this city, at this time in our history—and it is from this position that the current issue of In Transit engages SoTL to contribute to increased whole-campus awareness of the consequences of mass incarceration on the daily lives of our students. - Volume 9, Spring 2019: LaGuardia’s Prison-to-College Initiative
Papers draw upon class assignments previously initiated by cross-disciplinary faculty in the Provost’s Learning Circle or CTL seminars, and further developed in the three-semester Carnegie Seminar (Fall 2017, Spring 2018, and Fall 2018). Designed for traditional classrooms, online courses, and learning environments that exist beyond the classroom, the current issue’s SoTL explorations range from peer activist learning and philosophical debate as civil discourse to critical reading, culturally relevant pedagogy, and the relations between race and linguistics. All investigations further LaGuardia’s understanding of the multiple ways learning is experienced and evaluated in the arts and sciences at a two-year urban college.
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING & LEARNING
In his groundbreaking monograph, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), Ernest Boyer argues for a broadening of the traditional view of acceptable forms of scholarship to include teaching as a valid category of intellectual work. The scholarship of teaching and learning encompasses both practice and mastery, which in turn generate questions for systematic inquiry and the creation of new knowledge offered for public sharing and review. Intended for critical review by a community of peers, faculty "frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning – the conditions under which they occur, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth – with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it.”
At the Center for Teaching and Learning, inquiry into effective classroom pedagogy is a practice common to all seminars as is the commitment to making investigations into teaching and learning public and open to critical review. More formal research projects are undertaken in the Carnegie Seminar on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, a year-long seminar in which faculty investigate significant issues in the teaching and learning of their fields and complete a scholarly paper for internal publication in In Transit: LaGuardia’s Journal on Teaching and Learning.
RESOURCES
- Carnegie Seminar on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – Michele Piso Manoukian. A year-long seminar in which faculty investigate significant issues in the teaching and learning of their fields and complete a scholarly paper for internal publication in a href="http://ctl.laguardia.edu/journal/" title="In Transit: LaGuardia’s Journal on Teaching and Learning" target="_blank">In Transit: LaGuardia’s Journal on Teaching and Learning. A second seminar expectation is that papers will be presented at conferences and revised for external, peer reviewed publication
- Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop – Nancy Berke. The Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop, a year-long seminar providing collegial support for faculty developing research for peer-reviewed publication
- Literacy Brokers Writing Circle (semester-long writing group) – Maria Jerskey. You want to publish. So do your colleagues. You have expertise. So do your colleagues. Why go it alone? Get the community you need by joining The Literacy Brokers' Writing Circle.