Welcome

This web site, always a work-in-progress, offers a variety of resources to support the efforts of all Columbia faculty members to become more informed, confident, and creative practitioners of the art of teaching, thereby enhancing the quality of learning for a diverse community of students.

As a virtual Center, this site complements, amplifies, and extends the work of our new Faculty Center, located on the 8th Floor of the Alexandroff Campus Center at 600 South Michigan Avenue. Here you can contact us and other colleagues and access materials at any time from anywhere. As a teaching portal, this virtual Center connects Columbia's unique and dynamic academic culture to national and international dialogues on teaching and learning.

The brown cow pictured throughout this site, has become our unofficial emblem or mascot, representing some of the qualities that we hope will distinguish our Center for Teaching Excellence from any other. In our picture, the unassuming brown cow is framed by the Columbia College Chicago logo, and by a striking set of images announcing a celebratory exhibit of the sophisticated photography of Victor Skrebneski in our Museum of Contemporary Photography. When we know that the cow was created by Columbia students, we can recognize a compelling emblem for a creative, urban college of the visual and performing arts and media with a strong physical and intellectual presence in Chicago. For me, this brown cow has more personal implications, connecting it deeply to my commitment to the mission of our Center for Teaching Excellence.

During the summer of 1999, as I began my work as director of this new center, a parade of cows welcomed me each day as I walked south on Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute toward Grant Park and my office at 624 South Michigan. Since I had just moved from Wisconsin, where I had spent most of my life, this bovine salute was somehow both oddly comforting and disorienting. And the modest brown cow at 600 South Michigan was the most comforting and disorienting of all of the fantastical painted cows. Oblivious to all its more colorful fellow creatures scattered around it for blocks-and equally oblivious to the rush of pedestrian and vehicular traffic-this self-possessed brown cow welcomed me faithfully day after day. Welcomed. And challenged.

One challenge was the brown cow's reluctance to being photographed easily and clearly, a challenge made considerably more intimidating to an amateur photographer because of the lesson of the master -- Skrebneski -- lurking in the background. I wanted to learn how to see and represent the cow and its surroundings more profoundly. Wanting to learn is very healthy for a teacher. So is being humbled by learning.

But there were deeper and more humbling challenges in the brown cow's insistent questions. The simple word "How" is tattooed on the right side of this cow. "Now" is tattooed on the left side. These twin words reminded me uncomfortably of questions I had been asked a few months earlier when interviewing for my new position: How will you establish this new Center for Teaching Excellence? And how will you help enhance Columbia's commitment to teaching and learning -- now?

For me, then, this innocent looking brown cow's questions assumed greater resonance and urgency each day: what was I doing to establish a useful center to support teaching and learning in this complex, exciting, dynamic, unique place? And, given a window of opportunity, how I could I do it now, right now, responsive to the current needs of Columbia's teachers and learner?

One morning in late October 1999, all the cows disappeared from the streets of Chicago. My familiar brown cow was gone, forever, from 600 South Michigan. I felt vaguely relieved that morning not to be confronted by the cow's implacable questions, but also a little disappointed, a little empty.

The photo of "How, Now Brown Cow," however, reminds me to keep engaging the questions, and to remain open to all the unexpected, creative teaching moments, learning moments that shape the distinctive academic culture of Columbia College Chicago. And it reminds me that a certain playfulness adds joy and weight to the demanding, rigorous art of teaching -- and learning.

Please join us in our continuing pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning.



David H. Krause

Assistant Vice President for Teaching and Learning Initiatives
and Director, Center for Teaching Excellence