As a Faculty Fellow at Mercy College, I am implementing a year-long ‘faculty professional development innovation incubator.’ I have designed a process that builds on my scholarship on teaching and learning that I am calling play-oriented pedagogy. The innovation incubator’s focus is on co-creating conditions for learning.
The purpose of this project is two-fold:
- To create a development process where faculty members learn to design and implement active learning conditions in line with their pedagogy by using improvisation and innovation skill sets.
- To explore and learn from Mercy faculty their individual practices for active learning that fosters conditions for learning and promotes student engagement.
The methodology I’m designing is incubator process which brings together faculty across disciplines drawing on their innovative practices for student learning and engagement while building up their capacity to improvise, engage ambiguity, and take risks, which is central to innovation.
Drawing on practice-based evidence, faculty will learn student engagement activities for improving student’s learning experiences. In partnership with Matt Lewis of FCTL and drawing on my 15+ years of applied improvisation, we will lead faculty development workshops in improvisation-based activities and mindsets/practices for growing student engagement which faculty can then use in their classrooms. We will build on each others’ practices. This process will also help in unpacking their tacit knowledge and innovative pedagogical practices for student learning and help create an actionable resource base, transferable across disciplines and courses.
