My written Faculty President’s Report for the Whitworth Board of Trustees meeting in Spring 2020, followed by an approximate text of my remarks at the (virtual) meeting itself. These two pieces go together.
The Written Report
This week, the Faculty Exec and I are trying to figure out how to do a virtual faculty assembly, so that we can fill in some upcoming committee vacancies and connect just a bit with the whole faculty, even during this time of virtual meetings and social distancing. One of the things this Faculty President gig has brought home to me with some urgency is the preciousness of the few moments in the year when our whole faculty gathers. We’ve got a fall retreat day, a pair of faculty development days, and a half dozen Assemblies. That’s all, really, for whole-group encounters where we have the chance to interact a lot. I’ve been trying to make sure we walk away from each one of these events glad that we work here, and glad that we work together here. This means (in part) that I’ve been trying hard to avoid leading meetings that could have been replaced with long emails. Now, though, it looks like we need to find a way to turn an effective in-person meeting into something that could, plausibly, be emailed. Strange days. But I think we’ll pull it off, with the help of Ken Pecka [Director of Instructional Resource], Panopto, and a bit of virtual chewing gum to hold it all together.
The selection of Gregor Thuswaldner to be Whitworth’s next Provost and Executive Vice President would be just about the biggest news among the faculty this spring, if not for our sudden turn to virtual learning. Dr. Thuswaldner is a good listener with a heart for our mission and an impressive record of accomplishment as a teacher, scholar, and administrator. Change is always complex and full of unexpected challenges, and we will miss the steady hand of Carol Simon, but—as I gauge faculty response—there is a great deal of optimism about Dr. Thuswaldner among those who met him and heard from him during the search. And—it’s important to say—the search committee was magnificent. It’s no sure thing that a fifteen member crew doing a job with such high stakes will be able to talk well, disagree well, and arrive at a simply crackerjack group of finalists, but they did it all. We’re excited to see what Dr. Thuswaldner, whose own excellence stood out among those impressive finalists, will do with and for us in the coming years.
As this present academic year wanes in its extraordinary way, I’m looking back with some pride at how the Faculty Exec has helped the whole faculty to have good, live, thoughtful conversations. On our two Faculty Development Days (planned and led, as always, by the Faculty Research and Development committee), we’ve talked with one another about moving forward our individual research agendas and about managing the sometimes dizzy mix of teaching, scholarship, and service that we Whitworth professors pursue. In our Faculty Assemblies, we’ve had frank, important talks about how our handbook defines scholarship, how it defines service, and how we formulate and use our department scholarship definitions.
These conversations—especially the ones in Assembly—have been in support of the work of the Faculty Executive’s Faculty Evaluation Task Force (which has been laboring to clarify our handbook’s language about how teaching, service, and scholarship are understood in the promotion process). They (these conversations) are all linked by their interest in what it means to be a teacher here at Whitworth, these days. And (you’ll be glad to know) it still means teaching with clarity and passion, and it still means advising like our students’ lives depend on it. It also means understanding the many different kinds of research being done around campus, and it means finding ways to support and cheer on a generation of top notch young professors bringing exciting research agendas with them to the job. My hope is that these conversations have been both affirming and clarifying, and that when the Eval Task Force turns in its recommendations, they’ll look to the faculty like a pretty good mirror of the faculty’s own expectations for themselves and others. Given the current epidemic, we expect to vote on the task force’s recommendations next fall (rather than this spring, as planned).
I should also (and relatedly) mention the work of the Clinical Faculty Task Force, which the Exec has convened to tackle a specific, growing set of questions that has become more urgent with Whitworth’s addition of doctoral programs in occupational therapy and physical therapy. In short, the work of some of our new professors is not fully accounted or in our handbook. From the task force’s charge, at some length:
“Current faculty categories (Track I, Track II, Track III) do not address the unique expectations and review of Clinical Faculty. Clinical faculty often engage in nontraditional clinical scholarship (e.g. clinical case-studies, continuing education units for licensure) and often have a clinical (rather than academic) doctorate. Current guidelines do not provide clear guidance (for either the faculty member or [the promotion and tenure committee]) on how clinical scholarship should be evaluated. For example, some universities do not have publication requirements for clinical faculty due to their unique role. A related issue exists regarding clinical practice expectations. Clinical faculty may also be required by their Whitworth faculty position to engage in clinical practice (e.g. engage in direct patient care X hours per week). While clinical practice is required, current guidelines do not provide clear guidance on how (or if) it counts towards scholarship, service or teaching….Whitworth needs to address the questions surrounding Clinical Faculty expectations and evaluate as an institution rather than on an individual case-by-case basis if it wants to recruit and retain high caliber faculty in clinical programs. Thus, it’s essential the work of this task force start now before the DPT and OTD programs begin recruiting faculty.”
This group, led by Cynthia Wright (Athletic Training; Faculty Research and Development chair), has defined its task narrowly and is making good progress toward recommendations that we hope will pass through Faculty Assembly and come to the Board (as new handbook language) next year.
By the time you read this, faculty will have a couple of weeks of distance learning under their belts. We all have some skepticism about trying to teach our courses using a set of technologies that sound like villains from a Flash comic—Panopto, Cisco WebEx, Zoom. But, like others, I’m optimistic that our love of our subjects and our students, and our years of experience, and our strong departmental communities will keep us on our feet and carry us over the finish line. Some of us will even be grinning.
