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The History of the Sheridan Center1997 Edition (by Sheridan Center Director Rebecca S. More [then Associate Director]) 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. 2007 Edition (by Sheridan Center Director Rebecca S. More) Few endeavors survive the departure or demise of their creators. Unless firmly rooted in the needs of a constituency, the growth and ongoing development of a community organization may only last a short while. So it is with tremendous respect for the enduring value of Harriet Walzer Sheridan's vision for professional development in higher education at Brown, that we salute the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Sheridan Center. Her vision continues to inspire a growing cohort of faculty, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, at Brown, across the country and internationally, to challenge themselves to think substantively about the purpose of education in a complex global environment. The endowment of the Sheridan Center by Frederick Lippitt is a testament to the commitment by both Dean Sheridan and Mr. Lippitt to the value of education in a democratic society and the need to support the professional development of its faculty, present and future. A Definition of the Purpose of Education The open curriculum, introduced at Brown University in 1970, was, and is, ideally suited to helping students achieve that difficult goal. By the early 1970s students who wished to actively shape their own education, rather than follow a traditional prescribed route, were attracted to Brown. The opportunity to develop an individually tailored education permitted intelligent students with unique learning styles to succeed in an intellectually rigorous environment closed to them at other institutions of higher education. The result was, and is, a University alive with energy, curiosity and innovation at both the faculty and student level. Such a diverse learning community also requires thoughtfully defined structures to promote and enhance innovation across the disciplines without sacrificing the intellectual independence which is the hallmark of higher education. When Professor Sheridan arrived at Brown to serve as Dean of the College from Carleton College (Northfield MN) in 1979, she recognized the need for such supportive structures and worked closely with her staff colleagues to develop them. Both she and then President Howard R. Swearer, also a transplant from Carleton, deployed their years of experience in a small liberal arts college to ensure that the Brown curriculum provided appropriate support for its students. In addition, both had personal experience with students whose diverse learning styles challenged their ability to realize their potential in a highly competitive University. Along with other members of the Brown community committed to ensuring that the education at Brown truly helped all students realize their potential for growth, President Swearer and Dean Sheridan laid the foundations for many of the programs and center which are unique to Brown. As Dean of the College, Harriet Sheridan and her colleagues established the Curricular Advising Program, Modes of Analysis courses, the Writing Fellows Program, and the Writing and Math Centers to ensure that Brown’s open curriculum served student needs effectively. Her sensitivity to the value of diverse learning styles among students led her to host the first conference on Learning Disabilities in Higher Education in 1985 at Brown. She became one of the most articulate advocates to inclusive and democratic teaching and Brown gained national recognition for its leadership in this area. Following her establishment of what became the Sheridan Center in 1987, she worked with Associate Dean of the College Robert Shaw and colleagues at Dartmouth College to create a videotape demonstrating the value of “Effective Teaching for Dyslexic/All College Students." Since research on learning supported the notion that everyone has a unique learning style, the video provided faculty and graduate students with techniques which would empower the maximum number of their students, not just the ones who learned as they did. The Establishment of a Teaching Community In the twenty years since its founding, dedicated by the Brown Corporation in 1997 to the memory of Dean Sheridan, the Center has continued to develop as a collegial, grass-roots organization, run by and for the support of faculty, graduate students and, recently, post-doctoral fellows. Guided since the death of Dean Sheridan in 1992 by a dedicated faculty Advisory Board (as well as its ex-officio members of the senior administration), the Sheridan Center has grown from a small one-room, one-woman, operation into a constantly evolving service organization that provides the entire Brown teaching community with a wide variety of collegial programs, services and publications. The Sheridan Center has evolved from a few one-day Saturday workshops for Graduate Teaching Assistants on strategies for teaching to three full-year Teaching Certificate programs, as well as seminars and consulting services open to the entire academic community. Beginning in 1988 with the financial support of Artemis Joukowsky, four Graduate Student Fellows from each of the four academic divisions were appointed to help Dean Sheridan organize and promote