Begin Again

August 11, 2021

By Dr. Chuck Gobin, Associate Dean of Curriculum and Pedagogy

A little over a year ago, all of higher education found itself in an existential crisis due the COVID pandemic. Colleges across the U.S. were scrambling to figure out how to keep the doors open for returning students while also keeping students and staff safe. What would teaching look like in this new landscape?

In one sense, we were fortunate to have things “close down” in the last month of the Spring 2020 semester. As we adjusted rapidly to remote teaching and “just in time” strategies, we had some sense of what was working and what was not. We then had some idea of how to prepare for the Fall 2020 semester.

As we developed strategies and borrowed ideas from sister institutions, we began to amass a collection of useful pedagogies, which we grouped under the heading of “Keep Teaching.” In that same spirit, we want to build on the momentum by creating a Center for Teaching and Learning that can serve our community in several ways. This webpage will serve as an entry point to helpful resources and news of what is happening in the world of college teaching. It will also link to our Faculty Resources Discovery page, where you can find useful tutorials for our various teaching technologies. Finally, it will inform you of opportunities to deepen your teaching through mentoring relationships, our Faith and Learning Reading Group, and workshops that focus on topics related to teaching and learning.

As we enter the 2021 academic year (post-pandemic, mid-pandemic, semi-pandemic, or whatever it becomes), I invite you to ask what the Lord would have you learn this year!