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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ve got a fall retreat day, a pair of faculty development days, and a half dozen Assemblies. That\u2019s all, really, for whole-group encounters where we have the chance to interact a lot. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ll 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The selection of Gregor Thuswaldner to be Whitworth\u2019s 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\u2014as I gauge faculty response\u2014there is a great deal of optimism about Dr. Thuswaldner among those who met him and heard from him during the search. And\u2014it\u2019s important to say\u2014the search committee was magnificent. It\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As this present academic year wanes in its extraordinary way, I\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ve had frank, important talks about how our handbook defines scholarship, how it defines service, and how we formulate and use our department scholarship definitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These conversations\u2014especially the ones in Assembly\u2014have been in support of the work of the Faculty Executive\u2019s Faculty Evaluation Task Force (which has been laboring to clarify our handbook\u2019s 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\u2019ll be glad to know) it still means teaching with clarity and passion, and it still means advising like our students\u2019 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\u2019ll look to the faculty like a pretty good mirror of the faculty\u2019s own expectations for themselves and others. Given the current epidemic, we expect to vote on the task force\u2019s recommendations next fall (rather than this spring, as planned).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s charge, at some length: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCurrent faculty categories (Track I, Track II, Track III) do not address the unique expectations and review of Clinical Faculty.\u00a0 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\u2026.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\u2019s essential the work of this task force start now before the DPT and OTD programs begin recruiting faculty.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014Panopto, Cisco WebEx, Zoom. But, like others, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whitworth University
2\/2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIn-Person Report to the Board of Trustees Meeting,
Academic Affairs Subcommittee<\/h4>\n\n\n\nYou\u2019ve 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\u2019re finding viable ways to move learning online. My hope is that we\u2019ll all come away from this experience with a stronger sense of what is and isn\u2019t 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\u2019ll pick up some tech solutions that work for traditional courses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, a lot of our more administrative work as a faculty depends on the series of casual contacts we\u2019re 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\u2019re also giving a whole lot of time to figuring out technology and managing our non-work lives. That\u2019s good enough reason, Exec believes, to slow down some of the work we\u2019d planned to do this spring, particularly as regards the Faculty Evaluation Task Force. So some things we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next year will be my second of two years as Faculty President. It\u2019s a fast term. One of the things I hope I\u2019ll be able to do in year two is to use what I\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next year, we\u2019ll 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\u2019s made me all the more aware of the need to create continuity and to preserve institutional knowhow. We\u2019ll 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\u2019ll be an outstanding group for Gregor Thuswaldner to work with in his first year as provost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ve been asking to see faces or to have a check in with students about why I can\u2019t 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\u2019re figuring it out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most important small lesson I\u2019ve learned about teaching online so far is this: I don\u2019t shut down the virtual classroom until after students leave. Once I say this, it will be obvious, but the first week it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019re really important. They\u2019re also how I found out about students turning off their video and sneaking away, so there\u2019s that, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I should say that while it\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to quantify those things, but here\u2019s an interesting window on them. After about a week, all my students had learned to mute their mics upon entering a class session. Generally\u2014and especially in formal meeting situations\u2014that\u2019s good manners. But I kind of hate it for teaching; it\u2019s 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\u2019ve come to rely on for gauging the room and pacing my teaching. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So now I\u2019m saying things like this: \u201cHey, I see you\u2019ve learned to mute yourselves, and that\u2019s good manners. But we\u2019re a small class, and I want to give you permission to be unmuted, unless there\u2019s lots of noise around you or you\u2019re eating loud foods. You can make judgments about this yourself. Sometimes I<\/strong> might mute you<\/strong>. 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.\u201d That\u2019s working okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something that wasn\u2019t working okay was sitting in a chair to teach. I\u2019m 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\u2019ve been learning to gesture within the space of the screen instead of having my hands always disappear below it, and I\u2019ve been learning to think about my own proximity to the screen and what that conveys. And that feels better. I\u2019m not able to reach through the screen, but I\u2019m able to use the screen\u2014and my whole repertoire of teaching gestures\u2014quite a lot more effectively. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So part of my job today is to convey what\u2019s on the mind of the faculty, and I think it\u2019s this stuff. How do I reach through and across these screens? As I said at the start, I\u2019m optimistic that we\u2019re doing it well and learning things that will benefit us for years. But it\u2019s taking a lot of imagination and energy to get it done. If we are partially online in the fall, we\u2019ll be better at all this stuff, but we\u2019ll still have a lot to learn, and we might be in a new situation, where we haven\u2019t had a half semester to establish in-person relationships. So the learning curve will continue to be an issue, and we\u2019re all focused on climbing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whitworth University
4\/16\/2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"full-width-page-template.php","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-and-learning","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abjohnson.net\/vita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}