Centers for Learning and Teaching as enablers: Reimagining the future

Audience: Coordinators of faculty development and/or CLTs

This session will invite participants to rethink the future and re-imagine the possible and preferable future based on their current understanding of an environment that has been heavily influenced by the pandemic as well as global challenges and a changing digital landscape.

Using both Futures and Systems Thinking as springboards for this session, we will then convene around a series of provocations, questions and challenges to help us better understand the teaching and learning ecosystem within institutions of HE and how this connects with faculty and student needs. Using this systems thinking approach helps participants first seek to understand the challenges at hand through a series of activities in small groups or pairs.

The facilitator will then share some of the challenges identified at the American University in Cairo and the insights gained through a summer 2022 co-design faculty event the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) which examined the unique AUC teaching and learning space within its own HE ecosystem. This will be followed by an activity that will help participants reflect and think about designing their own approach to engagement with their faculty and other stakeholders.

The session will provide examples of how to conduct similar sessions, questions that can spark conversations around the possible future of centers for learning and teaching, and useful frameworks to spark ideation.