National leader in engaged learning to join Elon faculty

Deandra Little, a national leader in engaged teaching and learning and faculty development, will join the Elon University faculty in July 2013 as managing director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. She comes to Elon from the University of Virginia where she currently serves as associate director and associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Teaching Resource Center.

Little brings a wealth of experience and expertise in engaged teaching and learning and faculty development. During her tenure at UVA, she has worked with faculty across the university in a variety of ways to enhance teaching and learning efforts, including the areas of course design, course assessment, community engagement, mentoring undergraduate research, constructing inclusive classrooms, instructional technology, and responding to student writing in ways both fair and efficient.

In addition to these topic areas, Little has led workshops and institutes on faculty as writers, teaching first-year seminars, facilitating discussions, the first day of class, inclusive teaching, designing rubrics, teaching portfolios, and teaching with visual sources. She also wrote UVA’s handbook on Teaching a Diverse Student Body.

An active professional, Little has more than a dozen publications, including articles in Studies in Higher Education (2011) and in the International Journal for Academic Development (2012). She has presented invited workshops at many institutions, such as Boston College, Duke University, the University of Richmond, Seattle University and King Saud University (Saudi Arabia). In addition, she is completing a three-year term on the governing board of the POD Network, the leading professional association for faculty development in higher education. Little regularly teaches in her field of English, including recent courses on “Science, Identity, and 19 Century American Literature” and “Writing Women’s Lives.”

Little has been a faculty member at the University of Virginia since 2003, where she has been promoted from assistant professor and faculty consultant to associate professor and associate director of the Teaching Resource Center. Prior to UVA, Little served on the faculty at Vanderbilt University for two years. She has a doctorate from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s degree from Samford University.