An Oral History of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching

In 1986, Vanderbilt University established a new Center for Teaching, a unit that would help thousands of faculty and other instructors at Vanderbilt and across higher education develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I’m Derek Bruff, and I worked at the CFT, as we called it, from 2005 to 2022, serving as its director for over a decade. 

When I left Vanderbilt, I wanted to find some way to honor the good work of the Center for Teaching. It played an important role in my professional career and in the careers of the faculty and staff who passed through its doors. I decided to produce this oral history of the CFT as a way to document and celebrate the CFT’s story. I reached out to a number of former CFT staff, including all of its directors, to interview them about their time at the CFT.

You’ll hear from Ken Bain, Darlene Panvini, Linda Nilson, Allison Pingree, Peter Felten, and others CFT alumni, and I hope these stories capture just a bit of the CFT magic.

Additional Resources:

Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's 35th Anniversary Panel (video)

StoryCorps: Derek Bruff and Stacey Johnson on the CFT's work navigating the COVID-19 pandemic (audio)

This audio documentary is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Music: "Isola Bella" and "Contemplation" by Purple Planet.

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Chapters

• 1:17 Ken Bain
• 15:48 Darlene Panvini
• 23:21 Linda Nilson
• 35:28 Allison Pingree
• 47:26 Peter Felten
• 1:00:17 Derek Bruff
• 1:23:52 Impact of the CFT

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:00:06):
In 1986, Vanderbilt University established a new center for teaching the unit that would help thousands of faculty and other instructors at Vanderbilt and across higher education to develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I'm Derek Bruff, and I worked at the CFT, as we called it, from 2005 to 2022, serving as its director for over a decade. I'm your host for this oral history of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and I'm excited to share what made it a special place through the stories of its directors and staff. When I left Vanderbilt in 2022, I wanted to find some way to honor the good work of the Center for Teaching. It played an important role in my professional career and in the careers of the faculty and staff who passed through its doors. I decided to produce an oral history of the CFT as a way to document and celebrate the CFT story.

(00:00:59):
I reached out to a number of former CFT staff, including all of its directors, to interview them about their time at the center. You'll hear from Ken Bain and Linda Nilson and other CFT alumni, and I hope these stories capture just a bit of the CFT magic. Let's get started. Ken Bain was the founding director of the Center for Teaching, launching the new unit. In 1986, Ken went on to found centers for teaching at Northwestern University, New York University and Montclair State University, but Vanderbilt, CFT was his first. Ken was a history professor prior to coming to Vanderbilt, and it was his interest in teaching history effectively that led him to explore the scholarship of teaching and learning. That in turn helped him frame his early goals for the work of the CFT. I talked with Ken by phone in 2023 about his time at Vanderbilt.

Ken Bain (00:01:53):
My chief ambition, I think, was to try to facilitate a conversation about the research on human learning and how best to foster a deep approach to learning. I had discovered the literature on deep approaches to learning some years before and found that really quite attractive.

Derek Bruff (00:02:21):
Vanderbilt University is a highly selective research university located in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1873 and it regularly appears near the top of lists of the best universities in the country. When Ken arrived, Vanderbilt was a place that valued great teaching, but he quickly realized that some of the faculty would be skeptical of Ken's message about deep learning.

Ken Bain (00:02:45):
Many of the faculty had a notion that I certainly entertained early in my own teaching career. I had started teaching back when I was about three years old. I mean about 23 years old, seemed like I was three. I began teaching, thinking it's a waste to look at the educational literature because they don't know what teaching my discipline is supposed to be like, and they can't possibly provide any assistance with that. And I found later on, 20 years later when I ended up at Vanderbilt, that many of the faculty, senior faculty, and even some junior faculty entertain that notion. So they couldn't appreciate. They came in with a mind block that kept them from appreciating the rich research that had emerged on teaching and learning.

Derek Bruff (00:03:48):
For the first five years of the CFTs history, Ken was the only educational developer on staff. I'm not sure educational developer was a term used in the 1980s, but educational development is now a standard term to describe the work that centers for Teaching and learning do. In the 2007 article CFT alumni, Peter Felten and Alison Pingree, along with co-authors, Alan Kalish and Kathryn Plank defined educational development as helping colleges and universities function effectively as teaching and learning communities. We'll hear from Peter and Allison later in this program. The work of educational development can take many forms for Ken Bain's CFT. A lot of it was done through conversations on teaching.

Ken Bain (00:04:34):
We began doing so by, I think it was the first year that I created a series of public discussions on teaching and learning and bringing in some people from the outside world who could help contribute to that conversation. And then beginning with trying to ask people who on campus who had strong reputations for fostering very deep learning, so much of the conversation was about what do we mean by deep learning and how can we best foster that as opposed to more strategic learning where the students are concerned only and are primarily about grades and about making it on the grade book, and how could we foster a deep approach to learning? Because there was a lot of literature that had emerged in the seventies, late seventies and early eighties about this notion of deep learning that came out of Europe and came out of Australia and some other places. The conversations began to attract increasing numbers of people.

Derek Bruff (00:05:59):
Those campus conversations on deep learning would inform the CFTs work for decades and would ripple out across higher education through Ken's 2004 book, what the Best College Teachers Do. As Ken gathered Vanderbilt faculty members to learn from and with each other, he started framing these conversations around four key questions.

Ken Bain (00:06:18):
And I think right from the very beginning, we had four big questions that we wanted get people to address as they thought about their own teaching. The first one being, what is it that I want my students to be able to do intellectually, physically, emotionally, as a result of a class that they might take from me? And one of those goals mean if we say we want to, one of my major goals is that the students will emerge as deep learners. What does that mean and how do we define deep learning? So that was the beginning point of our discussions, whether they were small four or five person discussions or much larger discussions of several hundred people

Derek Bruff (00:07:22):
For those familiar with standard course design processes, it's no surprise that Ken's first question focused on identifying learning goals and objectives. His second question, however, did not move to the typical next stage of course design. That is figuring out how to assess students so they've met those learning goals. Instead, Ken went in a different direction as a response to misconceptions about the CFT and educational development more generally.

Ken Bain (00:07:48):
The second one was, what are the conditions that we need to create in order to facilitate, in order to encourage and facilitate those kind of conversations or rather to creation of an environment where that deep learning was most likely to emerge if deep learning was one of our major goals. But whatever our major goals were, we were interested in creating environment, environment rather than thinking about the performance of any individual in the class. I think a lot of people initially thought about the center as a place where you try to change the performance of teachers, and that often meant in those days to many, you're going to help 'em improve their lecturing ability. That was not our focus. It was rather how do you create a learning environment that is going to stimulate the kind of a learning outcomes that we had identified as being most important to us? And that became obviously a very complex question as the year and the years progressed,

Derek Bruff (00:09:31):
The idea that the CFT was there to help instructors improve their performance wasn't the last misconception that the university community would have about the center and about educational development. We'll hear how misconceptions about the CFT changed over the years as the work and the impact of the CFT grew. For now, let's hear about the third and fourth questions that Ken used to frame the CFTs early campus conversations.

Ken Bain (00:09:55):
The third question that we began with from the very beginning was basically what could go wrong? What were the challenges? What could keep our students from achieving deep learning? What could happen in their minds? What could happen within the course that would actually discouraged deep learning and put an emphasis upon surface or strategic learning? The fourth question is, how can you and your students best come to understand the nature and the progress of their learning otherwise known as what's your grading policy? But if you think about that question, it's a lot deeper than what's you're grading policy? How can you and your students best come to understand the nature and the progress of their learning? So that stimulated a lot of conversation and the four questions together, which have been sort of guiding notions in my work on teaching and learning, just lit some fires and changed people's thinking. And they began to say, okay, well, how do you do that?

Derek Bruff (00:11:38):
Ken started by helping faculty shift their attention from their performance as professors to the design of effective learning environments. But as Ken said, how do you do that? There's no one answer to that question. Since effective teaching is dependent on so many factors from the discipline to the students to the classroom where the action happens. Thus, the CFT started offering individual teaching consultations to help instructors reflect on their teaching contexts, goals and choices. And many of those consultations involve the use of student feedback on instruction using a tool that the CFT called a small group analysis or SGA.

