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The History of the Sheridan Center, 1997 Edition

Rebecca S. More
Associate Director, The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning
Brown University
1997

The mission of The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning is to improve the quality of teaching and the environment for learning at Brown University. The Sheridan Center builds upon the historic commitment of the University to excellence in teaching by recognizing the diversity of learning styles and of approaches to teaching. In order to encourage the exchange of ideas about teaching and learning, both within and across disciplines, The Sheridan Center consults and collaborates with the faculty, administration, graduate and undergraduate students. The Sheridan Center offers a broad range of programs, seminars, lectures and publications that address interdisciplinary pedagogical issues. It also assists departments and programs to realize the specific needs and potential of their disciplines. The Sheridan Center supports ongoing improvement of teaching for the benefit of the University and higher education in general. (March, 1993)

With these words, the Advisory Board, established by Harriet Sheridan and Provost Frank Rothman in 1992, articulated the University commitment to reflective teaching practice. The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University was founded by the late Harriet W. Sheridan, former Dean of the College and Professor of English, in 1987 as the Center for the Advancement of College Teaching (CACT). She chose the name because it embodied two concepts she felt were critical, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the acronym ACT for action. During the ten years since its inception, the Sheridan Center has continued to identify the pedagogical needs of Brown faculty and graduate teaching assistants and to develop and provide programs and services to support them. Dean Sheridan’s goal was that pedagogy should be designed to ensure learning by the greatest number of students; that faculty should recognize that the benefits inherent in diverse learning styles reflect Brown’s historic commitment to the creation of a diverse student population; and that the role of the teacher was to assist students to develop methods for learning which would maximize their own potential rather than merely replicate finite knowledge imparted by faculty. The Sheridan Center evolved quickly from a series of evening workshops for Graduate Teaching Assistants on strategies for teaching to a full academic year program of lectures, workshops and services open to the entire Brown community.

Following her resignation as Dean of the College due to serious illness, Dean Sheridan established the Center with the assistance of former President Howard W. Swearer, Provost Maurice Glicksman and former Dean of the Graduate School Phillip Stiles. She believed in “teaching artfully”, rather than “mechanistically”. To her, teaching to an imaginary student who thinks just as the teacher does is merely mechanistic teaching. Artful teaching is the ability to recognize diverse learning styles in student on order to help them realize their own potential. These convictions grew out of her long experience as a undergraduate professor of English at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, from 1953 until 1979. At Brown, she established the Curricular Advising Program, Modes of Analysis courses, the Writing Fellows Program, the UTRA program, and the Writing and Math Centers. The continued importance of these programs at Brown almost twenty years after her arrival in 1979 demonstrates her commitment to making Brown’s unique Open Curriculum serve student needs effectively. Her sensitivity to the value of diverse learning styles among students led her to join the Board of Directors of the Orton Dyslexia Society in 1982 and to launch the first conference on Learning Disabilities in Higher Education in 1985. She became one of the most articulate advocates to inclusive and democratic teaching, and was invited to be the keynote speaker at conferences until a just few months before her death in September, 1992.

The first year of the Center programs began in October, 1987 with a series of workshops “The Development of a Teaching Style” for graduate teaching assistants given by Brown faculty on a variety of teaching issues. Dean Sheridan saw these workshops as a way to help instructors at any stage in their career find “that particular quality in [themselves] that infuses [their] teaching in such a way as to... excite and challenge students”. Furthermore, she was concerned about the future professoriate and developed the Center programs as a means to answer the question “will [new Ph.D.s] be prepared to be advisors, to understand student needs, to be shapers of the curriculum, to be intellectual leaders on their campuses?”. She recognized that the key to helping graduate teaching assistants was to provide them with good role models and mentors. She enlisted the help of many senior members of the Brown faculty, including Leon Cooper, John Quinn, Michael Harper, Ted Sizer and many others, to demonstrate the validity of that relationship. The Center has continued to build on that fundamental relationship and the wide involvement of senior faculty in the Center, its programs and services, is the hallmark of the Sheridan Center.

