I originally started this blog as a test platform for Teaching and Learning Insights, a web-magazine that I began along with Sandra Courter as a part of a UW–Madison College of Engineering 2010 project. During the time of the 2010 grants, several Engineering departments investigated ways to encourage student retention, particularly among women and students of color, groups that were (and are) generally under-represented in the field of Engineering. The College hired a few graduate students from Education (including me) to help think about pedagogy, and so I spent a year talking with the Engineering faculty about their teaching practices. TLI was intended to communicate both strategies and supporting research related to teaching and learning in college engineering classrooms and it was distributed to all faculty, instructional staff, and students.

I eventually decided to hand-code the template for TLI during the 2007-2008 academic year, and I interviewed many engineering professors in order to write its various articles.

Image credit: CC Wikimedia picture of UW-Madison’s Bascom hall. Original photo (and quite a lot of history of the university) can be found here.