Fall 22 Call for CAE Learning Communities **New Indigenous FLC Added

The CAE invites all faculty – full and part-time – to join a learning community to support the ongoing reflection on and innovation of your teaching and writing. Consider joining us for one or more of the following opportunities:

Writing Accountability Groups (WAG): Writing accountability groups are small groups that form to meet regularly in order to keep all participants engaged in creative activities, research, scholarly, and artistic production despite the busyness of the year. Many groups are ongoing, and often include members from varied disciplines and approaches. The CAE supports these groups by connecting small numbers of faculty (usually three or four) with one another, and checking in now and then with those members. The structure, duration, and frequency is up to the members of the group. Let us know if you would like to be connected with a writing group, or if you have an existing writing accountability group that could use a new member.

Facilitated Teaching Circles: As with the writing accountability groups, teaching circles can take several forms but share a commitment to engaging regularly in conversations about our teaching. Teaching circles provide spaces for you to discuss your teaching questions, challenges and successes with a small group of dedicated teachers. If you have an interest in joining a facilitated group, let us know. 

If you would like to engage in some Peer Review of Teaching (PROT), in which you and a colleague observe and discuss each other’s classes, let us know that, too, and we will aim to match colleagues across disciplines and schools.

“Ungraded” Faculty Learning Community (FLC): If you’ve ever had a student ask, What do you want? or What do I have to do to get an A? - and if your immediate reaction was that this student only cares about their grade and not about their actual learning - then Ungrading may be for you. “Ungrading” is shorthand for finding ways to move beyond a focus on accumulating points and “getting A’s” and instead encourages students to participate in real learning. This fall, the CAE will be hosting an Ungrading Learning Community in which we'll explore some ways you can introduce ungrading to your courses - from the smallest in-class assignments to major projects. We’ll schedule monthly, hour-long Zoom meetings where we’ll discuss chapters from Susan Blum’s book, “Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead),” and brainstorm our own strategies to help students shift to a more intrinsically centered mode of learning. 

Indigenous Issues Faculty Learning Community (FLC) This FLC will allow faculty to share resources and approaches to integrating Indigenous issues across our classes. We will begin by reading and discussing Charles Brilvitch’s "A History of the Golden Hill Paugussett," which provides information about local Indigenous history, and discuss more recent issues facing the tribe, including federal recognition, profiling, and the history of political conflicts in Bridgeport and beyond. Possible other discussion issues include using and integrating land acknowledgments within and beyond the classroom, sharing resources for Indigenous-influenced approaches to pedagogy, and a visit to the Freeman Center for History and Community in Bridgeport and/or the Golden Hill Paugussett Reservation in Trumbull.

Questions? Contact Sonya Huber (shuber@fairfield.edu) or the CAE (cae@fairfield.edu

In order to get these groups started and underway, please click here to register for your preferred groups by Friday, September 16.

Best,

The CAE Team