Touchstone - Spring 2016

Preface

Christine Mangino

Welcome to the eighth volume of Touchstone, Eugenia Maria de Hostos Community College’s scholarly journal of teaching and learning. I had the privilege of authoring the first article in the initial edition of Touchstone (2008) and it is truly an honor to now write this preface. The journal was created at a time when all new faculty were reading Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered as part of the new faculty orientation and discussing the equal importance of teaching, service, and scholarship to faculty’s role in academia. It is apropos for our community college, focused on classroom instruction, to have Touchstone to share our teaching strategies with one another while celebrating our faculty’s successes as educators. Since the inception of this journal, the Professor Magda Vasillov Center for Teaching and Learning has further integrated these tenets. There is now a group of faculty within the center whose work is focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. We have developed the Hostos Teaching Institute, a year-long series of workshops designed to support faculty in their teaching, and the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) Teaching Project, a more intense application and reflection of pedagogical strategies. Within OAA, we have developed “The Academic Scoop” a monthly online newsletter which serves as a vehicle for sharing useful experiences. The faculty-authored Chalk Talk section is dedicated to highlighting various teaching strategies, and each month a different faculty member shares a unique technique from the Hostos classroom.