Building partnerships in education

Fall 2019

Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning opens

Teaching and learning happen everywhere at Wheaton—in classrooms, labs and residence halls; on athletic fields; and during student-run activities and Filene Center advising sessions.

The new Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CCTL), which officially opened in January 2019, aims to build on the college’s holistic approach to education, helping to grow a rigorous and culturally diverse learning environment to promote student success.

“It’s really important that we consider what’s happening both inside the classroom and outside of it, and that we develop a more holistic view of the teaching and learning taking place on our campus,” said Cary Gouldin, a co-director of the center and the humanities liaison in the library. “That will help us create an institution that can fully realize our goals to create a transformative learning experience.”

The CCTL is focused on fostering partnerships in teaching and learning among faculty, students and staff to achieve that goal, according to the leaders who have worked during the past year to bring the center into existence. The collaborators have big plans for the 2019–20 academic year:

During a webcast last November, President Dennis M. Hanno (above, left) talks with CCTL members—Professor of English Claire Buck, Dominick Torres ’20, Professor of Anthropology M. Gabriela Torres, Fatoumata Diallo ’19 and Cary Gouldin, humanities liaison.

This fall, the CCTL plans to offer two opportunities for faculty and staff to work with leading educators on inclusive pedagogy and racial justice: Floyd Cheung, vice president for equity and inclusion at Smith College (and father of a Wheaton student), on October 2, and Rhonda Magee, professor of law at the University of San Francisco and author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice, on October 23.

Read about the Faculty of Color Working Group Symposium that Wheaton hosted, featuring a presentation by Floyd Cheung.

In January 2020, the center plans to launch the CoLAB Institute to support faculty and staff in using scholarship on teaching and learning.

An Assignment Test Kitchen is also in the works; students will be trained to collaborate with faculty and staff to fuel innovation in assignment design.

“We want to foster a model of collaboration where students are brought into the educational process as partners from the start, not just in the classroom, but as partners in the design of the institution,” said Professor of Anthropology M. Gabriela Torres, who, along with Gouldin and Professor of English Claire Buck, is a co-director of the new center. “In prior years, students have been brought in as part of the consultation process after designs were completed.”

Fatoumata Diallo ’19, who also was on the steering committee before graduating, said that this approach gives students a real voice in their education. “We can actually be involved in making things happen,” she said. “We won’t be leaving it to our professor—or the provost or the president—to do it. And that will increase students’ engagement in their Wheaton education.”

Dominick Torres ’20, a film and new media studies major who has led the CCTL’s tool kit video project, agreed. “If students can take on some responsibility and ownership of teaching and learning, they are more inclined to be deeply engaged,” he said.

The center’s tool kit videos showcase experimentation in teaching and learning and feature students and faculty reflecting on their experiences, exemplifying the kind of collaboration the CCTL hopes to foster.

The senior, who serves on the center’s steering committee, also noted that “through collaboration, we can really stretch students into being more like a colleague. That’s really such a powerful thing—especially as we prepare to move from campus into work and careers.”

During the spring 2019 semester, the CCTL debuted the first of its videos, which featured Assistant Professor of History Shenglan Li and Assistant Professor of Biology Jessie Knowlton discussing how they implemented a small change in their pedagogy, drawing on James Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016). Two students, Artie Street ’21, a psychology major, and Dina Murphy ’21, a biology major, are also included, sharing their reactions to the changes.

Provost Renée T. White who called for the creation of the CCTL, speaks at a kickoff reception. (Keith Nordstrom photo)

For its inaugural event on February 6, the CCTL welcomed educator and author Peter Felten, professor of history and executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University, to talk about the book he co-authored, The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most, which identifies six core themes that matter most for student success. In addition to the public lecture, Felten met with the Student Government Association, the Curriculum Design Team and the Wheaton Inclusive STEM Excellence leadership group, among others.

On March 20, the center hosted Tia Brown McNair, vice president in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Student Success at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, for a public event as well as small-group meetings. To get ready for McNair’s visit, the CCTL partnered with the Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning to organize a book club reading of the book McNair co-wrote, Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success.

In May, Professor Torres also worked with Touba Ghadessi, associate provost for academic administration and faculty affairs, to incorporate a teaching and learning component of the Faculty of Color Working Group Symposium that took place on campus in May.

The work of the CCTL already is making an impact beyond Wheaton. In November, the CCTL co-directors are scheduled to make a presentation at the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education conference in Pittsburgh. They will share the work they did last spring establishing a semester-long learning community that looked at how algorithms and data perpetuate inequality and bias, and considered how the insight of new interdisciplinary scholarship can be incorporated into teaching and learning at Wheaton.

Buck noted that Wheaton has a long history of innovation in education to build upon. “Wheaton’s commitment to innovative and inclusive pedagogies goes back a long way. The development of a gender-balanced curriculum in 1982 was a signature initiative,” she said. “The Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning will build on this tradition, investing in developments at the college and promoting Wheaton’s reputation as a leader.”