a variety of summer institutes, lectures and workshops, primarily for graduate students. Faculty colleagues were called upon to present at these sessions on subjects such as Developing a Teaching Style, Balancing Teaching and Research, and Building a New Curriculum. The result was the development of a community of faculty dedicated to the support of collegial professional development in teaching and learning that has sustained and enhanced the continued growth of the Center in the fifteen years since Dean Sheridan's death. Without the dedicated support of that extraordinary team of faculty and graduate students, there would not be a Sheridan Center today. The impressive list of names in Part III: The Brown Teaching Community barely suggests the nature of the twenty years of hard work that have gone into the establishment of a center which represents and serves the professional development needs of a diverse community, from graduate students to junior faculty to post-doctoral fellows to clinical faculty in the Brown Medical School. The Transformation of the Center's Programs Following Dean Sheridan's death in 1992, it was evident that the Center would only continue if it was clearly aligned with the needs of the Brown teaching community. During the next few years an extraordinary network of Advisory Board members, Faculty Fellows, Graduate Teaching Fellows, graduate Teaching Consultants, and the departmental Faculty and Graduate Student Liaisons, as well as colleagues in other agencies across campus such as CIS-STG & ITG, the Swearer Center, the Career Development Center, the Office of Summer Studies, and the Library, worked with the small, part-time staff to identify and provide for the pedagogical needs of the community. As a result of this persistent, sustained effort by so many people, the Sheridan Center continues to revise and expand its various activities, whether programs, services or publications. The Center's handbook Professional Development Resources for the Brown Teaching Community provides a comprehensive account of what is offered today. For example, over the past ten years, the Sheridan Teaching Seminar Lectures have become an interdisciplinary forum on the fundamental elements of a reflective teaching practice which attract members of the Brown teaching community at all levels, including staff, as well as members of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) teaching community. As of September 2007, the RISD-Sheridan Center collaboration has resulted in the establishment of a parallel, self-sustaining, RISD professional development program. Other Center programs in 2007-2008 include:
Consulting Services for the Brown Community
Publications The Sheridan Center publishes a variety of materials to address the fundamental elements of a reflective teaching practice and to foster the collegial exchange about teaching and research which is characteristic of the Brown teaching community. The Frederick Lippitt and Mary Ann Lippitt House The Frederick Lippitt and Mary Ann Lippitt House at 96 Waterman Street was renovated in 2002-2003 specifically to provide a location for the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning as a center for the professional development of the Brown teaching community. The design and allocation of space in the Lippitt House reflect the mission, goals and objectives of the Center. In addition, the entire building has been wired by CIS so that the Center can support advanced use of technology for teaching and learning. Much of the artwork throughout the Center is by current and former Brown students. There is also a small Resource Library of books, journals, articles and videotapes, including lectures by Brown's master teachers, available to the entire University community. Staff Support In addition to the permanent staff, the Sheridan Center has depended upon its dedicated four Faculty Fellows, one senior faculty member each representing the academic divisions, and its extraordinary group of graduate student Teaching Consultants. The graduate students who are selected to become Teaching Consultants have demonstrated remarkable commitment to their own professional development and that of their colleagues across the University. Both the Faculty Fellows and Teaching Consultants conduct classroom observations and consultations with faculty and graduate students across the University. The Sheridan Center Advisory Board, drawn from members of the faculty, administration and Corporation of the University, was established by Dean Sheridan just before her death, to ensure the Center was led by a group of experienced and accomplished members of the community. As the Sheridan Center embarks upon its third decade, it is important to honor three members of the Brown community who have consistently supported the professional development of the entire community through the agency of the Center. While the Center has benefited from the wisdom and concern of many, many people over these twenty years, the contributions of Martha Sharp Joukowsky, Kathryn T. Spoehr and Nancy R. Dunbar are without peer. They have truly followed Harriet's example and helped to realize her vision for a center which would support the enhancement of student learning. Sheridan Center Academic Staff, 1992-2007 Administrative Staff, 1992-2007 Notes |
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