Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs)

Our Faculty Learning Communities (or FLCs) bring together small, inter-disciplinary groups of faculty who meet twice a month each semester for an academic year to address a pedagogy or academia-related problem of mutual interest.

2025-26 Faculty Learning Communities

Reimagining Schools of Education as Laboratories for Place-Based Educational Futurities, facilitated by David A. Philoxene (School of Education) 

This Faculty Learning Community (FLC) explores how schools of education can be reimagined as hubs for place-based, justice-oriented educational transformation. Building on the Ed Futures Praxis Lab, this FLC will focus on how faculty within the School of Education can engage in collaborative, community-driven work that directly impacts the educational landscape of our region.

As educational institutions grapple with crises of racial inequity, privatization, and public disinvestment, schools of education must move beyond preparing individual teachers and instead serve as regional anchors for educational innovation and equity-building. This FLC will examine how faculty can leverage their research, teaching, and partnerships to develop transformative educational models that directly engage with local communities, schools, and organizations.

Guiding Questions:

•  How can our School of Education function as a hub for place-based educational futurities?
• What does it mean for the school of education departments and faculty scholarship to be deeply embedded in local educational movements?
• How do we build and sustain regional partnerships that move beyond transactional engagement toward long-term, justice-oriented collaboration?
• How can we redesign our programs, courses, and institutional practices to support public education and grassroots educational work better?

Structure & Activities
This FLC will include:

• Mapping Our Role in Regional Educational Transformation – Examining how our School of Education currently interacts with local schools and communities, identifying strengths, gaps, and possibilities.
• Collaborative Experimentation – Faculty will develop pilot projects that reimagine their courses, research, and institutional initiatives to be more regionally engaged.
• Guest Speakers & Community Dialogues – Engaging with local educators, organizers, and policymakers to better understand the needs and opportunities in our region.
• Culminating Event – A public symposium or working paper outlining how our School of Education can more fully embrace its role as a regional hub for educational justice.

Working with Increasingly Diverse Student Needs, facilitated by Kevin Lo (School of Management) 

While part of our USF mission includes a global focus and educating first generation students, our students’ needs are increasingly more diverse. We don’t necessarily have 18-21 year old undergraduate students fresh out of high school or even what might be considered traditional graduate students. We see more veterans and student athletes, more students who need to work multiple jobs to pay tuition, and more mental health and wellness considerations (not necessarily registered with SDS). In addition, our students are generally overloaded with information and struggling to find jobs. As faculty, we see more negative behaviors (perhaps framed as excuses): missing or late work, absences from class, not returning for the start of the semester (or leaving early before a semester concludes).
 
Faculty might feel frustrated when seeing these student behaviors. At the same time, we might bear in mind the following thoughts. First, one of Brene Brown’s earliest books, I Thought it was Just Me, on shame shared, “We can’t shame or belittle people into behaving a certain way.” Second, Becky Kennedy’s book, Good Inside, makes the following points: 1) Kids are good inside and 2) Behaviors come out when we don’t have the skills to manage feelings.
 
This is the spirit of the FLC: Working with Increasingly Diverse Student Needs. After sharing the range of student behaviors we have seen, we could examine our assumptions about student behaviors. We could then look at some of these lessons from authors, perhaps including but not limited to Brene Brown and Becky Kennedy, and reimagine working with diverse student needs.
 
The hopes for the FLC are two-fold. First, faculty should find our conversations refreshing by breaking down isolation. We might think that we are alone in our struggles, however, that might not be the case. Thus, holding space for faculty by offering empathetic support would be a first outcome. Second, through our conversations we could compose scripts for faculty to use when responding to student situations. This second point would be a deliverable that we create and leave for the USF community.

Expanding the Frame: Centering AANHPI Experiences in Teaching and Learning, facilitated by Evelyn I. Rodriguez (Sociology + Asian Pacific American Studies + AANAPISI) 

How can we create a classroom where every student feels valued, supported, and empowered to succeed—no matter their race background?"" This Faculty Learning Community (FLC) is designed to delve into that question by gathering faculty to learn about, explore, and share tools and strategies that can improve how effectively we teach and support students from the University of San Francisco’s largest pan-ethnic race population.

