Consulting
Faculty Pedagogy Seminars

Beginning in the eighties as national director of the Lilly Endowment’s Post-Doctoral Teaching Awards Program, Gregory began organizing and directing both workshops and seminars on pedagogy. In the last decade, Gregory has regularly directed seminars at his home institution, Butler University; for ten years at Emory University; for three years at Mercy College (in Westchester County, NY), and at other institutions across the country. (Comments from faculty participants about Gregory's Pedagogy Seminars.)

Gregory’s pedagogy seminars are based on the following principles:

• That in order for anyone’s teaching to remain vital and fresh over a whole career, teaching has to work for the teacher as a persistent part of his or her own ongoing education
• That teachers are often too busy teaching to become reflective about it, and thus need some dedicated time and intellectual stimulation in order to make reflection a habitual part of their teaching practice
• That teachers will learn to improve their teaching most effectively not by being told what to do but by having the opportunity to pursue their own ideas with some degree of completeness and in conversation with other teachers

In keeping with these principles, Gregory does not direct his seminars by herding the participants toward common acceptance of any single theory of teaching. Rather, Gregory orchestrates a prolonged conversation among a group of participants. Gregory has experience at keeping a group conversation productive and cohesive, in the context of which teachers are liberated to teach themselves and each other.

Pedagogy Seminar aims and contents:

Purpose
The purpose of the pedagogy seminar is to provide faculty from a variety of colleges and disciplines across the university the opportunity to think creatively and searchingly about theories and ideas that contribute to good teaching.  This opportunity includes:

• a stimulating set of readings both classic and contemporary;
• an interesting group of companions and colleagues;
• a wide array of ideas established, speculative, hypothetical, and experimental;
• a series of conversations and discussions the flow of which will not be interrupted or broken by meetings, students, telephones, or classes;
• and a designated place and time (usually with remuneration).

Participants

• I limit seminar enrollment to twelve participants.
• I enjoy mixing teachers from professional schools such as medicine, law, and business with teachers from the traditional humanities, arts, and sciences.
• The schools that sponsor the seminars generally limit participation to full-time teachers (including Lecturers and non-tenure track faculty), but I do not object to participants from adjunct ranks.
• The seminar is best served if participants include a mixture of senior and junior faculty, men and women, ethnic diversity, and widely varying disciplines.
• Faculty are usually compensated in acknowledgement of the time and energy they invest in their own professional and intellectual development.

Contents
A seminar approach to teaching (as opposed to a workshop approach) encourages teachers to take a reflective look at what they do and especially at the intellectual infrastructure of ideas, concepts, metaphors, and values that support their practice. The primary method of learning is conversation. The seminar offers participants the opportunity to have an extended and connected conversation about issues that are too nuanced and complicated for teachers to pursue of their own amongst the busyness of meetings and classes. The seminar creates an oasis where such nuanced and complicated ideas can be pursued in rich talk but without distractions. It also offers participants the opportunity of hearing people from other departments and colleges talk about teaching from their point of view, which is both instructive and illuminating. The content of the seminar will fuel discussion and reflection with a set of readings that range across such pedagogical issues as

• the ethics of teaching
• metaphors of teaching and how they work
• whether teaching is a kind of “calling,” a kind of professionalism, or both
• whether core pedagogy does or should differ from pedagogy in the majors
• the rationale for different pedagogical strategies
• the distinctive features of different pedagogical strategies
• the implications of multiculturalism for pedagogy
• the proper role of teacherly power and authority
• the strengths and weaknesses of a “decentered” pedagogical authority
• the strengths and weaknesses of such pedagogical strategies as peer-tutoring and collaborative learning
• the strengths and weaknesses of self-consciously “ideological” pedagogies such as “feminist pedagogy,” “postmodern pedagogy,” “subversive pedagogy,” or “confessional" pedagogy”
• how to handle the tension between students’ need for deliberate pacing vs. the disciplinary imperative for maximum coverage
• whether “teaching the conflicts” is a really useful suggestion or not
• and other issues as they arise

Format and Schedule
The seminar can be compressed or expanded to fit any time frame:

• a day or two
• a week or two
• a semester in residency as a Visiting Professor
• I do/have done all of the above.

References

Walter Reed
Emory University
William Rand Kenan, Jr. University Professor; Department of English
Director, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
Founding director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum 1996-2000

Robert McCauley
Emory University
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum 2001-2004

Patrick Allitt
Emory University
Professor, Department of History
Current director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum

Louise Feroe
President, Mercy College (New York)

Bobby Fong
President, Butler University

Bill Berry
Provost, Butler University

Director’s Fees
Contact Marshall Gregory directly.

© 2005 Copyright Marshall Gregory