Introduction

To introduce the TRC's new handbook I want to reflect briefly not on the practical issues about teaching contained within its covers, but rather on what the TRC's full name and mission imply. In mulling over the meaning of the phrase "Teaching Resource Center," I found myself focusing particularly on the word "resource." "Resource" itself came into English from the Latin word resurgere ("to rise from a recumbent position"; "to take up arms again"). That etymological connection led me, in turn, to the related French word "source" with its primary meaning, "the point at which subterranean water emerges from its hiddenness and rises to the surface"-—thereby enspiriting and refreshing everything that lives by its energy. What specifically, though, do "resource" and "source" have to do with the remarkable work of our TRC at the University of Virginia?

Most concretely, the resources the TRC provides are to be found in the many programs the Center makes available to our faculty: the Teaching Portfolio Workshop, the Teaching Analysis Polls, the Classroom Observation Program, the workshops that begin every semester at U.Va., the work with international TAs on teaching American students, the programming for our Teaching + Technology Initiative Faculty Fellows, and much more. A principal focus of the TRC in orchestrating activities like these is on practical strategies for enhancing teaching performance, making the classroom experience for ourselves and our students more effective, enriching, and stimulating. Another less tangible but equally important focus of such activities is to encourage us as faculty to talk among ourselves—and especially across disciplines—about what we do as teachers. The TRC stimulates us to formulate our teaching philosophies, and to think more deeply about what we do in the classroom, with as well as for our students.

This brings me to a second resource and source of excellence in teaching recognized and celebrated by the TRC, one that bears on the nature of teaching at a research university. That resource is nothing more or less than the faculty's own love for and engagement with our disciplines, our research or scholarly projects, and our collective commitment to cultivating the life of the mind. The practical strategies for teaching are extremely important. Yet ultimately they will have the best long-term results in enriching our students' lives if they serve a special passion for ideas and intellectual discovery. It is this that has drawn each of us to academic life in the first place, and to teaching at a great research university. Whether we are faculty members or graduate teaching assistants, modeling this passion, together with the intellectual discipline and precise thinking that flow from it, can inspire and enliven students, even if it doesn't go hand-in-hand with polished pedagogical performance. This is an important point to keep in mind in terms of the resources we bring to our students, especially when we walk away from a given class thinking "I didn't think that class went very well." Indeed, teaching as engagement with an academic discipline and as a passion for pushing knowledge forward may not always have the appearance, in the classroom, of great "performance" in a superficial sense. The effective teaching of breakthrough ideas may take the form of hesitation, an apparent inconclusiveness, or a lack of clear direction-and these characteristics may seem opposed to ideas about the polished, clever, exciting lecture. Yet most of us, thinking back to our own education, would know that at least some teachers we now regard as the "best" would never have won teaching awards or received acclaim in popularity polls.

One final resource—and source—of excellence in teaching I must mention is our students. Their eagerness, their intellectual curiosity, and their life-experience are incredible gifts to us, and enable us, if we pay attention, to teach at our best. So long as we keep on listening and responding to them, they can inspire us to change and grow both as scholars and as teachers. We are greatly helped in our attention to listening by the good offices of those staff members in the TRC who organize the several kinds of student feedback that help us stay tuned to our students' needs and aspirations as learners.

As teachers, our goal, it seems to me, is not only to be engaged in learning and practicing pedagogical strategies, though these are important aids to classroom effectiveness. In a more global sense, we need to be continually "resourcing"—rising again and again to our calling as teachers—with just the kind of energy I associate with the surge and freshness of natural well-springs. This "re-sourcing" comes to us as we actively participate in the professional discourse that pushes our own intellectual lives and our particular disciplines forward. We also draw great energy for renewal by talking with each other about, and working on, pedagogical strategies of the kind you will find both in this handbook and in the stimulating discussion the TRC's many programs generate across the Grounds of the University.

Barbara Nolan
Robert C. Taylor Professor of English
Vice Provost for Instructional Development and Innovation