UW-Milwaukee
Professor Emeritus of French
Director, Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program, 2000-2006
Co-Director, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program, 1986-2000
This essay has been one of the easiest, and hardest, pieces I’ve had to write. Easiest because as a late contributor to this superb collection of personal and professional journeys that my friend and collaborator David Voelker has curated, I have benefited from the thoughtful reflections of teacher/scholars I’ve had the honor of working with: Bill Cerbin, with whom I co-directed the WTF/WTS program (1998-2006), Nancy Chick, who co-directed the program (2006-2011) after I became senior scholar and director of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), Lisa Kornetsky, visionary OPID Director (1998-2008) and one of the co-founders of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), LaVonne Cornell-Swanson, OPID Director (2008-2016), and Fay Akindes, Wisconsin Teaching Scholar (2000) and OPID Director(2017-present.These colleagues have clearly retold the intellectual history of SOTL and WTFS and connected it to their own professional development as contributors to these movements in Wisconsin.
The difficulty arises when looking for the unifying narrative for my own academic career that began with a dissertation on Molière in 1974 and continues with work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning some fifty years later. How did I move from traditional scholarship in literary analysis to studying my own teaching and my students’ learning, and to helping others to do the same? From a book and articles on Molière and the language of comedy to workshops and publications on faculty development, often based on the principles of SoTL? As my colleagues in this collection have shown so admirably, careers are more than timelines. Publications, conference papers, workshops, programs directed, projects undertaken and courses taught may each mark significant points on the journey. Their real explanatory power, however, lies in the fact that they may help us uncover a certain fidelity to foundational values, core habits of mind, and personal predispositions that give these diverse undertakings coherence and larger meaning. What must have rung true to me, philosophically, morally, and professionally, as I chose to follow some ready paths and to forge others for myself? What did I discover about teaching and learning from my students? How did the colleagues I worked with and the inspiring ideals of OPID, the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program and its participants, and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning guide me through the process? And what did I contribute to the evolution of these ideals?
As I think back on my career, I can see clearly that teaching, thinking about teaching, and helping others reflect on their own practice were core values for me from the beginning. I enjoyed the challenges of discovering new knowledge in my discipline and finding new ways to present that knowledge. I thrived on helping students engage in the how and why of learning. I loved investigating the latest innovative ideas in teaching literature and language and designing new courses, assignments and curricula to implement them. Guiding other teachers – at the beginning, graduate teaching assistants, later new assistant professors, and finally senior colleagues – to do the same followed naturally from this predisposition. It was far from obvious, however, how this type of “teaching work” could align with my traditional research responsibilities and interests.
At the heart of my interest in understanding teaching and how to do it better, however, was also a belief in the process of scholarship itself — the work of inquiry and reflection required to examine and advance any domain: literature, teaching, student learning, faculty development. All scholarship builds on the work of others, invites new questions, proposes and tests possible answers, encourages reflecting on preliminary findings, and ultimately raises more and better questions before adding to the knowledge of the field. In my literary analysis, that had meant a layered inquiry: What is going on in this Molière play? What is the problem that lies at the heart of it? How does Molière’s treatment of this problem fit into the larger context of his oeuvre? What does this play tell us about French comedy writ large? What does this treatment say about comedy itself, as a universal genre and a fundamental human experience? What can my discoveries add to the conversations of my discipline on these topics?
The scholarly habit of inquiry, I thought, might deepen my study of teaching and learning as well. Could I approach my teaching with similar types of questions? Could thinking about my teaching and my students’ learning as a source of interesting questions help me to bridge the gap between the responsibilities of teaching well and the necessity of pursuing traditional research? This type of “scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning,” a precursor of SoTL, might provide a path to a coherent professional career.
The traditional way to connect teaching and research in the late 1970s and early 1980s at research institutions such as UW-Milwaukee was relatively simple: you engaged in research in your field so that you could teach your new knowledge to undergraduates, especially majors in the field, and use your experience in the research methodologies of the discipline to guide graduate students in their own research. An early conversation with a UWM Vice Chancellor, ironically on a drive back to Milwaukee from a UTIC conference, made this perfectly clear to me. After I had spent a good half hour naively outlining my interest in extending my expertise beyond Molière to develop new courses, revise the curricula for the French major, and design professional development opportunities for graduate teaching assistants and new faculty, she suggested a much different career trajectory: continue your specialized research into Molière with the ultimate goals of regular publication in peer reviewed venues and of teaching seminars to small groups of graduate students interested in pursuing the same type of work.
At UW-Milwaukee, however, there would be little opportunity to follow this path. As a small department without a Ph.D. program, all of us, especially new assistant professors, were required to teach all levels of language, literature and culture, and had only the occasional opportunity to direct a graduate seminar on our specialty. Moreover, all of us were encouraged to teach undergraduates well but with minimum time commitment. The teaching we needed to do (our “teaching load” as we called it), threatened to limit our traditional research opportunities. Teaching and research were competing interests.
