University of New Mexico
ProfessorBritish and Irish Literary Studies
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow(UW-Green Bay), 2001-02
Co-Director, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars, 2012-13
I was fortunate to be hired by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1999 for a tenure-track position because it provided me with access to a vanguard movement in SoTL. I had always been fascinated by teaching and learning but had been discouraged from prioritizing it or treating it as serious scholarly work. Although I won numerous teaching awards as a graduate student the clear message was that research was distinct from teaching and more important to my career. My first tenure track position was at a branch campus with a 4/4 teaching load but with few professional development opportunities. It wasn’t until I became a faculty member at UWGB that I encountered support for my teaching and the encouragement to investigate student learning in a scholarly way, first by participating in the UWGB Teaching Scholars program (expertly led by Denise Scheberle and Fergus Hughes) and later when I was selected to be an OPID Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 2001.
I’m afraid that I don’t remember the details of my first proposed SoTL project very well. What I do remember well was the subjective experience of Faculty College and the Summer Institute: the generosity and care that went into our accommodations, the meals, the lively conversations, the time away from our respective campuses surrounded by folks who also valued teaching. There was something particularly rich and rewarding about being at a teaching-intensive institution and being given the luxury of being a learner myself again. There was also a feeling of camaraderie and a refreshing lack of academic competitiveness. Although I was fortunate to be in an interdisciplinary humanities department at UWGB, in the WTFS program I encountered folks from the social sciences, STEM, Art, and Education. Hearing them explain their disciplinary methodologies and teaching practices helped me to better understand my own.
Many collaborations resulted from the WTSF program. One of the first collaborations was a multi-campus “lesson study” project, where five English instructors identified a core understanding in our field of literature (recognizing and valuing complexity in literary texts) that is pivotal in moving into upper-level courses and collaboratively designed one class lesson. Lesson study is originally a Japanese educational method of collaboratively designing, iterating, and revising a single classroom lesson that focuses on an important skill. Our focus was the ways that undergraduates tend to reduce complexity in literature to a single, flat interpretation, ignoring evidence in the text that does not conform to the reading. Using the Theodore Roethke poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” we designed a lesson in which students explored each other’s widely divergent readings of the poem: does the poem describe abuse or a nostalgic memory of a loving father? The article situates our lesson within scholarship of literary studies, describing the process of identifying this “signature” move in literary studies, designing a multi-step process of pre-class individual work, group work, and metacognitive reflection. We also include descriptions of the group dynamics (classroom iterations of the lesson were recorded and live observed). In his meta-analysis of the scholarship of teaching and learning in literary studies, reviewer Paul Corrigan, noted that our article was one of the most influential and highly cited in the nascent field of the scholarship of teaching and learning about literary studies.
Later Regan Gurung, Nancy Chick and I co-edited Exploring Signature Pedagogies (2008), which asks the question, if each discipline contains a specific way of looking at the world, how do these disciplinary values and habits show up in the classroom? Supported by a University of Wisconsin System grant, my co-editors and I recruited Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars to “review the traditional ways of teaching within a discipline, analyze that those pedagogical practices teach students about the discipline, review pedagogical research underlying these practices, and sketch out potential signature pedagogies that [could] more effectively convey disciplinary ways of thinking and doing” (5). The edited collection reflects more than a call for chapters: it was itself a process of faculty development, with meetings with potential authors where we worked to clarify that could be meant by “signature pedagogies,” extensive commentary on each chapter, and mentoring. The success of this volume produced a follow up: Exploring More Signature Pedagogies (2012) in which an international collection of authors extended the original efforts and outcomes with chapters on signature pedagogies in the fine arts, philosophy, communications, political science, economics, chemistry, interdisciplinary fields such as Ignatian pedagogy, women’s studies and disability studies, and the professions (nursing, occupational therapy, social work, and teacher education).
In 2012 returned to OPID briefly as co-director of the WTFS program. I remember being nervous and excited applying to be co-director of the program. And how honored I felt to be selected to lead the program that had meant so much to me.
