An attack on teaching and learning centers

Colleges and universities should close teaching and learning centers because they threaten good teaching,  That’s the argument of a recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, and I wanted to address it here.

I’ll summarize the substance of “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong: In offloading pedagogical expertise to nonscholars, colleges degrade the classroom,” as it’s behind a paywall. Next I’ll share my negative reactions, followed my trying to take a more temperate stance.  I’d really like to hear from readers.

Before beginning, I should put my cards on the table, as my professional background gives me a perhaps atypical take.  On the one hand, I am a university professor and have taught in higher ed for many years: as a grad student; at a liberal arts college, like the author of the column under question; at a nonprofit, leading workshops; now at a research university. Throughout those positions and years I’ve been committed to improving my own teaching by a variety of means, from classroom experimentation, using emerging digital technologies, taking workshops, talking with colleagues, interviewing practitioners, and publishing on the results.  All of this should make me a receptive reader to Paul Schofield’s call for a return to faculty teaching faculty how to teach better.

On the other hand, I have had many connections to teaching and learning centers.  Among my many relationships with nearly all aspects of academic institutions I have done a lot of work with teaching and learning centers and related faculty and staff.  To pick just one example, we hosted Mary Wright, a leader in that world, on the Future Trends Forum in 2024:

I mentioned my current teaching, which is in Georgetown University’s Learning, Design, and Technology MA program.  Some of those graduates have gone, or will go on, to work in or adjacent to teaching and learning centers in multiple nations.  And LDT is deeply intertwined with the Center for New Designs in Teaching and Learning (CNDLS) office.

The latter experience drove me to fume at Schofield’s article. I’ll portray that rancor below, then try for a more balanced response.

1 Putting teaching and learning centers on the chopping block: the argument

Bates College Associate Professor of Philosophy Paul E. Schofield wants the reader to understand that teaching and learning centers are a bad mistake for higher education.  They degrade rather than improve pedagogy, and as a result should be closed.

Schofield’s article begins by describing an institutional arc.  Teaching and learning centers appeared on campuses through donor intervention, not by organic faculty demand, and grew in influence and power over time.  Such centers eventually supplant, then replace the pedagogical development work faculty members previously did on their own.  This yields two problems: first, the centers’ scholarship is often poor; second, faculty stop doing pedagogical work within their own departments.  “[I]t is those who work and teach in these specific fields who are the real teaching experts.”

Schofield then expands his critique.  Faculty using teaching and learning centers entails outsourcing a key function best done by professors themselves. It also involves too many metrics, crushing the full rich complexity of teaching into a few quantitative measures.  This is a form of value capture:

when an institution’s attempts to quantify or measure something of significance cause a person’s rich, subtle values to become flattened and distorted — often so much so that those values transform into something alien or even hostile.

The results are poor, as faculty “are being acculturated by staff outside of their discipline to talk and teach in the same, insipid, homogenized ways that faculty in every other discipline do.”  Centers crush the important differences between academic disciplines.

The article ends with two calls to action.  Faculty can just skip teaching and learning centers:

Faculty members can simply reclaim the various roles they’ve outsourced. We can resist using pedagogical jargon to characterize what we do; we can ignore spurious advice based on spurious studies; we can spend less time attending workshops about how to teach students and more time actually teaching them.

Or campuses can just shut centers down: “teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block.”  (I think discussion of the article has largely missed this clear call to fire a lot of academics.)

2 Some critical reactions

So what’s wrong with “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong”?

My first response was that the article offers a weird caricature of the centers for teaching and learning world.  Everything I’ve seen of the reality has been of thoughtful people, deeply committed to teaching and learning, embedded in scholarship, humble and caring. Unlike Schofield’s picture of a campus-capturing Goliath, they instead to be lightly funded and overstretched Davids, trying hard to scale up their work.  Instead of being Powerpoint-wielding robots they are people devoted to listening and relationship-building.  Centers staff are uniformly eager to learn and improve.

Indeed, the picture Schofield sketches offers a nearly cartoonish opposition.  On the one hand there are malign, soulless, ill-informed and -educated staff who crush teaching and learning.  On the other, good-hearted professors energetically focused on improving their teaching, housed on departments keen on student learning. It’s easy to pick out counterexamples from life which oppose either of these images, as I’m sure the reader can do.  I can easily think of centers staff with advanced and terminal degrees as well as faculty members who are not interested in changing their teaching practice. Some of those centers staff are also faculty members, and some – many – faculty are not full time employees (see below). But this simple, fictional binary is what powers the article; questioning it undoes the edifice.

I mentioned my own experience and the reader’s because that’s the sole evidentiary basis for the article: the author’s account of his experience. That one person in a single department in one college apparently speaks for the immense diversity of roughly 4,000 American colleges and universities.  There isn’t even a gesture towards national studies, nor any awareness of institutions other than an elite liberal arts college.  We could consider research universities, for example, which place teaching firmly in second place.  We could also consider the largest segment of the teaching professoriate, which is not, unlike Dr. Schofield, tenured faculty members.  Instead, adjuncts teach more than anyone else and generally lack the deep or cozy departmental immersion the article celebrates.

