ABSTRACT
Higher education in the United States is under scrutiny for how it is preparing students for the complex demands of the 21st century. Ernest Boyer (1990), then President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, noted that “the 1990s may well come to be remembered as the decade of the undergraduate in American higher education” (p. xi). Colleges and universities (whether liberal arts or research oriented) are reemphasizing undergraduate education and reaffirming their missions as institutions that exist to facilitate learning. Barr and Tagg (1995) argued that a paradigm shift is occurring in higher education with the focus shifting from providing instruction to producing learning. Regardless of the semantics of teaching versus learning, there are renewed efforts to “help realize our potential for a more informed, engaged, and self-reflective teaching and learning environment” (Ratcliff, & Associates, 1995, p. 39). Most new faculty are hired because of their expertise in a particular body of academic content, and preparation for the college and university teaching role focuses largely on the subject matter to be taught. Although the environment is considered important in the teaching and learning enterprise, there is too often little or no attention given to it or to the ways in which instructors and students socialize into the environment and into their respective roles. This chapter deals with the teaching and learning environment and socialization.
