What is a Teaching Center (at a College or University) For?

 

At the risk of copyright infringement, I am reposting this newsletter article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

I have been to UT-Austin and enjoyed its scholarship on teaching and learning. This news is baffling, although I've heard of such from other large institutions. 

If you are a college or university instructor, please respond to Dr. McMurtrie.  I worked in this field for many years--not at the level Josh Eyler, etc, do, but in my own little way--and this is not good news for higher education. 

I used to keep up a blog called Higher Education Observer (link https://highereducationobserver.blogspot.com/:  ) and posted many articles on this subject. 

What is a teaching center for?

Last week I reported on the impending closure of the University of Texas at Austin’s teaching center. The news, announced in an email by the provost, was short on details, but described the decision as part of an effort to “optimize” and “streamline” academic operations.

The Center for Teaching and Learning lists 13 staff members, along with 11 student workers, on its website. It’s unclear how many people will lose their jobs, and whether any of the center’s functions will move into the university’s colleges and schools. But faculty members I spoke to said they were stunned.

One professor called her experience as a provost’s teaching fellow, a program run through the center, “the single most transformative experience” of a nearly 30-year career. Another talked about the center as the place that brought together faculty members across a range of disciplines to discuss common teaching challenges. Everyone I spoke to was confused by the administration’s move to shutter a place that many on campus value deeply.

“At their best, teaching centers provide a place to advocate for faculty and to help them make it through the storm of constant changes.”

That made me wonder about the role that teaching centers have played in your professional lives. If you work on a campus with a center dedicated to teaching, how have you used it? What kinds of programming or support have you found most or least valuable? What do you want college leaders to understand about the purpose of a teaching center?

For my story, I spoke to Josh Eyler, senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. To close a distinguished center with a long history and a wide array of programming made no sense to him, particularly given how fraught teaching has become.

“At their best,” he said, “teaching centers provide a place to advocate for faculty and to help them make it through the storm of constant changes and new technologies and new fads and new approaches that are coming down the pike.”

I wonder, too: Does the closure of UT Austin’s teaching center indicate anything more broadly about where higher education is headed? In his brief statement, UT Austin’s provost did not suggest that this was a cost-cutting move. But other colleges have scaled back on student-facing services for financial reasons. If you have seen teaching support on your campus reduced, please let me know. And if you have seen investments in teaching support increase, I’d also like to know about it.

As Eyler said, given how many challenges faculty members face in the classroom — including, perhaps most pressingly, the omnipresence of generative AI — colleges need a place where they can go to share strategies and ideas. If it’s not the teaching center, where can they turn?

Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com