Elon faculty and staff present at POD Network Conference

Four Elon faculty and Student Life staff recently presented sessions at the 40th annual conference of the POD Network in Higher Education in San Francisco.

Deandra Little, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) and associate professor of English, presented two sessions. One, titled “Whose Theory, Which Practices? Disciplinary Identity and Educational Developers,” was with collaborator David Green, from Seattle University, and focused on research findings resulting from their international survey of over 1,000 educational developers. In the second, Little joined with Professor Peter Felten, assistant provost and executive director of Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning, and colleagues from Berea College and Otterbein University, to apply frameworks from research on mid-career faculty to explore the experiences of mid-career educational developers.

Professor of History and Associate Director of CATL, Mary Jo Festle, and Director of the Gender and LGBTQIA Center, Matthew Antonio Bosch, presented a session on “Assessing how well individual campuses serve their LGBTQ community members.” In the session, Festle and Bosch prompted participants to critically reflect on how their campuses might assess the learning and working conditions of LGBTQ students, faculty and staff, by sharing the methods (and surveys) their task force used to learn about people’s experiences and attitudes as well as how they crafted recommendations that resulted in Elon University dramatically improving its Campus Pride ranking.

As current president of the POD Network, Deandra Little also gave the welcome and presidential address during the first evening of the conference. For a full listing of presentations, visit the POD Network Conference online program.