Adjuncts are, sadly, utterly absent from the column, which offers an interesting picture of privilege. The author opposes tenured faculty to centers staff, who are usually staff, lacking the protections and power tenure can afford.  To readers attuned to questions of positionality and power, it looks like a simple case of punching down.  And punching down hard – don’t forget the author’s call to fire these people.

More, I simply don’t buy the argument that teaching and learning centers are somehow black holes on campus, dragging hapless faculty to their doom. (The gravitational metaphor is Schofield’s.) These centers lack the ability to prevent professors from having conversations with each other, from reading the scholarship of teaching (in Boyer’s famous phrase), from consulting with peers elsewhere.  Indeed, they support and celebrate faculty doing such work beyond the center.  Here’s what Trey Conatser, Assistant Provost for Teaching & Learning and Director of CELT at the University of Kentucky, has to say:

We don’t have anything close to that authority by many orders of magnitude. Like, none of us do, anywhere. And we will be cheering when we learn that faculty have started a teaching excellence committee, or a pedagogy reading group, or a course redesign initiative, or whatever, in their own department. The idea that a professor would feel so intimidated by a CTL that they would hesitate to discuss teaching with their colleague in the office next door is laughable.

Weirdly, Schofield ultimately agrees at the end, undoing his argument, when he recommends that faculty who can’t fire centers staff just ignore them.  If not listening is so easily done, where’s the threat?

Further, the lite binary sketched out in “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong” manages to miss other campus other units.  I was surprised to not see the library make an appearance, especially for a humanist author.  Libraries play all kinds of teaching roles, from teaching information literacy and library use to supporting students in their research.  Educational technology departments also go missing here, even though they perform so many key teaching and learning functions, from teaching faculty and staff to use software to supporting classroom tech, running multiple educational applications to researching the implications of new digital tools and issues, just to name a few.  I’m not sure what Schofield would make of other centers, such as those dedicated to quantitative literacy (surely of some interest to a Liebniz scholar) or GIS.  I can hazard some guesses about how the author might direct the ax, but that’s all I can do, given the material.

One more point.  Making educational materials accessible (in terms of disabilities) is a major problem in terms of ethics, potential lawsuits, and federal policy.  Right now teaching and learning centers, along with libraries and educational technologies, are often campus leaders in trying to get this important work done.  Faculty alone have not done so, despite some good intentions. The problem is a hard one and clearly needs a collaborative approach to solve.

3 Listening further

Let me pause my critique here.  When I read “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong” I was furious.  I shared the thing across social media and vented various complaints in all directions.  Quite a few folks agreed with my howls of outrage.  Unsurprisingly I found many instances of people issuing their own takedowns, notably on LinkedIn.

Then I received a lot of pushback from faculty online.  I disagreed with nearly all, but instead of arguing with them I wanted to listen hard and take their critiques seriously.

(I haven’t gotten permission to share quotes, so will paraphrase here.)

Many who shared Schofield’s views spoke not just of their respective centers (none referred to national studies) but instead saw those staff as part of larger university systems they disagreed with.  Like Schofield they saw centers as pressing for pedagogies focused on metrics, rubrics, standards, and learning outcomes – which these faculty disliked – and that those came from on high, either the generic “administration” or from specific senior figures (a dean, a vice president) and policies (accreditation efforts).  These discussants didn’t share my view of centers staff as lonely, politically unprotected workers, but as elements of institutional mechanisms imposed from the very top. (None added the outside influence Schofield mentioned.)

Along these lines, a few interlocutors disagreed with me flat out on the power of centers.  These faculty members reported enormous pressure to take center programs, to collaborate with center staff, and administrative threats if they did not.

Others echoed the article’s emphasis on faculty supporting faculty members.  Several referred to steeping themselves in decades of teaching experience and wanting to work with others in a similar position.  In contrast, they preferred to not work with centers staff whom they saw as having little to no such experience.

Several focused on the metrics argument, telling me what they valued in teaching went beyond those measurements.  They feared centers-style teaching gutted their pedagogy.

Overall this pushback seemed to me tp describe another, related version of Schofield’s binary.  On the one hand they saw themselves committed to teaching and wanting to learn from similar folks. That teaching is largely qualitative and psychological, a powerful intervention in students’ lives. On the other hand they saw centers as tools of oppressive administrations, integrated attacks on the abilities, nature, and identities of professors.  Schofield didn’t use this language, but it feels like a labor argument about who gets to do what work under what conditions, and how we define a given academic profession.

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I’ll stop here, as this post is nearly as long at the column it addresses.  I’d really like to hear from you all, especially faculty members and centers staff.

To further stir the conversational pot, here are some more items to read on the topic. Professor Brandon Zicha agrees with Schofield. The Bates center’s director posted this reaction and invitation.  Thomas Tobin offers, as always, good fodder for thought.  Here’s Conatser’s full LinkedIn post.  Amanda H issued this critique.  Philip Dawson turns on the sarcasm.

(thanks to many fine folks for talking with me about this, including David Ebenbach, Maggie Debelius, Kevin Gannon, Tom Tobin, and the Remaking the University group)