CETL Archives
Faculty Forum Workshop Day Archive - Spring 2003
Faculty Center for Teaching Excellence
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
We welcome you on this day specifically set aside for you to take part in activities designed to enhance teaching and learning.
Our Keynote Speaker today is Dr. Mary Rose O’Reilley, a member of the English faculty at University of St. Thomas since 1978. Among other awards, Dr. O’Reilley is a recipient of the Sears Roebuck Foundation Award for Campus Leadership and Excellence in Teaching.
O’Reilley’s Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice is a book about our lives as well as our work, suggesting that the “secrets” of good teaching are the same as the secrets of good living: seeing one’s self without blinking, offering hospitality to the alien other, having compassion for suffering, speaking truth to power, being present and being real. She says these are “secrets hidden in plain sight.” She will tell us how to discover what spaces we can create in the classroom that will allow students the freedom to nourish an inner life. The basis of O’Reilley’s remarks is not religious, but rather it is pedagogical. In her book The Peaceable Classroom, O’Reilley writes about certain moral connections between school and the world outside, making clear that the kind of environment created in the classroom determines a whole series of choices students make in the future, especially about issues of peace and justice.
The theme for today is “The Teaching Quilt: Putting the Pieces Together” and it centers on the life of a teacher, similar to that of a quilt with many parts making up the whole and how we “piece it all together.” Dr. Mary Rose O’Reilley blends pedagogy with feelings, structure with compassion, and academics with the outside world; she emphasizes “teaching from the heart.” Let us welcome Dr. O’Reilley.
