I am excited to announce a name change for our college that will officially be completed in Fall 2025. Beginning today, the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (MLFTC) will be known as the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation (MLFC). 

In the years since 2006, when the Fulton family made their transformational gift, the college has become a leading college of education in the U.S. and, increasingly, the world.

While our college still sets the pace for teacher-preparation, we understand that our commitment to educators and learners should — and does — extend beyond teacher preparation. 

It also extends beyond the world of P–12 schools. Teaching and learning are not confined to formal school environments and the first quarter or third of our lives. Our work must and does extend to higher-education, professional education and the continuous learning that is the foundation of flourishing human lives. 

Today, our college is shaping the national conversation about the design of the education workforce and is partnering with schools, school districts, youth-serving organizations, foundations, governments and nongovernmental organizations to develop educational capacity across the globe.

We distinguish ourselves among colleges of education by the scope of our ambition, the quality and scale of our research and our positive impact on the broader education system. We bring people and ideas together to make education systems work better for learners, educators and their communities. 

In short, the new name reflects both the reality of what we have become and the vision of how we aspire to continue to meet the challenge of fulfilling the ASU Charter —  assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities we serve.

Not innovation for innovation’s sake  

Our new name matters. Innovation matters. But not simply for the sake of novelty or newness.

More than five years ago, in the first blog post I wrote as Dean of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, I took a crack at answering the deceptively simple question: What’s a college of education for? I think it was a good start. But — five years, one pandemic, the emergence of AI and a lot of social upheaval later — I think we need to go deeper.

We inhabit a moment of declining public trust in both P–12 educational institutions and institutions of higher education. The fact is that colleges of education are charged with generating both experts (people) and expertise (ideas) at a time of declining trust and confidence in experts and expertise.

Colleges of education need to regain trust. When asked why we exist or what our purpose is, we can’t respond with answers that merely satisfy or flatter ourselves. We need a response that meets the needs of the communities and societies we serve. 

Our new name embraces a role beyond the credentialism and scholasticism that hobble so many colleges of education today. By credentialism I mean an expectation that the primary function of a college of education is the fundamentally bureaucratic one of preparing individuals to meet the licensure requirements necessary to be hired as educators in schools. By scholasticism I mean the entire set of incentives, rewards and expectations that shape much (not all!) of scholarly production in colleges of education. I mean ivory-towerism, a too-heavy premium on intellectual tonnage (publication and citation counts and a degree of intellectual conformity) and not enough attention to the relationships among research, educational practice and learning outcomes.

We need our education systems to advance equity, propel our economy and sustain democracy: to offer all learners access to quality education throughout their lives; to equip learners for the next workforce; to prepare people to carry out the functions of citizenship. These challenges don’t respect lanes or siloes.

Our college is built so that our degree programs, our research activity and our action-oriented centers and initiatives are mutually reinforcing. Teaching and learning innovation happens when those three strands of our college bring people and ideas together in schools and other learning environments to address the most pressing questions about education and education systems.

• How can we support educators throughout their careers?
• How can we make our knowledge and resources available to individuals and communities that want to support learners?
• How can we strategically staff schools to create better working and learning environments?
• How can we integrate key insights from educator practice and the science of learning?
• How can we improve educational outcomes and life opportunities for learners who receive special education services?
• How can we generate interdisciplinary knowledge that can help education leaders and practitioners make effective decisions
• How can we rigorously examine and test transformative ideas so that research informs action?
• How can we use AI as a tool for humans to see what is possible?
• How can we create sophisticated narrative and expository media that both supports and describes effective innovations in teaching and learning?

So when we talk about the “teaching and learning innovation” at the heart of our new name, we are not talking merely about newness, novelty, change or futurism for their own sake.

We are talking about marshalling all the human and intellectual assets we can. We are talking about a long haul. We are talking about always integrating our approaches to learner experience, educator experience, the organizational design of schools and other institutions, and education policy.

And, after we talk about it, in order to be worthy of the civic trust required for us to succeed, we need to do something about it. Every day.