Faculty Interest Groups
The ATL’s Faculty Interest Groups (FIG) are faculty learning communities. They are forums for faculty to read common texts and think together about issues shaping higher education today and for the future. These issues include institutional challenges: changing student demographics and shifting paradigms of discovery and creativity. They also include challenges that transcend the academy: poverty, disease, and oppression.
Perhaps you have an idea for a future Faculty Interest Group. We want to hear from you. Contact us at atl@baylor.edu.
Spring 2025 - Engaged Learning
Interested? Please email atl@baylor.edu to register your interest and so that we can plan based on numbers of responses.
All meetings will be at 8:00 AM on the Thursdays shown below.
Meetings will be held in Jones Library Creekmore Conference Room. (Diagram of Jones Library 2nd Floor for Creekmore Location)
We prefer that Waco participants commit to being together in person for this Faculty Interest Group. The meetings will be hybrid for participants based outside of Waco. (see below)
Description:
Engaged Learning courses advance the mission of Baylor University to “educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service.” These courses help students develop skills to orient and apply their classroom learning toward broader public goods. Engaged Learning features engagement that is active, experiential, often unscripted, and oriented toward the common good, allowing students to discover and apply knowledge in spaces beyond the traditional classroom.
This Faculty Interest Group (FIG) invites faculty at all levels of involvement in engaged learning – whether you are curious, a novice, or an expert - to join together in discussions that explore topics related to development, implementation, and evaluation of engaged learning courses.
This FIG is offered in collaboration with the Office of Engaged Learning with Dr. Rebecca Flavin (Political Science), Director of Engaged Learning Curriculum.
Meetings & Topics:
Meeting 1 – Thursday, January 30
- Meeting theme: How can your course incorporate engaged learning for the common good?
- Potential discussion topics: Formulating learning goals and sharing best practices for engaged learning assignment design
Meeting 2 – Thursday, February 20
- Meeting theme: How can your course meet community needs?
- Potential discussion topics: Community-based global learning and fair-trade learning practices and sharing best practices for coordinating with community partners
Meeting 3 – Thursday, March 20
- Meeting theme: How can your course provide a manageable and meaningful experience for faculty and students?
- Potential discussion topics: Resources provided by Baylor’s Office of Engaged Learning and sharing faculty best practices for anticipating the unexpected in engaged learning courses and sharing student perspectives on engaged learning experiences
Meeting 4 – Thursday, April 24
- Meeting theme: How can you evaluate the effectiveness of your engaged learning course and use this data in research?
- Potential discussion topics: Designing evaluations that measure the success of learning goals and quantitative and qualitative data from the Global Engagement Survey (GES) and Engaged learning and SOTL across the disciplines and workshopping abstracts for SOTL conference proposals
Section 01 - 8:00-9:00am
Section 02 - 3:30-4:30pm
Education Research Journal Club
Thank you, all, for your ongoing interest and participation in our Education Research Journal Club. These faculty learning communities focus on reading the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education. Several topics are offered each semester.