Faculty Center
Supporting, Sustaining, and Celebrating Faculty
At F&M, we support, sustain and celebrate faculty in their roles as teachers, scholars, and college citizens. Our Faculty Center focuses on faculty development and is specifically dedicated to offering pedagogical and scholarly support as well as building community through informal interaction.
We strive to be the first line of support for our F&M faculty through our programming and resources, including:
- New faculty orientation during which offices across campus provide group and individual support for our new faculty colleagues on topics relating to pedagogy, scholarship and being a part of the F&M community, as well as the general higher education field.
- Monthly workshops and events covering topics such as pedagogy, grant seeking, time management, advising, leadership, and more
- Writing circles, reading groups, and other collaborative faculty working groups
- Private consultations offering a confidential, non-evaluative setting to discuss common faculty issues, including mid-semester course reviews, syllabus design, work-life balance, department chair concerns and maintaining scholarship
- A small library of volumes specifically selected on pedagogy and faculty life
Grants and Funding
The Faculty Center offers financial support to F&M faculty members for innovative work at the class, course, and curricular levels. We also support collaborative projects important to faculty on our campus. Recent examples include addressing mid-career faculty issues, equity in STEM disciplines, social justice, and power dynamics in the curriculum.
Those embarking on larger projects can turn to F&M’s Office of Sponsored Research for support navigating and facilitating sponsored funding opportunities from internal sources as well as federal, state, and nonprofit organizations.
Turning a Dream into Reality
The Faculty Center is the culmination of a faculty-driven initiative. The project began in 2013 to enhance our extraordinary teaching and learning tradition and fuel knowledge, discovery, and artistic creation. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $700,000 grant to provide startup operating support to the Faculty Center.
Today, we continue this mission and work hand-in-hand with our many campus partners to offer a wide array of programs to address the varied professional development needs of our faculty. The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations awarded the Faculty Center a grant to help us rise to the challenge of identifying tools and strategies to prepare today's students for success in an increasingly global, knowledge-based society.
