Tuning Updates

• Nearly a dozen of the faculty members who are participating in the AHA’s Tuning project made presentations at the Workshop on Undergraduate Teaching in New Orleans. They discussed their responses to a range of issues their programs are facing, from orienting large numbers of international students to succeed in the U.S. history survey course to supporting students through their capstone research projects and making the positive case for curriculum revision to fellow faculty. (See the video story on the workshop here and the blog post here.)

• HistoriansTV interviewed faculty participant David Trowbridge (Marshall Univ.). In addition, parts of an interview with faculty participant John Savagian (Alverno College) appeared in the coverage of the Undergraduate Teaching Workshop, above.

• Anne Hyde (Colorado Coll.), councilor, Teaching Division, and the faculty director of the AHA’s Tuning project, wrote recently about how Tuning offers historians the opportunity to blaze a trail away from the problematic credit hour toward more meaningful measures of what students learn in higher education in “Defining Learning Expectations,” Inside Higher Ed, December 21, 2012.

• The AHA’s approach to Tuning has been drawing attention across the higher education community. Staff and project participants presented on the work in a variety of venues, including the Association for the Study of Higher Education meeting, the Southeast World History Association meeting, and the international Tuning conference in Brussels, Belgium, last fall. We will also hold sessions at the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ annual meeting in Atlanta on January 25 and the Southern Conference on African American Studies conference in Tallahassee in February.

• The Institute for Evidence-Based Change, which is consulting with the AHA on its Tuning work, is producing a revised guide to Tuning processes that should be available soon.

• The Tuning project is having its second two-day meeting in Washington, D.C., next month. From February 15–17, participants will discuss their approach to the Tuning process, and share strategies for improving the effectiveness of their curricula and their communication with the communities beyond the campus.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.