Ken Bain (00:12:17):
The other major activity was to create services to help people collect information about their own teaching. And I borrowed an idea that I encountered at several other teaching centers that first year that became what I was calling a small group analysis. So we began to get a lot of traffic and a lot of activities doing small group analysis and the staff part-time staff within the center began to grow because one person couldn't do all of the small group analysis.

Derek Bruff (00:13:06):
During my time at the CFT, I'm sure I conducted a few hundred SGAs. This was a mid-semester feedback service that the CFT offered to instructors, one where A CFT consultant would conduct focus groups with the instructor, students then meet with the instructor to review the student feedback and identify teaching strengths and opportunities for change. Those consultations were often very productive with the instructor, gaining new insight into their students' learning experiences and making concrete plans to improve a course. As Ken noted, this process wasn't invented at the CFT. It's more commonly called a small group instructional diagnosis, and it was developed in the 1970s by Joseph Clark, who founded the Center for Instructional Development and Research at the University of Washington. For most of my time at the Vanderbilt CFT I considered our SGA service, one of the best things that early career faculty could do to improve their teaching. The service was popular during Ken Bain's term as CFT director too,

Ken Bain (00:14:05):
And they were growing in number for several reasons, some good, some bad. Some department chairs began to try to use 'em to make evaluations of non-tenured faculty and just make decisions about whether or not they should keep Joe Blow who had been there for three months. And that was not the ambition that I shuddered to realize that that was going on. But for others, it was the faculty members who wanted to gather information and insights about their own teaching. And so we tried to sell it. I use that term as a service for all the faculty members.

Derek Bruff (00:15:07):
Ken points to a boundary he helps set for the CFTs work at the university. CFT services were meant to provide faculty with actionable feedback about their teaching practices, but were not meant to play a role in personnel decisions about faculty and other instructors. That is the CFT would provide formative feedback for instructors but not summative or evaluative feedback, giving some teachers a thumbs up and a thumbs down. During my time at the CFT, we often said that there was a firewall between the work of the CFT and the formal faculty evaluation process. That firewall kept the CFT a place where faculty would feel comfortable asking for help in their teaching. The CFT had a very small staff in its early days, just Ken and an administrative assistant. However, in 1989, Ken had the bright idea to recruit a graduate student to serve as a teaching assistant of sorts for the CFT. That graduate student was Darlene Panvini from the biology department who served for two years as a CFT graduate fellow. Darlene wasn't sure if she was the first CFT grad fellow when I talked to her in 2023, but she knows she was one of the first and she had a specific focus for her work at the CFT.

Darlene Panvini (00:16:21):
Then he invited me to have this part-time position and primarily working with the international TAs because at that time, I don't know the situation now, but at that time there were a lot of international teaching assistants and particularly in the sciences. And since I taught lab and I was a scientist, it seemed that it would make sense to have someone who could sort of talk that science language with the international TAs and help them learn and to figure out more about how to be an effective lab ta.

Derek Bruff (00:16:53):
Ken clearly valued Darlene's contribution to the CFT because he offered her a job at the CFT upon her graduation.

Darlene Panvini (00:17:00):
And so when I graduated, as I was wrapping up and finally said, okay, I got to not be a graduate student anymore, I need a real job. Ken invited me to, he said, let's create a position as an assistant director for the Center for Teaching. And that's how that position got started. So what brought me to the Center of Teaching is a combination of my passion for teaching. I really enjoyed working there. The two years part-time and desperation for a job to be totally terrible job market, to be totally honest,

Derek Bruff (00:17:40):
Yes, Darlene Panvini was the CFTs first assistant director. There would be many assistant and associate directors over the years, but Darlene broke that ground for the center. I asked Ken about working with Darlene in those days.

Ken Bain (00:17:58):
Darlene came in. She was really quite wonderful and brought a different flavor and interest, and she was a lot better than I was at administrating and getting things done. I would just do it myself. She could organize people to do things. I learned a lot from her, by the way, of how she worked and created organizations.

Derek Bruff (00:18:32):
Darlene would go on to work at the CFT for 12 years. Ken, however, was recruited by Northwestern University in 1992 to establish a teaching center there. This made for a bit of a surprise for Darlene after she accepted the assistant director position.

Darlene Panvini (00:18:48):
The real catch on this, I started my position as the assistant director, a full-time position, and Ken announced that he was leaving.

Derek Bruff (00:19:01):
Like, almost immediately.

Darlene Panvini (00:19:03):
Yes. Wow. For a short time, I was the interim director and I had no desire to be the director of the teaching center because I felt like I was green enough in knowing what to do. And I never felt like I had the skillset to navigate the bureaucracy at Vanderbilt and I just wanted to focus on teaching. And so I was the interim director just to kind of keep things moving along until Linda was hired,

Derek Bruff (00:19:38):
Linda was Linda Nilson, the CFT'S second director. We'll get to her part of the story in a bit right now. Let's hear more from Darlene who expanded her work with international teaching assistants During her time as assistant director,

Darlene Panvini (00:19:51):
I loved particularly working with the international TAs, and if I have to say if there was any highlight of my time at the teaching center, it was getting to know people from all over the world, particularly a lot of people from China, a lot of Asian TAs. China was where a lot of the TAs were from, and just getting to know them, supporting them in their work. And then I came up with the whole ITAP, international Teaching Assistance Program where we had that triangular, and I called it TLC for ITAs

(00:20:29):
If you remember that, or have any brochures or anything like that around. But the TLC stood for Teaching Language Culture, and I had sort of this triangular logo that I created. I remember walking across campus one day thinking, teaching language culture, oh, that's TLC. And so the real focus and I created enveloped that whole program. And Ken had actually started having some undergrads paired with some of the international TAs. And so I just took that and really ran with it and expanded it and did more comprehensive training for the students. And were they called student consultants maybe? I think that's what they were called

Derek Bruff (00:21:13):
Sounds right.

Darlene Panvini (00:21:13):
The undergrads who the undergrads were paired. And so it was a big thing to train the undergrads and then to pair them up and to get good pairing where it could be productive for both the undergraduate student to have this moment and this experience of getting to know someone from somewhere else in the world as well as to learn more about graduate school and what graduate school's like. And then the grad students just loved the interactions with the undergrads, again, to know more about the cultural pieces. And they would do English lessons and they would do practice teaching, and then they would do fun stuff like go out and get coffee or watch a movie or watch TV shows, just sit and talk.

Derek Bruff (00:21:54):
ITAP was going strong when I arrived at the CFT as a graduate fellow in the early two thousands. And I remember shelves full of games like categories and DVDs of the television show, friends that the ITAS and student consultants would use to explore US culture and language. Darlene has been teaching biology at Belmont University, also in Nashville since 2003, but she still keeps in touch with some of those international TAs she worked with at the CFT.

Darlene Panvini (00:22:22):
So yeah, that was just some of my most favorite parts is working with the international TAs. And in fact, I had, let's see, maybe it was in the fall of 21, 1 of them was here from China, and his son goes to college at an American university, I think was his daughter was looking at schools and they were here visiting different schools. And he contacted me. We went out and had dinner together. That's awesome. And he was just so appreciative of what I had done and everything that I had done to support him and his work. And I'm on Facebook actually with a couple of international TAs that I've still kept up with as well. Yeah,

Derek Bruff (00:23:07):
I love that story. Darlene had such a passion for working with international students during her time at Vanderbilt, and that passion was encouraged by the second CFT director. Darlene worked with Linda Nilson. Listeners may know Linda's name from her many books on teaching and learning in higher education, especially her classic Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, now in its fifth edition. Linda arrived at Vanderbilt in 1993, coming from a similar position at the University of California Riverside. When I talked with Linda in 2023, I asked her about her initial goals as CFT director.