Favorite faculty-student collaborations

The CCTL formalizes and expands efforts to engage faculty, students and staff in working together on common educational goals. The center builds off the spirit of collaboration that has been deeply ingrained in the Wheaton liberal arts tradition for many years. So, we asked recently tenured faculty members to tell us about their favorite collaborations with students and what they learned from the experience, as well as what they think students gained.

Students in Associate Professor of Filmmaking Patrick Johnson’s “Production II” course shoot a scene from “Outed” for a class project. (Patrick Johnson photo)

Patrick Johnson, associate professor of filmmaking: “In ‘Production II,’ it’s important that students get as close to a professional experience as possible, so we routinely produce and film an in-class project and I assign students specific roles, as one would find on a professional set. Lee Diamond ’21 wrote an incredible script, ‘Outed.’ Students in the course workshopped the script, we filmed the story over six class periods, and it was then edited by students in my ‘Digital Editing’ class. I served as a creative producer and assistant director, making sure that everyone had input into the project and streamlining the workflow so we could complete it. It is very challenging to film a project in two-hour bursts, but as a class, we figured out the puzzle of how to make it work and create a collaborative environment that facilitates learning.”

Leah Niederstadt, associate professor of museum studies, history of art: “Collaborating with students on collections-based projects is among the best aspects of my job at Wheaton. Last spring, I taught ‘Museum Anthropology’ for the first time and, among other assignments, asked the students to research our collection of Native American basketry and to inventory our ancient Mediterranean ceramics. As they worked to master unfamiliar subject matter and gain new skills, the students built a community of scholars in our classroom. They shared resources, suggested new avenues of inquiry and collaborated with each other and with faculty, staff, alumni and off-campus experts. By the end of the semester, the students had strengthened their research, writing and problem-solving skills while also contributing to our understanding of the Permanent Collection’s objects, donors and history. Their willingness to support each other and to challenge themselves—personally and professionally—inspires me every day.”

Matthew Gingo, associate professor of psychology: “I’ve learned a lot about how full the lives of my students are. They are musicians, dancers, athletes, DJs, club presidents, etc., and are learning so much more than what is covered in the very square corners of their books and our classrooms. A few years ago, I worked with some students to run a big study in the Norton schools. The study focused on the sorts of lies that children judge are all right to tell to different sorts of authority figures. We interviewed hundreds of students and spent a couple years working on the data set. Over the course of the project, many Wheaton students helped with transcriptions, coding and number-crunching. It was also really cool to watch them progress as researchers. My favorite moments were listening to the folks who had been working on the project the longest explain a theory or a procedure to someone who was new to the lab; it always amazed me to see how tuned in they were to all the various facets of the project and how they saw things fitting together.”

Dipankar Maitra, associate professor of physics/astronomy: “My favorite collaborations with students are the various summer research projects. The summers offer an almost uninterrupted opportunity to dive into exciting research projects that are otherwise on the back burner. Sometimes these student projects directly contribute to my own research and have led to publications in peer-reviewed journals. And they always help the students and me to deeply understand and appreciate the workings of nature.”

Aubrey Westfall, associate professor of political science: “I really enjoy a couple practices borrowed from Associate Professor of History Dana Polanichka that I use with my senior seminar students. Every week, I schedule hours of ‘Write Now Right Now’ [like we do as faculty in the science center every day] with my students. They are required to attend a certain number of sessions a month to work on their projects for the seminar. I write alongside them in these sessions.

My hope is that the experience will expose the students to the process of creation, the power of habit formation and the discipline required to make progress. Later in the semester, I distribute what I have been working on to my students and a few colleagues, and we have a peer-review session in which everyone openly critiques my work.

The review sessions provide a real-time example of how academics give and receive feedback with the best intentions. I make it clear that constructive criticism is a gift, not a condemnation. During the session, I am effusively grateful to the students who offer me comments, deliberately emphasizing that I am not offended at all, and that I appreciate their efforts to help my analysis to become stronger. I hope that this experience can change the way they react to their professors’ and future employers’ evaluation of their work.”

Christina Riggs Romaine, associate professor of psychology: “The past several years I have worked with a group of student research assistants to gather data from juvenile court records. One of my students noted inconsistencies in how race and ethnicity were reported in the court records. We got curious about what information was reported, when, by whom and about whom. We created a side project examining that specific question that led to a national presentation [co-authored by my student Lauren Grocott ’18] and a published paper on best practices that has now been used in multiple states to train the clinicians who write these records.

This project was really interesting because it wasn’t an issue we anticipated, but the data led us to a new question that gave my students a chance to engage in the full research process from developing an idea to defining a research question and finding the right methodology to answer that question. Those skills can translate to any of the ways we use data [from marketing to research to analysis and planning for a nonprofit]. I am particularly proud of this project because of its real-world implications for clinicians working in the courts. The best practice approaches we developed may help limit the effects of bias in the courts.”

—Sandy Coleman

Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning opens

Favorite faculty-student collaborations

Contact

Related Links

Audrey Spina ’17 offers job advice on CollegeRecruiter.com

Minority Nurse magazine includes professor’s expertise

Related Topics