| Ann Ferren Teaching Conference garners record attendance
BY MIKE UNGER
Pat Aufderheide considers herself the poster child for the Ann Ferren Teaching Conference.
As the reigning AU Scholar-Teacher of the Year, Aufderheide delivered the keynote address at Friday’s 16th annual conference, sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence. But Aufderheide wasn’t always the calm, cool, and collected educator who spoke in front of more than 200 faculty members, the conference’s largest turnout ever.
“The biggest problem I had in learning how to teach was fear,” said Aufderheide, a SOC professor. “I feared that someone would figure out that I was screwing up. Fifteen years ago I was doing a [wretched] job of communicating with my students. So I took the advice of the deans who told me to seek help at the Ann Ferren Teaching Conference. It turns out there are lots of people who will not look upon me as a failed teacher because I’m looking for help. I think I have the skills now to meet my goals of being a good enough teacher, and I don’t think there’s anything natural about it.”
Aufderheide’s tale is music to the ears of John Richardson and Lyn Stallings, the director and associate director, respectively, of the CTE.
“The goal of CTE is to facilitate effective teaching and the conference plays an important role in this by giving faculty a chance to share their experiences and share their ideas on different facets of teaching,” Richardson said. “It’s an opportunity for faculty to gather and learn from each other about ideas for quality teaching.”
Aufderheide was introduced by Provost Neil Kerwin, who spoke about teaching and called Aufderheide a “masterful teacher and fine scholar.”
“It has been my position that there is no tension between scholarship and teaching,” he said. “Our students tell us that the faculty are deeply engaged in the educational process.”
After Aufderheide’s remarks, faculty filed into one of nine symposiums, where more than 40 faculty took part in panels. Topics for the early session included civility, interactive learning, integrating international students into the classroom, and feminist pedagogy.
Another topic was using D.C. as a laboratory. Professors encouraged their peers to both bring guest speakers into their classrooms, and bring their students out of the classroom and into Washington’s leading institutions.
“On any topic you can think of, there are literally hundreds of interest groups,” said Diane Lowenthal, an American politics professor for Washington Semester who led the discussion.
But the District’s resources are not limited to governmental entities. The city is a thriving center for technology and biotech companies as well.
“Washington is a phenomenal place,” said David Post, an accounting professor at Kogod. “I’ve taught at Duke and Chapel Hill, and the resources Washington brings to bear are absolutely incredible.”
The later session featured discussions on integrating ethics and learning, teaching writing, teaching outside the box, and outcomes of community-based learning at AU.
Among those in attendance were product development representatives from Blackboard, the company that makes the software AU uses for its courses, Richardson said.
Aufderheide, who earned three degrees from the University of Minnesota, said she considers herself a learner more than a teacher.
“The core of our task here is to be perpetual learners,” she said. “That’s what makes us university professors. We don’t just know a lot, we know how to find things out. We are constantly adding to and changing the living organism that is human knowledge. We do it for ourselves and for the future of our fields of knowledge.
“We’re not just intellectual FedEx,” Aufderheide said. “Our goal is not just to communicate what we know, it’s to communicate the vocation that we’re feeling. We want to give them contexts. We want to give them methods. I see students go from people who have absolutely no questions about my work to students who show up early because they want to discuss what they’ve seen or what they’ve read. I work hard at teaching, and I see that they work hard at learning.”
Reprinted from American Weekly, Jan. 11, 2005.
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