Bok Center To Double Staff, Expand to Allston

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning will more than double the size of its staff and open a number of satellite offices across the Harvard campus, including one in Allston, with funds raised in the Harvard Campaign for Arts and Sciences, the center’s faculty director, Robert A. Lue, said Tuesday afternoon.

The center currently has a staff of 14, counting Lue and the center’s executive director, Terry Aladjem, according to its website. Headquartered in the Science Center, the Bok Center already has one satellite office at 125 Mount Auburn Street, where it shares a space with edX.

“The Bok Center does need to grow,” said Lue, who is also a professor of biology. “We’re stretched very thin.”

According to Lue, demand for the center’s services has grown in recent years. Increasingly, professors and teaching fellows seek out help to improve their own teaching, as well as assistance with course development.

“Teaching is evolving,” said Diane Andronica, technical supervisor at the Bok Center. “That's going to pose some challenges that we’re going to have to figure out how to face, and more personnel would certainly not hurt.”

Lue said that with funds from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences capital campaign, the center will both expand its current operations and begin new projects. At the moment, the Bok Center works to promote better teaching by providing training and professional development resources to Harvard teaching staff, including teaching fellows, as well as junior and senior faculty members. From teaching evaluations for instructors to research on pedagogy, the center sponsors more than a dozen programs.

“If you’re going to be a sandbox...for teaching, you need experimental spaces,” Lue said of the center’s hands on approach to testing different methods for the classroom.

The expansion will include the addition of several “nodes” across the University, including one at the new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences campus in Allston, Lue said.

When administrators announced in Feb. 2013 that large portions of SEAS would move to Allston, they said that construction would begin this year.

Andronica said the expansion plans made sense given the trajectory of the center.

“We can definitely use more space, especially if we're going to do more work and expanding to more departments and schools,” she said. Particularly, Andronica cited the difficulties associated with transporting equipment across the Charles River as another reason to open a node in Allston.

FAS aims to raise $150 million to fund “Leading in Learning,” one of its six key campaign priorities. The funds raised for “Leading in Learning” will be split among the Bok Center, HarvardX, and the SEAS Learning Incubator, according to promotional literature for the $2.5 billion campaign.

For the Bok Center specifically, the campaign aims to provide support for media literacy and visualization, speaking and student engagement, and the art and science of learning, according to the promotional literature.

FAS Dean Michael D. Smith declined to comment on the Bok Center’s expansion. The dean has refused to meet with The Crimson for regular on-the-record interviews since May 2013, several months before FAS made its capital campaign public.

—Staff writer Dev A. Patel can be reached at dev.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @dev_a_patel.

—Staff writer Steven R. Watros can be reached at steven.watros@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveWatros.