New era for the Bok Center

As Karen Thornber envisions the next chapter for the Bok Center, connection, collaboration, and innovation are her guiding principles.

Since Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, appointed Thornber to the role of Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in July, the Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations has set her sights on expanding the reach and deepening the impact of the center, which has served the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community for 50 years.

For Thornber, who also co-chairs the FAS Civil Discourse Advisory Group and serves on the Generative AI Faculty Advisory Committee, fostering constructive conversations about difficult topics in the classroom and reimagining teaching in the age of AI are also top priorities.

“My vision is for the Bok Center to become a leading and integrated center for innovative teaching and learning,” Thornber said. “We have big goals, big aspirations, and I think we’re definitely on track for succeeding in this endeavor.”

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, she discusses her vision for the center’s future.

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You’ve been in this role for six months so far. What pre-existing work have you been building upon, and what are your primary goals moving forward?

In the past, the Bok Center had been very good at working with faculty who were already exceptional and who wanted to take their teaching to an even higher level, creating exquisite and bespoke courses. The center was also really great at working with faculty and teaching fellows who were truly struggling in the classroom and getting them to a place where they could be more successful. My goal and our mission is to partner with all members of the FAS teaching and learning community, from the undergrad course assistants and graduate student teaching fellows to non-ladder faculty, tenure-track, and tenured faculty, and to continually reimagine and adapt courses and teaching, learning, and professional growth more broadly.

I’m fortunate to have a nimble, forward-thinking staff eager to be a part of Bok’s dynamic future. In the coming months we’ll be hiring extraordinary individuals who can help propel the center to a more central position in the FAS and University. We are absolutely committed to collaborating, so we’ve been working very assiduously with FAS leadership, the Office of Undergraduate Education, the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Office for Faculty Affairs, and other units across the FAS.

“We have big goals, big aspirations, and I think we’re definitely on track for succeeding in this endeavor.”

How are you hoping to expand the way Bok serves faculty?

One thing I’m really excited about is creating a faculty advisory committee that will help me keep a pulse on what’s on faculty minds and assist me in determining priorities for the Bok Center. I’d like to make the Bok Center more accessible to a broader range of faculty, and one fundamental way to do this is to have a website that is a go-to source for concise guidance on all aspects of teaching, from course design to facilitating difficult discussions, and teaching in the age of AI. We’re also planning several speaker series, one of which will feature faculty sharing strategies and best practices with one another. And I think the Bok Center can improve its role in the new faculty orientation, introducing new faculty to teaching resources at Harvard and innovations in pedagogy. Last fall I visited a lot of peer teaching and learning centers to get a better sense of what excites folks in this field. From these visits, I took away many inspiring ideas, from new programming to ideas of how to engage more faculty.

And how are you planning to engage graduate students and teaching fellows?

We’re partnering with the Safra Center, the OUE, GenEd, and GSAS to develop new trainings for our teaching fellows — we rolled out the pilot program in January. Any first-time teacher needs some training and it’s now required for GenEd TFs — a major milestone in the TF training landscape. My hope is to expand this program to all TFs in future semesters. We’re also working with the OUE and GSAS to restructure the Pedagogy Fellows Program so departments will receive the support they need in running pedagogy seminars and providing guidance to TFs. We are additionally reviewing our Bok Teaching Certificates, which are very popular with Harvard graduate students but could become more rigorous and more integrated with departments and GSAS. This spring, we are running several new Bok Seminars including “Community and Civic Engagement in the Classroom,” with the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship. Another one, “Beyond the Classroom: Practical Tools for Teaching,” is focused on the actual, practical part of what happens in teaching — it’s going to be much less theoretical than in the past, because our current environment really demands that.

How can undergraduates get involved in the Bok Center?

Undergraduates have long been involved as Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LUFFs), who bring fresh, incisive perspectives on media production, instructional design, and research. We also have Culture and Communication Consultants who work as course assistants in some Bok courses, offering feedback on teaching and language skills to our international scholars. Finally, we have Undergraduate Pedagogy Fellows, who work on programming related to equity and inclusivity in the classroom. We’re rethinking a lot of these programs, but one possibility is something I learned about while visiting Dartmouth and Barnard: course partners. These are undergrads who shadow a faculty member’s course and give candid feedback and advice on how to further engage undergrads or make the material more exciting and accessible. This is just one idea, but I’m excited about exploring this and other new ways to engage our undergraduates.

What work is the center doing to foster civil discourse on campus?

Civil discourse is at the heart of successful teaching and classroom engagement. It’s clear to us that nurturing the ability to foster and manage difficult conversations is an important part of teacher training. In January we partnered with the Safra Center, OUE, and GSAS on TF training that highlighted strategies to foster civil discourse. And in February we welcomed Matthew Sohm as the Bok Center’s first assistant director of civil discourse and classroom culture. Matthew is collaborating with faculty and TFs to create an open classroom culture for students to engage respectfully and collaboratively with different and novel viewpoints. His work addresses a culture of self-censorship, silence, and premature consensus that many students have identified as impediments to their pursuit of a liberal arts and sciences education at Harvard. Other Bok staff, including Chloe Chapin, Sarah Emory, and Jonah Johnson, have also been integrating civil discourse approaches into their areas of expertise.

“It’s clear to us that nurturing the ability to foster and manage difficult conversations is an important part of teacher training.”

This spring, we’ll be partnering with the Safra Center on a series of talks relating to civil discourse. We plan to build a robust civil discourse webpage as a faculty resource. A longer-term project is working with Education Support Services on classroom design and infrastructure. You need to have flexibility in your classroom space, whether we’re talking AV or the way the desks and chairs are placed. It’s hard to have a really meaningful conversation in a large lecture hall, just because of the way the chairs are configured. Loneliness and disconnection negatively impact students’ ability to learn. The classroom needs to be a space where students feel connected with one another, and with what they’re learning. Instructor training will prioritize this.

How is the center reimagining teaching and learning now that AI is increasingly impacting education?

Bok’s Learning Lab is focused on harnessing AI to design groundbreaking tools that personalize and enhance learning experiences and also foster critical understanding of AI’s broader implications. Our workshops and faculty collaborations don’t just react to technological trends; they’re aimed at anticipating and shaping the future, equipping our educators and students to thrive in an AI-augmented academic environment. We know some faculty want to learn more, but don’t know where to start. My aim is to equip a much broader range of faculty to teach in the age of AI. For some faculty members, this will involve partnering with the Bok Center to develop ways of harnessing AI to augment the teaching and learning process. For others, this might involve working with the center on how to encourage their students to think critically about the ethics of AI or how to give even greater emphasis to the in-person, experiential learning that is possible only in brick-and-mortar classrooms on a residential campus like Harvard’s. Ultimately, the faculty determine the learning objectives that matter in their classrooms, and the Bok Center stands ready to help them achieve the outcomes they desire.