Linda Nilson (00:23:47):
Now, as far as my goals went, I didn't really know enough about the Vanderbilt community or the whole campus. I didn't know enough about it to really come in with a bunch of goals. But one goal that I did have, because I did know that the campus didn't have it, I wanted to write the best campus teaching handbook that I ever had. And I had written for three previous ones. So I cut my eye teeth on teaching handbooks. So I knew a lot about how to do it, how to put it together quickly. And again, I knew that the community needed this would benefit from it, let's put it that way. I don't know what needed it, but definitely would benefit. And this included both the teaching assistants and the faculty

Derek Bruff (00:24:46):
More on Linda's handbook momentarily. The CFT had begun working with graduate students under Ken Bain's leadership, particularly graduate students who were serving as teaching assistants or TAs. Linda built out that line of programming significantly, primarily by hiring more graduate fellows, which she called Master teaching fellows to lead orientation sessions for new TAs as well as other programming for graduate students throughout the academic year.

Linda Nilson (00:25:14):
In addition, we expanded the teaching assistant training program. There wasn't much of one. There was the international Teaching Assistant Training program that Dr. Darlene Panvini headed up. It was excellent, excellent program. And I learned about it, but I didn't mess with it. It was beautiful as it was. So I mean, I think I might've thrown a little bit more money at it. But other than that, but we really started TA training. And

(00:25:45):
What I'd done that, my previous job at the University of California Riverside was to set up disciplinary cluster programs with a master teaching fellow in charge of each cluster. And we had the science, the lab sciences, then we had the mathematical sciences, which included physics and math, and we would've had computer science. Well, we got computer science later on because we had other colleges coming in, and then we had one for the languages. We had one for the social sciences and religion Divinity school brought them in. They were thrilled to be included, absolutely thrilled. So anyway, and then there were five of them all total. It worked very, very well. And partially because the students, the graduate students who I was able to hire were just top notch and it went very, very smoothly. I did a train the trainer program with them right before the fall semester started and off we went.

Derek Bruff (00:26:59):
I can attest to the impact of Linda's train the trainer approach to working with TAs. I arrived at Vanderbilt in 1998 as a PhD student in the mathematics department. And my very first on-campus event was a TA orientation organized by the CFT. A few years later, after teaching calculus in the math department for several semesters, I had the chance to serve as a master teaching fellow and lead sessions for new TAs at TA orientation myself. I loved my time as an MTF mainly because it got me out of the math department and talking to other graduate students around campus about teaching during Linda Nelson's term as director from 93 to 98, she delighted in the small staff she had put together, especially Darlene Panini and the CFTs, longest serving staff member, Melissa Penix,

Linda Nilson (00:27:47):
Darlene Panvini, Dr. Panvini. And she was fabulous. And Melissa Penix was our administrative assistant. And they come, no better. They come no more delightful too. So we had so much fun. We had weekly staff meetings, and as far as I was concerned, they were like little parties, little totally sober parties that we had, I believe we had over the lunch hour. And so we would get together and we would exchange, well, I don't know, stories from what happened over the week in whatever we were doing. And it was a wonderful thing. The Master Teaching Fellows and Darlene had some great ideas about things to add to the center, or different programs to put out or different workshops to offer to the faculty. It was just wonderful. It was beautiful synergy. And it went on for years, just years. It was just fabulous.

Derek Bruff (00:29:00):
I have to say a word here about Melissa Penix, whom Linda hired as an administrative assistant around 1994. Melissa served in that role at the CFT for 22 years, working with three directors, including me. She didn't start her Vanderbilt career at the CFT, but she retired from Vanderbilt at the CFT after more than 25 years at the university. At one point, our staff did one of those strengths inventories, and I believe Melissa's top strength was consistency, which rang so true, whether it was budget or payroll or travel arrangements. Melissa always got the job done, and as Linda said, she was a delight to have on staff, and I'm honored I got to work with her for so long. Back in the mid nineties, Linda and Darlene were pioneering another key aspect of the CFT and its work: teaching credit bearing courses as staff members. It wasn't a given that staff at the Center for Teaching would actually get to teach at Vanderbilt, but Linda and Darlene made that happen.

Darlene Panvini (00:29:59):
So when I was at Vanderbilt at the teaching center there, I taught one course a year, a conservation biology course in the biology department. And that came about only through a lot of negotiation, and the directors really advocating for me to be able to do this because we were seen as staff and not as faculty. And I think it was also challenging since I did my graduate work there for faculty there to take me seriously. And I don't know, maybe you had the same thing. You were a grad student there as well. And I can remember one time one of the engineering professors that I was working with who I was communicating with him about one of the international TAs, and he seemed surprised that I had a PhD and that I'm like, yes, I have a PhD, and yes, I am a competent person here. So because faculty sometimes really had this, your staff or your faculty kind of dichotomy, and I think that's just recognizing the reality of a bureaucratic system.

Derek Bruff (00:31:07):
It's perhaps not surprising that teaching center staff would want to teach. Linda certainly appreciated her time in the classroom at Vanderbilt.

Linda Nilson (00:31:15):
Something that was really special. There was students. The students were so high quality, and I got to teach them. By the way, I taught a freshman seminar, and this was something that was absolutely wonderful about Vanderbilt. I could just make up my own course, whatever I wanted to teach. Oh boy. So I didn't have to, sociology was my degree, my PhD degree in, and that was what I was teaching before at UCLA, but I didn't have to do that. So I used sociology in my class, but I taught more. It was really based in philosophy more than anything else. It was called Free Will and Determinism.

Derek Bruff (00:31:58):
I'll have more to say later about the importance of CFT staff teaching courses as part of their work at Vanderbilt. Right now, I want to circle back to Linda's goal of creating a campus teaching handbook. She accomplished that goal, and in fact, I was given a hard copy of her 200 page teaching handbook when I attended TA orientation as a new grad student in 98. I still have that book on my shelf, and it's called Teaching at its Best. Yes. Linda's classic book teaching at its best got its start at the Vanderbilt CFT. Linda retired in 2016, and that book is a highlight of her career.

Linda Nilson (00:32:33):
Couple of things. First of all, that handbook was revised and became Teaching at Its Best, which just came out in its Fifth Edition.

Derek Bruff (00:32:46):
Fifth Edition, wow.

Linda Nilson (00:32:47):
So it's been around a while, and this was something that Todd Zakrajsek really worked on. I, I've gone into working with animals, so I've moved away from faculty development, but Todd is taking it over and hopefully he will keep it going when it goes into its sixth edition, which I wouldn't be at all surprised if it does. But anyway, but I did definitely all the first four editions, and it was a wonderful thing. I was so glad to see it published and to see that it was needed. I guess I thought of Wilbert McKeachie's Teaching Tips, and I thought, oh, wow, wouldn't it be cool to be the next Wilbert? And it kind of happened. It did, and I was really thrilled about that. Very thrilled.

Derek Bruff (00:33:44):
Linda left Vanderbilt in 1998 to found the teaching center at Clemson University in South Carolina. When I interviewed Linda, I asked her about why she left Vanderbilt, and I found her story quite touching.

Linda Nilson (00:33:57):
So why in the world did you leave? Well, a main reason why I left was my husband died while I was there, and a year or so later. I mean, I was doing fine. I went back to work ASAP after this happened, and thank God for work that I did. I was really pleased. He was the one who had told me, Hey, why don't you take that handbook you wrote for the Vanderbilt community and turn it into a book for everybody else? Which I did, but I wasn't making, there were too many memories, too many places that I passed every day, and it reminded me. So I thought, you know what? Change in an environment might do me good. And it did. It really, really did. And as soon I remember driving into Clemson when I was moving there, and it's like this, I had in my own condo and everything, it was like this dark cloud over my head just dissipated, just went away, and I was healed that quickly, and really it took a change of venue to do it. So that was a good decision that I made my own mental health and my own joy.

Derek Bruff (00:35:28):
1998 brought two big changes at the Center for Teaching. One was that Allison Pingree replaced Linda Nilson as director of the CFT. Allison came to Vanderbilt from Harvard University where she had worked at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. This was her first job as a teaching center director, and the job was bigger than it had been in the past. That's because the other big change that happened in 1998 was that the CFT moved from the College of Arts and Science where it had been housed since its founding in 1986 to the Provost's office. That meant serving the entire university, not just one college. I talked with Allison in 2023 about the goals she had during her early days as CFT director and the growth of the CFT staff to meet those goals.

