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Greetings everyone and I want to thank you for being a facilitator for our faculty learning
communities. What I want to do is in a series of about 3 or 4 videos just give you an overview
of the FLC program and to sort of orientation so you know what to expect. So this is the
introduction. A faculty learning community or FLC is a voluntary, structured, yearlong,
multidisciplinary, community of practice of size around 8-12 that includes the goals of
building community and the development of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning).
And that's what we really try to do with these learning communities is we often have people
from different disciplines on campus and uhm we've found that we learn a lot. We identify
similar problems. We also identify things that are specific to our disciplines. The
quote that I read you was from Milton *** and he is an expert in FLCs. There are a couple
of major types of FLCs. Some are cohort-based and some are topic-based. The cohort based
one, as you can see from the information on the slide, they focus on faculty or staff
who've kind of felt isolated or fragmented or feel kind of out of touch with what's going
on with the University. So for example, you have FLCs for junior faculty, senior faculty,
mid-career faculty or part-time or adjunct faculty. We don't have any FLCs for this group
although we're more than willing to start them if you're interested. We do have a lecturer
organization that is an effort address some of the issues and concerns of our lecturers.
Our FLCs at Fresno State are topic based. And that's involves creating a curriculum
designed to address a campus or divisional teaching, learning or policy or program need,
issue or opportunity. And again this is from Milton *** and what you do is focus on a theme
or issue. And that's what our FLCs have been about. I just wanted to give you an overview
of how the different FLC proposals that were proposed and hopefully we'll have enough people
faculty interested in them. Critical thinking, ePortfolios, faculty mentoring, first generation
or advising college students, improving student writing, internship experience, inter-professional
education, learner centered teaching, professional ethics, publishing a scholarly article, SAP,
single subject teaching credential and undergraduate research. Those are all FLCs that have been
proposed and that some of these are continuing FLCs from the past academic year. You'll also
see on this table that's presented on this slide the names of the facilitators for these
FLCs. I am the I'm Ida Jones, I'm the Program Director of the FLCs. Anytime you have any
questions or concerns feel free to contact me. I'm more than happy to help you out. So,
what's a facilitator or what does a facilitator do? Well this is a quote from Ortquist-Ahrens
and Torosyan and they say that effective facilitation is essential to creating and sustaining an
environment in which faculty learning communities can thrive. Just as faculty learning communities
differ qualitatively from other familiar work groups in higher education, the role of the
facilitator differs from what are perhaps more familiar roles of content expert, lecturer,
chairperson, or traditional leader. So on this next slide, I kind of uh identify those
roles more specifically. You're a facilitator of learning-you don't have to be the expert.
You're in with a group of faculty who are interested in the topic, who bring a vast
amount of experience. It's very different from when we're doing things in the classroom
where we are the content expert, even though we may have uh, student participation. It's
still kind of different the areas of expertise that we have that the students don't yet have.
In these FLCs realize that you don't have to know everything about the topic. You started
with the idea that you're helping to help your group learn about the topic but you're
the expert, necessarily the expert on the topic. You could be a political strategist
and activist depending on the topic and uhm whether you want to pursue changes based on
what you've learned. You become a communication specialist in the sense that you want to foster
full communication during the meetings and between meetings so that you can get the best
uhm cooperation and results. You're something of an entrepreneur in that especially if you're
starting on a new topic or something that isn't uhm isn't the usual at the University.
And then the MOU itself outlines some of the other specifics. But the key that I want you
to remember from this is that you are helping to guide learning but you don't necessarily
have to know everything. You don't have to do all the research first and then present
it to the group. The group itself can identify what topics it wants to look at within that
broad overall topic. Thanks for listening!