Teaching and Scholarship Hub News

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

Congratulations on completing another fall semester and best wishes for your winter break.

The Faculty Hub would like to make you aware of our spring term opportunities and highlight some successful programs from fall term. Please see the Faculty Hub website to register for spring programs or email us if you have any questions.

NEW – Faculty Hub Associates – Deadline for application is January 29, 2020

The Faculty Hub announces a pilot program for faculty to share their areas of expertise related to enhancing excellence in faculty teaching and/or scholarship and creative works. Please see the attached call for applications for the new Faculty Hub Associates program. Questions may be directed to Linda Boland, Director of the Faculty Hub.

Sign up now for Faculty Hub events in January

On January 9, the Faculty Hub welcomes Michael Palmer, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia, for a workshop on learner-centered syllabi. Registration is required for Creating Syllabi for Courses You’ll Love to Teach and Your Students Will Love to Take. Please join your colleagues for post-new year coffee, tea, and bagels at 9:00 a.m. plus a chance to make a significant change to your teaching in just two hours (9:30-11:30 a.m.). We hope you will join us!

From January-March, we are running a Faculty Hub Book Group to explore how intentional utilization of technology can help students achieve course learning objectives. Two discussion groups are being formed, and we still have some openings in the breakfast group. Please sign up on our events page, and we will send you our guide book Intentional Tech (Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University).

Other spring term events

The Faculty Hub Talks program got off to a great start in the fall term with two sessions led by Nicole Maurantonio and Doron Samuel-Siegel. In the spring term, we welcome David Wilkins, Chris von Rueden, Corey D. B. Walker, and Rana Dajani. Hub Talks start at 12:12 p.m. with an 18-minute presentation followed by a discussion that outlasts the duration of the talk! Faculty are finding these to be a useful form of community-building and engagement across disciplines. Please register here. We offer lunch, so you can visit, eat, and learn — all in one hour!

We are planning ahead for a faculty professional development event on Wednesday, May 6. We have invited Claire Howell Major, a frequent speaker at faculty development conferences and author of many books on pedagogy. She will be working with us on approaches to active learning and engaging our students — all faculty will find this useful. We are working out the details and registration will be available soon.

NEW – We are working on a concept for a pre-summer Faculty Hub Institute beginning on the Tuesday after Commencement, just before the time period when many faculty re-focus on summer scholarship or creative works. We are brainstorming about short, intense (2-2.5 day) learning experiences that will have immediate impact on faculty scholarship and/or teaching. This year’s focus is Data Visualization Using Tableau. Our approach will be a cross-disciplinary experience to help faculty develop new skills to make data presentations more dynamic, engaging, clear, and interpretable. Likewise, this in-house institute will help establish a community of faculty learners. We aim to rotate the Hub Institute topics annually and may be able to offer a small stipend for participation. Would this type of learning experience benefit your work? Please share your thoughts with Technology Consultant Andrew Bell. Our planning process depends on your input.

Highlights from the fall semester 2019:

• We ran our first Teaching Squares program to facilitate peer observation and self-reflection about effective teaching across disciplines. Early feedback has been positive, and a January gathering of this cohort will help share the value of faculty participation in the program.
• We initiated an Early Career Faculty Seminar program; the inaugural cohort focused on inclusive pedagogy in the fall term. We will continue our work together this spring with a focus on small-scale changes to enhance teaching and student learning. All early career faculty are invited to join us. Please contact Linda Boland if you are interested.
• Other successes this fall included several inclusive pedagogy trainings, one-on-one academic technology consultations, development of video training modules, planning for upcoming space renovations for the new Faculty Hub in Boatwright Library, and other behind-the-scenes development of procedures and plans within the Hub. We are excited to continue to expand and improve programming and opportunities to help faculty grow in their professional development.
• We developed a Faculty Hub statement about confidentiality with respect to individual faculty consultations; please see our website for details.

The Faculty Hub initiated its work in the fall term of 2019 with the goals of fostering excellence in teaching, cultivating cross-disciplinary interactions for scholarly exchange, and promoting professional development for faculty at all career stages. We encourage faculty to contact us if you have ideas and needs that we might help service, or if we can connect you to campus partners who may also be able to assist you.