As chance would have it, my early career in language teaching coincided with the Oral Proficiency movement, a central interest of my first professional society, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL). “Teaching and testing for proficiency,” as we called it in the 1980s, suggested a different way to think about teaching and learning a foreign language and how to study and describe student achievement. The proficiency framework emphasized what students could do with the language over what they knew about its forms and structures. Creative, functional use of the language, as a goal and a pedagogy, replaced mastery of grammar and vocabulary. “Functional use” was often defined based on insights from the field of second language acquisition about how native speakers express meaning and develop fluency. Thinking about language teaching and learning in this way thus afforded me a more scholarly way to take this part of my responsibilities seriously. I remember asking myself my first real pedagogical questions at that time: What does proficiency in speaking look like? How do our current curriculum, methods and techniques align with this understanding? For instance, if we expected our students to develop their speaking abilities, didn’t we need to evaluate their progress by directly testing their ability to converse and perform discursive functions such as asking questions and supporting an opinion? How could we describe this progress and measure it against reliable standards? In asking these questions, I began to ask the broader questions about the possible connections between new courses, course design, better teaching techniques and student engagement and outcomes. Again, an early form of scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning that gave depth and meaning to my language courses and the first and second year language courses taught by the teaching assistants I directed at the time. This line of inquiry would lead to an innovative textbook based on research in second language acquisition that my department, after much discussion, would accept as a research contribution to the field.
This shift from what the teacher does to what students do and the skills they acquire was an early first step on the road to developing the habits of reflective practice and it would remain a guiding principle throughout my career. In acquiring further certification as an ACTFL Oral proficiency tester and trainer, I followed a path that made perfect sense to me: learning a new way of thinking about my field, acquiring the skills to implement that thinking in the classroom and curriculum, and inspiring and guiding others to do the same. And I learned how important it was to study the results of my innovations. Framed in this way, my conference papers and workshops on teaching and testing for proficiency were gradually accepted as scholarship by my department and campus.
As I moved into the larger field of faculty development, as founding director of the Center for Instructional Improvement (CII) at UW-Milwaukee (1981) and later as director of the Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council (UTIC) (1983-86), OPID’s initial name and purpose, I found myself again at a time of momentous change in a field. I had served on UTIC’s undergraduate grants committee and had even received Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Grant funding to incorporate recordings of authentic language in my language courses. Faculty development, however, had begun to move from the deficit model of remedial workshops (a “narrative of constraint”) that asked teachers to implement “tips and techniques” to improve instruction in individual classrooms (e.g., how to ask better questions, improve class discussion, use small groups effectively, design better ways of testing) toward a “narrative of growth” that would engage faculty more intellectually in the philosophy and implementation of larger curricular concerns (e.g., general education, assessment, deep learning). In addition to national and local models, UTIC and campus centers began to introduce faculty to the cognitive science research into how people learned outside the classroom and to consider how their classroom methods aligned or not with insights from this field. This mirrored the conversation about language proficiency I discussed earlier.
Ernest Boyer’s influential Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) encouraged faculty to extend their scholarly habits of mind to all aspects of their daily work – research, teaching, curriculum development, and service to the field and the institution. Building on Boyer’s idea of a scholarship of teaching, Lee Shulman and Pat Hutchings from the Carnegie Foundation would elaborate the concept of “taking teaching and learning seriously” and thus encourage faculty to understand their “teaching work” as a consequential part of their responsibilities. Two important directions would be assessing student learning in relation to course and program goals (“classroom assessment”) and going public with work in course design and evaluation through course and teaching portfolios that could be shared with colleagues and evaluated in ways similar to traditional research. This new perspective would contribute significantly to changes in the way the academy defined faculty roles and rewards. Taking teaching and learning seriously, for example by making teaching and learning visible, would become the guiding principle for faculty development nationally and in Wisconsin, and ultimately lead to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as we know it today.
UTIC and campus-sponsored faculty development programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Wisconsin would take this more scholarly approach. Course and program development funding began requiring clear teaching and learning goals, reliable assessment procedures beyond student satisfaction surveys and course grades, and the dissemination of results to colleagues. Priority was given to new courses developed in the light of new frameworks for learning –problem-based instruction, writing across the curriculum, group learning through discussion, general education, paired or team-taught courses – that meaningfully described and evaluated improvements in student learning. Studying teaching and learning was significantly advanced when faculty from all disciplines and campuses were brought together to participate in and contribute to these new frameworks (for example at UTIC statewide conferences and Faculty College). This new approach to faculty development would inform Wisconsin’s participation in, and its effect on, a new national initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment of Indiana, the Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellows Program.
