Lipscomb’s faculty hopes to bring new perspectives to their classrooms this spring as the university recognizes the opening of Faculty Club 1891 and its discussion series Carpe Discentes.
The club is located in the upper level of the student center and is designed to allow faculty to engage in meaningful discussions that will improve their teaching in the classroom and help them implement new methods with their students in the community.
Dr. Jim Thomas, assistant to the president and a committee member for Faculty Club 1891, said he thinks the new facility and discussions will benefit the university, the students and the city.
“We move from simply an intellectual challenge to an implementation in society that makes society better than it was previously,” he said.
Thomas said the committee, which is comprised of six other professors, hopes the facility and the discussion series will challenge faculty to think “not only in academic terms but in implementation terms.” Then, he said, students learn how to apply concepts and how to assess community impact. This implementation benefits the whole city, he said.
“We think it’s win, win, win, all the way around.”
Thomas said he finds “tremendous enrichment” to education when professors and students take things out of the classroom, into the community and then bring it back to the academic setting for evaluation.
Thomas said the committee chose the title Carpe Discentes, which means “seize the learning,” because the name “matches the tone and the level” they want Faculty Club 1891 to have.
“I really hope that we can begin to create an atmosphere so that there is an interdisciplinary discussion about scholastic endeavors and projects,” he said, “at an academic level that we want the university to engage in.”
Thomas said he hopes the faculty club will allow professors to discover “commonality in purpose and effort.”
The first meeting for Carpe Discentes was Tuesday, Feb. 28 and featured Dr. Thomas Darwin from the University of Texas.
Darwin outlined four pillars of intellectual entrepreneurship: teaching, research, mentoring and engagement. Thomas said he thinks those are “four matters at the very heart of what the academy is trying to do.”
“One of the concepts that Dr. Darwin talked about was being able to move faculty from simply coming up with an idea to actually taking some of that out with our students and implementing it and then bringing it back to the classroom,” Thomas said.
More than 40 faculty members attended the first session.
“We think that it was a very good start,” he said, adding that it was a “much larger number than we expected.”
The session times and days of the week will vary throughout the semester, Thomas said, so that more professors have an opportunity to participate.
Thomas said even though the overall purpose of the meetings will be the same, the format may change each time. Some will involve a guest speaker followed by Q & A. Other times they may have a faculty panel that discusses how one department applies ideas from a guest speaker and to encourage other departments to adapt their ideas. Sometimes they may hand out material prior to the event and then have a discussion about it during the meeting.
“We’re more concerned about the outcome,” he said, “than we are about the process.”