An Oral History of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching

When I left Vanderbilt University in September 2022, I wanted to find a way to honor the good work that the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching had done over the years. The CFT was founded in 1986, which made it 37 years old in 2023 when the current Vanderbilt provost folded the center into another unit. I worked at the CFT for 19 of those 37 years, including two years as a graduate assistant, six years as an assistant director, and eleven years as the CFT's director. The CFT played an important role in my professional career and in the careers of the faculty and staff who passed through its doors.

You know that adage that says when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well, my hammer is podcasting. I decided to use my audio production skills to put together an oral history of the Center for Teaching, to tell the CFT's story through the stories of its directors and other staff and graduate student alumni of the CFT. It's taken me two years to finish this project, but I'm very glad to share that my audio documentary is now available on the Intentional Teaching podcast feed. I've published it on the podcast feed to make it readily available, but I've also released it under a Creative Commons license to increase access. And I'll be asking the Vanderbilt Libraries to add the oral history to their institutional repository.

This oral history will, I hope, be very special to the people who worked at or interacted directly with the CFT. It might also be of interest to people outside of the Vanderbilt teaching community, however. The CFT was widely known across higher education for the quality and quantity of its web resources, primarily the 70-or-so teaching guides the staff produced over the years. What's less widely known is the stellar nature of the CFT staff alumni. Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, was the CFT's founding director, and he was followed by Linda Nilson, author of Teaching at Its Best, among other popular books. Peter Felten, co-author of Relationship-Rich Reducation, got his start in faculty development at the CFT, and other well-known scholars in the field, including Nancy Chick and Milt Cox, worked at the CFT over the years.

I didn't have the bandwidth to interview all of the CFT's illustrious alumni, but I did sit down (virtually) for in-depth interviews with CFT directors Ken Bain, Linda Nilson, and Allison Pingree. I also asked my friend and colleague Stacey Johnson to interview me about my time as director so that I could use the same framework to explore the years I led the center. Long-time CFT assistant director Darlene Panvini, now a professor of biology at Belmont University, sat for an interview, as did the above-mentioned Peter Felten. I also put out a call for "audio memories" from graduate student and staff alumni of the center, and I was able to include several of those in the project, as well.

This was a new kind of audio project for me. My typical podcast episodes feature an interview with one or two people which is fairly straightforward to edit down to a tight 35 minutes. This oral history involved many voices and much more storytelling than I've done before in audio projects. That said, I'm very proud of how it turned out, and I hope that it finds an audience among people who value the CFT specifically or centers for teaching and learning more generally. Thank you to all who listen and thanks especially to those who shared their time and stories with me for this project.

The oral history was published on Tuesday, and I'd like to share just one response that has been shared about the project. It's from Bryan Lowe, associate professor of religion at Princeton University, who taught at Vanderbilt before moving to Princeton.

Thanks for the kind words, Bryan! And thanks for all the great conversations about teaching over the years.

​You can listen to my oral history of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

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