FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITIES
SMARTEACHING Schedule
About Faculty Learning Communities
Faculty Learning Communities are peer-led groups of 8–10 faculty, staff, and graduate students who meet monthly throughout the year to explore a topic or project connected to pedagogical innovation (teaching + learning), faculty development, or publicly-engaged scholarship. During the 2024-25AY, the P3 will sponsor two Faculty Learning Communities, providing administrative and technical support to organizers while each group sets its own agenda, goals, and activity for the year.
Faculty Learning Communities function to:
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Stimulate collaboration and foster experiential learning environments;
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Encourage professional development with a peer-support model for learning and action;
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Bridge disciplinary boundaries and support community-building among instructors across the university
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Facilitators will receive a professional development / research stipend of $1,000. Once this year's communities are selected, we will issue a broader call for participants.
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Eligibility & Expectations: All Rutgers-Newark faculty, staff and PhD students are eligible to participate.
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The application to propose an FLC for the 2024-25 AY is now closed.
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Interested in joining a Faculty Learning Community? Learn more below.
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2024-2025 FLC Facilitators
FLC Description
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In the past, P3-sponsored FLCs have focused on disability services, critical digital pedagogy, developing microcredential programs that support student outcomes, and issues of student belonging. This year, for the first time ever, the P3’s FLC was facilitated by two current graduate students - Chloe Sudduth and Rosheka Faulkner - who guided their FLC through a group reading of bell hook’s Teaching to Transgress alongside a discussion of “bias free” grading approaching.
2023-2024 FLC Participants
FLC Description
This year, the P3 took a different approach to our regularly-offered Faculty Learning Communities program. Working in collaboration with John Gunkle’s office, we created an in-house faculty learning community called the “Student Belonging Institute” or SBI for short. The SBI presented and discussed research on social belonging and learning mindsets, and employed an online curriculum developed to support practical teaching approaches that bolster student engagement, increase equity in academic outcomes, and support student success. Faculty participants in the SBI cohort met in both Fall and Spring semesters of this academic year and worked together to revise their course materials to foreground student-centered messages and policies. The SBI also involved a survey component that gave (or at least endeavored to give) faculty a real-time glimpse of their students’ belonging certainty or belonging uncertainty at various points in the Spring term. This was an ambitious training program that relied deeply on participants' willingness to be open and share classroom observations and pedagogical reflections.​​
2022-2023 FLC Facilitator
FLC Description
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Digital credentials, interchangeably known as microcredentials, take a variety of forms and they are quickly growing as workforce and career development tools. Our FLC is about learning how to create cost-free microcredentials for RU-N undergraduates (academic credit or co-curricular). We are particularly interested in microcredentials that represent a verifiable module of skill and knowledge that has value to an employer or industry (i.e. industry-aligned, competency-based microcredentials).
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Value & Quality in Digital Credentials
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Jesse Liss
Sociology, SAS-N
Faculty Learning Community on Leveraging Microcredentials to Improve Student Outcomes
2021-2022 FLC Facilitator
Lance Thurner
History, SAS-N
Faculty Learning Community
on Critical Digital Pedagogy
2020-2021 FLC Facilitators
Cristhian Altamirano
Disability Specialist, Office of Disability Services-Newark
Faculty Learning Community
on Accessibility
Allen Sheffield
Director, Office of Disability Services-Newark
Faculty Learning Community
on Accessibility