The National Teaching and Learning Forum began publication in the fall of 1991 as a joint venture with the ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education. ERIC/HE already published a series of short books reviewing research literature on various higher education topics, and it embraced the idea of The National Teaching and Learning Forum warmly as an extension of its mission.
By 1993 the publication had become big enough and successful enough that it needed a new home. It found one in the Oryx Press which, in 1992, had replaced Macmillan as publisher of the American Council on Education's Series on Higher Education. Then, in 2000 after 25 years in publishing, Oryx was acquired by the Greenwood Publishing Group, a well-respected publishing company with many imprints and a long history of serving the higher education market. Nothing stays the same for long in modern publishing, and beginning in 2003, the Forum ended its partnership with Greenwood and took over all operations at its home office in Madison, Wisconsin.
From the first, I wanted The National Teaching and Learning Forum to be a different sort of newsletter. I gained a lot of experience with newsletters, having created or had a major hand in creating: Academic Leader, The Teaching Professor, and a number of others. I recognized that we live in an age pressed for time, but felt that that fact only increased the need for good writing. Repeated surveys reveal that faculty care deeply about teaching and work hard at it, but it's not something they talk about with their peers. Why? One reason, I thought, might be the lack of a serious, but not ponderous, forum. Why keep giving readers 500 word teasers? "Quick fixes" and "short takes" don't reflect the seriousness faculty bring to teaching, nor do they invite conversation; actually, they imply that complex challenges have simple solutions. Teaching is taken seriously only when the conversation becomes more interesting, and faculty begin talking to each other about it.
It was around 1990, through the leadership of Russ Edgerton and Pat Hutchings at the American Association for Higher Education, that the idea of "a conversation about teaching" began to gain currency. The metaphor of a conversation fit closely with what I wanted The National Teaching and Learning Forum to be. As one thinks of a conversation among intelligent people discussing matters of real importance to them, one quickly understands the kind of discourse the Forum strives to create. The talk ranges from citations and addresses, the kind of useful facts and access keys friends scribble out for each other, to anecdotes that make a point, to serious arguments for a particular point of view, to familiar essays in which a faculty member distills wisdom from experience. I saw a banquet table, and I wanted to fill it with the full range of rhetorical nourishment. I would offer the things a good host offers in the way of guiding and contributing to the conversation, but I would invite as many faculty as I could to speak up and contribute their ideas.
In its first 12 years, The National Teaching and Learning Forum has achieved critical acclaim and popular success with this approach. The contents range as widely as good conversation. Topics embrace a wide diversity of cross-disciplinary concerns. The Forum's pages cover the latest findings of cognitive psychology on attention span and their practical implications for teaching. They talk about seeing the relevance of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton to the lives of today's more gender-aware and ethnically diverse students. They are open to a variety of faculty viewpoints, each of which offers the gift of insight to colleagues both in this country and abroad.
The National Teaching and Learning Forum has quite a number of foreign subscribers. Perhaps that is because the publication has taken an increasingly international perspective. Much valuable research into what actually works well in teaching and learning has been done outside the United States, and the Forum has introduced this important work to many of its American readers.
The conversation grows and changes, but the mission and focus of the publication hasn't changed at all. Indeed, from the very beginning I envisioned an on-line version that could offer readers expanded, interactive access to the best information and discussion of teaching possible. Now, thanks to the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web and the success of the print version of the Forum, an on-line presence has become a reality.
In a world of fast-food encounters and breathless busy-ness, The National Teaching and Learning Forum has managed to create a sustained and sustaining conversation about teaching and learning. I hope you'll join it.
The National Teaching & Learning Forum
