(left to right) Dr. Mary Poteau-Tralie, Dr. Anne Law, Dr. Arlene Wilner and Dr. Alex Grushow

"How are you introducing the concept to your students?" "What was their reaction?" "Can your content be restructured so that it will be more meaningful to them?"

These are just a few of the many questions several Rider faculty ask each other face-to-face every two weeks. As they gather around a long table in the Teaching and Learning Center, the conversation flows freely and grows lively as they hit upon areas of commonality or divergent views. The disciplines at hand one recent Friday afternoon were chemistry, accounting, psychology, French and English.

For the past three years, Dr. Arlene Wilner, professor of English, has led these discussions focused on classroom-inquiry projects with Rider faculty across many disciplines. Her efforts to support faculty in illuminating connections among their expert knowledge, their teaching, and their students' learning, have evolved into a major collaborative initiative at Rider known as BRIDGE (Bridging Research, Instruction, and Discipline-Grounded Epistemologies).

Dr. Wilner credits Dr. Phyllis Frakt, vice president for academic affairs and provost, for setting the course in this direction. During the late 1990s Frakt strongly encouraged faculty to think about an emerging field, the scholarship of teaching and learning. Participating in national higher education conferences, she saw that the merits of supporting faculty who were interested in classroom research to assess and improve students' learning. Frakt spoke frequently about a national initiative called the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching (CASTL). The initiative intrigued Wilner.

Upon applying and being selected for a CASTL Fellowship in 2000, Wilner pursued a project of great interest to her - finding effective ways to redesign curriculum for her freshman writing classes. Her studies based on this research are forthcoming as articles in Composition Forum and Reader and as a chapter in a book called Identity, Learning and the Liberal Arts (Jossey-Bass). During her CASTL residency, she found that colleagues across the country shared similar concerns about existing teaching methodologies.

"Many expressed to me that what appears to be connected and meaningful information can in fact be largely disconnected and meaningless to students," said Wilner. "Our students must contend with four or five of us with our separate subjects, approaches, expectations and idiosyncrasies. Although we were once in their shoes, we tend to forget what the experience felt like."

Her solution: facilitating ongoing dialogue on campus with Rider colleagues while providing a forum for discipline-based inquiry into teaching strategies. Dr. Katharine Hoff, emerita professor of English, helped conceive the proposal and served as co-director during the program's initial year. Faculty members across a wide range of disciplines, in turn, have responded enthusiastically. Voilà, the seeds for BRIDGE were planted.

"The exchange of ideas helps us to better understand the process of learning," said Dr. Alex Grushow, chairperson of the chemistry department. "Baby steps need to be taken. I have been conducting a lot of open-ended discussions with my students for a number of years. The BRIDGE experience has given me more of a locale to rehearse new strategies."

Dr. Anne Law, chairperson of psychology, concurs that the process is a work in progress. Law has participated in each faculty group since the program's inception. "This is an outstanding way to explore teaching and learning," said Law, a BRIDGE project mentor. Many of my students typically translate the reading of disciplinary articles into versions of what they already think they know. Sometimes they have difficulty connecting observational data to research and often substitute their personal experience for analysis of evidence.

"My challenge every class is to introduce them to discipline-based methods of inquiry in order to foster critical thinking and informed decision-making skills."

Dr. Betsy Haywood-Sullivan, assistant professor of accounting, did this recently with an assignment she gave her freshman business students. Each was asked to create a scrapbook of information, providing an analysis of recent business articles on a company of their choice.

As part of the BRIDGE experience, Haywood-Sullivan has been provided two books and several articles to read about the scholarship of teaching. She reported her step-by-step objectives to her BRIDGE colleagues, expounding upon her goals for the course as well as methods she thought were effective and ineffective. Feedback included small suggestions (such as calling the project a portfolio rather than a scrapbook) as well as ideas for supporting students in the conceptual thinking required by the assignment.

"I never believed that teaching and the learning process could be examined 'scientifically,'" said Haywood-Sullivan. "BRIDGE has really converted me. I am finding that you can approach teaching in similar ways to conducting a research project."

Dr. Mary Poteau-Tralie, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, now views things differently. "This program allows us to step outside our particular box and view the way we teach more objectively," she said. "We work together to find ways to reenergize a particular lesson, assignment or activity."

The synergy is exciting, notes Wilner.

"Students who are able to think critically through exercises actually learn more content and learn it better than students who are asked to somehow 'get through' a textbook," said Wilner. "Rethinking the way things are done helps us to overcome pedagogic solitude. We have to reach out to each other. It's all about practicing the kind of collaborative partnership we increasingly advocate for our students. Not only do we benefit, the benefits to our students promise to be immeasurable."

To see summaries of BRIDGE inquiry projects over the last three years, go to www.rider.edu/~bridge. This year's BRIDGE participants are Dr. Law, Dr. Haywood-Sullivan, Dr. Grushow, Dr. Stephanie Golski, assistant professor of psychology; Dr. Poteau-Tralie, Dr. Gary Pajer, adjunct assistant professor of chemistry; Dr. Rebecca Basham, assistant professor of English; and Dr. Hope Corman, professor of economics.

For further information regarding BRIDGE, call Wilner at (609) 895-5567.

Return to top