Allison Pingree (00:36:15):
I mean, the kind of core goal was to expand the center to serve the whole university, right? Because that was, I think what occasioned the search that led me to apply to begin with was that pivot from a and s to the whole university. So it was already on the books. The plan that they had already sketched out was that the person taking this position, that there would be two additional assistant director positions right away, two lines made available as part of this expansion,

Derek Bruff (00:36:51):
Because before you came, it was I think a three person staff. Is that right?

Allison Pingree (00:36:55):
Yes, it was Melissa Penix, Darlene Panvini, and Linda, and then it was me. So we were three people, but there was a line for assistant director of technology that was actually, you know what? Initially there was just one line, the assistant director for technology, and then I was able to make the case to get an additional line, which then led to the three assistant director model that we had for so many years. You may or may not remember that originally Darlene had been doing the grad student work so beautifully for so long, but to have me and only me do the faculty stuff was just unmanageable because as we expanded, we needed, so that's where Peter came in and was the faculty person. And then John Rakestraw was the technology.

Derek Bruff (00:37:56):
The Peter that Allison mentioned was Peter Felten, who came to the CFT as an assistant director and later left Vanderbilt to found the Center for Teaching at Elon University. Listeners may know him from his fantastic 2020 book co-authored with Leo Lambert called Relationship Rich Education. CFT staff have a habit of writing great books. We'll hear from Peter a bit later. Back in 1998, Allison had a big job to do. Fortunately, she had some help starting with some of the faculty who had served on the search committee that hired her.

Allison Pingree (00:38:28):
The search committee that he had put together was a wonderful, it had representation from all the schools and many of the people who had been on the search committee who had then met over the course of my, I did two different visits. I asked them to be on our first advisory board, and they helped set policy around things like our confidentiality. And my understanding is that had been a little bit of an issue that some faculty had been concerned about what was happening with the materials that, from conversations they had had. And so Kent Syverud, bless his soul, it was then Dean of the Law School. He's now president of Syracuse University. He was one of my most important early mentors in helping us as a committee, as an advisory board to create the confidentiality policy that I think, I don't know, has it changed? I don't know if it's changed, but still in the books.

Derek Bruff (00:39:31):
Same so far as I know. Yeah.

Allison Pingree (00:39:34):
And that helped us just to be very, very clear about who we were answering to on what and what kind of spaces for safe exploration we could ensure. That was a big part of our expansion, because then I could not only things like the policy, but just like I had representation everywhere, and they could then help us think, well, what from your perspective do you think is going to be most useful for the school of nursing, et cetera. So I did a lot of listening tours. I did a lot of tapping into what they already knew. And I think the process of conducting a search at a national level for a director, as it always happens, there's lots of good things that happen through searches that have nothing to do with. People meet each other and they start talking, well, what do we really want? So that was really helpful.

Derek Bruff (00:40:32):
Remember the firewall I mentioned between the work of the CFT and the formal faculty evaluation process? the CFTs confidentiality policy was a big part of that firewall. In brief, it meant that what was discussed about teaching at the CFT state, at the CFT, if a faculty member was getting poor student evaluations and their department chair asked them to visit the CFT for a consultation, we would not report back to that chair even to say that the consultation had occurred. Chairs generally understood this, and it meant that faculty could be honest about their struggles as teachers with CFT staff. The CFT advisory board wasn't the only group of faculty. Alison Pingree leaned on as the CFTs scope and mission grew.

Allison Pingree (00:41:13):
A kind of second body of people that were super, super valuable were the chairs of Teaching Excellence. Yeah, well, it was a really big deal. These were two were selected every year, and they got a boatload of money. I am not remembering well in either then dollars or today's dollars, what it would be, but it was something like $25,000 a year, some pretty big amount of money, and they were kind of a kitchen cabinet for me. I gathered them and to just hear about, again, what are the issues at your school? They were often the prime people to turn to for new faculty orientation for workshops. One of the things that over time we worked on together with the CFT, with the provost office, was to have the chairs of Teaching Excellence take on projects. Because initially, I mean, this predates me. It was already in place. I don't know if it was under with Linda or Ken, but the main thinking was to originally it was much more a kind of gold star and how wonderful you are, and that's great, and maybe you'd give a workshop or something, but I think the provost office wanted to get more bang for their buck, which makes sense.

(00:42:39):
We didn't turn them into faculty fellows as such that model, but we were trying to have them, 'em have something that was sort of their signature contribution. So Leonard Folgarait in fine arts, for example, he would always give workshops about what I would call now learning to look.

Derek Bruff (00:43:01):
This is where I come back into the story. I mentioned that my first event as a Vanderbilt graduate student was the CFTs TA orientation. In my fourth year as a grad student, I served as a master teaching fellow at the CFT, helping to run TAO and other workshops throughout the year for my fifth and final year as a graduate student. I wasn't eager to teach calculus yet again for the math department because that wasn't going to add much to my CV that wasn't already there. Instead, I managed to get a graduate assistant position at the CFT. John Rakestraw, the CFTs Assistant Director for Technology was on leave that fall semester. So I took over his webmaster duties. In addition to other projects like editing the CFT newsletter, Alison mentioned art history. Professor Leonard Folgarait leading workshops on learning to look. I distinctly remember attending one of those workshops during my year as a graduate assistant. It was part of a series of workshops led by senior faculty, many of them, chairs of Teaching Excellence meeting and learning from those faculty was transformational for me and for Allison as she settled into her new role as director.

Allison Pingree (00:44:04):
People like Marshall Eakin, whose office was in Benson Hall, right? So this is the history building. And English right across his office was in the lower floor of Benson, and he always had a Brazilian flag there. And I would sit in my office and I could see that Brazilian flag, and it just gave me so much hope. It was like, oh, Marshall, he's right there. And I often would just go over to his office and just like, oh, Marshall. And he had this rocking chair in his office, and I would just sit and rock and we would talk. I don't know. I owe so much to Marshall. He was such a mensch.

Derek Bruff (00:44:46):
Allison, listeners might have gathered by now, was a relationship builder. Those relationships served her well as she turned her attention to a second important goal, deepening the Vanderbilt teaching community's intellectual engagement around teaching. Ken Bain had started that process by connecting faculty with the educational research literature. And Linda Nilson had continued it by contributing to that literature through her teaching handbook, which was widely shared at Vanderbilt. Allison built on those efforts by helping Vanderbilt faculty not only learn from the literature, but to explore their own teaching through scholarly inquiry.

Allison Pingree (00:45:22):
That was the time when the Carnegie Foundation, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Castle, that whole thing launched the SOTL movement as it were. And I remember going to, I think it was an AAC&U. No, it was an AAHE conference when they were still having those, American Association of Higher Education. And Marshall went as well because I guess because he was a chair of teaching excellence and there was money for it or something. Anyway, we both got super excited about Castle and about SoTL stuff. And so we started to do that kind of work on campus, and it also helped me and us to, do you remember the inquiry cycle we had that it's kind of like, I can't remember the four stages, but everybody's got their version of it, but it's kind of inquire, play around with ideas, try it out and learn. And that just became like a backbone for us being able to talk about our work in scholarly ways and that it's like CIRTL, teaching as research. Research on teaching and learning at a research university, getting faculty buy-in to thinking about teaching. It's always going to be a tough nut to crack. And so

(00:46:37):
It didn't feel to me that the mission and the work of the CFT had been, and this was part of the purpose number two, which is to make more rigorous and respectable in a scholarly way, the work we were doing. And so I think we made good progress on that kind of conceptual framework of the work we were doing through that whole process.

Derek Bruff (00:47:03):
This work helped address the misconception about the CFT that Ken Bain had identified that our work was only about helping teachers perform better in the classroom. Yes, classroom teaching was a big part of our work, but it wasn't about performance. We helped faculty take a scholarly approach to the choices they made as teachers, drawing on the educational research literature and sometimes contributing to it as well. Allison wasn't wrong about the uphill climb that some faculty experience when trying to develop their teaching at a research university. Here's Peter Felten, whom I talked with in 2024, about the Visible Knowledge Project, part of the CFTs efforts to support the scholarship of teaching.

