Faculty Learning Communities
Join a faculty learning community this year and learn with your colleagues.
Center for Teaching and Learning
Faculty Learning Communities
Faculty learning communities bring colleagues together around shared questions about teaching, learning, scholarship, and academic practice. They provide an informal place to exchange ideas, examine evidence, ask questions, and learn from faculty across disciplines.
Each community has its own focus and participation format. Some provide an ongoing online space with flexible participation, while others are small, semester-based cohorts that require advance registration and regular attendance.
These communities are designed to support thoughtful conversation rather than promote a predetermined position. Faculty members with different levels of experience, different disciplinary perspectives, and different points of view are welcome.
How faculty learning communities work
Select a community connected to your interests and review its participation expectations. Open communities allow faculty to read, contribute, and attend as their schedules permit. Cohort-based communities bring a small, consistent group together for a defined series of meetings and shared activities.
Current Communities
Now open
AI and Teaching Faculty Learning Community
Join an ongoing faculty conversation about how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching, learning, assessment, academic integrity, faculty work, and higher education. The community examines both the possibilities and the limitations of AI rather than assuming that every use is either beneficial or harmful.
What you can do in the community
- Discuss how AI is affecting teaching, learning, and assessment
- Ask questions and learn from faculty across disciplines
- Share articles, research, assignments, prompts, tools, and examples
- Examine benefits, risks, ethical concerns, and unintended consequences
- Attend informal online conversations and faculty demonstrations
- Participate whether you are experienced, skeptical, uncertain, or simply curious
Submit the short Mercer form. The Center for Teaching and Learning will follow up with access and meeting information.
Fall 2026 registration open
Sustaining Well-Being in Higher Education
Join a small, semester-based faculty learning community focused on how personal values shape work, responsibilities, boundaries, productivity, self-care, and academic culture. Participants will consider both individual practices and the institutional conditions that influence faculty well-being. Please indicate interest even if Tuesdays don't match your schedule; we will try to add another section.
Shared reading: Jorden Cummings, Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education: Values-Based Self-Care for Work and Life
ISBN: 978-1-032-46036-9
What participants will do
- Read approximately one chapter before each meeting; the book is provided
- Identify core values and examine how they shape faculty work
- Consider realistic, values-based approaches to self-care
- Discuss workload, productivity, boundaries, and overcommitment
- Develop a brief personal well-being plan
- Consider one cultural or organizational change within their area of influence
Fall meeting dates
- September 8 and 22
- October 6 and 20
- November 3 and 17
Submit the short Mercer form to request a place in the complete six-session series. The Center for Teaching and Learning will confirm participation while space remains.