Garden of Pedagogy: Planting the Seeds for a Faculty Learning Community

Some of the most effective collaborations are those that organically grow to fulfill a genuine need in an academic community. This chapter details a collaboration between an academic librarian and an English instructor inspired from shared interests to create a faculty learning community. Faculty learning communities are a subgroup of communities of practice that share a common articulated learning goal. The academic librarian had been previously offering a series of professional development workshops for faculty in information literacy. The English instructor had been working on professional development for writing pedagogy through Writing Center initiatives and committee work. Information literacy and scholarly writing are interdependent sets of process-oriented practices that are bridged by critical reading, another set of process-oriented practices. All three sets of these process-oriented practices, information literacy, critical reading, and writing composition, are needed for academic excellence and disciplinary expertise in any subject area distinct from content knowledge. So, while both the librarian and the instructor had been individually thinking about starting an interest group around research pedagogy and writing pedagogy, respectively, it took conversations prompted by a professional development workshop for this collaboration with a focus on the interconnectedness of these process-oriented pedagogies to begin. Rather than work separately on these goals, they recognized that they have a common interest in the processes of student learning as related to pedagogy and wanted to gather colleagues who also share this interest.