Stephen Yandell

Faculty Director, Center for Teaching Excellence
Xavier University

Project Title:

The Jesuit Teaching Center Network

Overview:

The Jesuit Teaching Center Network is an online resource being created to centralize information about (and articulate the key features of) pedagogical programming offered at our twenty-eight U.S. Jesuit schools. This online resource will not only allow worldwide access to pedagogial content grounded in Jesuit ideals, it will offer models for schools working to strengthen their pedagogical offerings.

Rational:

Although Xavier University's Center for Teaching Excellence partners with several ofganizations to help leverage teaching resources among institutions (including the Greater Cincinnati Consortium of Colleges and Universities and the Association of Independent COlleges and Univerisities of Ohio, for example), perhaps the most notable absence in this leveraging is support between our sister Jesuit schools. The AJCU currently has no conference or affinity group in place to support the work of our teaching centers. Our 28 U.S. Jesuit schools have varying levels of resources devoted to faculty development, specifically in regards to teaching, and most of us do not have a clear sense of what other teaching centers exist--and they typically know less about how to contact them, what work they are doing, or how to take advantage of their resources. A centralized web resource, along with new content devoted specifically to Ignatian pedagogy, will begin to address some of these problems. Work to develop a teaching-center affinity group in the AJCU is also underway.

Project Details:

Linked to Xavier's already well supported Ignatian Resources web content, this resource will help clarify what teaching centers exist (information that is notoriously difficult to find at the moment for some of our schools), their primary contact information, and their major programming. Particularly useful will be a range of video-based pedagogy content currently being developed by me with an Ignatian focus.

Indications of Success:

1. Monitoring web hits for individual-user access over the first year.
2. Monitoring forum participants in the JTCN, new threads begun, and questions answered over the first year.

Challenges:

1. Balancing time available for generating new video content with a resonably high level of quality.
2. Ongoing maintenance of content and links.
3. Finding most effective location for web server space.