UAFS to create Center for Teaching and Learning with First National Bank donation

The University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS) is using a $500,000 contribution from First National Bank of Fort Smith to support strategic development that will result in better engagement between UAFS professors and students.

UAFS announced Wednesday (Aug. 21) the creation of a Center for Teaching and Learning, strategic development aimed at advancing faculty expertise and student engagement through innovative educational strategies.

“A center for teaching and learning is something I’ve hoped we would create on this campus since my arrival,” said UAFS Chancellor Dr. Terisa Riley. “It’s a major component of faculty development and a way we can truly invest in our people. By enhancing our mission, vision, and commitments through this pedagogical hub, we are laying the groundwork for our faculty and our students to thrive in their academic pursuits.”

First National Bank of Fort Smith contributed $500,000 to endow the center.

“We at First National Bank believe in the capacity of education to advance our region in ways few other initiatives can,” Bank President Sam Sicard said in a statement. “When Chancellor Riley explained the vision for the Center for Teaching and Learning at UAFS, I knew it was a way First National could invest in the future of our community, ensuring that we continue to develop knowledgeable and skilled individuals who want to live, work, and serve our region after graduation.”

UAFS Provost Shadow Robinson said a center for teaching and learning is one of the few places on a college campus that has the potential to directly impact every faculty member, and thereby, every student. The center will provide the type of professional support to take experts in their fields, which UAFS faculty are, and help them become expert classroom teachers, Robinson said.

“It is a chance to learn how to better engage the students of today,” he said. “It will help our faculty understand the students that they are going to engage on a daily basis.”

As part of the programming that will be available through the center, the university now provides LinkedIn Learning to every full-time faculty, staff, and student at the university. LinkedIn Learning offers more than 16,000 online courses taught by industry experts. The university is searching for a faculty member to be the inaugural teaching and learning fellow. The fellow will begin the process of leveraging internal and external expertise to offer collaborative programming, a news release said.

Initially, programming for the center will be housed in the Boreham Library. It will use internal and external expertise to offer collaborative programming.

“A teaching and learning center does not take the approach of being the one with the most knowledge,” Riley said. “Instead, it’s tasked with finding out where expertise lives on and off campus and how we can utilize that expertise to meet the needs of our faculty and our students.”

Robinson said challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic increased the need to train faculty continuously.

“Literally every student graduating from 2020 through 2030 has been affected,” he said. “Every traditional student who enters our classrooms for the next decade will have had 15 months of their emotional and psychological development impacted by the pandemic.”

Robinson said students, who had been changing before the start of the pandemic, are changing at an even more rapid rate.

“And now what we are seeing year over year is different student populations,” Robinson said, noting that includes the rapid changes in artificial intelligence.

The center will help faculty understand how to bring AI into the classroom and prepare students on how to use that for the careers of today. Riley said the changes in student background with the impact of the pandemic and development of AI make the launch of the center perfectly timed to impact the student population.

“We know that developing and improving our faculty’s understanding of pedagogy and pedagogical innovations absolutely makes a difference in student learning,” said Riley. “It makes a tremendous impact on student success.”

UAFS hopes the center will deepen cross-campus relationships that contribute to student success, featuring collaborative workshops with the student health clinic, the counseling center, the academic success center, the Babb Center for Career Services, and more. The center will help faculty identify holistic methods of preparing students for hands-on learning experiences, internships, and job paths and, thus, empower them to engage with students even further, Robinson said.

“In today’s world, students expect more than a professor who is a content area expert or even a leading researcher,” said Robinson, who taught and researched nuclear physics for 15 years. “They expect a professor who can tie those classroom concepts to their careers or their graduate programs.”