In 2013 I was hired to direct the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of New Mexico (an HSI, R1 institution) where I was also granted tenure in the Department of English. My experience with WTSF program and my SoTL publications helped me get this job. From 2013-2024, the Center for Teaching and Learning grew from four separate programs into a comprehensive, research-based set of programs that supports student learning from both sides of the classroom: offering direct support to undergraduate and graduate students as well as supporting faculty who seek to improve their teaching. I founded the UNM Teaching Fellows program (modelled initially on OPID’s WTFS) that guides faculty across disciplines in developing scholarly teaching projects. I collaborated with Graduate Studies to create UNM’s first teaching certification for graduate teaching assistants, using existing courses and CTL workshops to provide a solid foundation for UNM TAs for their college teaching, impacting student success in these courses and better preparing our graduate students for the academic job market. Combining programs that focus on undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty has been challenging; however, the combined teaching and learning center is now a national model and was able to pivot quickly and effectively during the 2020 COVID crises, supporting students with online tutoring and helping faculty teach remotely. My involvement in preparing graduate teaching assistants led me to co-author Teaching Matters: A Guide for Graduate Students that aims to give graduate TAs across disciplines a foundational understanding of inclusive teaching and support for the unique role that graduate student instructors hold at universities.
In the summer of 2024, I stepped-down from my role as Executive Director and became a full-time faculty member in the department of English. I received promotion to the rank of Full Professor in 2024, based on a scholarly record that included both literary studies and the scholarship pf teaching and learning. I was pleasantly surprised that the English department promotion committee and the university recognized and rewarded my SoTL work.
Now that I’m teaching again, SoTL continues to inform my pedagogy, through the research on how students learn, what helps engage and increase belonging in first-generation and minoritized students, as well as my own work in literary pedagogy. However, I also remember the subjective experience of the WTFS program: what it means to feel welcomed, how important community is, and how important, crucial it is to continue these nurturing spaces.
Biography:
Aeron Haynie is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where she was founding Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning from 2013 to 2024. Pervious to her time in NM she co-directed the WTFS program and was Director of CATL at UWGB. She is co-author of Teaching Matters: A Guidebook for Graduate Students and co-editor of Exploring Signature Pedagogies and Exploring More Signature Pedagogies as well as articles on Victorian literature.
Selected SoTL publications:
Haynie, A. and Spong, S. Teaching Matters: A Guide for Graduate Students. West Virginia University Press; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Series, 2022. https://wvupressonline.com/teaching-matters
Chick, N., Haynie, A. and Gurung, R. Exploring More Signature Pedagogies. Stylus, 2012.
Gurung, R., Chick, N., Haynie, A. Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind. Stylus Press, 2009
Kim Fournier, Aeron Haynie, Stephanie Sanchez, and Stephanie Spong, “Holistic Support: the strengths of a comprehensive teaching and learning center.” Higher Education Beyond COVID: New Teaching Paradigms and Promise, Edited by Regan Gurung and Dwaine Plaza, Routledge, 2023.
Haynie, A. “Equity‐Minded Faculty Development.” To Improve the Academy, 37: 55-62 (2018)
Sweeney, T. West, D, Groessler, A., Haynie, A. Higgs, B. Macaulay, J. Mercer-Mapstone, L., Yeo, M. “Where’s the Transformation? Unlocking the Potential of Technology-Enhanced Assessment.” Teaching and Learning Inquiry Volume 5, Number 1 (2017).
Chick, N., Hassel, H. and Haynie, A. “‘Pressing an Ear Against the Hive’: A Lesson Study on Reading Literature for Complexity.” Pedagogy, Winter 2009 Volume 9, Issue 3.
Podcast guest; Tea for Teaching; “Teaching Matters,” May 25, 2022.
Podcast guest; Tea for Teaching; “Signature Pedagogies,” April 29, 2020.