Presenter: Dr. Lauren Herckis, Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, January 11th, 11:00-12:15, CTLR, followed by lunch

As the body of research on teaching and learning grows, innovative practices are touted, and dynamic new tools are tested and offered for use in classrooms around the world, the pace of innovation rapidly outstrips the pace of change in college classrooms. The development and delivery of college classes is a core practice of the professoriate. Faculty, administrators, and students have different ideas about what constitutes good teaching. Central to both institutional and faculty identity, teaching priorities, approaches, and practices that instructors hold dear are often notably different from those promoted in institutional policy. An anthropological approach to understanding the role of teaching in faculty identity formation reveals that institutional and individual strategies are often at odds.

Lauren Herckis is a Simon Initiative Research Faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University.  She is trained as an anthropologist, and she is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences and the Human-Computer Interaction Initiative.   She specializes in organizational and contextual boundaries and affordances to the adoption of innovative tools and practices in higher education.  As part of the Simon Initiative, she is exploring the intersection of campus culture, technological change, and effective teaching at the college level.

 

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