Whitworth University
2/2020
In-Person Report to the Board of Trustees Meeting,
Academic Affairs Subcommittee
You’ve already heard today about the many efforts being made to keep our teaching and learning work in motion, and you have in my written report notes on what the Faculty Executive has been up to this year. To those reports I would only add, at this point, that while faculty are tired, my sense is that they’re finding viable ways to move learning online. My hope is that we’ll all come away from this experience with a stronger sense of what is and isn’t possible in online spaces, and with a deeper well of experience to draw on when it comes to virtual and distanced learning. I even hope we’ll pick up some tech solutions that work for traditional courses.
Now, a lot of our more administrative work as a faculty depends on the series of casual contacts we’re able to have with each other, day to day. Without that, coordination and communication and brainstorming becomes a different kind of challenge, in the first place, and we’re also giving a whole lot of time to figuring out technology and managing our non-work lives. That’s good enough reason, Exec believes, to slow down some of the work we’d planned to do this spring, particularly as regards the Faculty Evaluation Task Force. So some things we’d hoped to land this spring will likely be landing in the fall. We expect that will include proposals coming from our Clinical Faculty Task Force and from a newly proposed (and not yet formed) Research Approval Task Force.
Next year will be my second of two years as Faculty President. It’s a fast term. One of the things I hope I’ll be able to do in year two is to use what I’ve learned to lead the Executive through some conversations about its own practices, needs, and record keeping. My hope is that those conversations will yield some increased efficiency, shared leadership philosophy, and more effective preservation of learned wisdom for future iterations of the Executive.
Next year, we’ll be losing Vice President Nate Moyer (from Mathematics) and Secretary Gregg Brekke (from World Languages and Cultures), as their terms come to an end, and that’s made me all the more aware of the need to create continuity and to preserve institutional knowhow. We’ll be welcoming, as VP, Aaron Putzke (from Biology), who led our general education revision efforts, and, as Secretary, Elise Leal (from History), an outstanding junior faculty member who recently brought her sharp thinking to the provost search committee. Along with the continuing members, I think they’ll be an outstanding group for Gregor Thuswaldner to work with in his first year as provost.
I want to end by talking about virtual classrooms. I figured out last week that while some students were muting their video because of poor connections, others were muting their video because they were pretending to be in class. Since then, I’ve been asking to see faces or to have a check in with students about why I can’t see their faces. And there are reasons! I have three students with concussions who need to minimize screen time, for example, and I have a couple who need to dial in, only, because of connection issues. We’re figuring it out.
The most important small lesson I’ve learned about teaching online so far is this: I don’t shut down the virtual classroom until after students leave. Once I say this, it will be obvious, but the first week it wasn’t obvious to me. I said goodbye to my students, and that I was grateful to have seen them, and that I looked forward to our next session. And then I shut down the meeting. There was something disquieting about doing that, and it took me a couple of days to realize what. I was chatting with my colleague Jake Andrews, who had just spent 20 minutes after virtual class talking with students who were trying to work out ideas. And I realized then that I was missing those good, brief, right-after-class exchanges about deadlines and assignment details and the readings themselves. There’s actually a ton of relationship building and teaching and learning that happens there. Next class, at the end, I invited my students to leave while I hung around, and all those conversations reappeared. They’re really important. They’re also how I found out about students turning off their video and sneaking away, so there’s that, too.
I should say that while it’s good to find an approximation of something we take for granted in person, not all of those in-person things can be recreated online. You lose a lot of the subtle communication that happens between teachers and students as a class session goes on. It’s hard to quantify those things, but here’s an interesting window on them. After about a week, all my students had learned to mute their mics upon entering a class session. Generally—and especially in formal meeting situations—that’s good manners. But I kind of hate it for teaching; it’s unnerving to be teaching to utter silence. There are small laughs, hums of agreement, nervous or bored shuffling sounds, and things like that that I’ve come to rely on for gauging the room and pacing my teaching.
So now I’m saying things like this: “Hey, I see you’ve learned to mute yourselves, and that’s good manners. But we’re a small class, and I want to give you permission to be unmuted, unless there’s lots of noise around you or you’re eating loud foods. You can make judgments about this yourself. Sometimes I might mute you. Take that not as an insult but as a quick note about your background noise. But mostly, I like a little background noise, and I like to hear you respond, and I think we should experiment with leaving the mics open.” That’s working okay.
Something that wasn’t working okay was sitting in a chair to teach. I’m not saying teaching on my feet is aerobic exercise, exactly, but a full day of teaching in a chair left my body and soul feeling strange, trapped, and weirdly lethargic. I dragged a lectern into my office, so that I could move around, and I’ve been learning to gesture within the space of the screen instead of having my hands always disappear below it, and I’ve been learning to think about my own proximity to the screen and what that conveys. And that feels better. I’m not able to reach through the screen, but I’m able to use the screen—and my whole repertoire of teaching gestures—quite a lot more effectively.
So part of my job today is to convey what’s on the mind of the faculty, and I think it’s this stuff. How do I reach through and across these screens? As I said at the start, I’m optimistic that we’re doing it well and learning things that will benefit us for years. But it’s taking a lot of imagination and energy to get it done. If we are partially online in the fall, we’ll be better at all this stuff, but we’ll still have a lot to learn, and we might be in a new situation, where we haven’t had a half semester to establish in-person relationships. So the learning curve will continue to be an issue, and we’re all focused on climbing it.
Whitworth University
4/16/2020