2005-06 Colloquy on Teaching and Learning for
Mid-Career Religion Faculty at Colleges and Universities

Description:
The Wabash Center is pleased to announce its Mid-Career Colloquy on teaching. The colloquy covers an extensive period of a teacher’s life, from the granting of tenure (or its equivalent) and the last decade or so before retirement. This period in a teaching career presents its own particular challenges for teaching and learning. This is a time when reflection can help mid-career faculty to identify possibilities, renew commitment, venture in a heretofore unconsidered direction, and compose a more clarified sense of self and purpose. At this point faculty find themselves asking questions such as:

How do faculty find they have changed and adapted to the demands and culture of their institution?

How does a mid-career person keep herself/himself interested and retain a sense of who they are and what they are doing?

What are the boundaries and rhythms of teaching, research, and citizenship at this stage in one’s career?

What are the necessary losses and the satisfactions that go with being generative and with being a leader at mid-career?

What is the relationship among leadership, roles, institutional context, and person?

How do mid-career faculty take on appropriately the role of generative leaders in their profession and in their institutions?

How do mid-career faculty continue to form themselves and to be formed?

The colloquy is an opportunity for mid-career faculty to gather for reflection on the particular challenges and opportunities of teaching at mid-career.

Goals:
To support sustained reflection on the rhythms, responsibilities, and challenges of teaching, scholarship, and university citizenship at mid-career;

• To support excellence in teaching and mentoring of teaching for faculty on the other side of the tenuring process;
• To provide opportunity and resources for participants to develop self-selected projects related to teaching and learning in their courses;
• To consider the shape and challenges of leadership for mid-career faculty at this time in the field and in higher education;
• To help mid-career faculty strategize about ways they can support and cultivate their own and others’ vocations as teachers;
• To develop projects that will encourage excellence in teaching in participants’ schools and broader academic settings.

Front Row (left to right): Carol Anderson (Kalamazoo College), Jeanette Rodriguez (Seattle University), *Patricia O’Connell Killen (Pacific Lutheran University), Christiana deGroot (Calvin College).

Second Row: *Lucinda Huffaker (Wabash Center), Margaret Odell (St. Olaf College), *Caroline Jones Medine (University of Georgia), Warren Frisina (Hofstra University).

Third Row: *Frederick M. Denny (University of Colorado, Boulder), Stacy Patty (Lubbock Christian University), Jane Harris (Hendrix College), Sandie Gravett (Appalachian State University), Susie Stanley (Messiah College).

Fourth Row: Mark Hulsether (University of Tennessee), Bruce Forbes (Morningside College), David Howell (Ferrum College), Merrill Hawkins (Carson-Newman College).

Fifth Row: *Eugene V. Gallagher (Connecticut College), Stephen Stell (Austin College), Madeline Duntley (Bowling Green University).

*leadership/staff