The College Teaching Certificate is offered by the Preparing Future Faculty Program. The certificate is offered free to all enrolled students at CGU. Alumni may earn the Certificate by enrolling in a PFF Certificate program course - for details, please contact the PFF program office. 

Students aspiring to teach in formal academic contexts, or whose work will take them into consulting, advocacy, or other leadership work that engages and leads minds will benefit from the PFF Certificate program. 

The Certificate program helps you develop the following knowledge and skills:

• Teaching as a leadership process that integrates excellence, ethics, and engagement to include and support all learners toward success.
• Inclusive pedagogy that embraces and integrates diversity in all its forms (culture/ethnicity, nationality, age, language, gender, sexual orientation, abilities/disabilities, learning cultures, life experiences, and more).
• A design approach for integrating inclusive pedagogy as part of the mission of higher education to prepare a diverse student body for the emerging world.
• An understanding of how and why learners engage and disengage with learning.
• How to select and design pedagogical strategies and tools, including in digital form, to support learning engagement and success.
• How to design courses that are inclusive and engage students in active learning to master both course content and critical human capacity skills for the 21st century.
• A critical awareness of yourself as a teacher-scholar and leader that you can articulate in a teaching philosophy and diversity statement.
• How to begin and maintain a reflective practice so that as an educator and leader you are an agile, ethical, and life-long learner.

 
Courses: The PFF College Teaching Certificate program requires successful completion of two courses, “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” and “Teaching Practicum and Portfolio.” Each course and the certificate completion are recorded on your transcript. The “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” course can be taken with different units to complete different requirements toward your degree. 

PFF 530: Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education
(0 units, free for current students, $50 for alumni)

TNDY 430: Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education
(4 units, regular tuition cost for current students)

This course invites you on a transformative journey to develop the mindsets to become an ethical, agile leader of learning. We present teaching as a transdisciplinary and inclusive future-focused endeavor for positive learning and development in diverse settings, within and beyond the classroom. In doing so, we engage with the question of how we can effectively and ethically respond to increasingly complex global and institutional contexts in preparing learners holistically for their futures. Working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams, we will use systems, complexity, and design thinking frameworks to explore student identities and diversity in our classrooms, the changing global paradigms that shift our teaching missions and methods, and what learning sciences and the ethics of education tell us about engagement and motivation. We will also draw from key frameworks such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Active Learning, and Good Work in this exploration. We will work reflexively using a Portfolio-based approach individually and in teams to explore and document our own assumptions, values, and beliefs about education and how these transform in the light of our discoveries about ethical, agile teaching. Our goal will be to co-create pedagogical principles that transcend disciplinary teaching and learning cultures toward agile, ethical leadership of learning in our diverse educational and work contexts. 

To earn the College Teaching Certificate, you also must complete the PFF 531 course, Pedagogy Practicum and Portfolio. 

PFF 531: Teaching Practicum and Portfolio

You must have completed the course, Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education (listed as PFF 530, PFF 520, or TNDY 430), to enroll in this course as it is a prerequisite for PFF 531 Teaching Practicum and Portfolio. 

This class structures your progress through the teaching practicum and completion of all the teaching portfolio items for the College Teaching Certificate. In this course, you will apply the principles and frameworks from “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education” into practice. The class is presented through an online, asynchronous format with coaching modules and a structured assignment submission and feedback process. Using the work that you began in “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Education”, you will complete your teaching philosophy statement, diversity statement, and sample course design and syllabus. In addition, you will develop a sample learning management system course and a teacher-scholar website. The course culminates in a final integrated reflection of your entire PFF journey toward becoming an inclusive, future-focused educator.

University Policies. Policies detailed in the current Policies and General Information Bulletin apply.

Admission. Admission requirements are detailed in the Admissions section of the current Policies and General Information Bulletin.