Santa Clara University Creates New Center to Boost Teaching Quality

Professor Renee Billingslea instructing students in Digital Photography. Photo by Nina Glick

Santa Clara University will officially launch its Center for Teaching Excellence this upcoming fall, formalizing a decade-long effort to strengthen what has become one of the institution’s defining characteristics according to faculty, staff and students.

The center represents a key goal of the University’s Impact 2030 Strategic Plan and will operate as an autonomous unit under the provost’s office, according to the University. The initiative comes as Santa Clara University has been recognized as the No. 17 best undergraduate teaching program nationally by U.S. News & World Report, which also ranked the university No. 63 overall among national universities.

“I’m just excited for the visibility of teaching and learning and support for teaching and learning that a center confers,” said Amy Lueck, associate provost for faculty development and professor of English, who has overseen the center’s development. “Even though we had offered some of these kinds of similar functions, I would still always hear from faculty be like: ‘Oh, I didn't know that we had support for teaching.’”

According to Lueck, the initiative builds on groundwork laid a decade ago by her predecessor, professor Eileen Razzari Elrod, and other campus collaborators. The effort gained momentum when Provost Jim Glaser arrived last summer and made establishing the center one of his first commitments.

“He came in and he said: this will be one of the first things we accomplish; we should absolutely do this,” said Lueck.

The University is currently recruiting a director for the center, with a listed salary range of $131,800 to $144,500 annually with a priority application deadline of July 15. The position requires “significant experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning,” according to the job posting, along with prior experience directing a teaching center or similar faculty development unit.

According to the job posting, the director will be responsible for advancing evidence-based, equitable and justice-driven pedagogies across the university in both curricular and co-curricular settings. Responsibilities include implementing programming that establishes Santa Clara University as a trusted resource for effective pedagogies, overseeing faculty consultations and course observations, and designing innovative professional development conferences for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and other institutions.

The center addresses what University officials see as a critical need for faculty development in an era of rapid turnover. According to Lueck, the University hires approximately 70 new faculty members annually on continuing contracts.

“If you think about the math there, if you just have those folks getting that same kind of baseline, you’re getting culture shift pretty quickly,” she said.

Lueck speculated that it could become an expectation for newly hired faculty to attend programming from the center. “There’s good reason to believe that that’s a great moment to do it, because even if folks have teaching experiences at a different institution, they don't have it at Santa Clara, and we do have a distinct kind of educational ethos.”

University surveys reveal that faculty identify evidence-based teaching, academic excellence and collaborative approaches as their most meaningful values. The top programming priorities include design workshops for pedagogy and courses, new faculty onboarding workshop series, and learning communities, according to survey results.

The center will host teaching-specific programs previously administered by Faculty Development, including teaching grants, awards, observations and training, according to a presentation to the Faculty Senate on May 28, 2025. It will also sponsor faculty learning communities, provide individual consultations and create new programming such as workshop certificate series on effective and inclusive teaching.

According to Lueck, the center aims to strengthen the University’s educational approach rooted in Jesuit Ignatian pedagogy, which she described as synonymous with inclusive teaching, equity-based teaching and teaching for social change.

“People don't always have a deep kind of understanding of Ignatian pedagogy specifically,” Lueck said. 

She emphasized that the center’s approach will focus on practical application rather than theoretical frameworks.

“Whatever it is, the framework that people find meaningful, giving them the space and the resources to think, what does this look like in practice, though?” Lueck said. “Often it means breaking with the ways that we were taught, and it does involve a new learning curve.”

The director will work closely with Faculty Associates—faculty members selected as excellent teachers representing various disciplines and appointment types—to deliver programming across all university schools, according to the job description. The center plans to emphasize internal expertise over external consultants.

“The way that we’ve had to do it in the past is largely through outside resources, outside perspectives that we bring in, and that's really what we want to move away from,” Lueck said when referring to existing Faculty Development programming. “We have so much faculty expertise on this campus. We are known as one of the best undergraduate teaching institutions, what we’ve needed is an organizing structure for that.”

The center will provide stipends for faculty who take on extended engagement with programming, according to Lueck, though she acknowledged the compensation is often nominal.

“It’s not a fair going rate. It’s a gesture to say: ‘We see you.’ We see the work you’re doing,” she said. “We know that when you write this on your annual report, it counts for so little, even if you do have a service expectation, and so it’s really just an attempt to make people know that they’re valued in some way.”

The center’s budget comes from the provost’s office, with plans to pursue donor funding for long-term sustainability, according to Lueck. 

Though not directly student-facing, Lueck emphasized the center’s student-centered mission and invited student input on how it can serve learners' needs.

“Even though the center is not student facing, it is student centered in a very real way,” she said, extending an invitation for students to engage with the center about how it can serve their needs as learners.

The center launch reflects broader trends in higher education toward formalizing teaching support, as institutions increasingly recognize the need for structured faculty development programs to maintain educational quality amid changing demographics and pedagogical approaches.