Summer 2025 Faculty Reading Community (FRC)

Event Description

Join fellow faculty and CTL staff for sustained cross-disciplinary conversation on critical topics in teaching and learning.

The featured book for the Summer 2025 Faculty Reading Community will be Elizabeth Norell’s recently published The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. Amid the current crises of higher education, this timely book offers much-needed guidance for cutting through the emotional static that can hold teachers back from fully engaging with their students. Norell explains how an educator’s presence, or authenticity, can be critical to creating transformational spaces for students. And presence, she argues, means uncovering and understanding one’s own internal struggles and buried insecurities—stresses often left unconfronted in an academic culture that values knowing over feeling. Presenting research on how and why such inner work unlocks transformational learning, The Present Professor equips educators with the tools for crafting a more authentic presence in their teaching work.

Dr. Norrell will join our group for a discussion of her work on June 18.

Participants are required to attend 3 of 4 meetings. Faculty will receive a print copy of the book courtesy of the CTL. Seats are limited.

Meeting Mode: The Summer Faculty Reading Community will meet via Zoom.

Meetings will be from 11:00AM-noon on the following Wednesdays:

• June 4. Chapter 1: Presence Defined and Chapter 2: Relational Teaching and Presence
• June 11.  Chapter 3: Academic Culture and Chapter 4: A Dozen Present Professors
• June 18: Chapter 5: Mindfulness, or Getting Quiet with Yourself and Chapter 6: Movement, Clarity Through Embodiment
• June 25: Chapter 7: Playing Big, Chapter 9: Confronting our Biases and Chapter 10: A Roadmap Forward.

The summer reading community will be facilitated by Eric Fournier, Director of Educational Development.

For questions about the Faculty Reading Community, please contact Dr. Eric Fournier (efournier@wustl.edu)

Registration

This program has reached capacity. For more information, please contact Eric Fournier: efournier@wustl.edu