From the beginning, Graduate Student Fellows were appointed to assist Dean Sheridan organize and promote an appealing menu of plenaries and workshops held in the Graduate Center. These were designed to broaden the horizons of graduate TAs on subjects such as Developing a Teaching Style, Balancing Teaching and Research, and Building a New Curriculum. The Center's chief business at that time was to prepare graduate students to teach Brown undergraduates, and to fulfill their teaching responsibilities as the future professoriate elsewhere. Those who attended a specified number of these Sheridan Center events were awarded a Teaching Certificate at the end of the year which recognized their commitment to teaching.

In 1989 The Sheridan Center, as CACT, was part of a three year grant project under the aegis of FIPSE in conjunction with the Association of American Colleges and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, "Preparing Graduate Students for the Professional Responsibilities of College Teachers", which focused on the transition from teaching in universities to teaching in colleges. Faculty and graduate students from four departments at Brown (Classics, English, History, Religious Studies) were teamed with their colleagues at Connecticut College. As a result, from 1989 to 1992 The Sheridan Center was able to offer a more extensive and comprehensive program involving faculty and graduate students in plenary and workshop sessions.

Since the death of Prof. Sheridan in 1992, The Sheridan Center has continued to expand its activities. The Sheridan Teaching Seminar provides a interdisciplinary forum for teaching issues by offering lectures and workshops centered around the Teaching Portfolio as a means of demonstrating reflective teaching practice. These explore a broad range of topics, including cognitive process, persuasive communication and student feedback. A New Teaching Assistant Orientation is offered in the fall for all beginning teaching assistants to introduce them to the specifics of teaching at Brown. The Sheridan Center offers a Teaching Certificate to those graduate students who attend the Sheridan Teaching Seminar regularly, and who participate in both a departmental Micro-Teaching session and an Individual Teaching Consultation. The Sheridan Center Services Handbook contains a full account of all Sheridan Center programs and activities.

The Sheridan Center Individual Teaching Consultation has become the most valuable service offered to faculty and graduate students. A group of trained consultants, including the four Sheridan Center Faculty Teaching Fellows [in 1997-98 these will be Professor Emerita Patricia Arant (Slavic), Professors Jonathan Waage (Biology), Mary Gluck (History) and Thompson Webb (Geology)], are available to observe classes and provide constructive feedback designed to help instructors attain their own teaching goals.

The Sheridan Center also has a variety of publications in addition to The Teaching Exchange : a series of handbooks, Teaching at Brown, Constructing a Syllabus, Instructional Assessment in Higher Education, Teaching Portfolios, Teaching and Persuasive Communication and the forthcoming Teaching to Cognitive Diversity. The Sheridan Center videotape "Effective Teaching for Dyslexic/All College Students" is still distributed nationally and internationally.

The Center, which Dean Sheridan created ten years ago as a gesture of optimism and faith in the future in spite of her own illness, has continued to dedicate itself to the vision which she had for it as a forum for “Artful Teaching”. Central to the establishment and implementation of that vision was the collaboration of a enormous number of administrators, faculty members, graduate students, parents and friends. The Center is firmly rooted in serving clearly articulated pedagogical needs. As a result, the staff of part-time Director, part-time Associate Director, full-time Administrative Assistant and four Graduate Teaching Fellows is augmented by the four Faculty Teaching Fellows, the Individual Teaching Consultants, Faculty Teaching Liaisons and Graduate Student Liaisons from each department as well as the Sheridan Center Advisory Board, drawn from the faculty, administration and Corporation of the University. Chief among the many parents and friends who have supported the Center from its inception are Chancellor of the University, Artemis A. W. Joukowsky, and Prof. Martha Sharp Joukowsky (Anthropology and Old World Archaeology). Their commitment to Dean Sheridan’s vision of “artful teaching” in higher education continues unabated to the benefit of all members of the Brown teaching community.