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James N. Jensen recently was named director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Resources. An associate professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering whose specialty area is environmental engineering, he won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1995.
What is the Center for Teaching and Learning Resources?
The Center for Teaching and Learning Resources, or CTLR, is an office at UB dedicated to promoting and sustaining the highest quality of teaching. The CTLR started in 2001 and has grown tremendously through the efforts of Associate Director Jeanette Molina, faculty volunteers and the support of Provost Elizabeth Capaldi and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Kerry Grant. The CTLR facilitates and contributes to the ongoing conversation about teaching and learning at UB by providing services, workshops and teaching resources to faculty and teaching assistants. We work with newly minted faculty to jump-start their teaching careers, and with experienced professors who, with apologies to TV chef Emeril Lagasse, want to "kick it up a notch" in the classroom.
What is your role as director?
Our staff has to wear many hats to help teaching professionals at UB. Jeanette Molina puts together our workshops and Lisa Francescone from Vice Provost Grant's office maintains our Web page. In addition to helping with those efforts, I bring the faculty perspective to CTLR activities.
Why did you want to take on this responsibility?
I appreciate the demands on faculty at UB with regard to research, teaching and service. I improved my own teaching through a tortuously slow process of trial-and-error. By serving as the director of the CTLR, I hope to help faculty and teaching assistants reach their teaching goals more easily. In addition, I love working with professionals who are passionate about teaching.
What has been your most challenging moment in the classroom? Your most rewarding?
Every teaching professional will tell you horror stories about their first class. I hope my youthful enthusiasm at the time overcame my inexperience. In 15 years of teaching, moments of embarrassment have reared their ugly heads (confusing lectures as I worked on little sleep shortly after our children were born or giving a whole lecture without knowing that my then-2-year-old son had put a sticker on my backside. My most rewarding times in the classroom come when that magical connection between the instructor, students and material emerges—the "aha!" moment when comprehension of an idea flashes through my students' eyes. I also enjoy teaching training courses for professional engineers and seeing my former students as confident, curious professionals. I have been overwhelmed, too, by the enthusiasm for teaching shown by faculty at CTLR events.
Teaching sometimes seems to take a back seat to research at UB. Is teaching just as important as research at a "research-intensive" university like UB? What can be done to raise the profile of teaching here?
The days of "research versus teaching" at American universities are over and have been replaced with "research and teaching." In other words, research and teaching need to complement each other in higher education. We all know that UB has a powerful research faculty, but we forget about the wonderful home-grown talents of our faculty in the classroom. Intelligence, creativity and passion—characteristics of the faculty at UB—are prerequisites for teaching excellence. With a little help, UB faculty can and do excel in the classroom, as well as the research lab. Teaching is and will continue to be important at UB. A good example of the esteem held by teaching at UB is the reception on Feb. 6th hosted by President Greiner and Provost Capaldi to celebrate teaching at UB and honor faculty who had made notable contributions to teaching. If anyone doubts the commitment of UB faculty to teaching, I invite them to attend a CTLR workshop and listen to the heartfelt exchanges between faculty and the presenters. For many faculty, the impact on the nation of what they do in the classroom will exceed the impact of their efforts in research and creative activities. In making this statement, I am not trying to minimize the importance of research. But teaching has a fantastic ripple effect, with every turned-on student leading to another engaged, creative practitioner in the future. This impact of teaching will sustain and elevate the importance of teaching at UB, as Western New York seeks well-trained professionals to shift its economic engine into a higher gear.
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
How can faculty and teaching assistants take advantage of the CTLR? I urge faculty and TAs to learn about the services, workshops and resources of the CTLR through our Web site at http://wings.buffalo.edu/ctlr, or by visiting us in 415 Capen Hall, North Campus.