The College Teaching Certificate is offered by the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. The certificate is offered free to all enrolled students at CGU. Alumni can earn the Certificate by enrolling in certificate courses – for details, please contact the PFF program office at pff@cgu.edu.
Students aspiring to teach in formal academic contexts, or whose work will take them into consulting or other leadership work that engages and leads minds will benefit from the PFF Certificate program.
The Certificate program helps you develop the following knowledge and skills:
- Teaching is a leadership process that integrates excellence, ethics, and engagement to include and support all learners toward success.
- Inclusive pedagogy that embraces and integrates diversity in all its forms (culture/ethnicity, nationality, age, language, gender, sexual orientation, abilities/disabilities, learning cultures, life experiences).
- A design approach for integrating inclusive pedagogy as part of the mission of higher education to prepare a diverse student body for the emerging world.
- An understanding of how and why learners engage and disengage with learning.
- How to select and design pedagogical strategies and tools, including in digital form, to support learning engagement and success.
- How to design courses that are inclusive and engage students in active learning to master both course content and critical human capacity skills for the 21st century.
- A critical awareness of yourself as a teacher-scholar and leader that you can articulate in a teaching philosophy and diversity statement.
- How to begin and maintain a reflective practice so that as an educator and leader you are an agile, ethical, and lifelong learner.
Certificate Program Outcomes:
After completing the certificate students will be able to:
- Think reflexively in supporting your beliefs, values, and goals at disciplinary and personal levels as a future-oriented, inclusive, and agile educator.
- Analyze and address issues in legacy systems in education that block, marginalize, and oppress learning and learners in current and emerging contexts
- Apply active learning and design thinking principles in designing, observing, and facilitating inclusive, equity-minded, and future-focused learning.
- Integrate learning science and transformative pedagogical principles that disrupt learning barriers and promote engagement and active learning in teaching design and learning facilitation.
- Collaborate within and across disciplines to develop transdisciplinary principles for ethical, future-focused teaching and learning.
Certificate Courses:
The College Teaching Certificate requires successful completion of two courses, “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” and “Teaching Practicum and Portfolio.” Each course and the certificate completion are recorded on your transcript. The “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” course can be taken with different units (zero or 4) to complete different requirements for your degree. The courses are exactly the same except for the cost and units that count toward your degree.
PFF 530: Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education
(No units, free for current students)
TNDY 430: Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education
(4 units, regular tuition cost)
Course Description (PFF 530 & TNDY 430): This course invites you on a transformative journey to develop the mindsets to become an ethical, agile leader of learning. We present teaching as a transdisciplinary and inclusive future-focused endeavor for positive learning and development in diverse settings, within and beyond the classroom. In doing so, we engage with the question of how we can effectively and ethically respond to increasingly complex global and institutional contexts in preparing learners holistically for their futures. Working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams, we will use systems, complexity, and design thinking frameworks to explore student identities and diversity in our classrooms, the changing global paradigms that shift our teaching missions and methods, and what learning sciences and the ethics of education tell us about engagement and motivation. We will also draw from key frameworks such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL and Active Learning in this exploration. We will work reflexively using a Portfolio-based approach to explore and document our own assumptions, values, and beliefs about education and how these transform in the light of our discoveries about ethical, agile teaching. Our goal will be to co-create pedagogical principles that transcend disciplinary teaching and learning cultures toward agile, ethical leadership of learning in our diverse educational and work contexts. To earn the College Teaching Certificate, you must also complete the PFF 531 course, Pedagogy Practicum and Portfolio.
PFF 531: Teaching Practicum and Portfolio
You must have completed the course, Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education (listed as PFF 530 or TNDY 430), to enroll in this course as it is a prerequisite for PFF 531 Teaching Practicum and Portfolio.
Course Description: This class structures your progress through the teaching practicum and completion of all the teaching portfolio items for the College Teaching Certificate. In this course, you will apply the principles and frameworks from “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” into practice. The class focuses on coaching and a structured assignment submission and feedback process. Using the work that you began in “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education,” you will complete your sample course design and syllabus. In addition, you will develop a sample learning management system course and a teacher-scholar website. The course culminates in a final integrated reflection of your entire PFF journey toward becoming an inclusive, future-focused educator.
If you cannot take on the full demands of the certificate, you can build your own portfolio of teaching tools and resources, course syllabi, and useful documents like a sample course or teaching philosophy statement for your job search through our consulting and appointment service. You can also just attend PFF 530 or TNDY 430 for professional development without taking PFF 531.