New A&S colleagues and returning A&S faculty,
Welcome back! As always, I hope your summer has afforded you a productive and uninterrupted time to pursue your creative and scholarly endeavors while also being relaxing and restorative.
My conversations with everyone returning to campus have been filled with excitement about the new academic session. This year is remarkable, not only because of the size of the entering class (925 at last count), but more importantly, because of diversity among these new students. Students of color make up nearly 25% of the first-year class, and over a fifth of our new students are the first generation in their families to attend college.
As we meet this amazing new group of students, there are questions I am confident we are all asking ourselves:
- Are we ready to meet the needs of this entering class?
- Will we be able to provide these new students with the challenges and opportunities that will allow them to make the most of their liberal arts education at Richmond?
- At the end of four years, what will the class of 2013 say about their teachers at Richmond?
While teaching is always at the forefront of our professional goals, this year, perhaps as never before, we are focused on this primary objective. This year the faculty is committed to begin preparations for the new first-year seminars, to engage in extended discussion of the general education curriculum, and to explore new ways to provide additional interdisciplinary offerings that cut across our five schools.
These are ambitious goals, but we have shown we are ready for the challenges ahead. This fall we will be launching our new Integrative Quantitative Science program (IQS) for first-year students. Ten faculty from five departments will team teach this course that was developed as part of a yearlong faculty seminar. IQS integrates the first courses in biology, chemistry, computer science, calculus, and physics and includes an entirely new set of integrated laboratory experiences. Seventy-eight students applied for the twenty available slots in the course. Clearly, our new first-year students want this kind of intellectual challenge.
We will have two additional faculty seminars in the Spring term also focused on curricular development. A group of American Studies faculty will participate in the first Tocqueville Faculty Development Seminar. These faculty, joined by Professor Winfried Fluck, University of Berlin, will be collaborating on the development of new courses that examine American Studies from a transnational perspective. Another group of colleagues will be part of a faculty seminar that will develop the core and capstone curriculum for the new Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law major. With the distinctive assets of our five schools we are ideally poised to become a national leader in these two areas of interdisciplinary study.
While these faculty seminars are an important collective endeavor, great teaching is a process of continuous individual improvement. Just as we want our teaching to challenge our students’ existing conceptions and paradigms, we need to examine our own pedagogical practices with equal rigor. As part of that pursuit, I hope you will take a few minutes to read the attached article by Ken Bain, “Understanding Great Teaching.” In four pages Bain examines how great teachers overcome students’ pre-existing ways of knowing and learning with the goal of moving students from being what he calls “surface” and “strategic” learners to “deep” learners.
I trust this article will provide you with additional insight as we go about the most important part of our job—student learning. In the dean’s office we are eager to help you in whatever way we can as you work with your students to provide them the very best in learning opportunities.
Best wishes,
Andy
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