More About Executive Director Peter Felten

Peter Felten is executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, professor of history, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published seven books about undergraduate education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) co-authored by Isis Artze-Vega, Leo Lambert, and Oscar Miranda Tapia – with an open access online version free to all readers. His next book, The SoTL Guide (CEL Open Access Book Series), is co-authored by Katarina Mårtensson and Nancy Chick, and will be published in 2025. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute. Contact Peter at pfelten@elon.edu.

Peter’s Recent CEL Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes

Why engaged learning?

By now it is cliché to point out the “disruptions” facing and the “revolutions” occurring in higher education today. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are drawing hundreds of thousands of students, and nearly as many headlines, as a radical force for change. The financial model for many colleges and universities also is teetering on a cliff edge as mounting student debt and an institutional addiction to tuition increases erode what had seemed to be solid ground not so long ago.

And then there’s the problem of student learning. As Academically Adrift revealed, and many suspected, not all of our students are learning nearly so much as we had promised or hoped. Some now claim that it’s time to toss out the course credit hour. Or, as Randy Bass argues, perhaps we have entered a post-course era, a time when the formal curriculum is no longer “the primary place where the most significant learning takes place” in an undergraduate’s education. And then there’s the drumbeat for gamification, transforming college by applying the lessons of successful game design.

In the face of all of this, why should a new Center, or a faculty member, or an institution, focus on something as last century as engaged learning?

Welcome to the Center for Engaged Learning!

Welcome to the web site for the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University! The new Center will bring together international leaders in higher education to develop and to synthesize rigorous research on central questions about student learning, filling an important gap in higher education.

Researchers have identified what the “high-impact” educational practices are – study abroad, undergraduate research, internships, service-learning, writing-intensive courses, living-learning communities, and so on. However, while we know what these practices are, we could know much more about three essential issues: (1) how to do these practices well, (2) how to scale these practices to many students, and (3), how students integrate their learning across multiple high impact experiences.

We know, for example, that undergraduate research has powerful outcomes, but it’s very labor intensive – usually one faculty member mentoring one student over an extended period of time. If we understood more about how students learn and develop during an undergraduate research experience, and if we better understood effective faculty mentoring practices, then we could design scaled research experiences that simultaneously would be more effective while reaching far more students – at Elon and elsewhere.

The Center for Engaged Learning also will allow us to tackle a third important issue – studying how students integrate their learning across multiple high impact practices. Most colleges and universities treat student experiences as distinct – with separate offices and sets of evidence-based practices for study abroad, internships, undergraduate research, and so forth. At universities where students study abroad and then later complete an internship, or participate in service-learning and then conduct undergraduate research, how can we best help our students integrate across these experiences so that they reinforce each other? The Center will lead precisely that kind of research so that we can support students in integrating across their many engaged experiences.

By collaborating with local, national, and international leaders in high-impact practices, the Center will focus energy and creativity on these important questions. By conducting multi-institutional research and programs on what precisely makes certain experiences “high impact,” how to scale-up those experiences for all students, and how to help students integrate their learning, the Center will not only advance engaged learning in higher education, but it also will support the deepest learning for students.

We invite you join the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University in this work to transform engaged learning.

Peter Felten, Executive Director

Jessie L. Moore, Interim Associate Director

Select Recent Publications

Books:

Select Articles/Chapters:

