As a FIRST participant, you will join a thriving community of faculty dedicated to teaching inquiry and reflection who have created a strong tradition on campus. The project began in 1994 with the University of Nebraska – Lincoln’s (UNL) participation in the Peer Review of Teaching Project initiated by the American Association for Higher Education. The following year, a FIPSE grant augmented by university funding enabled the creation of a campus program that supported faculty as they engaged in peer consultation on teaching and developed course portfolios describing and documenting their teaching. In 1999, with financial support from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Hewlet Foundation, our campus program was expanded to collaborate with four partner campuses (Indiana-Bloomington, Texas A&M, University of Michigan, and Kansas State University). In Spring 2004, the project hosted a national conference "Making Learning Visible: Peer Review and the Scholarship of Teaching" (March 26-28, 2004) in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Over the last two and a half decades, the project has continued to involve 30-40 faculty members across the NU system facilitated annually by the project's alumni. In 2021, the project was renamed and expanded so that it could be offered year-round.
This core group of faculty continues to advance the mission by actively participating in the scholarship of teaching and learning at a local, national, and international level.