Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs) are the US's best kept educational secret!
I worked at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA) for 6 years, and before that at DePauw (Greencastle, IN) for 1 year. Both are selective four-year institutions of higher education.
These teaching-intensive environments are a dream for anybody who loves teaching curious young adults. They encourage an interdisciplinary approach and we often found ourselves collaborating and co-teaching with colleagues in widely different fields. These colleges also support their faculty members' pedagogical development. For me, this meant the ability to invest in digital pedagogy by attending workshops, conferences, and experimenting with digital tools in the classroom and beyond.
Classrooms at a SLAC are often much smaller than at other universities: my classrooms varied from 6 to 26 students, and I could follow each student's individual journey across the semester. We also advise students who major in our department's speciality (history, in my case, or Asian studies). This means we help them with course selection and talk about career options, in collaboration with the Career Center. This time-intensive advising and mentoring builds fantastic relations between students and their teachers, quite different from anything I experienced in other higher education environments.
