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Faculty Lead, EPIC (Excellence in Classrooms and Innovative Pedagogy [$5M, Mellon])

“The Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) Program is a partnership between UCLA Division of Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation designed to develop to the fullest, in our faculty and in our students, the art of teaching that lies at the heart of humanities disciplines. Teaching has been a part of our disciplines since their origins, and we have long offered models of effective teaching for the university and for the world beyond academia. But as the world changes and as our students change with it, there are inevitably opportunities to do better and even—if we dedicate ourselves to the task—to be the best at what we do.

• How can we make the real diversity of every one of our classes a source of excellence and an opportunity for learning of the kind that changes lives?

• How can we use insights from the teaching of writing and of languages to make all our teaching better?

• How can we take advantage of data and technology in a way that deepens our teaching without undoing the humanistic spirit of our work?

• How, more generally, can we deepen the ties between our research and our teaching, and in this way give our students the broadest possible view of the values of humanistic study?

• And how can we best prepare our graduate students to be valued for their learning and for their teaching wherever their careers take them, whether in academia or beyond?

EPIC is a call for a cultural change across the humanities disciplines at UCLA. It is an invitation to focus anew on our privileged role as practitioners of the art of teaching and an invitation to strive for nothing less than brilliance in this art. I hope that you will support the work and its aims.” (David Schaberg, Dean of Humanities)

Faculty Advisory Committee, HET (Holistic Evaluation of Teaching)

Preparing the next generation of leaders, scholars and workers is a central purpose of higher education. This is why it is critical that we continue to evolve our teaching to improve the academic experience for our students and support their long-term success. With our newly-created vice provost for teaching and learning position and formal establishment of the Teaching and Learning Center — which brings together disparate centers into one campuswide entity — we are ensuring that quality teaching remains a hallmark of a UCLA education.

UCLA is focused on cultivating and incentivizing effective, inclusive and innovative teaching practices. Key to this is ensuring that our teaching evaluation processes align with our professional development programming and that both support desired outcomes.

To this end, UCLA is expanding the Holistic Evaluation of Teaching (HET) initiative, which helps instructors showcase their teaching expertise and new pedagogical approaches. HET is organized into a three-part framework that establishes consistent and thorough criteria for evaluating teaching excellence. The initiative recognizes that strong teaching is nuanced and varies greatly depending on discipline and context. For this reason, departments can adapt the framework to reflect their specific practices, cultures and priorities. 

Humanities Representative, UCLA Committee on Teaching

The Committee on Teaching (COT) is responsible for the selection of the Distinguished Teaching Awards and the advising of the Division and departments with regards to policies that will enlarge possibilities for distinguished teaching and improve the quality of instruction, including methods of evaluation of teaching.

Founding Faculty and Steering Committee, Institute for Innovation and Cultures, UCLA

The UCLA Institute for Culture and Innovation (ICI) aims to solve some of the most persistent or “wicked” sociocultural problems of the 21st Century:  

• The past, present, and future of democracy

• The ethics of computation, AI, and big data

• Climate change and biodiversity loss

• Megacities and urban justice

• Cultures of health and medicine

These profound and pressing problems are as much cultural, social, civic, and political as they are design-related, scientific, and engineering. They extend beyond canonical disciplines or academic divisions and thus require truly transdisciplinary, collaborative, and imaginative approaches in both research and teaching.  

The ICI provides a staging ground for experimental research and project development through a network of support infrastructures, staff expertise, and curricular opportunities.  Affiliated faculty and staff form the nucleus of the ICI by:

• developing research projects and grant proposals

• hosting workshops and seminars

• securing intra- and extramural funding

• leading undergraduate or graduate seminars linked to research initiatives

The ICI fosters bona fide interdisciplinarity by circumventing structural and bureaucratic silos. It offers a support structure to reward and incentivize transdisciplinary research tied directly to the classroom.

— plus a range of curricular initiatives to increase the professionalization of undergraduates and graduates alike. These are situated not only in the Humanities, but also in the Anderson School of Business, the David Geffen School of Medicine, and other transidsciplianary locations around campus.

At present much effort is invested in dovetailing the work of CEILS and EPIC. (CEILS = Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences.) They have much to teach us, not only in terms of teacher training, but also with regards to a sage, pedagogical ethos. “Evidence continues to accumulate about the increase in course effectiveness when designed with an active learning approach; in-class interaction is associated with improved learning outcomes for all students, while often decreasing the achievement gap for underrepresented minority students.”