Overview of Emory Faculty Development/Teaching Center
Discussions
Arguments for a
● More efficient, effective, avoids duplication, pools
financial resources, remedies confusion and ignorance about available resources
● Partnership,
not competition, between university-wide center and individual schools’ centers
is possible. A comprehensive center can
support the heterogeneous development of each local center.
● Localized
centers and resources have not formed in the years since the “Report on
Teaching”. This shows that localized
centers cannot develop without the assistance of a comprehensive, centralized
core to initiate development.
● Emory needs a comprehensive center to
remain competitive with other leading
American universities. Demonstrates
the importance of teaching at Emory with
more than
just lip service.
● Allows
development of objective, consistent evaluation tools and review from outside, bringing
in professional and non-biased evaluation experts for confidential consultation
● Staffed
by a director and instructional developers with specialized experience,
therefore does not rely on additional work from existing faculty or department
chairs. These external consultants have
special expertise that brings legitimacy and validity to the scholarship of
teaching, evaluation, and development.
● Interdisciplinary
discussions, workshops, seminars, trainings, promote conversation and
collaboration in developing new initiatives. Cross-school dialogue is a strength, not a weakness, as UACT and the MTP have shown.
● Allows longer institutional memory
● Easier to secure external funding for
a comprehensive center than for individual centers
Arguments for Localized, School-Specific Centers:
● Teaching is finally
discipline-specific; University-wide resources are ineffective.
Focus should be on discipline-based practices rather than
abstract techniques.
Difficult to talk about teaching or faculty development meaningfully
at a level of
University-wide
abstraction, especially given different financial organization of
health
sciences vs. college, for example.
● University-wide center is a top-down
administrative remedy. Better to build
bottom-up
than top down; initiative must come from inside each school in order to be
effective.
● Comprehensive
center would duplicate, co-opt, or dissolve current localized centers (CTC,
UTF, etc.) that work well as they are currently organized.
● Faculty want resources organized
informally and used locally. Local, fluid
organizations are preferable to
centralized, perhaps rigid, bureaucracy.
Because
tenure and promotion decisions
are made locally, resources for faculty
development
should also be local. Teaching must be
demonstrated to be
important
in tenuring by schools themselves.
● University-wide
center would require each school to adjust to the center’s structure. Taxation on each school’s resources may
outweigh the help given to faculties or be unevenly distributed. Net benefit to specific schools
not proven.
● Initiative
should go towards local center development before resources are expended on an
expensive and expansive teaching “supercenter”.