All of us at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching extend our warmest wishes to Professor Adrienne Lavine–who served as CAT’s associate vice provost and faculty director from 2017-2022–as she returns to her faculty responsibilities in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
A former Chair of UCLA’s Academic Senate, Professor Lavine took on the leadership role at CAT already highly regarded by her colleagues across campus for her research and teaching activities. While at CAT, Professor Lavine led efforts to strengthen and expand the resources devoted towards UCLA’s teaching mission, created a robust faculty advisory committee for CAT, strengthened our center’s relationships with other teaching support units on campus, and gave welcome attention to staff training and community-building across CAT.
Professor Lavine led CAT during a very challenging period, not only responding to the pandemic and remote teaching with strong leadership and commitment, but also sustaining and growing the services CAT provides in terms of faculty and TA development, teaching innovation events and bootcamps, and partnerships across campus to drive more equitable teaching practices. Professor Lavine has been a particularly tireless champion of CAT’s work to increase faculty engagement at departmental and school levels, and helped lead campus-wide efforts to strengthen TA training requirements and to develop more holistic ways to think about and document teaching innovation and effectiveness by synthesizing self-reflection, student input, and peer review.
Because of her role as head of CAT, and with UCLA so heavily involved in transforming teaching and learning, Professor Lavine served on an extraordinary number of governance committees, teaching and learning work groups, and advisory groups across campus from 2017-2022. She has also represented UCLA in national and international networks dedicated to transforming higher education, such as the Bay View Alliance. Only someone so fully committed to serving UCLA for the betterment of our students and faculty would have the drive to be so involved. Indeed, as Annelie Rugg, Director and Humanities CIO for UCLA Humanities Technology, so aptly expressed, “on any given committee, Adrienne participates as though it is the only committee of which she is a member, and interacts with staff and faculty equally and with the utmost respect.”
Professor Lavine (center row, fourth from left) with members of UCLA’s Cross-Campus Teaching Innovations Group
All of us at CAT will miss Professor Lavine greatly, but we also know that her strong leadership has put CAT on a path for continued growth and success in our next chapter. It came as no surprise that Professor Lavine was awarded UCLA’s 2022 Faculty/Staff Partnership Award. We hope you will join us in extending congratulations to her on this achievement and on her five years of stellar service to CAT and to the wider UCLA community.
Professor Lavine’s departure from her role at CAT was announced to the UCLA community in a message from Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt at the start of the Fall 2022 quarter providing updates about ongoing shifts in how UCLA organizes support for teaching and learning. A new university-wide Teaching and Learning Center will be created to coordinate many of the existing teaching and learning efforts on campus, to be headed by a new vice provost for teaching. Until this new position is filled, Dean of Undergraduate Education Adriana Galván will serve in the role on an interim basis–and as interim head of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
Special thanks to Annelie Rugg (Director and Humanities CIO for UCLA Humanities Technology) and Michelle Lew (Assistant Dean for Learning and Research Technology in the UCLA Law School and former Director of Teaching & Learning Technologies at CAT). Their letters in support of Professor Lavine’s nomination for UCLA’s 2022 Faculty/Staff Partnership Award contributed to this news story.
