The Teaching Excellence Center (TEC) and the Center for Sustainability are two new initiatives recently developed at Principia. Both centers will be focused on introducing and developing concepts that have been touched on at the college in the past few years but have never fully developed.
The TEC will provide support for professors and promote new teaching methods. It will focus on supporting professors at the college by creating a space for them to work together and share ideas. The Center for Sustainability will help Principia “green up” the campus by centralizing sustainability issues.
The TEC will be a continuation of current faculty-sponsored teacher support groups and teaching workshops that were instigated over the last two years. This new center will support faculty development and provide a place for professors to get help, collaborate on ideas for inside the classroom, and improve their level of teaching. It has been approved for one year, although it currently has no location.
Newly appointed TEC director Libby Scheiern said that “the purpose for the Teaching Excellence Center is to promote and support excellence in the classroom and to continue the development of character education.” Scheiern also said that the TEC mission is “to develop faculty excellence in general pedagogy, learning theory, teaching methodology, education assessment, and character education in order to enhance student learning.” The TEC will systematically help professors inside the classroom, and provide resources for faculty such as a resource library.
Scheiern said that most institutions of higher education have a center for faculty support and professional development, so Principia’s progress in this regard says a lot about the college.
Dean of Academics Scott Schneberger said that the TEC will bring together two important activities: 1) a teacher support group where “new teachers can ask each other questions,” and 2) a teaching excellence group which will “host lunchtime events for professors.” The teaching excellence group will also host talks by outside professionals, give out books to help improve teaching processes, and send professors to conferences. Schneberger said that few people recognize that professors are “experts in their field, but not necessarily in teaching.” The center will help professors learn new ideas about and styles of teaching and promote academics on campus. As Schneberger said, “The new administration has been focusing on improving our academic excellence, and the Teaching Excellence Center is part of that overall strategy.”
In addition to the TEC, another new initiative, the Center for Sustainability, has been launched. The idea for this center began last fall with a tiger team composed of students and faculty, who worked for a week over winter break on sustainability issues. Newly appointed interim director of the center Mike Rechlin said that this Tiger Team discussed both the Center for Sustainability and a sustainability minor.
The center will help “green up Principia” and will centralize sustainability issues. Rechlin said the center will be “a focal point for coordinating campus greening activities” and will encourage students to become more involved in sustainability efforts on campus. The tiger team’s original proposal said that the center would help Principia to “better educate our students for the coming ‘green economy’ as well as foster student recruitment to a cutting edge academic and intellectual campus environment.” The center will focus on issues such as recycling, and water and energy conservation.