Peter Felten (00:47:43):
So Visible Knowledge Project was something Randy Bass got a large from Georgetown, got a large private donation to try to lead a national humanities arts and humanities sort of inquiry project into teaching and learning. Scholarship teaching and learning was a thing at that point, but it wasn't discussed that much. One of the really interesting things from my perspective about this and what was happening is faculty would be part of this cohort. You'd have a campus cohort and then you'd participate in summer institutes, and each faculty member would be doing an inquiry project basically in their own teaching. And then we'd be looking at that making, there was a lot about making the process of teaching and the thinking behind that visible using sort of course portfolios. So there are great faculty at Vanderbilt who were involved in this project. I could name some of them. One of the things that was interesting is one of those faculty members who was an associate, they were all tenured already.

(00:48:49):
This was part of the gig, and one of them said they did not want their chair or Dean knowing they were part of it. So we didn't announce this as a thing. CFT had gotten a grant and was supporting three years with the faculty work or anything like this. And another one of the participants said at one point, and I think this is a direct quote, all of the work in this area is shit. And I looked at them and was like, are you doing shit work? And this is someone, I could say their name. I'm sure you would know them, and they did great work. But I think, anyways, the

Derek Bruff (00:49:32):
Meaning that it didn't feel like scholarship to them. So do you think there were some positive outcomes of the VKP in spite of the invisible nature of the Visible Knowledge Project?

Peter Felten (00:49:45):
Well, yes, because knowing what the work the faculty at Vanderbilt did, it helped very good, very thoughtful teachers become a little more intentional, a little more effective. So I think there was direct benefit to those faculty and their students. And I think it also really informed some CFT intellectual infrastructure, if that makes sense, about really helping to see, and this is something Alison Pingree had been talking about from arrival of thinking about teaching as an active inquiry. And so I think it reinforced that it supported that it got more faculty doing that rather than sort of nodding along when they say was an active inquiry. But it's in mind with Allison's vision,

Derek Bruff (00:50:57):
While Allison and Peter and John Rakestraw were helping faculty see teaching as inquiry, Darlene Panvini was busy building out the CFTs programs for graduate students, and not only graduate students serving as teaching assistants, but also helping graduate students prepare for future faculty careers.

Darlene Panvini (00:51:15):
So there's the Preparing Future Faculty programs that were, what these were grant funded or something that other universities were doing, and we didn't get in on the first wave of that. So we were trying to grow our own kind of program. And yes, I was very much, I totally had forgotten about that, very much involved in that. So we called it Future Faculty Preparation Program, F2P2, and I remember that the grad students, I don't know that we had many postdocs, but I think if postdocs wanted to participate, we would certainly have let them, but certainly grad students would. And we had this sort of set of classes and programs and workshops that they would participate in. But one of the things I remember doing is taking groups of them to different universities. Do you remember that? I

Derek Bruff (00:52:11):
Had totally forgotten about that piece of

Darlene Panvini (00:52:13):
It. Yeah, I had to until just now. But I remember that the goal was that as part of the program, they would visit at least two or three different kinds of universities. So I would organize these trips, these cohorts of grad students, and we would go and I would contact people at the school and we would try to meet with a faculty member in their discipline if we could Deans and any administrators, and of course if they had a teaching center, that was usually my point of contact and point of entry. But it felt really important to help grad students as they were making choices about their future, the difference between a primary, an institution that's a PUI, primarily undergraduate institution, a community college, and they kind of know what an R1 is because they're at Vanderbilt. But I remember going to Sewanee, I remember going to Fisk because we also wanted students to see the differences and HBCU,

Derek Bruff (00:53:17):
The work that the CFT did to prepare future faculty is one of the ways the CFT had a national impact. I've known of many faculty members thriving at other institutions that attribute at least some of their success as teachers to participation in CFT programs. We'll hear from a couple of those faculty later on. One of those programs were graduate students. One that actually predated F2P2 was called GradSTEP. Many of the graduate students who wanted to participate in CCFT workshops couldn't get away from their research or labs during the workweek. So the CFT started holding a day long Saturday event. Every January grad staff sessions were mostly facilitated by the Master teaching fellows. Those experienced grad students at the CFT hired to run TA orientation. One of those master teaching fellows was Alison Piepmeier, who went on to be an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston, and sadly died of brain cancer in 2016. Allison Pingree remembers the very first grad step event. Well, because of Alison Piepmeier.

Allison Pingree (00:54:18):
GradSTEP. We happened in January of 1999, the first one, because I remember Alison Piepmeier, who was an MTF from the first year, had scheduled to have it at the Divinity. So it was scheduled to be, I don't even know if it's still, maybe they've redone the whole Divinity School, but in their big cafeteria area, that's where the plenary was going to be with Michael Rose and blah, blah, blah. We could not get into the building. It was locked. It was a Saturday morning, Alison Piepmeier, may she rest in peace, wonderful human being, jury rigged. She climbed through the window. She figured out how to crank, open the window. And anyway, so GradSTEP was our first, we need something for professional development, not just you're a TA and you come to TAO. Bye-bye. We got to do more. So that was grad step, and then it was like, well, maybe there's a program and you could get credit in different kinds of ways. And F2P2, and then of course the teaching certificate.

Derek Bruff (00:55:27):
Alison Pingree was the director of the CFT for 13 years, from 1998 to 2011. There's a lot more that could be said about the CFT during her tenure, including the shift of the master teaching fellow positions into more substantial graduate teaching fellow positions, and the launch of the CFTs very popular junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program, which ran for 12 years and saw many alumni of the program move into leadership positions around Vanderbilt. The Center did incredible work during Allison's time there, but she's quick to point out that all that work wasn't a grind

Allison Pingree (00:56:02):
And that I would put that under. One of the things I'm proud of, sort of like a humanizing culture of care and of playfulness, that I think some of it comes naturally to me just because of who I am and who my mom is, frankly, and how she loves a good well. Oh, and my mom, Mrs. Pingree's peanut brittle, so for advisory board in the first couple of years. So she used to make peanut brittle professionally, and I sent boxes to all the members of the advisory committee to thank them. And Marshall Eakin still, I mean, I have stopped sending it to him, but he's like, your mother's peanut brittle. I have to have and just, I dunno, doing things like the parties, the Halloween parties come on. I mean, Cynthia Ganote with Lion of the Witch and the Tumnus, and she was Lucy and I was one year I dressed up as the N Drive. Remember I was mysterious.

Derek Bruff (00:57:03):
A quick explanation for most of my time at the CFT, we used a shared network drive for documents and such, and we called it the in drive since it was mapped to the letter N on our laptops as we archived things in the N Drive. Over the years, it became more and more cluttered so that eventually, I think Allison and I were the only ones who could find things there. Thus Allison's costume featuring a large letter in on her shirt, surrounded by lots of question marks.

Allison Pingree (00:57:30):
One year, Robert Jenkins, who was one of our GTFs, and we had had different ones of us, were sort of key mentors for different ones. So I was kind of his key mentor. He came up dressed as me. Did you know that he had a red wig and like a blazer? And he was like, oh, hello. And always having an end of year celebration. Well, early, it was just an internal to CFT celebration. Then it turned into the celebration of teaching. And I tried to make a point of my first year, I remember writing a song to the tune of, I've been working on the railroad, we've been working at the center all live long, and just, I dunno, giving gifts little. So to me, that was such an important, it tapped into my creativity. It tapped into my love for people. I think it helped people to, helped us to not take our work so seriously.

Derek Bruff (00:58:37):
Allison left the CFT in 2011 to take a position at Harvard University where she had done her doctoral work. But before we move our narrative to that point, let's hear from Darlene Panvini again about a theme that ran across her long tenure at the CFT.

