In this chapter we describe the Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University and how Decoding has been used in new and multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum, and research projects that are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.

A number of universities in the United Kingdom (UK) have launched institution-wide initiatives recently to embed inquiry and research more firmly into the student experience. Among these, the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) led a five-year development program at The University of Sheffield (TUOS) between…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

The University of Gloucestershire, located in the southwest of the United Kingdom, is a small university with approximately 7,500 full-time students and 400 teaching staff. It has three faculties, all with a professional or applied focus: (1) Media, Art, and Technology; (2) Business, Education, and Professional Studies; and (3) Applied Sciences.…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

The study of management in historical and comparative perspective can help resolve tensions between business and the liberal arts in undergraduate education. With the stimulus provided by the Professional Preparation Network, the Business Department at Skidmore College has developed a set of courses for the college's liberal studies core…

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute demonstrates that the gap presumed to exist between university faculty and school teachers can be bridged by building an intensive, long-term collaboration focusing on subjects considered most important by teachers for strengthening their own teaching. (Author/MLW)

The Stockton Connection, voluntary summer seminars, focuses on bringing to middle and high school faculty continuing updates on the most recent developments in the various content areas--selected, summarized, and simplified with an eye to classroom use, and presented to students to develop higher-order thinking skills. (MLW)

The steady emergence of small-college honors programs in the early 1970s and the subsequent rapid growth of community college honors programs after 1978 are reviewed. The many successes in these colleges to capitalize on their existing strengths have avoided the problems of larger, university programs. (Author/MSE)

Fiscal threats mobilized a coalition of administrators and senior faculty at Long Island University's Brooklyn (New York) campus to address student retention. Drawing on collaborative curricular models from the honors program, the coalition created mutually reinforcing faculty development initiatives, to the benefit of both faculty retention and…