10 January 2006
Dear TLA Colleagues,
I am so disappointed not to be able to join you for this first week of TLA dialogue in the New Year. But I’ll be engaged in another conversation on teaching and learning in PaloAlto at Stanford at the Carnegie Foundation where 21 of us from across the U.S. and other countries will be reporting out on our research projects. As some of you know, I am studying the “Metaphors We Learn By,” that is, metaphors learners use to describe themselves. I look forward to sharing the results of my study with all of you, too.
For those of you joining the TLA conversation for the first time and for those of you interested in recalling where we’ve been, I’d like to highlight some features from our collective past. Dedicated to self study, the TLA has been working together since 2000 to understand better the learning culture at WWU and also to make it better. While the primary product of our dialogue is a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our learning environment, we have also taken important action. For example, TLA contributed significantly to the recommendations for changing/reducing the GURs. Last year, together with the Center for Service-Learning, the TLA forwarded a proposal for Western’s development of the Waterfront that includes a center for dialogue, an idea that was enthusiastically received by the review committee. That proposal is still under consideration by the committee. Two prominent suggestions emerging from fall quarter’s dialogue are being advanced as we speak: 1) Creating more dialogue opportunities for first-year and new students that would enable upper class students to inform and guide entering students and 2)exploring the creation of TLA satellites across campus where students could enter into disciplinary-based dialogue in departments for credit. Several students and others are pursuing formal proposals this quarter through independent study credit and other means for realizing those suggestions.
Fall quarter, in answer to what we think it means to be an educated person, we outlined several hallmarks of an ideal education including abelief in life-long learning, a valuing of process (not just product), increased individual sense of responsibility for making good learning happen, and opportunities to reflect on and apply learning in authentic ways. This quarter, we look to focusing on a related big question “How do we honor and sustain the kind of education” we have said we want. While we only have 50 minutes five times during the quarter, I am confident that we will deepen our understanding and generate even more exciting ways to make WWU a better place to teach and learn.
Now, I want to turn it over to Peter, TLA Program Assistant, who will introduce you to the conversational ground rules we hope you will endorse and then to Damion Sweeney who will lead you in an exciting process of “Open Questions.” I look forward to what comes out of your first conversations and to the second round of TLA sessions when I will be sitting right beside you.
Best wishes for a thoughtful and provocative quarter of dialogue,
Carmen