Through shared readings, discussions and workshops, guest speakers, and other varied activities, this FLC aims go beyond the Black-White binary that has structured much culturally-responsive curriculum and pedagogy in the US, to better understand experiences and challenges faced by students with Asian, Native Hawaiian, and/ or Pacific Islander (AANHPI) backgrounds. To be clear, this is not to minimize the continuing significance of understanding Black student learning experiences and needs, though it aims to build a deeper understanding of how systemic racism, colorism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination impact the engagement, academic success, and emotional well-being of these racially minoritized populations. Community members will learn how we can (further) develop teaching methods that honor and integrate AANHPI students' diverse cultural identities, to create inclusive classroom environments where every student feels valued and supported. This FLC will also emphasize the importance of intersectionality, highlighting how multiple aspects of identity—such as class, gender, and immigration status—interact to shape the experiences of USF’s AANHPI learners.

Ultimately, "Rethinking Diversity" aims to empower faculty with practical knowledge and skills to help AANHPI students navigate academic challenges, and to foster classroom cultures that meaningfully engage diversity and prepare all students “to humbly and responsibly engage with, and contribute to, the cultural, intellectual, economic and spiritual gifts and talents of the San Francisco Bay Area and the global communities to which we belong.”

Creative Pedagogy Lab, facilitated by Christine Young (Rhetoric and Language) 

The Creative Pedagogy Lab FLC invites faculty working in all disciplines to share and imagine assignments and classroom activities that foreground creativity, experiential learning, and student choice. During this time when students report record-levels of anxiety; the public demonstrates skepticism about the value of a college education; and the field of higher education faces numerous existential threats, faculty are uniquely positioned to transform the student learning experience by upleveling our holistic teaching practices. By creating opportunities for more pleasurable, playful and personally relevant engagement with learning activities, creative pedagogies have the potential to enhance student interest and satisfaction in the classroom, particularly for students who struggle to engage with traditional teaching methods.

During the fall semester, FLC members will explore topics such as creative assignment design, neurotypes, experiential learning, and arts integration (use of arts tools and methods in non-arts classes) and share examples of classroom activities we currently use that feature creative or experiential elements.  Each participant will also design a “tiny classroom experiment” to be deployed in the spring semester.  These pedagogical interventions could address a current classroom challenge or create an opening for new learning possibilities. 

During the spring semester, FLC participants will report on the progress of our experiments, collectively problem-solve, and reflect on the impact and future potential of our creative interventions.  We will also collaborate to create a digital toolkit of creative pedagogy principles and practices that can be shared with the broader USF community. If desirable, we may offer a public sharing of our discoveries, perhaps in collaboration with other FLCs.

Examples of possible readings (limit of 15-30 min prep per session):

• Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, 2023)
• Do Your Lessons Love Your Students? Creative Education for Social Change (Mariah Rankine-Landers and Jessa Brie Moreno, 2023)
• Creativity in Education: International Perspectives (Nicole Brown, Amanda Ince, Karen Ramlackhan, 2024)
• Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown, 2017)
• Experiential Learning Design (Colin Beard, 2022)

2024-25 Faculty Learning Communities

Clinical Pedagogy, facilitated by Lindsay M. Harris (Professor of Law, and Director of the Frank C. Newman International Human Rights Clinic)
Scheduling for this FLC will be determined at a later date.

This is intended for professors and instructors engaging with students in practical community and/or client-serving work. For example, the law school has six legal clinics where students engage directly representing communities and individuals under the supervision of licensed Professor-attorneys. Instructors from other schools who are supervising students engaged in direct community/patient/client work are invited to participate.
 
The group will follow a “rounds” structure – borrowed from the medical profession but used throughout clinical legal education today to explore challenges facing professors and instructors supervising students engaged in bridging theory and practice. The six stages of rounds involve:

• Fact Gathering
• Problem diagnosis
• Question flooding
• Problem solving
• Check in
• Reflection

Some fruitful issues to bring to a rounds discussion may involve: student partnership/team/collaboration challenges, practice management questions or problems, professional identity formation, working with students through a lens of cultural humility, anti-racism and empathy, rapport building and client/patient relationships, oral/written communication challenges, emotional responses to trauma exposure and high intensity/stress work, cultivating hope and resilience, and more.

Exploring the Unique Histories and Common Identities of APIMEDA Communities, facilitated by Saera R. Khan (Professor of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences)

Scheduling for this FLC will be determined at a later date.

