Mission and Values
 

The Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) and its partner institutions of the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA) have established a multi-national Consortium for Teaching and Learning (http://glcateachlearn.org). This educational community includes faculty members of the 13 colleges of the GLCA and from the extended range of institutional partners comprising the Global Liberal Arts Alliance. The Consortium has been created to serve faculty and instructional staff at these colleges, providing them access to educational resources beyond those available at any single college; we seek to form broader communities of practice among GLCA institutions and liberal arts colleges in the U.S and abroad. In an era of limited resources, there is much to be gained by combining knowledge, experience, and practice in a common endeavor.

Formed with generous support from the Teagle Foundation, the GLCA-GLAA Consortium on Teaching and Learning (CTL) is not a physical site.  It consists rather of a community of educators across multiple colleges and nations initiating interactive engagements to support faculty interested in improving teaching and learning, building  capacity at every stage of one’s career, and increasing the opportunities for transformative interactions. The CTL will participate actively in critical discussions about the role of liberal education at a time of considerable challenge and calls for change within higher education institutions.

Mission

The mission of the GLCA-GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning is to support and advance effective liberal arts education, providing access to teaching resources and connections to a vital international community of educators with a shared commitment to enhancing liberal arts teaching and student learning.

Our Core Values

In establishing a multi-campus Consortium for Teaching and Learning, we affirm these core principles:

We are an international community whose members advocate and support effective teaching as a primary value in our liberal arts colleges.  To achieve and sustain excellence in teaching requires an environment of support, including the support that faculty members give to one another through the sharing of ideas and experience.
We affirm that there are multiple ways to teach effectively; no single approach will work for everyone. At the same time, as scholars of teaching and learning, we recognize the importance of the empirical evidence describing how students learn and affirm the need to align our pedagogical practices to what this research indicates are the most productive approaches to student learning.

Consistent with the central tenets of liberal education, we regard our responsibilities as teachers to be best achieved by helping our students develop as independent thinkers capable of providing informed and critical perspectives, able to act responsibly in the larger world and to respect and engage constructively with others who may not share their ideas and who will come from a rich diversity of backgrounds and identities