A About The Center for Teaching
The Center for Teaching at Sewanee has been active since the fall of 2001 in assisting faculty in the development of courses with a deidicated ethical component. Under the leadership of Center director John Willis (Dept. of History), the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Thomas Kazee, and the Lilly Steering Committee, courses have been developed through the departments of Religion, Philosophy, Biology, and Forestry/Geology which have either a community service and/or reflective ethical component engaging students beyond the immediate demands of these respective disciplines. Students in these courses might be asked to imagine the connecting ethical and moral concerns of a career research scientist or a forester, or to entertain questions about ecology from the point of view of a religious tradition, or to study the connection between worship and belief in the various Christian denominations. Drs. Richard O'Connor and Laurie Ramsey, both succeeded John Willis as co-directors of the Center for Teaching in the summer of 2002. Dr. O'Connor states that students at Sewanee who come to class with more questions than just those which pertain strictly to academics "...are obviously seeking a moral center, and so often they do it through the lens of identity, of attempting to identify with a group or point of view that provides a way of seeing the world.” The courses are so designed to bring those concerns to the foreground and to provide a map for discussing ethical and moral questions that, sooner or later, beg the attention of practitioners in these various fields. The effect of this kind of study is to enhance the accepted sense of “professional development” so that students embrace a vocational awareness of the various careers connected to these areas of study.
