Bridgewater State University believes in its faculty and librarians and their lifelong pursuit of excellence. Research shows that faculty development programs improve teaching and are reflected in improved student outcomes. BSU supports faculty in their teaching through the Office of Teaching and Learning and faculty initiatives Writing Across the Curriculum and Quantity Across the Curriculum.
Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL)
The Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) provides exceptional support to faculty and librarians for innovation in teaching and learning through offerings such as workshops and consultations with individuals and departments. In addition, the OTL team organizes the most relevant information on pedagogy, academic technology, and other related topics to make them accessible and useful for those who teach, facilitate and support teaching at Bridgewater State.
OTL offers funded opportunities for faculty and librarians to develop their courses, methods and philosophy of teaching, to participate in teaching conferences, and to pursue the scholarship of teaching and learning, including our Summer Teacher-Scholar Institute, travel grants for expenses related to conferences with teaching-focused sessions and Faculty Learning Communities and Teaching Circles.
In addition, with our team of three Teaching & Learning Faculty Fellows, we offer strictly confidential classroom observations and 20-minute student focus groups. We also partner closely with our campus’s other professional development initiatives.
To learn more about support for teaching and learning at Bridgewater State University, please contact the office at OTL@bridgew.edu or 508.531.2694; or Cindy Kane at c1kane@bridgew.edu or 508.531.1269.
Quantitative Reasoning Across the Curriculum (QuAC)
Numeracy, or quantitative literacy, is the ability to confidently handle numbers in everyday situations. Yet while our world has become more number-driven, adult numeracy skills in the U.S. lag significantly behind the rest of the developed world. Because practical number skills are critical to the coursework, careers, and civic engagement of all students, regardless of major, it will take nearly all of us in higher education to share in solving this challenge.
Quantitative Reasoning Across the Curriculum (QuAC) is a faculty-driven program supporting quantitative literacy at Bridgewater State University. QuAC's mission is to increase student and faculty engagement and success with numbers in all disciplines of higher education, in order to increase our graduates' financial security, their access to the highly-skilled workforce, and their informed citizenship. QuAC offers workshops, resources and events to support this mission.
To learn more about the QuAC initiative, please contact the QuAC coordinator, Dr. Rachel Navarre, at rnavarre@bridgew.edu or 508-531-2528.
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)
Writing is central to the ability to communicate, to learn, to engage with others, to think critically, and to achieve academic excellence. The Writing Across the Curriculum program at BSU recognizes the importance of writing to education and is motivated by a commitment to student achievement. One of the main tenets of WAC is that learning to write is a lifelong process, a process that cannot take place in a single course or a single semester but extends across a student’s academic career and beyond.
It is the mission of WAC to aid faculty and students in this process and to encourage the commitment to writing across the campus through workshops, discussion groups and co-sponsored events with other faculty development programs. WAC also offers faculty one-on-one consultations, resources, and retreats to support its mission.
To learn more about the WAC initiatives, please contact the WAC coordinators, Dr. Paul Rubinson at prubinson@bridgew.edu or 508.531.2412 or Dr. Liz Veisz at eveisz@bridgew.edu or 508.531.3890.