"Activities That Foster Intellectual Communities"

STANFORD
"...one strategy for creating intellectual community is to create research seminars that bridge specialties; such connections are especially important as disciplinary boundaries blur. Connections with others in different subareas or fields can lead to new collaborations. Inviting students to organize these events brings further advantages for both knowledge building and professional training.

For graduate students, seeing how and what others teach is an opportunity not only to expand their pedagogical repertoire but also so observe different modes of explanation, different metaphors, and other models for transforming key ideas in the field. For faculty, observing colleagues and students not only communicates interest in their work, but provides a chance to reflect on one's own teaching. Departments in which classroom doors are open (metaphorically and otherwise) are settings for building a particular kind of intellectual community that some are calling a "teaching commons" (Huber and Hutchings, 2005).

ALLOWING RISK AND FAILURE. Important breakthroughs are more likely in settings that allow for risk taking and failure. But it is rare for a department to include these opportunities as an explicit part of the program. Typically, risk taking, if it is invited at all, is encouraged or modeled in individual classes, labs, or advising relationships."

Link to: Activities That Foster Intellectual Communities