Princeton Weekly Bulletin February 2/15/99
Teaching, Learning Center head to come from Berkeley
Jacqueline Mintz, founding director of the GSI Teaching and Resource Center at the University of California at Berkeley, will become director of Princeton's new Harold W. McGraw Jr. Center for Teaching and Learning at the beginning of the 1999-2000 academic year.
Mintz has led the Berkeley center for 10 years, working particularly with graduate student instructors (GSIs) and with faculty members to enhance teaching and learning on that campus.
She earned her 1982 doctorate in comparative literature from Berkeley, and she continues to teach in comparative literature, particularly drama and Renaissance literature. She has written more than a dozen papers and articles and directed a highly praised videotape on educational development. Twice honored for innovative pedagogy and program design by the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, she served on the organization's board of directors and currently chairs its committee on professional development.
The Berkeley center offers a number of centralized programs, but the core of its activities is a series of seminars on pedagogy developed and taught by faculty, together with GSIs, within the individual academic departments. The center serves as a partner in these seminars, offering support and expertise.
Highly collaborative structure
"The decade of highly successful professional experience and the depth of personal commitment to improving teaching and learning that Jacqueline Mintz brings to the leadership of the McGraw Center give us great confidence that the center will fulfill our aspirations to provide a truly valuable resource to both teachers and students at Princeton," said President Shapiro.
"Mintz's programs at Berkeley are particularly distinguished for their highly collaborative structure and for their attention to the role of teaching within the larger context of professional and personal life. She can help us to realize in new ways Princeton's strong commitment to teaching," noted Associate Provost Georgia Nugent, who led the search along with Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and Dean of the Graduate School John Wilson.
"I look forward to having the opportunity to work with faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at Princeton, in a way that can highlight the interrelations of teaching and learning activities among all of these," said Mintz. "I hope and expect that I will be collaborating with many individuals and departments at Princeton in order to initiate and develop a flourishing program at the new McGraw Center."
Laboratory for new ideas
The McGraw Center is intended to serve as a laboratory for new ideas and a place to share, across departments and disciplines, teaching discoveries that have proven successful in individual classrooms at Princeton and other colleges and universities. To provide easy access for the undergraduates, graduate students and faculty who will draw on its professional and technological resources, the center will be housed in the new Frist Campus Center, currently under construction.
Among the specialized facilities to be included in the McGraw Center are a state-of-the-art electronic classroom for instruction of undergraduates, a multimedia resource lab where faculty and graduate students can experiment with new teaching methods and develop new teaching materials, a library of print and electronic teaching resources, a seminar room, and consultation areas. The center also will act as an informal meeting place to encourage discussion and interaction among faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and the center's professional staff. Nearby classrooms in the campus center will be equipped with video-taping capabilities.
The teaching and learning center is to be established through the generosity of publisher Harold W. McGraw Jr., a member of the Class of 1940, who made a $5 million gift to endow the facility in 1998. McGraw, who has spent 52 years at McGraw-Hill, currently serves as chair emeritus. Among his many previous gifts to the University, he endowed the editing of Albert Einstein's papers by Princeton University Press when he served as its president. He has also established an endowed chair for writing courses.