Prologue. Beginning an Exchange: Administration, Faculty, and the Shared Conversation -- Rooms in Common: Where Teaching and Learning Matter -- Judith Summerfield -- The Campus Center: Negotiating the Teaching Spaces of Higher Education -- Cheryl C. Smith -- The Book Structure: An Overview of the Conversations -- Cheryl C. Smith and Judith Summerfield -- Part I. Changing Institutional Spaces: The Challenges of an Integrated University -- Chapter 1: Bridging the Colleges: Perspectives on the Integrated University -- Robert Whittaker -- Chapter 2: The Fortunate Gardener: Cultivating a Writing Center -- Maria Jerskey -- Chapter 3: Accountability/Assessment as a Catalyst for Building College Community -- Sue Henderson -- Chapter 4: The CUNY Online Baccalaureate: A Transformative Cyberspace -- Barbara Walters, Ellen Smiley, George Otte, William Bernhardt -- Part II. Negotiating Roles and Identities: The Challenges Faculty and Students Face -- Chapter 5: Creating Space for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Transforming the Meaning of Academic Work -- Debra Swoboda, Emily Davidson, Leslie Keiler, and Bonnie Oglensky -- Chapter 6: The Writing Fellow/Faculty Collaboration in a Community College: Paradigms of Teaching & Learning Across the Curriculum -- Linda Hirsch and Andrea Fabrizio -- Chapter 7: Academic Discourse on a Multilingual Campus -- Ann Davison, Eva M. Fernández, and Sue Lantz Goldhaber -- Chapter 8: The Power of Peers: New Ways for Students to Support Students -- Paul Arcario, Bret Eynon, Louis Lucca -- Part III. Re-envisioning Pedagogy: The Challenges of Evolving Practice -- Chapter 9: “Tempo and Reading Well” -- Christa Davis Acampora -- Chapter 10: Exploring History, Architecture, and Art Across Three Colleges in the Bronx -- Carl James Grindley, Susan Polirstok, and Harriet Shenkman -- Chapter 11: Campus Without Boundaries: The Brooklyn GreenWalk -- Monica Berger, Reggie Blake, Anne Leonard, Mark Noonan, Robin Michals, Susan Phillip, Peter Spellane -- Chapter 12: Sparking Student Scholarship through Urban Ethnography -- Kenneth J. Guest -- Chapter 13: Building Community in Professional Education: Team Learning by Design -- Carol M. Connell.

This volume captures the spirit of collaboration and innovation that its authors bring into the classroom, as well as to groundbreaking undergraduate programs and initiatives. Coming from diverse points of view and twenty different disciplines, the contributors illuminate the often perplexing debates about what matters most in higher education today. Each chapter tells a unique story about creating vital pedagogical arenas that have the potential to transform teaching and learning for both faculty and students. These exploratory spaces include courses under construction, cross-college and interdisciplinary collaborations, general education reform initiatives, and fresh perspectives on student support services, faculty development, freshman learning communities, writing across the curriculum, on-line degree initiatives, and teaching and learning centers. All these spaces lend shape to an over-arching, system-wide project bringing together the often disconnected silos of undergraduate education at The City University of New York (CUNY), America’s largest urban public university system. Since 2003, the University’s Office of Undergraduate Education has sponsored coordinated efforts to study and improve teaching and learning for the system’s 260,000 undergraduates enrolled at 18 distinct colleges. The contributors to this volume present a broad spectrum of administrative and faculty perspectives that have informed the process of transforming the undergraduate experience. Combined, the voices in these chapters create a much-needed exploratory space for the interplay of ideas about how teaching and learning need to matter in evolving notions of higher education in the twenty-first century. In addition, the text has wider social relevance as an in-depth exploration of change and reform in a large public institution.