January 2012 Archives
Spring Lunch Conversations
By on January 29, 2012 7:31 PM
Spring Lunch Forums - faculty, staff, administrators, student leaders invited
Noon-1, drop-in, bring your own lunch
Faculty Center, Library first floor
I hope you'll join Provost Rogerson and me for conversations about SSU's academic story and our role in Sonoma County and the world.
Noon-1, drop-in, bring your own lunch
Faculty Center, Library first floor
I hope you'll join Provost Rogerson and me for conversations about SSU's academic story and our role in Sonoma County and the world.
President Armiñana will attend those marked *
Wednesday, January 18*
Friday, February 10*
Friday, February 24
Monday, March 12
Friday, March 23*
Tuesday, April 10
Monday, April 23*
Monday, May 7
Welcome to Spring 2012
By on January 17, 2012 4:51 PM
Welcome to the Spring 2012 semester! I hope your classes are getting off to a good start, and that your students are engaged and excited.
First, a few links from the Spring University Retreat: The Clay Shirky TED Talk we watched pieces of is "Institutions vs Collaboration," and the poem with which I ended the retreat is Marge Piercy's To Be of Use.
I didn't manage to keep up with blogging in the second half of the Fall semester - still trying to figure out what this medium feels useful for - so I'll try to catch up a bit here.
In asking us to engage this year as a University community in a conversation about SSU's academic story, I wondered if we would be able to identify and agree on any central identifying elements that might distinguish SSU from so many other 5-10,000-student underfunded state universities. One framing for those conversations was "what does/should make SSU distinctive as an academic institution?" It was remarkable to me how many faculty, students, and alumni independently led with some version of "close faculty-student working relationships." Many other ideas were floated as well, of course - student scholarship experience came up a lot, for instance - and Debora Hammond suggested at one of the lunches that "collaborative education" seemed to encapsulate a lot of what had been coming up.
"Collaboration" strikes some as vague and perhaps not distinguishing enough; the word is certainly not a pithy encapsulation of a story all by itself. We'll need to flesh it out this Spring as we explore how we might "build collaboration into the infrastructure," as Clay Shirky puts it in the TED talk above. I want to talk here about why I think it can be the basis of something distinctive and meaningful, by talking about the various ways in which collaboration might shape what we do - all of which came up in conversations this Fall.
First, collaboration as a tool/setting for student learning: Most of the time, I feel like my students learn more when they are working together on problems or projects than they do in any other mode. I would love for my students to arrive with the expectation that this is what it means to learn at SSU, and to have similar experiences in most of their classes. This model does not fit society's standard (but no-longer-relevant, I argue) model of a class as information transmission from instructor to students, and so this understanding of collaboration could give us some real distinctiveness, both externally and in driving our internal discussions about teaching.
Second, collaboration across disciplines and across other traditional university boundaries: There are so many great contexts for learning all over the University, and so many benefits to the University overall of situating learning in those contexts. Internships offer a small way to take advantage, but I'd love to explore this much more broadly. The stretch English program is using service writing assignments for the SSU preserves, for example; Associated Students Presents is doing outstanding work to help tie co-curricular and curricular efforts together. I'm sure we could be doing so much more - if we could figure out how to remove barriers that make it so hard right now. An story of collaboration across the entire university in creating our students' education would be quite distinctive in the current hyper-disciplinary higher ed world.
Collaborating with colleagues to improve my teaching: We still have way too little collaboration among ourselves as teachers, I believe. I spend a fair bit of time in K-12 schools. I was part of a research team visit to the Bellevue, Washington school district some years ago, and I have never seen a more engaged, involved teaching group (district-wide). Teachers were in and out of each others' classrooms; hallway and lunch conversations were often about ideas for how to approach certain ideas or certain students. Teaching does not have to be as solitary an endeavor as it often is for us. I feel like I become better at it when I get out of my stand-alone box and work with colleagues to examine it carefully.
Community-engaged partnerships are a powerful form of collaboration about which much has been written. Lots of research demonstrates the motivating and outcome-improving effect of situating learning in a meaningful community context. How do we make it easier and part of the normal course of things?
Finally, collaboration as a skill that our students are known for: In most careers/life endeavors, the ability to work with others to accomplish goals is a hugely important skill. How could we make it the case that the world in the future knows our graduates to have this skill?
First, a few links from the Spring University Retreat: The Clay Shirky TED Talk we watched pieces of is "Institutions vs Collaboration," and the poem with which I ended the retreat is Marge Piercy's To Be of Use.
I didn't manage to keep up with blogging in the second half of the Fall semester - still trying to figure out what this medium feels useful for - so I'll try to catch up a bit here.
In asking us to engage this year as a University community in a conversation about SSU's academic story, I wondered if we would be able to identify and agree on any central identifying elements that might distinguish SSU from so many other 5-10,000-student underfunded state universities. One framing for those conversations was "what does/should make SSU distinctive as an academic institution?" It was remarkable to me how many faculty, students, and alumni independently led with some version of "close faculty-student working relationships." Many other ideas were floated as well, of course - student scholarship experience came up a lot, for instance - and Debora Hammond suggested at one of the lunches that "collaborative education" seemed to encapsulate a lot of what had been coming up.
"Collaboration" strikes some as vague and perhaps not distinguishing enough; the word is certainly not a pithy encapsulation of a story all by itself. We'll need to flesh it out this Spring as we explore how we might "build collaboration into the infrastructure," as Clay Shirky puts it in the TED talk above. I want to talk here about why I think it can be the basis of something distinctive and meaningful, by talking about the various ways in which collaboration might shape what we do - all of which came up in conversations this Fall.
First, collaboration as a tool/setting for student learning: Most of the time, I feel like my students learn more when they are working together on problems or projects than they do in any other mode. I would love for my students to arrive with the expectation that this is what it means to learn at SSU, and to have similar experiences in most of their classes. This model does not fit society's standard (but no-longer-relevant, I argue) model of a class as information transmission from instructor to students, and so this understanding of collaboration could give us some real distinctiveness, both externally and in driving our internal discussions about teaching.
Second, collaboration across disciplines and across other traditional university boundaries: There are so many great contexts for learning all over the University, and so many benefits to the University overall of situating learning in those contexts. Internships offer a small way to take advantage, but I'd love to explore this much more broadly. The stretch English program is using service writing assignments for the SSU preserves, for example; Associated Students Presents is doing outstanding work to help tie co-curricular and curricular efforts together. I'm sure we could be doing so much more - if we could figure out how to remove barriers that make it so hard right now. An story of collaboration across the entire university in creating our students' education would be quite distinctive in the current hyper-disciplinary higher ed world.
Collaborating with colleagues to improve my teaching: We still have way too little collaboration among ourselves as teachers, I believe. I spend a fair bit of time in K-12 schools. I was part of a research team visit to the Bellevue, Washington school district some years ago, and I have never seen a more engaged, involved teaching group (district-wide). Teachers were in and out of each others' classrooms; hallway and lunch conversations were often about ideas for how to approach certain ideas or certain students. Teaching does not have to be as solitary an endeavor as it often is for us. I feel like I become better at it when I get out of my stand-alone box and work with colleagues to examine it carefully.
Community-engaged partnerships are a powerful form of collaboration about which much has been written. Lots of research demonstrates the motivating and outcome-improving effect of situating learning in a meaningful community context. How do we make it easier and part of the normal course of things?
Finally, collaboration as a skill that our students are known for: In most careers/life endeavors, the ability to work with others to accomplish goals is a hugely important skill. How could we make it the case that the world in the future knows our graduates to have this skill?