Principles

From an email circulated today:

Dear Colleagues:

The Executive Board (EB) of the UCLA Academic Senate is pleased to release the following Principles for the Future of Instruction (Principles). These Principles are intended to guide critically important campus conversations at this time of reckoning about teaching and learning, especially in light of lessons learned during the pandemic.

Responding to the possibility of transformations in teaching and learning and to faculty and student concerns, the Executive Board in Winter 2022 charged a working group with the development of the Principles. While EB will use the Principles to inform our 2022-23 Future of Instruction task force that focuses on academic policy, we hope that people across our campus will use the Principles to shape discussions and planning in administration, among students, in departments, and in various venues within our Bruin community. While we cannot predict the form or substance of those conversations, as the steward of UCLA’s educational policy and the faculty voice in campus governance the Academic Senate seeks to engage and collaborate in the coming months on developing instruction-related policies and frameworks in an environment that has been reshaped by the pandemic and the Administration’s enrollment growth expectations.

Principles for the Future of Instruction at UCLA

• Foster student learning and well-being through pedagogical excellence.
• Connect instruction to the university’s role as a public, land-grant institution.
• Create teaching and learning that enhance UCLA’s academic mission of teaching, research, and public service.
• Ensure student access to transformative engagement with the knowledge production intrinsic to a research university.
• Sustain and improve instruction that centers in-person learning while also, as appropriate, enhancing instruction with technological tools.
• Promote and protect diverse, equitable and inclusive teaching and learning, including but not only through increasing teaching and learning accessibility.
• Advance instruction that increases the quality and value of an undergraduate or graduate degree from UCLA.
• Reinforce the authority of the Academic Senate over instructional policy.
• Nurture campus community involvement in the planning, practice, and evaluation of teaching and learning.
• Incorporate continuous evaluation and improvement of instruction.
• Apply classical and innovative pedagogical philosophies, approaches, methods, and techniques, and maintain the resources, sites, facilities, and tools to facilitate their effectiveness.
• Sustain instructor well-being and improve student-to-instructor ratios, with attention to instructor time and labor.

Sincerely,

Jessica Cattelino, Chair, UCLA Academic Senate

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Note from yours truly: The impetus behind this list of principles seems to be the pandemic-related acceleration of online courses and all that, and what it implies for the future. A suggestion for the eventual taskforce report: Focus on that starting question. Otherwise, the proliferation of principles will fail to give much guidance and the report will end up in a drawer.