For more information, and to participate in one of the following learning communities, please contact its facilitators.

Accessible Course Design: Instruction for All through Universal Design for Learning

Co-Facilitators:

The Accessible Course Design Learning Community takes a practice-based approach to exploring accessibility and Universal Design for Learning. Our goal is to develop our own accessible teaching practices, while creating and promoting accessibility to the campus community.

Adams Academy 2.0

Co-Facilitators: 

As a group of former Adams Academy Fellows, our learning community extends the work of the Adams Academy by focusing on what Huber and Hutchins call “going public” with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. With that said, we aim to build an audience for SoTL at MSU by focusing on three questions:

  1. Who would benefit most from an increased understanding of SoTL?
  2. What would be the best ways to communicate knowledge of SoTL to those individuals/groups?
  3. What content/ideas would be most beneficial to their practice?

Department of Animal Science Teaching and Learning Community (ANS TLC)

Co-Facilitators:

The Department of Animal Science Teaching and Learning Community (ANS TLC) will address educational topics that are proposed by members of the Department of Animal Science (ANS) and additional ANS TLC members. For 2020, two types of workshops will alternate monthly:

  1. Workshops focusing on instructional design and assessment techniques which will address alignment with course SLOs.
  2. Workshops to host discussions among ANS faculty/staff and ANS TLC members in order to align departmental SLOs across courses. The goal of ANS TLC is to provide tools for its members and SLO alignment across courses to create an impactful and cohesive educational experience for undergraduate students.

Building Capacity for Inclusive Excellence in Research Mentoring @MSU

Co-Facilitators:

Inclusive excellence in research mentoring has been linked to important professional outcomes (e.g., persistence, research productivity) for undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. In this learning community, participants from a diversity of disciplines will both read and discuss approaches for improving mentoring relationships, as well as identify and share evidence-based practices being adopted in research labs, departments, colleges and disciplines. This community will leverage the Fall 2019 National Academies Report on Mentorship, as well as the new MSU Graduate School Guidelines on Mentoring and Advising, to bring visibility to the intellectual products and resources produced by learning community members.

Building Effective Data Science Learning Communities

Co-Facilitators:

This learning community explores pedagogical approaches, curricular content and best practices for developing graduate/undergraduate level workshops that support emerging MSU data scientists in their academic pursuits and careers (hands-on technical and career development).

Charting the Future of Online Graduate Education at Michigan State University

Co-Facilitators:

The impetus for the learning community is a need for communication, shared best practices, and innovation among the online graduate degree programs at Michigan State University. Since January 2019, this learning community has met and prioritized the following domains related to graduate online education for discussion: program marketing and student recruitment, student experience and support, faculty onboarding and support, financial models, accessibility, administrative policies and faculty evaluation. The learning community will discuss more specific topics within each of the domains, as well as begin multiple work groups to develop tools, manuscripts, proposed policy, etc. as outcomes from the learning community.

Developing and Implementing Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: What Are/Should We Be Doing?

Co-Facilitators:

Culturally responsive pedagogy aims to develop supportive and empowering environments for traditionally underrepresented students. This FLC will:

  1. Share and discuss ongoing efforts at MSU to develop and implement curricular change that will enhance underrepresented student interest, competencies, and retention rates.
  2. Read and discuss relevant literature.
  3. Provide a safe space for the personal and institutional self-study that is needed to develop culturally responsive programs appropriate to our unique contexts.

Digital Humanities Pedagogy Learning Community

Co-Facilitators:

The DH Pedagogy LC brings together instructors from across campus who are new or somewhat new to digital humanities methods and theories and interested in integrating these approaches into their undergraduate courses. Digital humanities methods‚ such as annotation, digital curation, mapping, text analysis, visualization, and social media analysis allow students to explore topics of the humanities through multiple hands-on ways of knowing and integrate active learning approaches alongside critical approaches to engaging with technology. Over the course of the year, LC members will transform a syllabus of a course they teach to integrate a digital project (or several) into the class.

Diversifying and Contextualizing Agriculture and Natural Resources Education

Co-Facilitators: 

This learning community will focus on identifying and discussing research and resources that 1) are authored by scholars of color, female scholars, and others affected by the historical and current inequities in agriculture and natural resources and in higher education access 2) center the experiences of those same under-represented groups in agriculture and natural resources and 3) contextualize our discipline in the historical and current questions of equity and access in agriculture and natural resources.

Exploring Data and Computing Ethics Curricula

Co-Facilitators:

Data and computing ethics encompasses a wide range of topics including issues of data ownership, stewardship, data and code sharing, intellectual property, concerns of algorithmic bias, and related topics. MSU currently offers several courses with foci related to these topics. The goal of this learning community is to understand what is lacking in our shared curriculum and explore effective strategies for data ethics education.

Hybrid, Online, and Blended Instruction at CANR (HOBI@CANR)

Co-Facilitators:

How can I more effectively engage students in an online environment? How are others finding success and what can I share that might help others? In Hobi@Canr we will be learning from each other and guests about instructional design, content delivery, video, assessment, Quality Matters, classroom “flipping,” and other issues we have in common.

Identity Formation and Passing in Global Contexts

Co-Facilitators:

This learning community explores issues related to identity formation and passing in global contexts, including various geopolitical spaces and historical times, as well as in multiple registers (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, language, class, religion, sexuality, desire, and the body to name just a few).

Interdisciplinary Design Collaborative

Co-Facilitators:

With MSU at the center of the state’s intellectual economy and with so many faculty and students that engage Design from disparate areas of campus, creating an interdisciplinary group could lead to a more unified campus network of makers and thinkers. This learning community could facilitate alternative educational models, inform collaborative research practices, and further extend networks beyond MSU.

Medical Educator Roles and Identity in the Age of Integrated Curricula

Co-Facilitators:

Over the past ten years, medical education has undergone vast changes. This learning community will explore what this means in terms of the identity and skill sets required of medical educators. We will also explore how to measure faculty success in this new setting, with a focus on promotion of medical educators.

The Medical Student Experience as Data: Introduction to Qualitative Research

Co-Facilitators:

Qualitative analysis provides an opportunity to explore the rich and varied student experience, critical to determining the value of the learning exercises we are creating as educators. The learning community will provide medical educators an opportunity to learn about common approaches to qualitative research in education and apply qualitative methods to their own educational research projects.

Military-Affiliated Students Learning Community

Co-Facilitators:

Did you know that 4% of students at MSU are military-affiliated? Come explore how we can best support these students in our community to achieve success in the classroom and beyond.

Mindful Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Co-Facilitators:

In this Learning Community, we will define what mindfulness means in the context of teaching in a higher education setting, working with three different texts: The Mindful Twenty-Something, written by a Duke University psychiatrist specifically for an audience of college students; A Fearless Heart, based on the landmark course in compassion training that the author helped create at Stanford Medical School; and the classic, Mindfulness in Plain English. While mindfulness practices are often associated with stress-reduction, we will explore how such practices also enable the development of empathy, emotional resilience, and ethical awareness. We will work on applying mindfulness to make us more effective instructors, support student learning, and create inclusive classroom communities.

Restorative Justice

Co-Facilitators: 

We seek to create a community of scholarship and practice centering on restorative justice, and to identify ways to use RJ to build community within our campus. We will work to define restorative justice, explore ways in which it can be utilized on our campus, and to produce resources for other MSU community members interested in implementing restorative practices on campus.

Sharing Process Improvement Tools in Undergraduate Internships and Experiential Education

Co-Facilitators:

The Sharing Process Improvement Tools in Undergraduate Internships and Experiential Education community is designed to provide internship coordinators an opportunity to work through challenges commonly faced within the MSU environment when implementing internship experiences. The intended outcome of this group is to design resources for internship coordinators. All internship coordinators and experiential education specialists are welcome; we are looking to create a shared community of practice and network of support.

Student Transitions

Co-Facilitators:

  • Sarah Gretter sgretter@msu.edu
  • Jim Lucas lucasjam@msu.edu

Michigan State University is looking at the multiplicity of ways students from different backgrounds experience their transition to college in order to better support student transitions. This project is sponsored by APUE and RHS, and facilitated by the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology. We are seeking individuals with expertise or interest in student transition research from an academic, developmental, and institutional perspective. This FLC will explore topics related to issues of diversity, inclusion and sense of belonging during transitions, and the group will contribute their research to the ongoing Student Transition project on campus.

Teaching Maker Pedagogies in Nonmaker Classes: A Partnership with Lansing Makers Network

Co-Facilitators:

This learning community seeks to provide an opportunity for teachers to explore ways to incorporate maker practices and makerspaces into their classes. Participants will receive full access to a local makerspace. This will provide physical space for tools and resources, in addition to facilitating playful experimentation with maker practices. We will also have the opportunity to take part in monthly meetings to share our experiments and discuss the possibilities a multimodal practice of making opens in our teaching.

Teaching with Your Strengths

Co-Facilitators:

What do great teachers do differently? How can you become the best teacher you can be? Channeling the work of strengths-based development by Don Clifton, PhD, participants will discover how their innate talents lend themselves to effective, engaging teaching. At the end of the year, participants will both be aware of their talents and will have incorporated ways to apply and refine these talents into strengths.

Trans-Regional Studies Scholarly Writing Group

Co-Facilitators:

The Trans-Regional Studies Scholarly Writing Group will meet monthly to share writing projects in process with members. Faculty and graduate students across disciplines will present current research and join a supportive community with the goal of completing one scholarly product.

Transforming Teaching Through Reflective Writing Experiences (TTTRWE)

Co-Facilitators:

At the very heart of each MSU faculty member is a teacher who wants to share his/her/their knowledge and skills and one who wants to work and thrive in the organizational maze of professional challenges to ensure their students’ success. The TTTRWE project offers that safe, nurturing environment for faculty in which to collaborate, reflect on, and write about their pedagogical and scholarly practices, research interests, and publication goals.

MSU Trauma Services Training Network

Co-Facilitators: 

The mission of the MSU Trauma Services and Training Network (MSU TSTN) is to better understand, communicate, and address the impact of trauma at MSU and in the broader mid-Michigan community. We strive to collaborate across disciplines to care for trauma survivors through the development of trauma-informed, evidence-based education, training, and service.

Water Infrastructure: The Interface of Natural and Built Environments in Urban, Suburban, and Rural Communities

Co-Facilitators: 

Water infrastructure at the urban, suburban, and rural interface offers challenges and opportunities to protect human health and the environment and to provide sustainable resources.  This learning community brings together MSU faculty, extension and institute educators and specialists, and University facilities professionals to enable more effective programs and research at this intersection and the use of MSU‚ campus as a living, learning laboratory.

What If We Visited the Art Museum?

Co-Facilitators:

Asking “what if” questions is essential to almost every field. The art museum is particularly well suited for such questions and offers the opportunity to integrate multiple ways of knowing along the multifaceted pathway to understanding our world. This learning community brings together Integrative Studies faculty from across campus who are interested in exploring the role of object-based learning and creative interventions in their teaching practice. Together, faculty and MSU Broad Art Museum educators will create and pilot impactful faculty resources and participatory frameworks to facilitate object-based learning in Integrative Studies courses.