Associate Director, Center for Teaching and Learning (Two positions)

Amherst has taken a leadership role among highly selective liberal arts colleges and universities in successfully diversifying the racial, socio-economic, and geographic profile of its student body. The College is similarly committed to enriching its educational experience and its culture through the diversity of its faculty, administration and staff.

Job Description:

The Amherst College Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) seeks TWO experienced and thoughtful educational developers committed to equity-minded approaches for their thinking and practice, especially as relevant and effective within a small private liberal arts college teaching and learning environment. Our work in the CTL is primarily faculty-facing, while centering learning and holistic well-being for all stakeholders in designing, implementing, assessing, and improving our support and programming for effective teaching practices. We partner with faculty, students, and staff across the College to explore, identify, and integrate the most effective, evidence-based practices within our context. Amherst College is an equal opportunity employer and encourages persons who hold a diversity of identities and relevant experience to apply.

Knowing that the candidates for this position will bring a wide range of knowledge, skills, and experience, we are excited to search for these two positions concurrently and draw on the collective strengths the candidates will bring to the Amherst community. Both associate director positions are full-time, year-round positions, with a job group and level of RI-4, with a minimum starting salary of $85,000 per year - commensurate with experience. Reporting to the director of the CTL, the associate directors will contribute to program development, assessment, and administration of the CTL. The individuals in these roles will collaborate with colleagues at local, regional, and national levels to promote excellence in education and student learning at Amherst.

Summary of Responsibilities:

Faculty, Academic Department, and Institutional Consultations

• Consult and collaborate with faculty, instructors and other campus colleagues on a variety of teaching and learning needs, across disciplines. This work may include developing innovative assignments, activities, instructional and assessment approaches, as well as syllabi and curricular improvement

• Provide support for the design and assessment of courses, curricula, instructional methods, and learning initiatives, all tailored to faculty domain areas and disciplines 

• Provide resources for faculty on established and emerging pedagogical methods, with a focus on equity-minded pedagogies for diverse student populations

• Introduce faculty to practical and innovative possibilities for meaningfully assessing student learning, especially using approaches best suited to small residential liberal arts learning environments

• Facilitate learning communities, seminars, and workshops on pedagogical methods and effective practices in a variety of focus areas such as syllabus design, course design, inclusive pedagogies, meaningful learning assessment, active and engaged learning, emerging and innovative pedagogical frameworks, etc.

 Programmatic and Course/Curricular Design Projects

• Work with the CTL team and appropriate partners to sustain ongoing CTL initiatives including the pedagogical partner program (P3), CTL faculty fellows, syllabus and course design seminars, learning communities, and the CTL student advisory team

• Sustain and develop programming and initiatives on a variety of topics that contribute to an inclusive learning environment, engage with interdisciplinary and emergent ways of knowing, and emerge from work with our faculty, staff, and students. These have included work such as Being Human in STEM, intergroup dialogue, embodied pedagogies, Indigenous ways of knowing, scholarship of teaching and learning, and the challenges and possibilities of generative AI

• Collaborate with the CTL team and other campus partners to develop, sustain, support and assess educational development initiatives

Operational Support

• Represent the CTL for a wide range of audiences and serve on College committees, as appropriate

• Collaborate with t