Welcome to the first CTL newsletter of the 2024-2025 school year! I’m excited and grateful to serve as this year’s Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. I’d like to give a massive shout-out to April Boulton, Michelle Gricus, Paige Eager, and all of the smart, creative members of the CTL advisory board–you can see their names at the bottom of this newsletter–for answering my many questions, coming up with great ideas, and serving as the heart of our community of practice surrounding teaching.
Like many other folks teaching in higher ed, I never had formal teaching training: I learned by being tossed into the classroom and flailing around until I found something that kept me above water. I was 22 when I taught my first class, and when I tell you I flailed, I mean I flailed. I cringe just thinking about it. Turns out most college students taking a required writing class aren’t super excited to diagram sentences–but how was I supposed to know that?
Anyway, I survived. I’d like to say that I had a graduate program that taught me varied pedagogical approaches and reflective practices, but really, the thing that saved me was my friends, who were figuring it out alongside me. We shared assignments and syllabi; we got feedback and advice from one another; we talked through problems. We figured out how to swim, so to speak.
At Hood, we talk about how our students are lucky to have instructors who center teaching in their professional practice, but we’re lucky, too: we work in a community of folks who study pedagogy, folks who have decades of teaching experience, folks who are trying creative and weird and fun and outside-of-the-box approaches in the classroom. Unlike me and my grad school buddies, who talked for well over an hour about what you’re supposed to do with your hands when you're in front of the class, we have a group of experts right here, teachers who are doing the same work as us, but in different, interesting ways. Teaching is something we never need to go at alone. My hope in this role is to create space for our community to get together and share what we’ve learned, what we’re still learning, to ask about the things that we don’t know what to do with yet.
So: the word of the year for CTL is open. As a librarian, I am, of course, very rah-rah about sharing knowledge openly, and I am bringing my full librarian self to the Center for Teaching and Learning. This year we’re talking open dialogue, open access, open educational resources, open pedagogy, OpenAI, and more. We’re sharing what we’ve learned. We’re sharing what we haven’t learned yet. No flailing allowed. I welcome your ideas, your feedback, and your presence at CTL events, which will be so fun, I promise.
Kelly Esposito ‘00 is a graduate student seeking a degree in the humanities program. Kelly’s research interests are exploring how historic domestic frugality methods can be utilized today to allow us to be more ecologically sustainable in and out of the home and how these real-world applications could be taught in a classroom setting to increase student interest and engagement.
The Center for Teaching & Learning
Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, 401 Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD
Phone: (301) 696-3397