Howard Symposium Highlights
Scholarship of Teaching, Learning

WASHINGTON
A lecture by Dr. Lee S. Shulman on the scholarship of teaching and learning attracted an enthusiastic audience of more than 150 Howard University faculty members and graduate students to a half-day symposium on improving doctoral education. With as many faculty members as graduate students in attendance, Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, opened the Howard symposium with a talk that urged faculty members and graduate students to examine their effectiveness as teachers by using academic research methods and practices.  
"It's a positive accomplishment if we can use scholarship to improve our teaching," Shulman told the audience. 
With the symposium on the scholarship of teaching and learning, Howard University's graduate school kicked off the first in a series of symposia as part of the Responsive Ph.D. (RPh.D.) Initiative. Howard is one of 14 doctoral granting/research universities chosen by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to participate in the initiative, which was launched early this year at the Washington-based campus.
The initiative is focused on improving doctoral education in graduate schools at American universities. It also seeks to "make doctoral education more responsive to the career goals of students and to societal needs without compromising the traditional academic and research values of the Ph.D. degree," according to a statement from Howard. 
— By Ronald Roach