Teaching Resource Center

• The Teaching Resource Center (TRC) will provide resources to new and existing faculty to improve their teaching skills and effectiveness. The center will engage faculty, teaching assistants, students, staff, and community members to work in a collaborative environment to create rich, service/engaged learning and teaching experiences.
  The Center will have the capacity to:

  • Establish and maintain long-term partnerships across the campus and between the campus and the broader community
  • Connect systematically with related initiatives on the UAF campus (such as general education, distance education, assessment, graduate/undergraduate research, etc.)
  • Provide workshop and summer institutes on how to use new technologies in the classroom
  • Leverage campus and state collaborations so that each benefits the other
  • Provide support between and among student service areas (including advising, tutoring, counseling, etc.), productively involving both staff and faculty
  • Collaborate with faculty, staff, students, community members, and programs engaged in related forms of experiential, community-based teaching, learning, and scholarship, thereby helping to strengthen such efforts and generating new models for effective curricular engagement across a range of venues (e.g., undergraduate research, learning communities, etc.)
  • Garner external funding in support of the teaching, learning, and scholarship activities associated with curricular engagement
  • Support the university's mission to build excellence in teaching.

  University's mission:
  The Teaching Resource Center will be integral to the academic mission of the university.
  The university's mission statement includes the following TRC-related commitments:

  • Assist faculty members in the development of course syllabi that incorporate not just a list of lectures and laboratories, but that include content on teaching strategies, grading practices, office hours, etc.
  • Provide the framework for a new Excellence in Teaching Award each year for faculty members to acknowledge improvement and excellence in teaching performance. This could be based on student evaluations and could even require student nominations for the award.
  • Development of a small teaching grants program that would provide funds for faculty members to develop new course materials. These funds could be used for the actual materials, or for release time to develop them, or to travel abroad to train on them. 
  • Close interaction among students, Teaching Assistants (TAS), faculty, and staff in support of intellectual growth and personal development.
  • Emphasize personal and social responsibility in all fields of study.
  • Use assessment to deepen learning and establish a culture of shared purpose and continuous improvement.
  • Create an overall focus for the improvement of teaching excellence at UAF