Darlene Panvini (00:58:52):
I think working with three directors who were all very different, but they all mentored me in really good ways and in the ways that I needed at that moment in my career, in my professional development. They really helped me to see what I could do and what I could be as a professional and as someone who's very interested in teaching and learning. And they gave me the wings to fly, but they also helped keep me tethered when I needed that. And so I really valued the kind of mentoring that I got from all three of the directors. But I also valued being a mentor to the graduate students, the international TAs, and to the undergrads who were working for us, and just having those moments to be a mentor. I think when you are a mentor, you learn a lot about yourself and you grow through that experience as well. Trying to be a role model of how to be a good mentor to students felt important then and continues to feel important now. And the work that I do.

Derek Bruff (01:00:00):
I was also the beneficiary of really great mentoring at the CFT, especially during my time as an assistant director working for Allison that helped prepare me for the next phase of the CFTs history starting in 2011 when I was named director of the CFT. To help me reflect on that time period in the CFTs history, I reached out to Stacey Johnson to interview me for this project. Stacey was the assistant director for educational technology from 2015 to 2023, leading the CFTs support for faculty using a variety of instructional technologies, including the university's learning management system. Stacey interviewed me in late 2023, and she started by asking me the same question I had asked previous directors in my interviews with them. What were your initial goals for the CFT as director? I talked about addressing another misconception that the campus community sometimes had about the CFT, that it was only a resource for relatively inexperienced instructors pretty early.

(01:01:01):
It was clear to me that the CFT had a well earned reputation for working with graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty. That the kind of novice, more novice teachers on campus saw us as a place where they could go and they could develop their teaching skills and get good advice and get training and pedagogy. And so that was great, but I wanted us to do more than that. I wanted us to kind of help the entire teaching community at Vanderbilt, including more experienced faculty, to really think about teaching as something that is part of their ongoing professional development. That anytime in your career you can spend some time refining your teaching and exploring some new ideas and teaching and learning. And so that was a lot of our, I think the first few years as director was trying to figure out how do we go beyond that really great core business of working with more novice teachers and how do we develop programming and outreach that's going to connect with a lot of faculty in different places around campus at different points in their career? Early on, during my time as director, I made a small management decision that ended up being a big part of how the CFT would reach those more experienced faculty around campus. One of my early decisions was to restructure our liaison work when we were working directly with departments and programs and schools around campus. Previously, the director was our liaison to all the department chairs

(01:02:26):
And then assistant directors would be liaison to faculty within different discipline clusters on campus. So we'd have our liaison to the STEM faculty and our liaison to the humanities faculty and so on. I felt like a lot of the work at the department level happened with the chair and with the faculty, and the department was such a key unit of organization that I asked our assistant directors to take on those chair liaison relationships. So you wouldn't just be working with the faculty in your disciplines, but you'd be working with the department leadership in those disciplines as well. And I think that just kind of opened up the barn doors to all types of great collaborations. Again, we had assistant directors who had faculty like backgrounds, faculty backgrounds. They could connect well with faculty, they could create those working relationships with department chairs and other department leaders.

(01:03:19):
And so much of the change that might happen around teaching and learning at a place like Vanderbilt happened at the department level. And so to be able to create those relationships to come and do a workshop for the whole department, that the department chair invited people to figure out what the department teaching challenges were and try to cook up resources and professional development around that, I feel like we'd kind of plateaued in terms of our reach on campus with our come one come all workshops. And it was often, I mean it like we might have 15, 20% of the faculty come to those in a given year, but it was kind of the same 15 to 20% of faculty all the time. And once we opened up the door to these more robust department collaborations, we started reaching a lot more faculty on camp. But it meant that we needed senior staff who could do that work and we're kind of entrepreneurial enough to go and figure out what that would look like.

(01:04:18):
It would be different in the languages than it would be in the science departments than it would be at the business school. And so we needed senior staff who could kind of figure that out and of build those working relationships. So very proud of making that decision, which meant I had less work to do, but the senior staff had a lot more work to do. That really meant a lot. Stacey asked me about my strategy for staffing the CFT, particularly filling those critical assistant director roles. Most of the assistant directors that came in under Allison, including Cynthia Ganote, Patricia Armstrong, Jeff Johnston, and Kat Baker didn't have many years of faculty experience before they came to the CFT, and I count myself in that bucket, but many of the ones who came later, including Joe Bandy, Nancy Chick, Cynthia Brame, and Stacey Johnson had more robust faculty experience. Cynthia and Joe had even obtained tenure at their previous institutions. I think some of it was, I realized that given that our senior staff did so much work with faculty, that we needed a way to connect well with faculty as peers and colleagues and not as outsiders or educational experts or someone who,

Stacey Johnson (01:05:30):
Or support staff.

Derek Bruff (01:05:31):
Support staff, right. Yeah. We needed to have, and what I was looking for when I hired was faculty like backgrounds, and sometimes that meant someone like Joe who had gotten tenure at a small liberal arts college, and other times it meant people who had PhDs in various disciplines and had teaching experience and could have pursued faculty careers if they had wanted to, but I think especially about Joe and Cynthia where they both had made a difference at their previous institutions at a campus level, and they kind of enjoyed doing that, right? They figured out, yes, I enjoyed teaching, but I also enjoyed making change at kind of bigger levels than just my individual classroom, and I mean, you did too, right? This was work that you were already doing, and so I think that's a natural kind of transition to go from that. A faculty member who's not just kind of head down doing their own work but is kind of looking at the organization that they're in and how they can improve it.

(01:06:34):
That's a great person to be at a teaching center because it's so much of the work that we're doing at teaching centers. I'll add here that thanks to the trailblazing work of Linda Nilson and Darlene Panvini mentioned earlier, it became standard practice for our senior staff to teach in their own disciplines while working at the CFT, I taught a math course every year. For instance, Joe taught in sociology, Cynthia and Biology and so on. The fact that we were in the trenches teaching the same students that our faculty colleagues were teaching gave us a lot of credibility with those colleagues, and it meant we got to do something we loved teach. Having teaching as part of the assistant director job description was one way the CFT could recruit great staff. Stacey asked me to talk about the challenge of retaining these amazing assistant directors.

Stacey Johnson (01:07:19):
Is it seems to me like there were some very long-term assistant directors under you where maybe there was more turnover in the past. Was that a change in the types of hires or in the way we thought about those positions or?

Derek Bruff (01:07:37):
It was certainly a goal for me when I became director. This was another advantage of having been an assistant director

(01:07:43):
And been trying to figure out as an assistant director, what kind of career do I want to carve at a place like the CFT and at Vanderbilt and what does that look like long-term, one of my goals as director was to try to make those careers more possible for our assistant directors, and so I know I didn't solve that problem, but I think I tried to put in some structures that helped people see these senior staff positions as something they could stick with For a while, it was hard. We didn't have the organizational chart that allowed for a ladder of advancement, and so I tried to figure that out with administration wherever I could, but I was also trying to find ways to make the job rewarding and enriching for the folks that were in those jobs. Our assistant directors with their strong faculty backgrounds wanted a fair amount of autonomy in their work. I was happy to give them that since they brought such an entrepreneurial spirit to their work with the Vanderbilt teaching community. Heather Fedesco was the CFTs assistant Director for Graduate Student Programming from 2018 to 2020. She sent me some reflections on joining the CFT at that point in its history, reflections that capture how well the team worked together.

Heather Fedesco (01:09:02):
I was hired in 2018 as the assistant director of graduate programs, and I remember getting a lot of compliments for our offerings as if the credit should go to me, but the thing was that the Center for Teaching was such a finely tuned machine, so things like the teaching assistant orientation, the Graduate Teaching Fellows program, the certificate in college teaching program, these were all set up long before I got there, and they already had smooth processes established for how to run them along with really high quality content. On top of that, the graduate students were leading all the programs, and we hired the most amazing graduate students, so I never really could take any credit for the professional development support we offered to graduate students and postdocs. It kind of felt like I was just along for the ride, which was totally okay by me.

(01:09:48):
I have worked many places before and after Vanderbilt, and so far nothing has replicated how strong the quality of people are at the Center for Teaching. While I was there, there was no weak link that was the secret to its success, so every single person was committed to the mission of the center. Everyone was exceptionally hardworking. I think most of us were perfectionists and we all respected the unique contributions everyone brought to the table, which led to a very high performing team. Everyone was motivated and incredibly creative, and we all cared about each other and the Vanderbilt community. This meant that we could be trusted to do our work without too much oversight and working under that autonomy supportive environment let us all thrive.

