Welcome to the website for the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center!

This site will give visitors a sense of how the TLC will build out its programming over the coming months. Our primary mission is to support GC students as they develop as college teachers and, as such, we critically engage the myriad spaces that impact our classrooms. The TLC will offer support for a range of instructional practices and methodologies, host instructional design workshops, and generate discussion about innovative pedagogy. But we also believe that effective pedagogy is both contextual and grounded in a sense of community. The perspectives of committed educators must stretch beyond the classroom to question and intervene in the institutions, curricula, and environments in which teaching and learning are embedded. We must critically engage the tools and resources with which students learn.

The TLC will infuse its programming with these ideas. Our goal is to coalesce a community of teachers and scholars at the Graduate Center and beyond who will engage the structures, policies, spaces, and communities that shape higher education, and who will commit to working together to make sure our classrooms and curricula are as vibrant, stimulating, creative, empowering, and rigorous as the they can possibly be.

The TLC site features the following:

TLC Guides
Nine TLC Guides will be published during the Spring 2016 semester: New to Teaching, Teaching in the Disciplines, Educational Technology, WAC/WID/QR, Navigating CUNY, The CUNY Lexicon, Professional Development, Grants, and the Job Market. These documents will collect and organize materials, links, and best practices that will be of particular assistance to those who teach at CUNY, and will be living documents that grow and evolve over time in response to feedback and new ideas from the communities they engage and serve.

Workshops
The TLC will hold workshops throughout the Spring 2016 semester on a range of pedagogical questions, ideas, and opportunities. All of our workshops will be hands-on, participatory events, intended to give attendees skills, ideas, and methods that they can use and build upon. In Spring 2016 we will hold workshops on Creative Assignment Design, Teaching with Open Access Materials, Working with ELL/ESL Students, Teaching with Web-Based Technology, Social Reading, Social Writing, and Approaches to Course Design. For more details, see our Workshops page.

The TLC Forum
At the heart of effective pedagogy lay dialogue and community, practice and iteration. Please join the Teaching and Learning Center’s group on the CUNY Academic Commons to participate in our community of educators. Members of the group will receive announcements, and can use the TLC Forum to share questions and best practices, find collaborators, and participate in robust discussions about teaching at CUNY and beyond.

Office Hours
TLC staff are available to meet with members of the Graduate Center community (students, faculty, and staff) to discuss assignment and course design, a range of teaching methodologies, the integration of educational technology into courses, preparing teaching materials for the job market, and the development of special projects. Our drop in hours are available here, and additional appointments are available by request.

Special Projects
The TLC partners with colleagues at the Graduate Center and beyond on special projects that innovate or invigorate classroom practices. Current special projects include Teach@CUNY Day, what we plan to make into a yearly event at the Graduate Center that immerses members of the community in dialogue and activity about what it means to teach at CUNY (and beyond), as well as the CUNY Humanities Teaching and Learning Alliance, a Mellon-funded partnership between the TLC, the GC’s Futures Initiative, and Laguardia Community College’s Center for Teaching and Learning that places 27 Graduate Center doctoral students in community college classrooms and deeply supports their work.

Thank you for checking us out, and stay tuned for more announcements and activity coming very soon.

If you have questions, you can reach out to me at lwaltzer at gc.cuny.edu or, better yet, share them in the TLC Forum.

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CC-licensed image courtesy of David Lofink