International Conference on College Teaching and Learning

Welcome to the International Conference on College Teaching and Learning collection

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In 1984, FSCJ hosted its first Celebrate Teaching Week, a five-day affair sponsored by the College’s Instructional Network featuring conference presentations and workshops by the faculty. Four years later, in a presentation called “Taking Classroom Teaching Seriously, keynote speaker Dr. K. Patricia Cross of Harvard University challenged attendees to become involved in classroom research to enhance their professional growth. Inspired, faculty at the College rose to the challenge, and more than a dozen people met at brainstorming sessions throughout the winter and spring terms to develop a proposal for what would become The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. In Fall 1988, a steering committee formed, with members Claire Bailey, Marcia Bain, Lawton Green, Betsy Griffey, Alice Hadwin, Susan Hill, Elain Kyle, Rose Russell, and Arnold Wood serving under administrative facilitator Bill Martin. Modeling their nascent center on the National Center for Research to Improve Post-Secondary Teaching and Learning, the group got their project off the ground with strategic planning funds awarded by the College. The Center would receive permanent funding in the 1989-90 budget.

Despite a busy first year running workshops and awarding $15,000 in mini-grants to faculty projects, the Center from its inception nursed big plans: to provide a national forum featuring recognized educational leaders in the areas of teaching and learning right here in Jacksonville. In 1990, they achieved their dream, and the College’s annual Teaching Week was replaced by its first National Conference on College Teaching and Learning. Hosted May 10-12, 1990 in the Omni Hotel in downtown Jacksonville, the conference took as its theme “Improving Teaching and Learning Through Classroom Research” and featured as a presenter Dr. K. Patricia Cross, whose speech at the College several years before served as the wellspring for the Center. The first Conference drew more than 250 educators from as far away as Great Britain and the Soviet Union to hear its 90 presenters; within a decade, over a thousand people from around the world were attending newly-rebranded International Conference on College Teaching and Learning’s almost three hundred presentations and taking in keynote speeches from luminaries such as author Ray Bradbury and technology demos from the likes of virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier.

By 1992, there was already a movement to find a way to preserve and communicate the knowledge being shared at the Conference. Papers accepted that year were considered for publication in Interactive Learning International, the Wiley instructional technology research and development journal published in London, which devoted its entire Summer 1992 issue to the Conference. Beginning with the fourth annual Conference in 1993, the College published selected papers from the event itself, with professors Betsy Griffey, Susan Hill, Marlene Kovaly, and Arnold Wood making choices for inclusion in the volume based on the paper’s focus, discipline, general appeal, theoretical or practical applications, and quality of writing. Jack Chambers edited the first edition of Selected Papers from the National Conference of Teaching and Learning, and continued to do so for the next twenty years.

The College final International Conference of Teaching and Learning took place April 4-7, 2016. Returning to its original home in the Omni Hotel, the event featured keynotes by neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin and biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher. Over its 27-year existence, the Conference played host to thousands of educators, not to mention celebrity speakers such as journalist Norman Mailer, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, and physicist Michio Kaku. The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, known briefly in 2015-2016 as the Center for Learning Enrichment, lives on as FSCJ’s Academy for Teaching and Learning. You can learn more about their work by visiting https://training.fscj.edu/resources/atl.

If you have information regarding additional existing material relevant to this collection, please contact Jennifer Grey at jennifer.grey@fscj.edu.