Derek Bruff (01:10:31):
The autonomy the senior staff had was a strength of the center. Our senior staff in particular did such great work in their respective areas. However, it was also pretty great when we all worked together on a project, and so one of the things, there was several years there where I really look forward to the Course Design Institute every year because we got to work on it together and I got to see all of you guys in action, and I got to just sit in the back of the room and I'm like, oh yeah, Stacey's great at leading a workshop. Cynthia's fantastic doing it. So that to me, if I think about anecdotes that represent the CFT, to me, this isn't all of the CFT, but it does capture a lot of the magic of the c ft, which was really great. People who were really passionate about the work that they were doing, who were really smart and had a lot of expertise to bring to bear, but also this kind of shared sense of mission and purpose to help our teaching community on campus. And so again, we did a lot that was kind of everyone on their own, but to actually get the team together to work on something was really great. And then we revamped the Course Design Institute to focus on inclusive teaching, and that was another all team project. It got a little interrupted by Covid, but it was an all team project, and so that was really rewarding for me to be able to see the team in action like that.

Stacey Johnson (01:11:50):
The Course Design Institute is my favorite. It was the most magical time of year. It was one of those things every single year we collaborated, we coordinated, we planned, and then I was sure the day before, we just aren't together enough. We haven't collaborated enough. I don't know enough about what other people are doing to make sure my part fits, and then we would show up, and it was magic every single year. I learned more in those three days of the Course Design Institute every year than I'm sure the participants did. It was just fantastic.

Derek Bruff (01:12:25):
Yeah, Vanderbilt wasn't the only community to benefit from the expertise of the CFT staff and graduate fellows outside of Vanderbilt. The CFT was best known for its website, which featured what we called teaching guides, these guides, and we had over 70 of them eventually were another form of the scholarship of teaching and learning. The guides presented research-based teaching practices on a variety of pedagogical topics from the flip classroom to community engaged teaching to online course development and more. Stacey asked me about the teaching guides during our interview,

Stacey Johnson (01:12:59):
And my sense is that most of our guides were actually written under your direction. Is that true?

Derek Bruff (01:13:08):
Yes. There were a lot that predated me, but over time we would rewrite them, redo them, replace them. There was

Stacey Johnson (01:13:18):
Put them in APA format, expand them to be more scholarly. A lot of the older guides were really more like bullet points, here's what you need to know,

Derek Bruff (01:13:27):
Or a list of links to other pages. Yeah.

Stacey Johnson (01:13:30):
When you were a director, and I think especially because of that team that you built with the faculty background, they became really robust evidence-based guides to practice that I'm super proud of and I hope they're one of the things you're most proud of from your time there.

Derek Bruff (01:13:45):
They are. They are. It's the thing, and it's easy for me to brag on them because I wrote five of them. It was that we had a center that valued this kind of work, and we had, I mean, I can take some credit to say I tried to make time and space in our work portfolios so that our staff could be able to do this, but it's because we had so passionate staff, both senior staff and graduate fellows who wanted to explore these topics and wanted to write them up and wanted to share them. And so yeah, when people say, Hey, you guys have a great center website, I'm like, yeah, we do. We really do. It's a testament to the quality of the staff that we had over time.

(01:14:31):
I had the pleasure of directing the CFT for almost 11 years. There were lots of changes at the CFT during that time, some of which I've already discussed, but perhaps the biggest was the expansion of our work around teaching with technology. Stacy asked me about how that component of the C FT's work evolved over the years. When I was a grad student at the CFT, we had an assistant director for teaching with technology, John Rakestraw. Shortly after I came back as an assistant director, we hired Rhett McDaniel as an educational technologist, and his job initially was half of it was just supporting the technology needs of the center internally, but the other half was working with faculty and helping them think through technology. My own areas of great interest in teaching were around teaching with technology, and I think that's what got me involved with the Coursera initiative at Vanderbilt in 2011, 2012, 2013.

(01:15:28):
It was the days of MOOC mania, and there was a lot of interest from our administration in launching these free and open online courses, and I got tapped to help with that. It was a pretty successful project. I had some useful roles that I could play and other staff members at the CFT could play, and so shortly after that, it became clear that our learning management system, Blackboard was having some issues at Vanderbilt and would in fact need new management, new leadership. There was basically one person at Vanderbilt tasked with running Blackboard and she was leaving, and so it needed a new home institutionally, and I think because the CFT had shown its value to this administrative driven initiative around the Coursera project, Cynthia Cyrus in particular, one of the vice provosts looked at us and said, Hey, you can handle this other technology related project.

(01:16:24):
And so there were certainly times in that MOOC year where I was like, is this what I want to do for my day job? I don't feel like I'm a video production guy. The pedagogical models in these courses are not ones that I'm really fond of. There's lots of problems here, but one payoff was I kind of put in the time and serve the institution well in that place, and that allowed us to be given more resources and responsibility going forward. And so first it was the Blackboard, the learning management system that allowed us to hire you. We had an assistant director for educational technology and then other instructional technologists that we could hire to support that, and then Rhett's job expanded to do more digital media. We got to hire some digital media specialists. The team just kind of kept growing, and so when I came in as director in 2011, we had eight full-time staff positions, and at our high point in 2020, we had 14 full-time staff positions, and most of that difference was our technology piece, and many of those new staff were hired, trained and mentored by Stacey Johnson. When Stacey and I talked for this project, I turned the tables on her at one point and asked her about what made the Brightspace team named after the learning management System Vanderbilt adopted in 2016. I asked her what made that team at the CFT special.

Stacey Johnson (01:17:47):
I like to tell people, I'll say things occasionally tongue in cheek. I hate educational technology, which is why Derek hired me to be the assistant director for educational technology because I really don't think I had the experience. I didn't have the experience building a new unit. I didn't have experience managing a help desk. I didn't have experience working cross-functionally with professional IT staff. There was so much, it's really a mystery

(01:18:18):
Why we hired. I didn't have, in hindsight, I love that you hired me. You hired someone who was just like, Hey, educational technology won't fix all of our problems, but it will fix a few of 'em and we can help you do those few things better. And I think that's what Vanderbilt faculty needed to hear and not being, I was not interested in making a career in educational technology, and I allowed our actual IT folks and our actual educational technologists to shine and tell me what needed to happen, and I just love that you went in a completely teaching direction with your educational technology team, and I think it worked really well. I'm so proud of all the folks who were in the Brightspace team, I mean just to a person. They were all just wonderful, helpful, dedicated, amazing people that brought so much to Vanderbilt and so proud to have worked with them.

Derek Bruff (01:19:20):
Yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. Another great thing that came out of that work with MOOCs or massive Open online courses that I mentioned was the CFTs emphasis on engaging students not only as consumers of information, but producers of knowledge. We had a students as producers theme year where we explored what this looked like in a variety of teaching contexts, and then we wove those ideas into much of the work thereafter, especially our Course Design Institute. I'm really proud of the CFT students as producers model, and Stacy asked me to reflect on why it was important on the topic of students as producers. There were multiple origins of that idea and multiple purposes kind of strategic purposes for framing course design and assignment design as engaging students in production of knowledge. One of them was directly a result of the MOOC mania. There was all this attention on these free and open courses, and this was early days, so the folks at Stanford were having a hundred thousand students take their online computer science courses, and so the administration at Vanderbilt was like, what do we need to be doing?

(01:20:28):
One of the things that happened was I got put on a committee led by John Sloop and Jay Clayton, and it was like the social media committee. It didn't even have a proper name because no one knew what to call it, but it was like, what are we doing with digital learning around campus? And part of the initial work was just hearing from folks in different colleges and schools who would kind of survey their peers and see what's the landscape right now. And it became really clear to me hearing from those folks around campus that Vanderbilt had a strategic learning problem.

