A Faculty Learning Community (FLC) is composed of 6 - 12 faculty and requires a commitment to meet, work, collaborate with colleagues on the FLC and disseminate the outcomes of the FLC’s work to WCU faculty. FLCs can be either topic (ex. writing across the curriculum, teaching & technology, assessing student work, etc.) or cohort (ex. department heads, junior faculty, First Year Seminar faculty, Liberal Studies faculty, etc) based. Each FLC determines its own goals and objectives and how it will disseminate the results of its research and work to campus colleagues. Membership in a FLC is for the entire academic year.

Definition of a FLC

Miami University of Ohio was the recipient this year of a Hesburgh Award Certificate for faculty development based upon its work with FLCs. As it says on its FLC web site (http://www.units.muohio.edu/celt/flcs/index.php):

“The work of Alexander Meiklejohn (1932) and John Dewey (1933) in the 1920s and ‘30s gave rise to the concept of a student learning community. Increasing specialization and fragmentation in higher education caused Meiklejohn to call for a community of study and a unity and coherence of curriculum across disciplines. Dewey advocated learning that was active, student centered, and involved shared inquiry... The term learning communities traditionally has been applied to programs that involve first- and second-year undergraduates, along with faculty who design the curriculum and teach the courses.

“A faculty learning community (FLC) is a cross-disciplinary faculty group… engaging in an active, collaborative, year-long program.. about enhancing teaching and learning and… activities that provide learning, development, interdisciplinarity, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and community building. A faculty participant in a faculty learning community selects a focus course to try out innovations, assess resulting student learning…(etc) and presents project results to the campus... Evidence shows that FLCs increase faculty interest in teaching and learning and provide safety and support for faculty to investigate, attempt, assess, and adopt new (to them) methods.”

"Why Learning Communities? Why Now?... philosophical (because learning communities fit into a changing philosophy of knowledge), research based (because learning communities fit with what research tells us about learning), and pragmatic (because learning communities work)." - Patricia Cross

Goals of FLCs at WCU

A faculty learning community is a special kind of "community of practice" (Wenger, 2002). The goals of FLCs at WCU are as follows:

• build University-wide community through teaching and learning, thus creating a culture of engaged teaching & learning
• improve effectiveness and enjoyment of teaching and learning
• research teaching and learning based upon theory, evidence, practice and outcomes
• encourage scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and its application to student learning
• reconceive the evaluation of teaching and the assessment of learning
• increase faculty collaboration across disciplines
• support and promote the value of liberal studies for all students
• increase the rewards for and prestige of teaching that leads to excellence in student learning and in the scholarship of teaching & learning
• create an awareness of the complexity of teaching and learning and that good teaching requires sustained effort, experimentation, application, good means of assessment, and career-long professional development in both the content of one’s discipline and in teaching that discipline

Operation and Outcomes

The Faculty Commons will coordinate the formation and the logistics for the FLCs. Each FLC has the following responsibilities:

• actual operation of the FLC, its schedule of meetings, leadership, content, goals, outcomes and dissemination
• the leader of the FLC is to submit to the FLC Coordinator a one-page mid-year report (December) and a one-page final report (May) that summarizes and analyzes the work and outcomes of the FLC

The FLC as a whole, or individuals members, are also encouraged to consider disseminating their work in additional ways such as, but not limited to, the following:

• Publication of an FLC article in WCU’s ejournal on SoTL, MountainRise
• FLC presentation in the Faculty Series held each semester
• Writing a booklet for the Renaissance of Teaching & Learning Booklet Series
• Creating a FLC web site for its work that is shared with the campus
• Publishing in a SoTL journal
• Conducting presentations or workshops for departments
• Giving a presentation at a regional or national conference
• Publishing an essay in the Faculty Forum

If you are interested in joining an existing FLC or starting a new one, contact Robert Crow at x2761 or rcrow@email.wcu.edu.