Faculty President’s Letter to the Faculty, Fall 2020
This letter was my contribution to Whitworth’s faculty newsletter for fall 2020.
In 1896, Stephen Crane, who was just 25 years old but had already published The Red Badge of Courage, set out from Jacksonville, Florida, on a steamship full of arms and munitions for Cuban rebels. Crane himself had been hired by an early news syndicate to cover the escalating conflict in Cuba. And you might think this is about to be a story about Crane’s misadventures in Cuba, but he never made it. The ship sank, and Crane spent thirty hours in a ten-foot dinghy along with three other men, trying to keep their boat upright until they could be saved. “Many a man,” Crane wrote, “ought to have a bath-tub larger than” that boat. Crane published both a newspaper report (“Stephen Crane’s Own Story”) and a brilliant short story (“The Open Boat”) about his experience. The short story tracks the way the men in the boat perceive and misperceive their experience, as they trade off rowing and move carefully around their boat and fall into a set of roles defined by their skills and their energy and their need to survive. Crane’s stunning first line: ”None of them knew the color of the sky.” The urgent work of staying afloat meant all of their attention was trained on the boat and the waves, so that when the sun finally rose, only the changing colors on the waves told them so.
We’re not a lifeboat here at Whitworth (usually!), but we do spend much of the year keeping our various boats afloat, watching our many seas for signs (and wonders), and working to reach the May shoreline. We have a few important moments in the year, though, when we come together as a faculty and get to take a moment to raise our heads, greet one another, and look directly at the color of the sky. The first of those is Faculty Retreat, returning this year to Camp Spalding. As Faculty Exec and I have planned this summer for the fall retreat, we’ve tried to hold onto the idea that retreat is for reconnecting with one another while we’re not yet struggling to survive the seas of the semester. We hope you’ll all leave retreat with a fresh sense of who we are and what we’re all up to these days.
We’re also (more specifically) hoping to offer you a set of conversations about how knowledge and skills circulate through our curriculum. What do students in literature courses carry with them into their math courses? How do our students stitch together what they learn from studying history and what they learn from social science? And how can we help them stitch more effectively? How can we help them notice the skills and ideas they’re carrying from place to place? In the morning, you’ll be able to choose among sessions on Medieval and Early Modern Studies (led by Courtney Barajas), Environmental Studies (led by Grant Casady), Ethical Supply Chains (led by Josh Leim), and the Honors Ecosystem (led by Bert Emerson). Each of these sessions will feature three teachers from different disciplinary homes, some demo teaching (or demo advising), and a follow-up discussion on the ways students crossing through these different kinds of courses might be building their skills, transferring knowledge from place to place, and becoming multidisciplinary thinkers.
In the afternoon, we’ve got a similar set of concurrent sessions, but with more of an emphasis on application. Thom Caraway will be leading a session on design thinking, built on his editing and publishing curriculum. Cynthia Wright and the athletic training crew are putting together a session where you could learn some basic healthcare skills. Pete Tucker will be doing a session based on his “How To Make Darn Near Anything” course, which pairs computer science students and clients who need apps. Jann Leppien and Anne Wilcox will lead a session about differentiating learning in classrooms where students come from many backgrounds. In each of these sessions, there will be some opportunity to do or make something and some opportunity think about the cross- or multi- or meta- or omni-disciplinary skills that get activated and combined when we (and our students) apply our learning in practical ways.
We’ll complement the morning’s explorations and the afternoon’s applications with lunchtime reflections on the ways that knowledge transfer works (or can work) in our shared curriculum. So the underlying theme of the whole day will be knowledge transfer: How’s it moving around? How’s it building up? What can we do with it? How can we help our students mindfully carry knowledge from one experience to another as they wend their way through our curriculum? How can we give them moments when they look up from striving in their lifeboats and see the whole landscape of their lives and their learning? We don’t have to (and won’t!) come to one unified conclusion about all that, but I hope each of us will finish the day with a few new ideas about how to help our majors explain and value the work they’re doing throughout the curriculum.
One more note. We’re breaking a bit with tradition by gathering at Spalding for the new faculty installation service, which will come at the end of our off-campus retreat day (and before the Faculty Family Picnic back on campus). Exec hopes this will make it easy for all faculty to attend, though we understand that it may impact the attendance of our new faculty families. Fortunately, we will have the opportunity to welcome those families to Whitworth later that evening at the Faculty Family Picnic, outside the HUB in the usual style.
Looking forward to the day,
Fred
Whitworth University
8/2019