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ERIC Number: EJ1195422
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 5
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0009-1383
EISSN: N/A
The Leading Edge of Pedagogical Innovation: A Portrait of National Winners of the US Professors of the Year Competition, 1981-2015
Huber, Mary Taylor
Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, v50 n3-4 p79-83 2018
The past fifty years have witnessed a sea of change in teaching and learning in higher education. In a general shift of emphasis from teaching to learning, best symbolized by Robert Barr and John Tagg's much cited 1995 "Change" article, "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," reformers have introduced an array of new media pedagogies, active learning strategies, high impact practices, and novel approaches to classroom inquiry and improvement. While surveys can suggest how widely these new teaching practices have spread, they are limited in their capacity to capture the creativity involved in teaching well--with new or, for that matter, more traditional approaches. By contrast, the US Professors of the Year awards, offered from 1981-2015, afford a much more in-depth view of the leading edge of pedagogical innovation. Led by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Higher Education (CASE) in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, this program served as the only sustained national teaching award in US higher education that cut across the disciplines and recognized exemplary teachers from all major institutional types. Over its thirty-five-year history, 101 national winners were named--one annually from 1981-1993, then four each year from 1994-2015, representing the major types of higher education institutions: community colleges, baccalaureate colleges, master's colleges and universities, and doctoral universities. Annual winners were also selected from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories, when there were enough entries of sufficient quality. From the 1990s on, the number of nominations fluctuated from around 300 to 500 per year. Of course, this is a select group. By definition, they are not average college teachers, and they don't reflect the growing numbers of faculty in contingent and other non-tenure-track appointments over those same years. Still, if one wants to see how creativity in undergraduate teaching has developed over the past 35 years, this is a promising group to explore. This article discusses what educational innovations look like in the hands of teachers recognized as exemplary by their own institution and by the competition's judges. The article asks what has changed over time, and what has remained the same in the dossiers of those who have won this award. The article explores what has lasted the test of time throughout the decades, and how these faculty members engaged departmental, disciplinary, and institutional colleagues in pedagogical and curricular change?
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A