What I want college leaders to understand about teaching centers

To: Beth McMurtrie, Teaching Newsletter, Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Beth,

Thank you for your invitation in the Teaching newsletter, dated January 29, 2026, to share what matters to me about teaching centers.

I have been a beneficiary of, participant in, contributor to, and laborer for and on behalf of teaching centers since I began my PhD studies in ecology in 1996. I’m just now realizing that this year marks my 30th anniversary of even knowing that such a thing as a teaching center existed — and that it would shape my professional and personal life so profoundly.

At first, I didn’t even know the teaching center was there. Beyond my awareness, CTL staff and graduate assistants facilitated the orientation that jumpstarted my teaching assistantship in introductory biology laboratories and gave me first-day tools for beginning my teaching on solid footing. In my first semester, I also took a pedagogy course co-led by a faculty member and graduate student who received intellectual, financial, and community support from the CTL. That course created weekly space for me and my peers to reflect on our lived classroom experiences, learn theory and evidence-based practice, and situate ourselves within a global community of college educators and a larger scholarly tradition. We learned to shift our focus from performing expert authority to facilitating student learning and belonging. My teaching became a conscious, values-aligned, embodied practice of learning about my students, my institution, my field, my colleagues, and myself.

In the final year of my graduate program, I was nominated to participate in a Preparing Future Faculty program with the CTL — the TA Mentor Program. With twelve graduate students from across campus, we met weekly for a year to share teaching experiences across disciplinary boundaries, contribute to pedagogy programs for incoming teaching assistants, and explore faculty work across institutional types. This experience, in 1998–1999, was when I first realized there was something truly distinctive about a teaching center. My whole being experienced a deep sense of belonging I had never felt before. The TA Mentor Program was the first Circle of Trust I ever consciously participated in, and it shaped the rest of my professional life. I still have my first edition copy of Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach from that program, and I still occasionally connect with members of that cohort.

While the broader graduate student body was mobilizing around unionization, my own sense of power and purpose began to coalesce around teaching center work and the ethical, compassionate communities that grow from it. I have been engaged in graduate student pedagogical development, within or adjacent to teaching centers, ever since.

The news of the UT Austin CTL closing is devastating — for the staff who work there, the faculty and graduate students who call it home, and the field of educational developers who have long looked to it as an exemplar. Downsizing and shutdowns are happening to other centers as well. Several of my friends and former mentees have been laid off in recent years. I feel angry, frustrated, and deeply saddened — professionally and personally. These closures are not abstract decisions. They uproot lives, dismantle support systems, and generate institutional anxiety that no teaching center is truly safe.

I see colleagues trying to make rational sense of these decisions using the language of logos: finances, metrics, reach, KPIs, benchmarks, strategic initiatives, and annual reports. I understand this logic. Colleges and universities operate as businesses, and leaders decide what activities serve institutional goals. But what I see being dismantled are not peripheral units — they are parts of the organizational ecosystem itself. Teaching centers function as the nerve centers of institutions. They attend to the heart of instructional life: continuity, mentoring, formation, trust, and cross-disciplinary coherence.

Teaching centers are not primarily sites of compliance, quality assurance, or training strangers to become slightly more skilled strangers. They facilitate the low-barrier formation of real communities among educators — communities that generate pedagogical wisdom, mentorship, psychological safety, and professional stability. Participants learn to support one another’s growth in values-aligned practice, autonomy, identity formation, and self-authorship.

For me, teaching centers make sense in relational and ethical terms — as an argument of care: what we love, what we protect, how we share power, and what we choose to nurture in ourselves and each other. They help instructors love their students well while continuing to care for their own wellbeing, disciplinary expertise, families, communities, and values. They are sites of embodiment, care, resistance, and courage. They counter scarcity-driven, extractive systems with relational trust, mutual support, and shared meaning. They bring together people across ranks, roles, disciplines, and silos to share wisdom, resources, and hope.

They are sanctuaries — not in a sentimental sense, but in an institutional one: spaces where human formation, professional identity, and ethical practice are actively cultivated. They are life-affirming, generative spaces that sustain the people who sustain higher education.

Teaching centers are revolutionary in this world — not because they are loud, but because they are relational, ethical, and deeply human.

This is what I love about teaching centers and the people who work in them. And this is what I believe college leaders must understand: when teaching centers disappear, institutions do not just lose programs — they lose memory, coherence, mentorship, and the relational infrastructure that makes education possible.

Sincerely,

Katie Kearns, Ph.D.