| " University is the institute that encompasses all classical studies and embraces all schools of thoughts". Indeed, the faculty are the soul of the university. Faculty development has been endowed with great strategic significance when the idea of lifelong education prevailing and the higher education devoted to connotation development. The faculty development in China has started with a series of policy enacted since 2010, and the faculty development centers, springing up since 2012, have attracted much attention from the public as a kind of emerging professional institution. The world’s first faculty development center was established in 1962 at the university of Michigan. Afterwards, more and more similar institutions appear and currently, there have been about 75% colleges and universities set projects and institutions for faculty development. With 50 years’development history, faculty development centers in the U.S.A own rich resources for us to learn. This paper takes 264 faculty development centers in U.S. as the research object and applies the methods of website investigation and literature research to provide references for the construction of faculty development center in China. This article is divided into three parts.The first part includes two chapters. In the first chapter, the research background, purpose, significance and methods are introduced and the existing research both at home and abroad are studied through co-occurrence analysis and visual analysis in the form of scientific knowledge map. Meanwhile, core concepts are defined in this chapter. The second chapter, expounds the characteristics of faculty development centers in America, and divides its history into following three stages on the basis of the analysis of the agency profile:the early stage (the 1960s-1970s), the prosperity stage (1980s), and the transformation stage (1990s). After that, the author summarizes the characteristics of different stages from the perspectives of institution construction, faculty development connotation and teacher development system construction.The second part covers from the third chapter to fifth chapter. In this part, the mission statement, leadership guideline and practice of faculty development centers are respectively analyzed. The author categorizes the research object through the methods of keywords analysis, index building, word frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis, clustering analysis as well as case analysis, describes the situation of American faculty development center in a relatively objective way on the basis of a large amount of data, seeks for the characteristics of American faculty development center based on the theory of adult education as well as higher education,etc, and comments on its advantages and disadvantages combining with the social status as well as professional knowledge.The third part, namely chapter 6, discusses the enlightenment of the faculty development centers in the United States experience in the process of faculty development institution construction with Chinese characteristics on the basis of this study. It is found that the concept of faculty development center should be built on the theory of adult education and the teacher learning, combine with the mission of colleges and universities as well as spirit of the time, and finally point to the professional development of teachers. And the running mode of faculty development center should turn from dependent type to the independent one. We might as well construct teacher learning community, provide One-Stop security, and promote participatory teacher development. The content of faculty development center should focus on academic frontiers and adhere to the teaching ability improvement and student learning success. Moreover, the image of faculty development center should be set up by gaining more reputation, creating a relaxed and harmonious development culture and reflecting the real value of teacher development. |
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