Stop me, oh stop me

Prominently featured this holiday vacation on the MSU website is a little banner announcing the Academic Development Center's 19th Showcase on Teaching and Learning. Given that it's holiday vacation, I assume the banner will remain in place until the 19th Showcase on Teaching and Learning actually transpires on 9 January 2008. The casual visitor might be forgiven for thinking it is a pretty big deal. It showcases teaching, and learning, and is the nineteenth in a series. The very existence of an Academic Development Center on this campus would indicate that MSU is serious about quality education, right? Stop me if you think you've heard this one before.

Even a quick look at the ADC website suggests the Showcase is not the big deal it's cracked up to be. The content hinted at by the ADC website's left-hand navigation bar promises more than it delivers. One can choose from "professional development resources," or "learning communities," or even a conference on the "scholarship of teaching and learning" to be held a year and a half from now right here at MSU. Whatever the "scholarship of teaching and learning" is or isn't, it has never repaid the effort I have invested in trying to comprehend it. For example, the ADC website proudly features an article entitled "Integrative Model for Learning and Motivation in Higher Education." The article's authors, which include the ADC Director, undoubtedly worked very hard on it. But the accompanying graphic also - unwittingly, I'm sure - illustrates my stupefaction with the entire concept:

It looks like somebody decorated a dartboard with buzzwords: hit the bull's eye and win LEARNING PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES! Again, I'm sure the article is a major contribution to its field. But how it applies to anything I do in a classroom is utterly beyond me.

As for the development resources, the ADC offers seminars, learning committees, workshops, and - drum roll, please - the Showcase on Teaching. I have never attended the Showcase on Teaching, but I have been presenting at it since the last century. It used to bring together a mix of teachers with things to show off and support staff with new tools to offer, and it once attracted a representative audience of faculty. These days it is pretty much the usual suspects talking about the usual stuff to a rather specialized audience. Tenure-track faculty attend it because they have to attend everything, and attendance is taken (by social security number, no less). Administrators attend it because it would be churlish not to attend a showcase on teaching. Everyone else there attends it because they want to rub elbows with administrators. There are some interesting presentations scheduled the 19th Showcase on Teaching - but only one of them would add to what I already know. I think I'll be spending my time on something more meaningful - like a killer round of Bookworm.