The Wisconsin Teaching Fellows program began in 1984 when the representatives of the Lilly Endowment approached then UW System President Robert O’Neill with an invitation to participate in this new effort designed for faculty in their first three years of university teaching. Responding to national reports about the quality of undergraduate instruction at major research institutions, and to insights from the higher education associations, for example, the Association for the Advancement of Higher Education (AAHE) and American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Lilly was particularly interested in working with flagship campuses. The theory was that faculty coming out of Ph.D. programs at research institutions had little or no teaching experience except, perhaps, as teaching assistants, and that they and their institutions would benefit from a year focused on learning about undergraduate teaching early in their careers.
The Lilly Endowment appears to have thought that O’Neill was the President of UW-Madison, and believed that he could deliver UW-Madison to the program. As President of the System, however, O’Neill logically passed the opportunity to then UTIC Director Peter Hoff.
Although UW-Madison never did join the effort, UTIC’s reputation and the hard work of its Council convinced Lilly that we could provide a different, perhaps more timely, model for the work. And so, over six years, through a regional approach, we reached faculty at all the UW four-year UW campuses and many of what were then called the UW Colleges. After six years of support from the Lilly Endowment, the program continued with UTIC and UW System providing the program support while campuses took on the stipends. In this way, approximately seventy-five Wisconsin Teaching Fellows collaborated on course and curriculum development projects, often multi-campus and interdisciplinary in nature, and became valuable resources to their local teaching centers. UTIC and these fellows benefited from and contributed to the national conversations on transforming professional development in the 1990s. Many would go on to leadership roles in OPID, the WTFS program, and in their campus administrations. Moreover, this experience and success with developing a statewide initiative would garner national awards and position us to play leadership roles in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), which I would direct (2007-2010), the UW System Leadership Site, directed by Lisa Kornetsky and Renee Meyers, and ISSOTL, which Lisa co-founded.
The logistics of the WTF, WTFS, and WTS iterations have remained essentially the same since the outset. The program has evolved philosophically from an emphasis on course and curricular development and “teaching improvement” (what we as teachers need to do better or differently in order to teach well) to a focus on improving or even redefining student learning (what does better, deeper learning look like, for example, and how can we help students achieve it) to the SoTL perspective that continues to inform the work today.
The scholarship of teaching and learning perspective came to inform the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program through the efforts of Lisa Kornetsky, the OPID Director from 1998 to 2008, and Bill Cerbin, WTFS co-director from 1998-2005. The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with the Pew Foundation, had created the Pew National Fellowship Program for Carnegie Scholars in 1998, which “[brought] together outstanding faculty to investigate issues in teaching and learning in their fields in ways that contribute[d] to thought and practice,” as Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman described it in Opening Lines (2000). This seminal work documented the scholarship of eight of the original Carnegie Scholars, including Bill’s case study, “Investigating Student Learning in a Problem-Based Psychology Course.”
Lisa understood immediately the value of this work for OPID’s faculty development programs, and the Council (now OPID) under her leadership invited Carnegie Scholars to annual conferences and Faculty College. We also believed that the SoTL philosophy and perspective could take our own WTFS Program to a higher level. Together we engaged Bill as co-director, using his case study as a model for the type of scholarly “thought and practice” that we would encourage from our own scholars. As Wisconsin’s first and only Carnegie Scholar, Bill helped us understand and implement Randy Bass’s seminal insight that teaching (and learning) “problems” could first be problematized, and thus prepared for scholarly study – the foundational principle of the scholarship of teaching and learning. And, Bill’s own inspired and rigorous work gave us the concrete examples we needed to follow suit.
Bill and our scholars inspired me to look more closely at my own teaching as well, in particular, in a new Freshman Seminar course on comedy, and at my center’s faculty development program for senior faculty interested in developing similar seminars for freshmen at UW-Milwaukee. As a result, I was able to study, present, and publish on how students moved toward more complex thinking about a deceptively familiar topic, comedy and laughter, through accepting ambiguity and reflecting on changes in their own thinking. In our development program for senior faculty, we followed an in-depth inquiry into defining what we wanted our students to learn and do, what that would look like, which assignments and classroom practices would help make that learning visible, and, perhaps most importantly, how we could present our efforts in ways that other colleagues might build upon in their own course development and research into their students’ learning. Our guiding question became “how will a student know that they are in a freshman seminar?”
The scholarship of teaching and learning ultimately provided a unifying narrative to my own academic career. As an overarching framework, it has led me to approach my teaching and my students’ learning in a spirit of inquiry and reflection. In particular, it has taught me to carefully attend to what students could tell me about their own learning. In my freshman seminar, I supplemented my usual assignments with opportunities for students to reflect on how the course changed their thinking. These reflections, organized in categories with help from my colleague Renee Meyers, an expert in qualitative research and grounded theory, provided surprising and affirming comments that revealed the presence of deeper types of learning. Two examples come to mind.
