Faculty College 2025

45th Annual Faculty College 2025

(Re)Orienting SoTL: Rooting Inquiries in Your Identities, Purposes, Artifacts and Communities

THE OSTHOFF RESORT at Elkhart Lake, WI
mAY 27-30, 2025

Faculty College 2025 is designed as an institute|retreat for university teams led by teaching & learning center directors or a designee. We invite teams to work together before, during, and after Faculty College to (Re)Engage with the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 25 years after SoTL was introduced at Faculty College 2000. Our institute|retreat is inspired by national organizations such as the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) that bring together university-based teams and empower them to design university-based professional development.

Dr. Nancy Chick

Dr. Peter Felten

Faculty College 2025’s guest facilitators are Dr. Nancy Chick (Rollins College) and Dr. Peter Felten (Elon University), both with roots in Wisconsin and leadership experience in international SoTL. Nancy is a former Professor at the UW Colleges; she participated in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars and subsequently co-directed the program. She is the founding co-editor of ISSoTL’s journal Teaching & Learning Inquiry. Peter was born and raised in Madison. In 2022 he served as Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in SoTL at Carleton University, and is a Past President of ISSoTL and the POD Network.

Drs. Chick and Felten write:

In this workshop based on our forthcoming book The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (co-authored with Katarina Mårtensson), we’ll mark OPID’s 25th anniversary of SoTL in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars by re-orienting how SoTL is both understood and undertaken. We see SoTL as more than one thing:  it’s a practice that improves teaching and learning in context. It’s also a field that extends how we in higher education build knowledge. It’s a community that offers rich relationships for those who seek them. And it’s a form of scholarship with socially conscious and humane roots that call on us to make a difference in the education of students, in the careers of academics, and in the world.

Rather than a typical SoTL project development exercise that marches stepwise like a recipe, this workshop will revolve around inflection points in SoTL practice. Specifically, we will invite you to think deeply and in new ways about your own professional and personal identities, the meaningfulness or significance of your SoTL inquiry, the artifacts that illuminate your work, and the people who are part of your SoTL community. This thinking will inspire hands-on work of (re)conceptualizing your own SoTL work, including the ways that SoTL informs your professional life in and beyond your institution.

Also, rather than squeezing in too much content or rushing participants through a few perfunctory exercises under the expectation that they’ll do the real work on their own time, this workshop aligns with the “institute | retreat” nature of OPID’s Faculty College. We’ll treat the two full mornings and the beautiful location as an opportunity for slowness—a deliberate, reflective approach that values presence, depth, and connection. In this way, the substance and pacing of this workshop honor the complexities of teaching, learning, and all aspects of your work, inviting you to think not just about what you’re doing, but also why it matters.