Educational Development Fellow Reflection: Alex Mouw

 

Alex Mouw, Fall 2024-Spring 2025

Throughout my year as an Educational Development Graduate Fellow, I have supported three main projects: the GSPD Reading Community, IGNITE, and a Narrative Observation Protocol. Each successive project required me to take more ownership of educational development work, giving me deeper pedagogical knowledge as I embark on a faculty career.

In Fall 2024, Elina Salminen invited me to join her in implementing the GSPD Reading Community, a semester-long set of meetings to discuss teaching with colleagues across the university. First, I researched recent titles in pedagogy and educational development, which revealed a wealth of sources related to teaching individual subjects or the culture and impact of higher education generally, but a relative dearth of pedagogical sources that would appeal to a wide range of practitioners. We settled on Pedagogies for the Future (2023), a book which was co-written by three education researchers and combined accessible philosophical thinking about education with practical examples from across disciplines. More than twenty-five graduate students and postdoctoral fellows registered for the reading community, which Elina and I split into three subgroups that met weekly to discuss the book. Though it was important to pick a book that would appeal widely, I was struck by how hospitable participants were when approaching subjects outside their usual discipline. Each member of the group offered examples from their own experience about using holistic education or digital technology, while many of us speculated about how nature education or contemplative pedagogies could fit into our disciplinary classrooms in the future. Ultimately, I learned that committed teachers will find things to reflect on in a readable pedagogical book, whether or not it fits their expertise exactly.

Over the course of the academic year, I also supported IGNITE, first as a learning observer and then as a facilitator. I spent three sessions of Fall 2024 taking notes as Nicole and Katherine led IGNITE, which allowed me to build my own sessions in Spring 2025. With Nicole, I built and implemented three new IGNITE workshops in Spring 2025, ensuring that the plans were detailed, well-evidenced, and thus easily usable by future facilitators. Eight graduate students completed IGNITE by attending workshops and creating new pedagogical or curricular deliverables. As a facilitator, I found the “Grad Chat” portion of IGNITE, where participants share classroom challenges, offer support, and brainstorm solutions, to be especially meaningful. As I listened to other teachers, I learned about common challenges and strategies in Math, Musicology, and Biochemistry, fields that I otherwise would have known nothing about. These conversations, in turn, made it easier for me to research fields outside of English (my own discipline) when I created IGNITE lectures and activities, hopefully making the program more broadly beneficial. While the Reading Community introduced me to the diverse disciplinary audiences of the CTL, IGNITE gave me the chance to conduct educational development research and create new programming for the first time.

Inspired and fortified by my experience with IGNITE, I built and piloted a new observation protocol for the CTL. Working as an educational development fellow while also applying for academic positions, I noticed a gap in CTL offerings: though the existing observation protocol very successfully improved the quality of teaching, it did not take a form that could publicly document an instructor’s work. Having myself received a teaching observation in a detailed prose format suitable for my own teaching job applications, I wanted to offer an observation opportunity that was extrinsically useful for graduate students’ and postdocs’ professional purposes, such as teaching portfolios and the creation of teaching philosophies. Unlike the existing protocol, closely aligned with what educational development literature calls formative observation, the new protocol would, in its detailed prose form and documentary content, serve the professional needs of GSPDs. In Spring 2025, I piloted the Summative Observation program. Two graduate students in different schools utilized this service, which required me and a CTL staff member to conduct 1) a pre-observation intake, 2) an observation of a class session while taking detailed field notes, 3) a write-up of the observation, and 4) a follow-up conversation in which participants reflected on the experience and its use to them. Both participants found the experience valuable, and both of them plan to use the narrative summary in their professional portfolios. After the pilot program ended, I produced a detailed report accompanied by relevant documents, all of which are on Box so that a future fellow or staff member can easily take up this new program.

These three main activities stretched my pedagogical capacity. Though I consider myself a thoughtful teacher, all of my insights, successes, and failures were specific to my own disciplines. As an educational development fellow, I had to expand my vocabulary and my repertoire of examples to include other disciplines. Most helpful on this front was hearing from other practicing teachers, particularly in IGNITE. I didn’t know what a subsection in math courses involved, but now I do; I didn’t know what constraints a graduate student operates under while leading a Chemistry lab section, but now I do. I am more capable now of discussing active learning or access and accessibility in ways that are not exclusive to my own corner of the university.

The fellowship also came at an ideal time in my WashU career. Having finished most of my dissertation and all of my MTEs, I was free to be exploratory and open-minded about the fellowship. I loved observing others lead IGNITE, and I valued attending workshops on AI and cognitive science with the freshly gained perspective of a CTL practitioner. In retrospect, I feel that I got off to a slow start in the CTL—it wasn’t until late Fall 2024 that I really began brainstorming a project of my own. However, I feel lucky that I was allowed to slowly ramp up my engagement, moving from a very secure program (the GSPD Reading Community) to a relatively new program (IGNITE) to a brand-new program of my own design (observations). In a fellowship like this, where one’s carefully cultivated disciplinary expertise suddenly needs to speak to teachers across the university, it’s helpful to start with established programs before venturing out. Asking fellows to take up existing programs like IGNITE also ensures that those programs endure, avoiding a revolving door of new programs and fellows every semester.

This fellowship helped me develop a clearer pedagogical philosophy for myself, and it also significantly widened my view of pedagogy in general. I simply would not engage deeply with teachers in so many other disciplines were it not for this fellowship, and I’m grateful for the chance to learn and lead alongside the other fellows.