ACM Pedagogic Resources
The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) is a consortium of academically excellent, independent liberal arts colleges located in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Colorado. Through five decades of collaboration, the ACM colleges have collectively constructed a powerful asset for their faculty and administrative leaders. ACM facilitates a variety of forums and other opportunities for peers to discuss not only the direction of programs but, with great candor, the common challenges and emerging opportunities they face on their campuses.
This website aggregates pedagogic resources and web pages generated through a collaboration of ACM with the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College. This collaboration aimed to capture, document, and disseminate the work of ACM faculty in collectively addressing a variety of issues facing higher education in general and liberal arts institutions in particular.
Resource Collections
- Teaching Activities - Modules and Activities for use in the classroom on a variety of subjects.
- Course Descriptions - Descriptions and syllabi of courses illustrating a variety of ways of organizing course materials.
- Pedagogic Research Results - Results of classroom research on student metacognition undertaken during the Collegium on Student Learning.
Contributing Projects
Collegium on Student Learning
The ACM-Teagle Collegium on Student Learning focused on issues of cognition and learning that have particular relevance to liberal arts teaching—critical thinking and analysis, strategies for learning how to learn, and development of awareness about motivation to learn. Recent work on metacognition in learning was the focal point for the ACM project and proved to be a topic of great interest and applicability.
Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Project
Supported by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the ACM Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Project has provided opportunities for faculty at ACM colleges since 2004. The key themes of the project are Collaboration, Sustainability, and Outcomes and Impact. This project seeks to build on the comparative advantage liberal arts colleges have in developing successful models of pedagogical and scholarly collaboration that can transfer to other institutions, both large and small.
Learning From Study Abroad (LSA)
The ACM, as a consortial provider of over a dozen off-campus programs of study, offers a rich laboratory for studying these experiences. Over a study period, all students who enrolled in ACM's programs took the LSA survey online. The findings have provided ACM with a greater understanding of the relationship between the elements of off-campus study and learning outcomes we can ascribe to them, which provides a sound basis for making future improvements to our programs.
Seminars in Advanced Interdisciplinary Learning (SAIL)
The ACM-Mellon Seminars in Advanced Interdisciplinary Learning (SAIL) are intensive off-campus study experiences for ACM faculty that allow them to explore salient topics in cross-disciplinary contexts. The seminars immerse ACM faculty in a setting that encourages multiple perspectives and collaboration across disciplines and lay the foundation for the development of innovative, integrative advanced-level coursework.