Confessions of a Faculty Development Junkie
If you had money to spend on your teaching, what would you do with it? I’ve been thinking about that ever since applications for the Teaching Enhancement Awards were announced. I’ve been wondering what transformed my teaching – or what transformed me as a teacher. I’d like to hear your story; send it as a comment to this blog or as a proposal for a Teaching Enhancement Award. Did I mention that the deadline is Friday, October 10?
I had a wonderful education in teaching at SUNY/Buffalo with a full year of coursework on composition and rhetoric pedagogy, mentors who were passionate about teaching undergraduates, and students – many of whom had just been laid off as a result of the crash of Bethlehem Steel – who knew they needed to know what I was there to teach. I was equally fortunate in my first job, a rare tenure track position in literary theory (this was 1987 – not a good year) at Hamline University, a small, private, liberal arts university in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a southerner, I’m here to tell you that Minnesota winter is better than Buffalo winter. But not by much. Still, Hamline had an amazing general education curriculum designed in large part by the dean who hired me, Jerry Gaff. So I was in on the ground floor of the faculty seminars and workshops created to support the new curriculum. From that moment on I became a faculty development junkie.
All of these experiences turned me into a teacher and transformed my teaching. My colleagues and our conversations were my most profound influences. But as I became busier and busier with committee work, students, and family (yes, I was trying to have a life as well as finish writing a book) my conversations about teaching became fewer and far between. I started to miss the very thing that made me excited about the work I had chosen to do. How can we change that? (Hint: This is where Faculty Development comes in.)
Can we throw money at this problem? Yes we can. We don’t have trillions for a bailout, but as educators, we well know that a little goes a long way. But where should it go?
This takes me back to my original question: if you had money to spend on your teaching, what would you do with it?
Here’s my list of ways I have spent money that has transformed my teaching:
- Travel has led me to the places that mattered most to writers I teach:
- London to trace Virginia Woolf’s steps through Bloomsbury to find the shop where she used to buy her pens
- Southeast England to wander through Vita Sackville-West’s gardens – the magnificent one she created at the ruined castle, Sissinghurst, and the one at her childhood home, Knole – the largest house in England, given to her ancestor in compensation for delivering the death sentence to Mary of Scotland
- The Lake District of northwest England to experience Wordsworth’s sublime for myself as I rode a train into Windemere in a January snow storm
- Nottingham and the English midlands to find the house D. H. Lawrence grew up in and the realization that this gritty coal town was surrounded by lush farmland
- Interdisciplinary conferences on teaching have given me a broader perspective on the curriculum:
- The Association of General and Liberal Studies
- The Association of Integrated Studies
- The Association of American Colleges & Universities
- The Professional and Organizational Development Network for Higher Education
- Reading groups on teaching that given me a chance to talk about teaching with my colleagues: There are great books out there we could read together.
- Workshops on pedagogy have continued to change the way I teach and design courses: constructivism, writing across the curriculum, speaking-intensive classes, designing innovative courses, learning centered teaching, engaging students - the list goes on and on.
In the past, folks at USI have used Teaching Enhancement Awards in these and many other ways – including the International Studies Colloquium. Apply for one.
POST CONTRIBUTED BY: DR. KARYN SPROLES, director of Faculty Development.