Center for Teaching & Learning
About the Center for Teaching and Learning
The Center for Teaching and Learning is a welcoming and inspiring resource, collaborating with faculty, staff and students to promote ideas to enhance learning. The center provides support and encouragement to explore, develop and refine teaching pedagogy to promote academic excellence, and it is committed to promoting teaching and learning as ongoing and collaborative processes of inquiry, experimentation and reflection.
The center’s mission is to:
- Promote the value and practice of excellent teaching both in and out of the classroom to facilitate student learning and growth;
- Serve as an on-campus resource that provides professional development opportunities to promote teaching and learning;
- Provide opportunities for faculty to reflect on their work, share and learn from the experiences and expertise of their colleagues;
- Encourage faculty collaboration to enhance and refine their teaching;
- Promote active engagement and innovation in teaching and learning; and
- Act as a hub for knowledge of effective, evidence-based practices as well as a conduit to bring faculty together.
Jessica Hammack is the Head of Research and Instruction at the Beneficial-Hodson Library at Hood College. In that role, she coordinates information literacy instruction and research support across the curriculum, liaises to eight academic departments, supports the First Year Research & Instruction TA, and teaches course-connected and co-curricular workshops on topics related to information literacy, media literacy, research, academic integrity, and more.
In addition to 200+ information literacy instruction sessions, Jessica has taught a First Year Seminar on conspiracy theories and misinformation at Hood, as well as a variety of writing courses at other institutions, including introductory college writing, technical writing, and introductory, intermediate, and advanced undergraduate creative writing workshops. Before Hood, she was the Assistant Director of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House, a living-learning community for undergraduate creative writers at the University of Maryland, where she taught classes on writing in community and co-organized Writers Here and Now, a campus-wide speaker series.
Jessica is the co-chair of the 2024 Hood Votes Committee, co-advisor to the Feminist Student Union, and a 2022 recipient of the Dr. Henry P. and Page Laughlin Administrative Achievement Award. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and Writing from Hiram College, a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Florida, and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland.
The Center for Teaching and Learning condemns all forms of systemic racism, bias, and aggression against Black people, indigenous peoples, people of color, and those of marginalized genders and other marginalized identities. We understand that excellence in teaching, by definition, must reflect our shared humanity and promote inclusive practices such as:
- being conscious of biases, racial abuse, micro-aggressions, and those who are minimized or left out;
- understanding and supporting those underrepresented in our Hood community; and
- promoting ways to actively foster equity, diversity and inclusion in our classrooms, research, and publications.
The CTL advisory board is committed to raising awareness of all those who have been systematically oppressed, and we call upon Hood faculty and staff to join us in this commitment to create a more inclusive world.
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