Little and David Green from Seattle University were given the award for their article, “Family portrait: a profile of educational developers around the world” that was published by the International Journal of Academic Development in July 2015. 

51±¬ÁĎÍř the article:

During the last 50 years, the field of educational development has matured as a field of practice and scholarship and is becoming increasingly internationalised. Each university has its own history, culture, and values that shape the meaning and scope of educational development in that institution, and this diversity is compounded across national and international contexts. This paper reports much needed, large-scale research that helps us understand that diversity, and learn from it.

The judges agreed that Green and Little have “produced a very important piece of empirical research that lays the way open for others to ‘zoom in and examine close up questions of epistemologies, disciplinary differences, identity, credibility and values.’ By providing a mapping and a description of who educational developers are, where they come from, and on what resources and knowledge-bases they draw, the paper is therefore a seminal piece of work that provides the groundwork for a great deal more. It is a highly readable paper, providing valuable insights and piquing our interest for the more in-depth analysis that is to come.”

Last spring, ACUE film crews came to campus to record interviews and teaching demonstrations with two associate professors from Elon’s College of Arts & Sciences: Tony Crider, associate professor of physics, is filmed with students in a course module about using concept maps and other visualization tools, and Sophie Adamson, associate professor of French, figures in course modules focused on promoting a civil learning environment, developing and using rubrics, and providing useful feedback.

ACUE and the American Council on Education have partnered to launch the course in a national effort to advance effective college instruction and support student motivation and success. The initiative aims to provide tools and resources that are accessible to wide-ranging institutions that may not have teaching and learning centers.  

Links to include in the E-Net:

As part of the Collaborative Humanities Redesign Project (CHRP), a three-year interdisciplinary, cross-campus initiative funded by Teagle Foundation, faculty from Elon, Park and Rockhurst universities and the University of Kansas came together for the third time this September to collaborate on instructional design with the goal to enhance teaching in the humanities.

In the first year of the project, participants critically examined their teaching practices and pedagogical philosophies; brainstormed ideas for teaching innovations that would, in concrete and observable ways, improve student learning; and developed specific plans for implementing the changes. During the second year of the project, faculty experimented with some of the proposed innovative approaches, observed, evaluated and assessed their effectiveness on student learning.

As the Collaborative Humanities Redesign Project is wrapping up this year, participants are preparing portfolios that will make their particular teaching innovations accessible to the widest audience possible. In addition, many faculty participants plan to disseminate their work via professional conferences and publications.

Throughout the duration of this interdisciplinary and cross-campus project, faculty from all four universities met virtually and in person to share ideas and offer each other feedback on various experimental and innovative teaching strategies. Speaking about the grant’s success, Elon Professor Deandra Little, who is a member of the leadership group of the project, responded that, “many of these innovations made powerful and lasting impressions” Another member of the leadership group, Dan Bernstein, has noted that “[a]fter three years CHRP has shown that a community of scholars can become a sufficient audience to help develop and sustain a body of excellent instruction and learning.”

Elon faculty participating in the CHRP include: Deandra Little, Robin Attas, Olivia Choplin, Brandon Essary, Ketevan Kupatadze, Kristina Meinking, and Shawn Tucker.

Robin Attas, assistant professor of music, focused her attention on MUS 211: Materials of Music III, the third music theory course in a four-semester sequence required for most music majors. Robin focused on ways to better teach the activity of music analysis as a “whole-body” process that involves listening and playing the music as well as looking at a score and thinking about concepts and analytical strategies. She redesigned in-class activities to include more expert demonstration of this “whole-body” process, and out-of-class assignments to guide students step-by-step towards better incorporation of all aspects of musical engagement in their analytical and written assignments.

Olivia Choplin, associate professor of French, has been redesigning French 222: Intermediate French 2, the fourth semester of college-level instruction. In this course themed “The Stories We Tell,” students solidify their understanding of linguistic concepts through the study of authentic French-language texts including folk tales, a sitcom, articles from the media, and a short novel. Students study grammatical concepts outside class and are then are asked to identify and think about those concepts as they appear the primary texts they are reading for the course. Class discussions encourage them to use new grammatical concepts as they attempt to make connections between the texts they read and the cultural perspectives that those texts reveal. The course thus focuses on linguistic proficiency, critical thinking, and intercultural competency.

Brandon Essary, assistant professor of Italian, discovered through his redesign project of ITL 121 that, especially at the 100 level, students need the chance to speak in English occasionally to think more deeply and critically about the complex subject of intercultural competence. The majority of class is still taught in Italian; however, he now offers concentrated, high-impact activities in English to stimulate deep thinking and discussion about culture with students. These activities recognize that students might not speak Italian for the rest of their lives. However, they will travel to other lands and encounter people from other cultures at home or abroad. The lessons of intercultural competence – identifying significant cultural elements, comparing and contrasting cultures with nuance, and critically thinking about the reasons for these elements and the values of the target culture – can and will serve them no matter where they go, no matter what languages they speak.

Ketevan Kupatadze, senior lecturer in Spanish, often teaches 300-level advanced reading and writing courses in Spanish that are considered to be transitional from the study of linguistic skills to their use in meaningful contexts that develop students’ critical thinking and cultural competence. Her focus has been mainly on developing students’ ability to engage in meaningful and in-depth discussion in a foreign language classroom and developing tools to promote active and engaged learning.

Kristina Meinking, assistant professor of classical languages, worked on Latin 121: Elementary Latin I. Students learned the fundamentals of Latin grammar and Roman culture through a completely reading-based textbook (Orberg’s Lingua Latina), an inductive method that allowed most class time to be spent on reading and re-reading each chapter, extracting grammatical principles, and composing in Latin. They advance only when they had demonstrated their mastery of a set of three chapters by earning a mark of 85 percent or above on what Kristina calls a “challenge.” After the first challenge, students worked in smaller groups of peers who were learning the same set of material and the instructor’s time is divided between all the various groups that exist in any given class meeting.

Shawn Tucker, associate professor of art in the Art and Art History Department redesigned a daily writing assignment he uses in his Laughter and the Humanities course, which now puts students into study groups and asks them respond to specific prompts. Tucker found that the students’ written responses improved with the more specific prompt and with the motivation of being a contributor to a study group.

Deandra Little, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) and associate professor of English, presented two sessions. One, titled “Whose Theory, Which Practices? Disciplinary Identity and Educational Developers,” was with collaborator David Green, from Seattle University, and focused on research findings resulting from their international survey of over 1,000 educational developers. In the second, Little joined with Professor Peter Felten, assistant provost and executive director of Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning, and colleagues from Berea College and Otterbein University, to apply frameworks from research on mid-career faculty to explore the experiences of mid-career educational developers.

Professor of History and Associate Director of CATL, Mary Jo Festle, and Director of the Gender and LGBTQIA Center, Matthew Antonio Bosch, presented a session on “Assessing how well individual campuses serve their LGBTQ community members.” In the session, Festle and Bosch prompted participants to critically reflect on how their campuses might assess the learning and working conditions of LGBTQ students, faculty and staff, by sharing the methods (and surveys) their task force used to learn about people’s experiences and attitudes as well as how they crafted recommendations that resulted in 51±¬ÁĎÍř dramatically improving its Campus Pride ranking.

As current president of the POD Network, Deandra Little also gave the welcome and presidential address during the first evening of the conference. For a full listing of presentations, visit the POD Network Conference .