Philosophy
ATLE believes that educational experience needs to entail more than what might be called the transmission model of teaching. From such a model, professors often assume, “If we tell students, we’ve taught students.” The transmission model is “teacher-centered” implying that the teacher holds all knowledge. If, however, we become learning-centered in our teaching, and we put the focus on the students, we become student-centered. This shift encourages us to think about ways we can understand how students learn.
We must reject the notion that students are, in Carole Gilligan’s terms, received knowers, that they are people who receive knowledge from their instructors via lecture and other traditional methods. Instead, we must develop a new way of thinking in which students and teachers are co-constructors of the learning experience.
We also believe with John Sexton (President of New York University), as quoted in Ken Bain’s book What The Best College Teachers Do, that all faculty must become part of a teaching community for the “entire enterprise of learning, scholarship, and teaching.”