Faculty Inquiry Groups

The Kingsborough Center for Teaching & Learning (KCTL) is pleased to offer a series of Faculty Inquiry Groups (formerly Faculty Development Groups) for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Faculty Inquiry Groups are faculty-led learning communities where faculty from various disciplines meet throughout the semester to explore a common interest or emerging practice. Operating as faculty learning communities (FLC), communities of practice (COP), or faculty reading groups (FRG), faculty inquiry groups are low-commitment, high-impact communities that meet 5-6 times over a given semester. 

For the 2025-2026 academic year, KCTL has worked with faculty facilitators to create distinct FDG programming for each the fall and spring semesters:

Fall 2025 Faculty Inquiry Groups (meeting days/times will be determined based on faculty availability)

• Contemplative Practices
  Facilitator: Professor Rick Repetti (PHI) | [email protected]
  A community of practice of weekly online and in-person meetings for 20-minute meditations. 

• Game Based Learning
  Facilitator: Professor Grace Axler-DiPerte (BIO) | [email protected]
  A faculty learning community that provides faculty with resources and strategies to introduce playful, active learning and game-based activities into the classroom. 

• Navigating Higher Ed as Adjunct Faculty
  Facilitator: Evan Caccioppoli (COM) | [email protected]
  A community of practice designed specifically for adjunct faculty where we can share experiences, exchange ideas and strategies, form community, and learn about the many resources available at Kingsborough. 

• A Pedagogy of Kindness
  Facilitator: Gabrielle Kahn (ENG) | [email protected]
  A faculty reading group that will explore A Pedagogy of Kindness by Cate Denial, which was featured as the topic of last year’s KCTL Winter Workshop. 

• Teaching the Liberal Arts
  Facilitator: Jacob Segal (HIS) | [email protected]
  A community of practice that will foster a conversation on the importance of the liberal arts within higher education, teaching strategies for liberal arts disciplines, and provide community for interdisciplinary exchanges across the liberal arts. 

• Writing for a Public Audience
  Facilitator: Jamie Aroosi (POL) | [email protected]
  A community of practice and accountability designed to support faculty in developing their research for audiences beyond the academy and creating writing projects for audiences outside of their scholarly fields.

Spring 2026 Faculty Inquiry Groups (meeting days/times will be determined based on faculty availability)

• Civic Engagement in the Classroom
  Facilitator: Joanna Maulbeck (BEH) | [email protected]
  A faculty learning community that explores the central tenets of civic engagement as a pedagogical practice, as well as how to certify civic engagement courses at Kingsborough, create civic engagement assignments, and incorporate and assess civic engagement learning outcomes in your course.
• Contemplative Practices
  Facilitator: Rick Repetti (PHI) | [email protected]
  A community of practice of weekly online and in-person meetings for 20-minute meditations.
• Creative Practice Forward
  Facilitator: Paul Ricciardi (COM) | [email protected]
  A community of practice that serves to provide faculty from across disciplines with an opportunity to share the development of creative projects/works, creative teaching approaches and strategies, as well as a creative community to brainstorm and provide supportive feedback.
• The Productivity Power Hour
  Facilitator: Jennifer Corby (POL) | [email protected]
  This community of practice is designed to be a supportive drop-in accountability group that provides a space for faculty to work on a wide range of projects including syllabi, assignment design, conference papers/presentations, teaching portfolios, and/or other academic writing projects.
• The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
  Facilitator: Gordon Alley-Young (COM) | [email protected]
  A community of practice that will bring faculty together to explore the development of a SoTL project that probes a central teaching question, gathers related data/evidence, and examines student learning.

• Teaching LGBTQIA+ Students, Teaching Ourselves: A Working Group for LGBTQIA+ Faculty, Staff, & Allies
  Facilitator: Amy Karp (ENG) | [email protected]
  A working group for LGBTQIA+ faculty, staff, and allies designed to foster community, discuss the needs of our LGBTQIA+ students, and share resources to better serve our communities.
• Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Reading Group
  Facilitator: Dominic Wetzel (BEH) | [email protected]
  A faculty reading group that is devoted to reading significant works, and continuing scholarly and pedagogical discussions, within the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

More Information on Faculty Inquiry Groups

What are the different types of faculty inquiry groups?

• Faculty Learning Community: a cross-disciplinary faculty group that engages in an active, collaborative program, with a basic curriculum about the enhancing of teaching, and supports faculty learning, development, the scholarship of teaching, and community building (Cox, 2016).
• Communities of Practice: Initially envisioned by anthropologist Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, a community of practice is simply a group of people who come together to explore a shared domain and pursue a common goal. To do this, they engage in joint activities, discussions, readings, and research, and collaborate to develop a shared repertoire of resources and practices (Wenger-Traynor, 2011; Hoyert and O’Dell, 2019). While they are facilitated by a single member, communities of practice prioritize community-building and collaborating to collectively develop agendas, learning goals, outcomes, and deliverables.
• Faculty Reading Groups: a group of faculty members that gathers to read and discuss (and perhaps put into practice) a selected text that explores teaching & learning in higher education, or a topic of interest within a shared academic discipline. Faculty Reading Groups are primarily centered in reading and discussion, and do not necessarily have an articulated goal or outcome beyond the study of the selected text. Faculty Reading Groups often lead to the development of faculty learning communities or communities of practice in future semesters.

An open call for new and returning faculty inquiry group sis disseminated at the end of each academic year. Proposals are accepted at the end of one academic year, reviewed by the KCTL Advisory Board, and then programmed for the upcoming academic year. If you are interested in facilitating a faculty development group in the future, please contact Ryan McKinney ([email protected]), Director of the Kingsborough Center for Teaching & Learning, with any questions or to discuss further. Thank you.