The divide between faculty members' positions as teachers and students' positions as learners can be challenging to see, much less overcome. As experts, faculty may fail to provide appropriate entry points or convey specific goals, even when they think they are succeeding in these areas. Because they are rooted in their experience of teaching…

Classrooms should be liberatory spaces where people are nurtured and content comes to life. But students and faculty frequently note the charged nature of the classroom, especially when course content focuses on aspects of identity such as race and ethnicity or dynamics related to power and inequality. This article describes a Faculty Dialogues…

The problem in promoting general education across the college curriculum is fundamentally attitudinal. Faculty must (1) recognize that general education coupled with a major is good vocational education, (2) prepare themselves to teach general education, and (3) convince students of its value. (MSE)

Faculty development as a central and continuing task in higher education can often be hampered by a mistaken over-concern for faculty autonomy. A collegial approach to faculty development may be an effective means for the improvement of teaching while respecting the rights and dignity of the teachers involved. (Author/MSE)

This article describes an interdisciplinary seminar for college faculty which focuses on the process of discovering and crossing disciplinary boundaries to work with colleagues on developing and teaching general education programs. Participants were interdisciplinary teams from different institutions. (MSE)

Broad changes in the academic culture and the curriculum since the 1960s are reviewed, and the need is emphasized for a re-formation of the curriculum to bring the student back into focus and to rebuild the humanities. (MSE)

Fairleigh Dickinson University (New Jersey) students take four core general education courses from the second half of the freshman year through the first half of the junior year. All sections have the same syllabus, and faculty teaching them on separate campuses review and refine the courses together. Core course faculty participated actively in a…

A former faculty member at Eisenhower College, an experimental college that closed after only a few years' operation, gives an anecdotal account of some of the problems the college faced and how the administration handled them. (MSE)

Five liberal arts teachers present their ideas about the need to prepare graduate students better for careers as college teachers. Issues addressed include teaching curriculum preparation; imparting a historical perspective on the academic community; the value of mentors; and student perceptions of the discontinuity between graduate study and…

Lessons learned while reforming the core curriculum at the College of Saint Catherine (Minnesota) are outlined, including: broad ownership of the curriculum by faculty is essential; sometimes curriculum issues are more about faculty than students; a means for arriving at consensus must be devised; planning should take the curriculum through its…