One student wrote, “I have learned that you can never discuss, analyze, listen, comprehend, and reflect enough to really understand the meaning of something,” generalizing the complexity of learning and its processes. Another wrote, “I don’t accept things as just simple ideas anymore. I engage myself to reflect more now and not just accept what is given to me as right and wrong,” revealing how thinking with complexity about comedy can affect behavior and values. You’ll never know what goes on in the minds of your students unless you ask them!
The SoTL perspective, in particular its emphasis on treating teaching as serious intellectual work, has also connected my work in faculty development with my personal and professional values. In this, I have been guided by Pat Hutchings and Mary Huber, who wrote in The Advancement of Learning (2005):
There are many ways to improve the quality of higher education but … we have been struck by the power that comes with seeing teaching as challenging, intellectual work — work that poses interesting, consequential questions. The scholarship of teaching and learning invites faculty from all disciplines and fields to identify and explore those questions in their own teaching — and, especially in their students’ learning — and to do so in ways that are shared with colleagues who can build on new insights. In this way, such work has the potential to transform higher education by making the private work of the classroom visible, talked about, studied, built upon, and valued…
In this brief yet powerful paragraph, many of us, especially myself, have found some measure of coherence to our varied professional responsibilities.
For twenty-five years now, the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars have used the SoTL perspective to deepen understanding of student learning in individual courses, disciplines, and curricula, and the program has redefined faculty development itself as serious intellectual work. I am honored to have contributed to its success and thankful to all the colleagues and students who have worked with me in this endeavor.
Biography:
Anthony (Tony) Ciccone retired as Emeritus Professor of French from UW-Milwaukee in 2014 after a forty year career in teaching, scholarship, and professional development. He currently resides in Middleton, Wisconsin, with his partner, Kathleen Gettrust, a retired nurse and nurse educator. His son Mark has a Ph.D. in History from UWM, writes and publishes alternative histories, and works as a substitute teacher in several local high schools. His daughter Emily is a clinical assistant professor at the University of North Carolina specializing in infectious diseases. She has worked in Uganda and Malawi in pediatric medicine. She and her husband Matt will soon have their second child.
Tony volunteers at the Literacy Network of Dane County, where he tutors in the Essential Literacy and ESL programs. He regularly serves as a poll watcher for the Democratic Party. He has used his free time to read a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction works (recently, A Gentleman in Moscow (Towles) and The Song of the Cell (Mukhurjee)), to enjoy Madison’s theatre, music, and sports and keeps relatively sharp with the New York Times crosswords. Tony and Kathy travel extensively with their rescue dog Bijou and spend winters in the Southwest. Tony enjoys a good game of golf … and hopes someday to have one.
Selected Positions, Publications, and Presentations:
Professor of French, UW-Milwaukee (1974-2014)
Director, Center for Instructional and Professional Development, UWM (1981-83; 1988-2014)
President-elect, President, Past President, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) (2009-2012).
Senior Scholar and Director, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2007-2019)
Co-Director, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program, UW System Academic Affairs (1986-2000)
Director, Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program, UW System Academic Affairs (2000-2006)
Co-Director, Lilly Endowment Post-Doctoral Teaching Awards Project, UW System Academic Affairs (1983-86)
Executive Director, Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council, UW System Academic Affairs (1983-86)
“Asking Meaningful Questions,” in SOTL in Action: Illuminating Critical Moments of Practice, edited by Nancy L. Chick, Stylus, 2018.
Hutchings, Pat, Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.
“What’s so Funny? Moving Students Toward Complex Thinking in a Course on Comedy and Laughter,” in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol 7, no 3, 2008, with Renee Meyers and Stephanie Waldmann
Ciccone, Anthony A & Martine D. Meyer: Télétexte: Perspectives sur la France d’aujourd’hui. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers, Inc., 1992
Ciccone, Anthony A. The Comedy of Language: four Farces by Molière. Washington, D.C. : Studia Humanitatis, 1980
“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Historical Evolution, Principles and Practices, challenges and lessons learned, 2020 SOTL-China International Conference, Beijing Institute of Technology (remote presentation)
“Learning Matters: Reflections on Valuing Inquiry,” keynote address, UW System Office of Professional and Instructional Development, Madison, WI (2013)
“Learning Matters: The Power of Inquiry and Reflection for Teachers and Students,” keynote address, University of Fort Hare, South Africa (2014)
“Institutionalizing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” keynote address, North-West University, South Africa (2013)
“Accepting Ambiguity, Enjoying complexity: Threshold concepts for the Humanities,” NAIRTL Conference on Threshold Concepts, Dublin, Ireland (2012)
“Using Humor to Teach and Learn Creatively,” Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts, Emory College (2011)
“Engaging Pedagogies,” London SoTL 8th International Conference, Thames Valley University, England (2010)