The major, university-wide initiative, The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at Western Carolina University, was formally begun with the 2003 Summer Institute for Teaching & Learning. The goals of SoTL at WCU are improved student learning, teaching effectiveness, faculty development and a profoundly collegial community of and for teaching and learning.

At the 2008 Summer Institute, May 19-22, faculty will engage in sustained inquiry about teaching and students' learning. They have the opportunity to choose one topic on which to focus and become a member of one of the Focus Teams, described below, led by a faculty facilitator. During the three days of the Institute, approximately 10 hours will be with one's team, with whole-group activities at the beginning and end of each day, and time for individual work.

The Summer Institute is sponsor by the IT Division, the Division of Educational Outreach, Academic Affairs, the Chancellor's Office, and the Coulter Faculty Center.

Goals of the Summer Institute on Teaching and Learning

1. Contribute to expanding the pedagogical imaginations of faculty participants
2. Encourage faculty to approach their teaching as an interesting and challenging form of scholarship
3. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration among participants
4. Support participants' innovation and experimentation in their teaching and their work with students 
5. Develop an open and collegial academic culture where dialogue and interaction among participants about teaching practices, resources, experiences and experiments with student learning are the norm

There also will be lots of good food. We will provide morning and afternoon snacks and lunch each day, with a wine and cheese social scheduled for one evening. There is no cost to participants for attending the Institute.

Focus Topics and Facilitators

Educators are being charged with embracing new designs for learning based on emerging research on how people learn, effective uses of technology, and 21st Century Skills in the context of rigorous academic content. How do educators capitalize on the frenzy of multimedia that our students are already experiencing? This focus team will explore the why’s and how’s of using digital media in both traditional and online courses. Participants will investigate sound pedagogical reasons for using digital media, as well as create their own digital media objects as part of this focused experience.

Undertaking a SoTL project provides us with an opportunity to pursue questions that really matter to us about our teaching and, especially, our students' learning. Each member of this Focus Team will design a SoTL project to implement in a course in fall semester 2008 or spring 2009. Our first step will be to identify a good question about teaching and learning in one of our courses. Much of our work together will be devoted to: (1) investigating the kinds of questions that characterize SoTL, (2) identifying methods for collecting and analyzing evidence of students' learning, and (3) exploring options for “going public” with what we learn from our SoTL projects. The outcome of our work will be a framework for pursuing questions that really matter to us about our teaching and our students' learning.

Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that raises questions like: ‘Who’s to judge what is right and wrong?’, ‘How do I protect my rights from being trampled on by others?’, as well as ‘How ought we to live?’, ‘Must we appeal to the Good or God to justify our living morally?’, or more basically, ‘Why should I be moral?’. Traditionally, philosophers divide up ethics into moral theory (What do we mean when we say an act is right or wrong? Does justice take priority over rights? Is utilitarianism or Kantianism or virtue theory the best moral theory?) and applied ethics, the more famous moral issues that dominate public policy discussions, like capital punishment, civil disobedience, and environmental concerns. Many like to do merely one rather than the other, but I will press us to notice that ‘Theory without application is sterile, and application without theory is blind.’ So perhaps we will learn to find ethics both disturbing (are our comforts the result of discomforts elsewhere?) and challenging (can moral reflection inspire us to be more conscientious?). The degree to which we can engage with students in this common enterprise of moral reflection should give us insights into how we might live, both apart and together.

Toward these ends, I will present a syllabus or two that I have used over the years in teaching Ethics courses. Then I will ask you to submit a syllabus that fits into your disciplinary area. We will compare and contrast them, and see how they cover both moral theory and applied problems.

In our increasingly complex and technical world, it is often beneficial for students to experience activities that are not readily accessible through traditional learning modes. Experiential learning aims to make meaning for students by engaging them in activities that take them beyond the literal and/or the virtual classroom. This focus team will explore novel examples of experiential learning being developed and taught by faculty at WCU and provide the members of this team with support for promoting experiential learning in their own courses that extends beyond the classroom.

What's new in the world of information seeking? How do we help our students keep up? How do we help our students weed through the millions of articles, wikis, blogs, and websites and find the best information? How do we help our students find, evaluate, and use information successfully? In this focus team, we will:

• Explore ways to customize the way we search for, retrieve, and use information
• Develop and share strategies for teaching information literacy skills to our students
• Develop effective research assignments to use in our courses

The emphasis of each of these focus teams will be on application-on how we can use whatwe learn in one or more of our courses. Each team's work will be intensive, hands-on and interdisciplinary.

Outcomes & Dissemination
In addition to developing course materials to use during the coming academic year, faculty are asked to participate in the full 3 ½ days of the Institute, to engage in follow-up activities with the members of their focus team, to apply what is learned to one or more courses in the fall, 2007, semester and to, as Teams, faculty are encouraged to participate in the annual Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Faire in spring 2008.

Additional voluntary activities for focus teams to disseminate the outcomes of using the strategies/concepts with the WCU academic community could include writing an article for MountainRise, giving a Faculty Series presentation, creating a focus group web page, giving a presentation to departments or colleges, etc. The Institute focus teams also have the opportunity to consider becoming year-long Faculty Learning Communities for 2007-2008.

Each participant will receive a copy of Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald L. Finkel and a variety of materials about teaching and learning in higher education and about the topic of one's group.