On August 14, 2017 I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the Southwest Teaching and Learning Symposium, held at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. My heartfelt thanks to Don Carter for the invitation, and to Don, John Doherty, and Alexandria Lewis for all they did to make my visit smooth and greatly enjoyable.

As you’ll hear from my talk, I spent some time on familiar ground, but this time newly contextualized in ways the very long title points toward. My idea, emerging from my experience as a faculty member for twenty-seven years and as an administrator for twelve of those years, is that amidst the urgent, necessary, and largely (but not entirely) beneficial emphasis on so-called “student-centered learning,” we have not considered the role of faculty as deeply or as wisely as we should.

There are many reasons for that lack. I consider some of them in my talk. At the same time, I return to what I take to be some necessary, if inconvenient truths regarding faculty, whom I consider as the heart, the sine qua non, of a university. My point is not to demean or diminish anyone at the university who is not faculty. The intelligence, hard work, and insight of a university’s staff, and their commitment to their work for the greater good, sometimes put faculty to shame. If anything, calling attention to faculty’s central role in a university may remind us of faculty’s responsibilities for being good stewards of what is best in higher education–and, sadly, also remind us of where that stewardship is overlooked, denied, ignored, or mired in endless petty disputes.

My talk at NAU starts with faculty, then, and moves to faculty roles in a university, and enlarges that focus to bring in one of the defining characteristics of contemporary life, ubiquitous personal networked computing. Like all communicative extensions (to use McLuhan’s word), ubiquitous personal networked computing empowers some insights and obscures others. I do not believe that our age guarantees any outcome–to that extent, I am neither a technological determinist nor a techno-utopian. But I do believe, very strongly, in the human potential for good, and in communicative extensions as primary and powerful agents with which to realize and propagate that potential.

So in this talk, I try to take a comprehensive view of a key aspect of contemporary higher education, one that I don’t hear about very often (and I recognize I may not know where to listen–so help me there). I think once again about points of leverage, and places to stand where that leverage might be exercised. For it is nothing less than a world we seek to move, and I continue to believe with all my heart that education is both ground and lever for that motion.

So here’s the talk.

If you’d like to follow the slides, I’ve embedded them in a pdf below:

[pdf-embedder url=”http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NAU-2017_rev2.pdf” title=”NAU 2017 Teaching-Learning Keynote”]

Note that the black slide has several slides after it. I ran over time so I didn’t get to them, but they’re important and I wanted to include them here.