Monday, November 27, 2000
Ready for prime time
Four research VP finalists chosen
Baxter Street esplanade opens to pedestrians
Marine science prof ‘harbors’ lifelong fascination with the sea
Kudos
Administrative Changes
Two parking lots will close for construction projects
Teaching faculty a lesson
Long-term goals of UGA’s new Teaching Academy
By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Josef Broder, professor of agricultural and applied economics and assistant dean for academic affairs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, is a charter member of UGA’s new Teaching Academy and this year is serving as chair of the academy’s executive committee. Following the academy’s first workshop earlier this month at which the first class of members was installed (see Columns, Nov. 13), Broder talked to Columns about the long-term goals of the academy.

Columns: Can you begin by describing the teaching academy?
Broder: I think the academy is the first chance for teachers campus-wide to get together on a routine basis--to talk about teaching, to celebrate or complain or whatever. There’s never been such a group for the teaching side--a faculty group. I don’t mean an ad hoc interest group, but a group that is concerned about teaching all the time.
The people who win teaching awards and fellowships here--Senior Teaching Fellows, Lilly Fellows, Meigs people--spend a year talking about teaching but that’s the end of it. There’s no continuity. The academy allows these groups to share ideas.
It also gives some ownership of the teaching mission to faculty. It’s the faculty who really have the vision for teaching--not just in their classes, but the larger issue of teaching on campus.
The idea of conversation keeps coming up. How do you talk to people about teaching? Mostly you don’t--you talk about your research. Teaching is very private--you do it by yourself. This forum makes teaching public.
And it’s a celebration. One of the key things we want is to elevate teaching--not necessarily to reward it, because I think teachers are rewarded--but to give teaching some visibility. I think it will make a difference on campus--not a radical change, but an affirmation of what we’ve done over the years with the Meigs Awards, the Senior Teaching Fellows, the Lilly Fellows, all the work of Ron Simpson and Bill Jackson and Tricia Kalivoda. Bill Prokasy [retired vice president for academic affairs] was interested in bringing teachers together. We want to make sure that all continues.
You know, 20 years ago if you won a teaching award you were doomed never to get promoted. Now we’ve got a nice balance between teaching and research. Poor teachers no longer get promoted on the basis of their research.

Columns: How were the charter members of the academy selected?
Broder: They originally asked people who had won Meigs Awards, Lilly Fellowships, Senior Teaching Fellowships, and Regents, University, and Research professorships to express their interest in a teaching academy. From those who said they were interested they asked 13 to sit on a planning committee. Many of us had been active in the other national projects, like the peer-review project, with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Association of Higher Education. When the peer-review project concluded, AAHE and Carnegie came up with the academy idea, and they invited us to be part of it.
When we met we talked about core values and mission and objectives. We hammered through it, slowly but surely, even though sometimes we were all thinking, I could write this in about a minute. But it had to be a consensus.

Columns: How did the first workshop go?
Broder: Great--the inaugural class developed some interesting and challenging proposals. Peter Shedd [associate vice president for instruction] is going to summarize the suggestions and then we’ll go down the list and ask which are good community projects.

Columns: Will there be regular meetings?
Broder: That’s one of the things we discussed--probably a couple of meetings per semester. I think the work of the group is going to come from committees. We are thinking about one seminar or speaker each semester, and then a working session, where we can talk about what we want to do and governance and membership and those kind of contentious issues, and then another occasion just to get together.

Columns: Does the academy have a budget?
Broder: We don’t really have a budget, and some programs--like outside speakers--may require funds. We don’t really want the administration to have to fund them. We want to be independent, so we will probably seek educational grants.

Columns: How much connection will there be with Carnegie and AAHE?
Broder: There’ll be chances to share ideas. AAHE sponsors a meeting each year on faculty roles and rewards, and there is usually a section on the academies across the country. We’ll try to go to that, because it helps to see what other schools are doing.

Columns: As yet there has been no decision about membership?
Broder: Not just yet. We debated that long and hard. We were concerned about not making academy membership automatic, a result of winning something else. We wanted to think about commitment. We decided we would ask the people we invited to write a reflective essay--their vision, their philosophy of teaching, what they think the academy can be.
Next year’s the trick. Do we invite new Senior Fellows and new Meigs people? Do we expand? We’ll have to ask that question.

Columns: There might be interested people who have not won one of those awards.
Broder: Exactly. And we don’t want to be about teachers versus other groups. We want to make sure this is open to the whole teaching-learning process, including people that do research, people that do service.
Teaching and learning are important whatever else you do. You have to pass on what you know. That’s what the university is about. It’s not enough to discover--you have to transmit the knowledge to the next generation.
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