Reflections on Building an Ignatian Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community and Creating Possibilities for AJCU Collaborations

During 2013-2014, the University of San Francisco’s Center for Teaching Excellence launched its first effort to support faculty learning communities (FLC), a professional development opportunity that brings together faculty engaging in an active, collaborative, yearlong program with a curriculum dedicated to enhancing teaching and learning. The Learning Communities Journal (http://celt.miamioh.edu/lcj/) presents the scholarship of teaching and learning devoted to these communities of practice and its editors trained inaugural facilitators at a two day conference. FLCs offer a relationship based (hence implicitly Ignatian) approach to solving problems and incubating ideas, including ideas on how to use Ignatian pedagogy to greater effect across academic programs at AJCU schools. Below I offer a brief history of our Ignatian Pedagogy FLC, divided into 3 stages: formation, participation, and presentation. I conclude with some recommendations that emerged out of our reflections that are relevant to all AJCU schools, including the development of a digital collection that we will present in a subsequent issue of Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal