CELT Launches Journal to Celebrate Greater Faculties at UK

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 20, 2017) — The University of Kentucky’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT) is proud to announce the inaugural issue of Greater Faculties: A Review of Teaching and Learning, an open access journal hosted by the UK Libraries’ UKnowledge repository.

Featuring essays, interviews and reviews, Greater Faculties aims to bridge the gap between the scholarship of teaching and learning and popular writing for a broad audience. The journal showcases the contributions and insights of faculty and instructors in order to foster a culture of teaching excellence and contribute to the discourse on teaching and learning in higher education.

Greater Faculties responds to a critical moment in the history of higher education when the stakes for teaching and learning have never been higher. Educators and citizens ask difficult questions about student success in a competitive, global marketplace, and we continue to debate and revise the theories and practices that we employ to prepare those students for a lifetime of citizenship, leadership and learning. Just what does good teaching look like, and how can we innovate in thoughtful and informed ways? What cultural, historical and scientific contexts affect our understanding of how teaching and learning (ought to) work? How can our teaching model the very leadership we seek to develop in our students, responding to the world but also working to change it for the better?

The works in Greater Faculties seek to explore those and other questions with nuance and complexity while underscoring the value of education as a public good at the state’s flagship university — the University for Kentucky.

In the journal’s inaugural volume, the reader will find essays, interviews and reviews that address a range of urgent questions. A review of Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber's “The Slow Professor” asks us to rethink intellectual labor in higher education, while contributing essays explore a range of classroom challenges such as teaching intergenerational student cohorts and framing plagiarism in pedagogically useful and empowering ways. Other essays respond to the socio-political climate of higher education, from equity and inclusion in the classroom to student activism and protest.

Greater Faculties is built on community, and to stay true to these roots it also features extended interviews with skilled and innovative teacher-scholars. From a conversation with Deb Castiglione, universal design and instructional technology specialist at CELT, we read about including all learners in our teaching, as well as software that is available to enhance the learning experience of any student at UK. Steve Davis, associate professor in the Department of History, discusses how games and virtual world building allow students to develop skills in critical analysis and the historical imagination. And, lastly, Yuha Jung and Rachel Shane, assistant professor and chair, respectively, in the Department of Arts Administration, reflect on their work with colleagues to develop strategies for teaching with digital technologies in ways that bolster students’ abilities to stay focused and on task.

Moving forward, the editors welcome queries or ideas for publications from anyone involved and invested in teaching and learning at UK.

In addition to the essays, interviews and reviews featured in the inaugural issue, Greater Faculties aims in subsequent issues to publish scholarly articles and studies of teaching and learning. The journal will serve as a resource for all teachers, and as an example of what happens when an academic community responds energetically and thoughtfully to the forces that shape the classroom experience for both educators and learners.

Already collaborating with CELT on different fronts, UK Libraries is excited to have this opportunity to strengthen the connection by publishing Greater Faculties on UKnowledge. Thanks to the advanced features of the platform, Greater Faculties is built on a custom-designed site and optimized for search engine indexing. Its content gains higher online visibility and authors receive monthly notifications of the download counts of their papers. Additionally, UK Libraries registers digital object identifiers for the articles and undertakes the long-term preservation of journal content. Authors can rest assured that readers around the globe will have perpetual, seamless access to their articles.

Editors of UK-based journals are welcome to contact Adrian Ho at adrian.ho@uky.edu to find out more about UK Libraries’ free journal publishing services.