Event June 5 showcases innovative faculty

Western Washington University’s Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment will hold its annual “Innovative Teaching Showcase Learning Event” from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 5, in College Hall Room 310 on campus.

The theme of this year's showcase is “Empowering Peer Learning.” Community members are invited to meet the featured instructors, view videotaped interviews with those instructors and some of their students and find out more about how instructors at Western are incorporating peer learning practices in their courses.

The event celebrates the completion of the CIIA’s new online edition of its “Innovative Teaching Showcase,” detailing innovative teaching practices of several WWU faculty members:

  • Garth Amundson (Art), who promotes collaboration amongst his students via social networking, dynamic critique of art projects, and a group effort for fundraising and submitting to professional exhibitions in the professional art world outside the classroom;
  • Joseph Garcia (Leadership Studies), who created a new course that fosters leadership skills in upper division undergraduates who, in turn, become mentors to one another in their shared role as instructors to other undergraduates in break-out sessions of a lower division leadership course; and
  • Ann Stone (Finance/Marketing), who incorporates a team learning project into her Brand Marketing class where each group crafts a “creative brief” of a brand and presents it to the rest of the students who are each role-playing the part of creative marketing professionals and writing critiques during the presentation.

For more information on the 2011-12 “Innovative Teaching Showcase,” visit http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/showcase2011/ or contact Justina Brown at (360) 650-7210 or justina.brown@wwu.edu.