Successes, Trials, and Tribulations at Purdue University Fort Wayne

We will present our successes and the challenges we currently face. For successes we will describe our work in building up our Teacher Advisory Group (TAG) and how we are trying to grow this group. Our second success is the development of a ``Teaching and Learning Physics'' class. Our third is the adoption of Learning Assistants in the introductory classrooms. The TAG consists of 5 area teachers who are motivated to have an impact. The areas we are trying to impact are teacher recruitment and gender diversity. The Teaching and Learning Physics class was a 5 week long, 3 hours per week class we ran in the fall. The Learning Assistants were supported by the university tutoring center as embedded tutors and we expanded their mission to include assisting during classroom discussions and activities, which are quite extensive. The problems we are facing are significant. There is no designated physics teaching program to which we can recruit students. The students must double major in physics and secondary education. There is no support for marketing such programs. Administrative support is weak. The interim Dean of Arts and Science does not see it as a priority yet. The previous Dean did not see it as critical. The upper administration is very tied into metrics which make it very difficult to create ``new'' programming. However, because we have strong support from both the physics department and the school of educational studies, we believe that there is hope.