Welcome to the prototype web site for the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of South Carolina.

The purpose of this site is to develop content and ideas for the production web site of USC's new Center for Teaching Excellence. Once that site is completed, this site will probably remain to host an experimental Faculty Handbook on Teaching Excellence.

About the CTE

Mission

Our mission at the Center for Teaching Excellence is to promote excellence in teaching at all levels, in all contexts, and for all stakeholders in the educational enterprise at USC.

We provide professors and graduate students with resources to develop their communicational, managerial and technological skills, and to enhance the technological, intellectual and institutional environment in which they work. In addition, we pursue and publish significant research in areas related to these efforts.

On a community level we seek to become a structural hub on campus that will open channels of communication and opportunities for collaboration among the diverse stakeholders in the educational enterprise.

Philosophy

Our services are founded on the principle that teaching and learning are essentially crafts. They are performative vocations -- think of concert music, theater, and sports -- in which some are perhaps more talented, but in which all can benefit from having the right tools and training. We believe that when faculty and students come for help, they do not want philosophy, they want methods and solutions to immediate problems. We endeavor to provide these in as straightforward a manner as possible.

Although our approach is fundamentally pragmatic, our choices of methods and solutions are guided by certain theoretical principles regarding the nature of human cognition and the academic life.

Chief among these is the idea that teaching and learning are socially and culturally situated activities. This means that each participant in the educational process is engaged not simply in a neutral cognitive exchange of information, but is located in a network of social exchanges that uniquely defines the problems and opportunities they face.

For example, junior faculty must balance teaching and research as they walk the tightrope of the tenure process. Senior faculty must keep abreast of changes in their discipline and in the learning styles of their students, as they struggle to make their private world of research intelligible to them. Graduate students must balance the needs of both student and teacher as they prepare for an uncertain future. The idea of [http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/yrogers/sit_act/ situated action] helps us to train our attention on providing the specific resources people need to address the tensions and opportunities they face 'on the ground.'

A second principle is that the typical situations of of teachers, learners and administrators are linked and form sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory realtions. It follows that the solutions provided by the Center must strive to be multi-pronged, such that the methods applied in one domain must be considered in light of those in the others.

For example, effective syllabus design ought to be linked to realistic expectations of student reading loads, just as the time management principles suggested to students ought to realistically reflect what they are capable to doing. In addition, the administration may need to define policies and guidelines to influence these expectations.

A key role played by the Center in developing simultaneous solutions is to both sense and respond to the information that emerges from participants' situations. This involves promoting mutual recognition among differently situated participants by serving as a shared resource among these groups, as well as providing a centralized resource for the accumulation of institutional knowledge.

A third principle is that technology — in particular the networked computer in its various incarnations — now plays a fundamental role in the educational enterprise, acting as both environmental factor and pedagogical resource. Technology serves to intensify situational tensions, as for example when email use increases the amount of communication outside of the classroom, disrupting student notions of the professor's time they are entitled to, as well as professor's notions of how much time they may expect students to devote to their class. We believe that such disruptions are commonplace on college campuses today, and they are introduced into the workplace of learning each time a new kind of software or hardware becomes even slightly popular. Such disruptions are opportunities to learn about and codify the assumptions that underlie the educational process.

Beyond the management of the transformational effects of technology, we believe that technology holds the key to providing the situational resources and simultaneous solutions described above. For example, the digitization of a professor's research data often makes these materials available to students for the first time, helping to bridge the gap between teaching and research. And the emergence of social software, such as wikis and blogs, may hold the key to providing a common and safe space for the interaction of faculty, students and administrators. Above all, we believe that we are in a pivotal period of history in which technology is making changes for better for worse in all areas of life. Our approach is not to passively absorb these changes, but to leverage the assets of a university community, in particular its critical and practical perspective on technology, to help shape and channel technological change.

Finally, we believe that to deploy technology in this way, and to acquire an accurate understanding of the situated activities that comprise the educational enterprise at USC, the Center must devote a significant amount of its resources toward research. On the one hand, the Center supports research on situated action, in the particular oral communication practices of teachers and learners. This research may be described as the ethnography of education. On the other hand, the Center supports research in the area of instructional technology, focusing on human-computer interaction and in the ethnography of computing in the workplace of learning. In each case, the goal of the research is to produce both practical and critical knowledge about teaching, learning and technology.

History

Services

Walk-in Consultations

Workshops and Seminars

Assessment Videos

Programs

Faculty Mentoring

Blackboard Institute

CTE Faculty Fellows

CTE Graduate Fellows

Events

Spring Semester 2006

Handbook* Faculty Handbook on Teaching Excellence

Resources* Content Management Tools?

• Blackboard

Connections

• The Library
• Computer Science