Consultants

Consultants for Faculty Conversations on Teaching and Learning

Wabash Center Consultants are faculty and administrators drawn from colleges, universities, and theological schools to assist faculty, departments, and deans who have identified and are responding to specific pedagogical concerns. Through online sessions, the consultants convene needed conversations, walk alongside faculty and deans who are instituting changes which effect pedagogical systems and sensibilities, and facilitate topical workshops. With the understanding that each school is a unique context, consultants strive to improve teaching, enrich the teaching life, expand the learning experience of students, and enhance the overall ecology of teaching. In assigning consultants, we strive to assign a consultant who shares your institutional context and who has experience in the type of consultation that you request.

The Consultants Program focuses upon three areas:

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1) Strengthening institutional ecologies concerning traditions, habits, practices of racism and fostering pedagogies of anti-racism and equity.

Consultants assist with such contextual questions as:

• What does it take to calm the racialized turmoil in our faculty? What has been the harm of racist practices in our faculty ecology and what can be the healing?
• What are the violences of racism, profiling and bias amongst our faculty and in our teaching? How does this harm debilitate our institution and how might these violences be alleviated?
• In what ways might we rethink the destructive racist and culturally insensitive patterns in our curriculum and course designs?  
• What needs to be done to better welcome faculty persons of color into a predominately white faculty? What will it take to sustain a healthy ecology for a racially and culturally diverse faculty?
• In what ways might course offerings be improved for the formation of a racially diverse student body? As the student body becomes more racially diverse, what will it take to shift the course offerings to meet the needs of the incoming students?

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2) Developing capacities for praxis-based teaching, i.e., connecting the classroom with the world.

Consultants assist with such contextual questions as:

• How would we teach differently if we considered the peoples, communities, villages, neighborhoods, who will benefit from our students’ influence after graduation?
• Into what identities are we forming students and for what purpose in the wider society? Who do we want our graduates be and what kind of formation might we offer for this aim?
• What aspects of society can be brought into the classroom to strengthen the formation of students?
• What is learner-centered pedagogy? What would it mean to assist faculty with rethinking and expanding their courses to provide learner-centered experiences?
• What does it mean to design courses which engage and address the social problems and troubles of persons of which the professor has little knowledge or experience?

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3) Equipping faculty and administrators with capacities for creativity and imagination in teaching and learning. This includes issues of self-care and wellness.

Consultants assist with such contextual questions as:

• How can schools shift their paradigms of teaching to better serve differing student populations and to better showcase differing populations of faculty?
• What does it mean that a diversity of students requires a diversity of teaching approaches? How might teachers expand their repertoire of teaching approaches as the diversity of students expands?
• What are new approaches, methods, and models of teaching which better fit the digital age? What are the pre-requisites for designing a course and creating a syllabus that is relevant for 21st century students?
• What kind of teaching can engage students’ voice, nurture agency, and illicit imagination and creativity? In what ways can pedagogies of play, wonder, and awe better equip students for leadership and scholarship? 
• In what ways might more imaginative learning activities and stronger assignments enhance the learning experience? What kind of permissions need to be given for faculty to bring their imaginations and wonder into the classroom setting?
• In what ways would incorporating practices of self-care and wellness create a healthier teaching ecology? What aspects of spirituality and soul-care might be incorporated to strengthen our teaching community?

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The Wabash Center Consultants primarily work online and the Wabash Center provides the stipend for the consultant’s work. In the rare instance that a consultant travels to a campus, the Wabash Center will also provide travel for the consultant. All other costs (e.g., resources, hotel lodging, food) associated with the consultation are the responsibility of the school.

 

Meet Our Consultants