Nancy's Notes

I’m so excited to be part of TWU’s new Faculty Commons as a shared space for everyone in what used to be known as the Center for Faculty Success and the Center for Development, Design, and Delivery—to work together and with faculty.  

The idea of a “commons” has long shaped my professional life.  In their influential book The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, Pat Hutchings and Mary Taylor Huber describe the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as “a conceptual space in which communities of educators committed to inquiry and innovation come together to exchange ideas about teaching and learning, and use them to meet the challenges of educating students for personal, professional, and civic life” (2005, 1). 

Early the next year, I launched The International Commons, the newsletter for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And in 2009, the concept gained global recognition when Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her groundbreaking work on the sustainability of commons. (She remains the only woman to have received that honor.)  By chance, the ISSOTL conference that year was hosted at her home institution (Indiana University Bloomington), making her vision of the commons especially present and inspiring throughout the gathering.

As we begin this new chapter at TWU, I see The Faculty Commons as our own shared space—where we can come together across disciplines and campuses, exchange ideas, and support one another in the work of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Just like the many “commons” that have inspired me over the years, this one will only thrive through our collective participation. I look forward to seeing how we shape it together.

–September 2025