  • Cook-Sather, Alison, Peter Felten, ^Kayo Stewart, and ^Heidi Weston (2023). “Reviving the Construct of ‘Mattering’ in Pursuit of Equity and Justice in Higher Education: Illustrations from Mentoring and Partnership Programs.” In Academic Belonging in Higher Education: Fostering Student Connection, Competence, and Confidence, edited by Eréndira Rueda and Candice Lowe-Swift. Routledge. 198-214.
  • Lim, Lisa-Angelique, Simon Buckingham Shum, Peter Felten, and Jennifer Uno (2023). “Belonging Analytics: A Proposal.” Learning Letters 1, art. 4, 1-12.  https://learningletters.org/index.php/learn/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/14
  • Johnson, Amy M., Jonathan Iuzzini, Peter Felten, and Tazin Daniels (2023). “Institutional and Instructional Humility for Equity-Forward Teaching and Learning.” In Recentering Learning, edited by Maggie Debelius, Joshua Kim, and Eddie Maloney. Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming).
  • Felten, Peter, Rachel Forsyth, and Kathrine Sutherland (2023). “Building Trust in the Classroom: A Conceptual Model for Teachers, Scholars, and Academic Developers in Higher Education.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 11, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.20
  • Bovill, Catherine, Ashton Croft, Caroline Dean Glover, and Peter Felten (2023). “Is Discussing Identity More Important than Shared Identity to Student-Staff Relationship Building?” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 11, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.17
  • Felten, Peter (2022). “From Pandemic to Endemic Teaching: Being CLEAR in Our Teaching.” In International Perspectives on University Teaching and Learning, edited by Andrew Gillespie, James E. Groccia, Jennifer Mason, and Kalani Long. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Wiley Periodicals.
  • Bheda, Divya, Peter Felten, and Natasha Jankowski (2022). “Equitable Assessment: An Invitation.” In Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices, edited by Gavin Henning, Gianina Baker, Natasha Jankowski, Anne Lundquist, and Erick Montenegro. Stylus.
  • Ketcham, Caroline J., Anthony G. Weaver, Jessie L. Moore, and Peter Felten (2022). “Living up to the Capstone Promise: Improving Quality, Equity, and Outcomes in Culminating Experiences” In Delivering on the Promise of High Impact Practices, edited by Jerry Daday, Jillian Kinzie, Ken O’Donnell, Carleen Vande Zande, and John Zilvinskis. Stylus.
  • Hampshire, Claire, Jessie L. Moore, and Peter Felten (2022). “Social Media and Public SoTL.” In SoTL as Public Scholarship, edited by Nancy Chick and Jennifer Friberg. Stylus. 
  • McGowan, Susannah, and Peter Felten (2021). “On the Necessity of Hope in Academic Development.” International Journal for Academic Development 26:4, 473-476. DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2021.1903902
  • Anderson, Paul and Peter Felten (2021). “Improving Writing, Teaching, and Learning in Higher Education.” In Schreiblehrkonzepte an Hochschulen. Fallstudien und Reflexionen zum Schreibenlehren und –lernen, edited by Swantje Lahm, Frank Meyhöfer und Friederike Neumann. Bielefeld, 21-34. DOI: 10.3278/6004807w
  • Felten, Peter (2020). “Critically Reflecting on Identities, Particularities and Relationships in Student Engagement.” In A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice, edited by Tom Lowe and Yassein El Hakim. Routledge, 148-155.
  • Chick, Nancy, and Peter Felten (2020). “Slow: Liberal Learning for and in a Fast-Paced World.” In Redesigning the Liberal Arts, ed. by Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Phillip Motley, and William Moner. Johns Hopkins University Press, 254-265.
  • Felten, Peter (2020). “Critically Reflecting on Identities, Particularities and Relationships inStudent Engagement.” In A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice, ed. by Tom Lowe and Yassein El Hakim. Routledge.
  • Cook-Sather, Alison, Sophia Abbot, and Peter Felten (2019). “Legitimating Reflecting Writing in SoTL: ‘Disfunctional Illusions of Rigor’ Revisited.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 7:2 (14-27).
  • Felten, Peter, Sophia Abbot, Jordan K. Kirkwood, Aaron Long, Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone, and Roselynn Verwoord (2019). “Reimagining the Place of Students in Academic Development.” International Journal for Academic Development, 24:2 (192-203). https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2019.1594235.
  • Felten, Peter, Jessie L. Moore, and Tim Peeples (2019). “Multi-Institutional SoTL: A Case Study of Practices and Outcomes.” In Conducting and Applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning beyond the Individual Classroom Level, ed. by Jennifer Friberg and Kathleen McKinney. Indiana University Press, 149-161.
  • Matthews, Kelly, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone, Sam Lucie Dvorakova, Anita Acai, Alison Cook-Sather, Peter Felten, Mick Healey, Ruth L. Healey, and Elizabeth Marquis (2019). “Enhancing Outcomes and Reducing Inhibitors to the Engagement of Students and Staff in Learning and Teaching Partnerships: Implications for Academic Development. International Journal for Academic Development, 24:3 (246-259). DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2018.1545233.
  • Moore, Jessie L., and Peter Felten (2019). “Understanding Writing Transfer as a Threshold Concept across the Disciplines.” In Threshold Concepts on the Edge, ed., by Julie A. Timmermans and Ray Land. Brill, 341-352.
  • Felten, Peter, Kristina Meinking, Shannon Tennant, and Katherine Westover (2019). “Developing Learning Partnerships: Navigating Troublesome and Transformational Relationships.” In Building Teaching and Learning Communities: Creating Shared Meaning and Purpose, ed. by Craig Gibson and Sharon Mader. Association of College and Research Libraries/American Library Association.
  • Little, Deandra, David A. Green, and Peter Felten (2019). “Identity, Intersectionality, and Educational Development.” In Educational Development and Identity: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, ed. By Lindsay Bernhagen and Emily Gravett. Jossey-Bass, 11-23. DOI: 10.1002/tl.20335.
  • Felten, Peter, Margy MacMillan, and Joan Ruelle (2019). “SoTL Difference: The Value of Incorporating SoTL into Librarian Professional Development.” In The Grounded Instructional Librarian: Participating in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, ed. by Melissa Mallon, Lauren Hays, Cara Bradley, Rhonda Huisman, and Jackie Belanger. Association of College and Research Libraries/American Library Association.
  • Felten, Peter (2019). “Student Engagement in the United States: From Customers to Partners?” In Student Engagement and Quality Assurance in Higher Education: International Collaborations for the Enhancement of Learning, ed. by Masahiro Tanaka. Routledge, 46-56.
  • Matthews, Kelly, Alison Cook-Sather, Anita Acia, Sam Dvorakova, Peter Felten, Elizabeth Marquis, and Lucy Mercer-Mapstone (2018). “Theories, Constructs, and Metaphors: Conceptual Frameworks for Students as Partners in Higher Education.” Higher Education Research and Development, 38:2 (280-293). DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1530199.
  • Knight-McKenna, Peter Felten, and Alexa Darby (2018). “Student Engagement with Community.” In Student Engagement: New Directions for Teaching and Learning 154, ed. by James E. Groccia and William Buskitt. Jossey-Bass, 65-74.
  • Felten, Peter, and Nancy Chick. “Is SoTL a Signature Pedagogy of Educational Development?” To Improve the Academy 37:1 (2018), 4-16.

Special Issues Edited:

Select Presentations