Who is included in the “Asian American” community? This FLC (in partnership with the new AANAPISI initiative at USF) will seek to understand the unique histories and common identities of Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, North African, and Desi (i.e., Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) American communities. We will examine the shifting boundaries of who feels part of the group and who gets to be included under the umbrella term of “Asian American” from multiple scholarly and artistic perspectives. We also explore the socio-political, psychological and historical factors that influence how socio-cultural identities are created and experienced as racialized among first, second, and third generation communities in the US especially on college campuses.

Members of the FLC will read, discuss, and analyze scholarly and artistic works examining why some universities are calling for a new descriptive term, APIMEDA (Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, Desi American) to better reflect the American experience, especially on college campuses. Through our readings, museum trips, guest speakers and other varied activities, we will gear our explorations on what would be lost and gained for students, faculty and staff if USF embraced this new way of thinking about group memberships and ultimately, who is part of this community? This FLC welcomes perspectives from all cultural and academic backgrounds.

2023-24 Faculty Learning Communities

Pedagogy for the Age of AI: Responding to and Learning From AI-generated Content, co-facilitated by Chris Brooks (CAS, Computer Science) and Nicole Gonzales Howell (CAS, Rhetoric, and Language)

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have, in a very short time, upended academia and the ways in which we teach. These tools allow users to provide a text prompt and generate extremely sophisticated texts and images. While this has raised concerns in some quarters about the ease of plagiarism, generative AI also provides the opportunity to be a powerful new tool for teaching about tasks from writing to programming to design. For example, students can use ChatGPT as a tool for generating ideas for essays, or to write paragraphs with intentionally bad grammar that can be corrected, or code to solve simple problems. One interesting aspect of generative AI tools is their lack of an internal model; this causes them to generate text or images that seem believable but are wrong. The ability to identify this sort of content, and question the veracity of sources, is also an essential skill for our students to learn.

In this FLC, we will explore and develop ways in which generative AI can be used to support new pedagogies across disciplines and learning modes, and better teach students the critical thinking and analysis skills they will need to survive in a world of AI-generated content. In particular, together we hope to develop a USF-centric toolkit that provides pedagogical strategies and exercises for effectively applying Generative AI as a learning and support tool across the disciplines. 

Re-Envisioning Grading Systems to Advance Equity & Effectiveness in Teaching, co-facilitated by Dhara Meghani and Alette Coble-Temple (School of Nursing and Health Professions, Clinical Psychology PsyD Program)

Grading is widely accepted as a fundamental requirement of the teaching and learning process in higher education. It is assumed that grading is necessary for motivating students; assessing their learning; setting high standards for achievement; and ensuring a meritocratic system in which everyone is given the same opportunity to succeed based on their own hard work, aptitude, and objective performance.

But what if none of these assumptions are true? Contrary to popular belief, abundant research shows that traditional grading practices actually undermine academic motivation, do not help students improve future performance, and are in any event highly inaccurate and unreliable in assessing students. Perhaps most importantly, current grading structures privilege students who acquire knowledge in a conventionally structured, traditional style of learning and who have consistent familial and financial support for their educational pursuits.

In order for all of our students to effectively meet learning competencies, our grading systems must encourage mistakes rather than punish them and must be reconceptualized and recalibrated to instill hope and a desire to learn. As academic professionals, it is our calling to follow the research on how best to promote student learning. And as instructors at a university grounded in social justice values, it is our duty to re-envision how to ethically and equitably assess a student's acquisition of knowledge. This Faculty Learning Community will review the literature on the history, theory, and principles of grading to help us look beyond the status quo and promote changes to the grading system that will improve both equity and effectiveness in our teaching practices.

Post-Pandemic Learning, facilitated by Keally McBride (CAS, Politics)

What are the continuing impacts of the pandemic on student learning?  Some of these impacts may be related to trauma, others may be related to a cultural shift around learning and higher education more broadly.  This FLC will look at existing studies around post-pandemic learning in higher ed.  It will also organize several focus groups with current USF students to get their insights, which will be used to further direct our collective inquiries.  The goal of the group is to explore how teaching and learning can evolve in order to meet the changing needs of our students.  One possibility is that this group could help produce ideas and research to develop a grant for USF to implement pilot programs intended to address post-pandemic trends to improve our students’ learning. But ultimately, the direction of the group will be determined collectively by our research and our conversations with students and one another.

2022-23 FLCs

‘Zine Making as Transformative Pedagogy

 Facilitator: Adrienne Johnson (Environmental Studies) 

Knowledge Sovereignty and Indigenizing Universities

Facilitator: Kouslaa Kessler-Mata (Politics)