(01:20:58):
We had so many high achieving students who kind of approach learning very strategically and didn't engage in the kind of deep learning that Ken Bain writes about in his book, what the Best College Teachers Do,

(01:21:10):
And it wasn't just the arts and science, it was like everywhere on campus there was all this strategic learning happening. And so that was one of the reasons to try to shift how we thought about assignments and courses to the students as producers model, how can we engage students in some form of knowledge production that is personally meaningful to them so that they will dive in and not just try to get the best grade, but will actually be motivated to learn something. This issue that I think Vanderbilt struggle probably still struggles with is that we're really good at recruiting strategic learners, but shifting those learners to kind of a deep learning mindset is hard work. There was lots for me to enjoy about my term as director of the CFT, but it wasn't all Sunshine and Roses. Stacey asked me about my biggest challenges as director, and one of them was a result of that move the CFT made in 1998 from the College of Arts and Science to the provost office.

(01:22:06):
That new spot in the organizational chart meant balancing a lot of competing interests. I was thinking about some of the biggest challenges I faced, and I think playing well with administration was always a challenge, and I think sometimes I did it very well, but it was definitely an ongoing challenge of trying to figure out what are the needs and the priorities of the faculty and the other instructors that we're working with. What are the needs and the priorities of the administration because they're really important for the leadership and the resources that they have, and then what are the needs and priorities that we have as a center and how can I try to overlap those as much as possible and figure that out? And so yeah, some of it was managing up and educating up and helping administrators understand what this kind of educational development work looked like and what it needed.

(01:22:57):
And there were times where I could make that case to say, look, when we have an assistant director who sticks around for eight years, that person can build really productive relationships with the faculty that we're working with, and if they leave after three, we have to start that process over. And some administrators, I think understood that and tried to work with me to help on retention things and other administrators didn't seem to get that message. That brings us to 2022 when I left my position at the Center for Teaching, largely because of clashes with the leadership at the provost office, the CFT reported to the provost, and at the end of the day, it's the provost's priorities that control the CFTs future. In 2023, the Vanderbilt Provost decided to rename the CFT as the Office of Educational Design and Development and to merge the unit with the Office of Digital Education.

(01:23:54):
The Center for Teaching as Stacey and I knew it is no more, but its impact will live on at Vanderbilt and across higher education for some time to come. I wish I could share here some of the stories of the many, many faculty and grad students who benefited from the CFTs work at Vanderbilt, but that's beyond the scope of this project. I will, however, leave the listener with a few more voices from CFT staff and graduate fellow alumni about the impact of the CFT on their own careers in academia. First, here's Ryan Bowen, who served as a graduate teaching fellow at the CFT from 2016 to 2017. Ryan is currently an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Science and Research program at Vanderbilt University's Collaborative for STEM Education and Research.

Ryan Bowen (01:24:38):
I was a first generation graduate student at Vanderbilt, and I was in the chemistry program at the time, and I had no idea what sorts of opportunities were out there for teaching and learning until I came in contact with the Center for Teaching. My first point of contact was through what was called the BOLD Fellows Program, and after going through that program, I had all the reassurances that I needed of what I wanted to do with my career, and so I ended up leaving my chemistry program and doing education instead. And that also afforded me the opportunity to become a graduate teaching fellow. And I personally found that the Graduate Teaching Fellows program was absolutely transformative. It built foundations of teaching and learning. It gave people experience and discussion, facilitation and programming, and it also provided the autonomy for people to participate in research and contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. And so all of that was just very exhilarating and it taught me so much. And so after I finished up my doctorate, I ended up joining another center where I do all of the same types of work that I did at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt, and I really love my job. And so it goes without saying that the CFT and the GTF program were transformative for me and my career trajectory, and it just gave me the opportunity to envision something different for my career, something that I enjoy very, very much.

Derek Bruff (01:26:12):
Next, here's Peter Felten again speaking on a panel that we organized for the CFTs 35th anniversary in 2021. Peter was an assistant and later associate director at the CFT from 1999 to 2005, and is currently at Elon University where he serves as executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, professor of History and Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning.

Peter Felten (01:26:37):
There's two things I'm really thinking about with this one. One is I'm trained as a historian. I went to grad school as a historian. I did that as a historian. Then I worked at a community college for a few years before Allison called, and I was trained to work entirely by myself. That's how historians work and that's how teaching works. And so one of the things that really fundamentally reoriented how I am as a professional and how I am in the world is the relational work at the CFT, working with peers closely on things, not just, you do this, I do that. And even doing things like we used to have this, I can't remember what the acronym was, where we would read an article and eat bagels and talk about stuff, and I had never really accepting graduate seminars, talked about scholarship with people except students that I sort of preach to.

(01:27:42):
So that blending of things was really important and is fundamental to who I am and how I work Now. The other thing that's really, really important, and I want to give a shout out to people like Marshall Aiken on this, even if he doesn't know it, is again, I came into the CFT and there was the history part of me, and there was the teaching and learning part of me, and it felt like those were fundamentally intention. I could do one or I could do the other. And there's something wonderful about the way Allison and others Marshall helped me think about this is both a hand, it's not either or. That's been fundamental in how I do my work. So the research and writing I do now actually draws a lot of my oral history training, which confuses lots of people like what? But it does, right? That's basically what I'm doing is contemporary oral histories. So anyways, this sort of integrative and holistic and human thing is really the key for me.

Derek Bruff (01:28:48):
Also on the CFTs 35th anniversary panel was Brielle Harbin. Brielle served as a graduate teaching fellow and senior graduate teaching fellow at the CFT from 2014 to 2016, and she's now an assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy.

Brielle Harbin (01:29:05):
I'm teaching a class this semester. I created a class at the Naval Academy, the first of its kind. It's a race, gender, class, and sexuality in US politics. So all the things that I was thinking about in terms of how to have these conversations, thinking through the issues of how to meet students where they are, I was learning about that and thinking about that from the time that I was a grad student. And so I think that the translation into, as a civilian in particular, the military context and thinking about how to approach the conversation with literally students that come from every congressional district and so have very different viewpoints when entering into this conversation has just, it was an invaluable experience. So that's just on a broad level, a concrete example of how that comes to mind in terms of how the skills that I was developing as a grad student have helped me in my career.

(01:30:03):
I literally just gave a campus wide talk on issues of diversity in organizations that literally had one of the former directors of the CIA in the audience. And so being able to, I think because I've had such a long history of thinking about these things, I think it prepared me and was able to have the space to think about those things in the context of developing my research and my service orientation. I just don't think that I would have been able to step into these conversations or think about it in the same way if I wouldn't have had that time to develop myself as a grad student. So I think that it was an invaluable experience and both the ways that I grew and also the challenges that I had with trying to do that work.

Derek Bruff (01:30:59):
Finally, let's hear from Katie Headrick Taylor, who also spoke at the CFTs 35th anniversary event. Katie was a graduate teaching fellow at the CFT from 2012 to 2013, and she's currently an associate professor of learning sciences and human Development at the University of Washington.

Katie Headrick Taylor (01:31:17):
I can't overemphasize how collaborative the space was at the Center for Teaching and how that really prepared me to not just think about supporting my current graduate students around research, but also supporting them around their own instruction. And so I have several PhD advisees now who are teaching in our undergrad program, and though many of them are researching learning in various contexts, they have less or might be out of practice translating that theory into their own instruction with undergraduates. And so my time at the Center for Teaching really just I think developed a practice in myself to be continuously collaborating around how we can be better instructors, how teaching is really in reciprocity with your students, how to make your practice really public and visible all the time, and not to be shy about that and to be open about your failures and to be able to workshop those together. And so again, just underscoring this idea of that constant collaboration in the Center for Teaching really did develop this community of practice, but also I think launched me into this next stage of my career to really try to develop that with my own DOC students.

Derek Bruff (01:33:07):
Thanks to Katie and to all the other CFT alumni who shared their stories of the CFT for this project. I hope this oral history incomplete as it is, provides a sense of the Center for teaching and what a special place it was. I'm honored to be a part of that history, and I'm honored that you've taken the time to listen to it. I've been your host, Derek Bre. Thanks for listening.