Learning and Teaching Center (Old)

Building Intellectual Community Through Collaboration

The Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching and the Writing Program invite proposals from faculty for chapters of a new volume tentatively titled Building Intellectual Community Through Collaboration. Based on the success of the first volume of faculty essays, Reflection on Learning as Teachers, we invite faculty to write from their professional experience, using workshop methods to prepare an edited collection of related chapters. Editors will be Carol Rutz, Director of the Writing Program (and co-editor of the previous volume) and Mary Savina, Coordinator of the LTC. Funds from the Mellon Faculty Lifecycles Grant will support this project.

We welcome proposals from all faculty, and we encourage co-written chapters as well as individual contributions. We have identified some possible categories, listed below, and we will consider additional proposals as well.
Categories—please note generous overlap:

∑ Harnessing various literacies – How do educational techniques such as reading/writing, speaking, numeracy, and information literacy combine or conflict? What are the obstacles to success?

∑ Teaching collaborations – What kinds of joint teaching experiences help build intellectual community? What forms (co-teaching, triads, dyads, field research) work best?

∑ Departmental collaboration – How do departments work together to develop courses, refine comps, advise majors, and/or integrate student internship and off-campus study experiences?

∑ Department planning – How do campus-wide discussions of pedagogy affect departments as they hire and prepare for reviews? What important initiatives have come out of such planning?

∑ Collaboration with students – Where does undergraduate research fit into the definition of collaboration? What about undergraduates as peer teachers?

∑ Interdisciplinary approaches – What do area studies and other interdisciplinary approaches bring to the construction of intellectual community?

∑ Cross-disciplinary conversations – To what extent do we advance intellectual community through grass roots discussions—e.g., the group that developed a plan for quantitative reasoning? How do such conversations get started? What makes them successful?

∑ Faculty study tours – How do interdisciplinary groups benefit from travel together abroad? What sets such activities apart from the classic junket?

∑ Faculty book groups – What is the attraction of reading together? What do we learn from participation in these groups that adds to our intellectual community?

Rough Timetable

March 1, 2005 Proposals due
March 10 or 11, 2005: Convene faculty who have proposed chapters
August 22-26, 2005: Week-long workshop, supported by Mellon funds
Fall/Winter 2005: Revision, editing, preparation of the manuscript
August 2006: Publication, likely via
College City Press