Best wishes for a healthy and happy holiday season from the Faculty Hub!

 

The Faculty Hub is excited to announce a few upcoming events that align with our faculty development goals. We also have a few “save the date” opportunities for which pre-registration will be available soon.

October 8, 2019, 12-1 pm in the Richmond Room of HDC: We invite a representative of each academic department, program or unit or campus partner to Meet the Faculty Hub and learn more about our programming as we also learn how we can help you. The event requires registration.

Faculty Writing Space is still available on Friday mornings, every week. This is a chance to move forward on your writing projects. Until the space is filled, faculty may commit to all remaining weeks of the semester or participate less frequently. Please click here to reserve a space.

Don’t forget about our Workshops To-Go option for scheduling hands-on training at a time that meets your schedule. We invite departments, programs, faculty learning communities, communities of practice or other assembled groups of faculty to benefit from this opportunity for assistance. You may also request customized workshops. Go to our Programming and Events tab and scroll down to Workshops To-Go to learn more.

We want to point your attention to our first Hub Talk – an engaging format for presentation and discussion. Hub Talks will include an 18 minute presentation on an intriguing question or topic followed by a deeper discussion with your faculty colleagues. The talk begins promptly at 12:12 pm (easy to remember) and the discussion runs from 12:30-1 pm. You are invited to arrive early for a light lunch and visit with your colleagues. Hub Talks will help us share scholarship and teaching interests and build community among the faculty. We are thankful for the following speakers who will help us initiate the program this year:

October 28, 2019, 12:12pm in the Whitehurst Living Room: What can a taxidermied horse tell us about public memory? – Dr. Nicole Maurantonio, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies. Please click here for more information and to register for the event.

January 23, 2020, 12:12 pm (location and title TBA): Dr. David Wilkins, Professor, E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professorship in Leadership Studies. Save the date – registration is coming soon.

Save the Date – May 6, 2020: Faculty Development Day! A focus on teaching for learning. More information is coming soon.

Thank you for reading the Faculty Hub blog!

Dear fellow faculty members,

About seven weeks ago, we initiated the Teaching and Scholarship Hub (Faculty Hub).  We are excited today to roll out version 1.0 of our new website!  Our goal in the Faculty Hub is to support faculty development throughout the professional lifecycle, including support for effective pedagogical practices and opportunities to enhance scholarship, creative work, and intellectual community. With the start of another academic year, we are reminded of the countless ways in which our work demands our best every day.  However, sometimes it helps to acknowledge that there is no need to be an island.  Faculty connecting with and learning from other faculty enriches our professional lives and helps us do our best work with students and for our disciplines. We invite all faculty to consider the programs and opportunities offered by the Faculty Hub as ways to cultivate these important connections.

We want to point your attention to an upcoming event with an early registration deadline—we are fortunate to host Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden, an expert in facilitating dialogue to promote awareness and effective practices to encourage a culture of inclusivity.  On the morning of September 6, Dr. Shorter-Gooden will lead us in a workshop on strengthening faculty capacity to foster equity and inclusion.  We hope that faculty will join in this important discussion. To learn more about this event and please register here.

This semester, we are initiating an early career faculty seminar to dive into issues that resonate with the inclusive excellence plan.  This program complements school-based or department-based orientations and begins the process of connecting faculty with professional development opportunities in the Hub and building community among the faculty.

We invite faculty to share their creative, engaging, and sometimes provocative work or works-in-progress in our new “Hub Talks” series, a program designed to foster cross-disciplinary conversations. We also invite faculty to be “learners” in their colleagues’ classrooms through a new “Teaching Squares” program.  Please see this article for more information on teaching squares and you may register here.

An appreciation for the time demands on faculty has guided our approach to help faculty learn about and use pedagogy and scholarship tools.  We have designed a “workshops to-go” program with training to be delivered in time periods during which faculty already meet as a group.  We are also initiating on-line training for faculty in which we share approaches and materials in ways that facilitate faculty adoption of new tools in their teaching or scholarship.  We will continue to add to the workshop menu and create new learning modules and resources throughout the year.

We hope that faculty will engage with the Faculty Hub as we continue to grow and expand the opportunities for meaningful professional development.  In addition to programming and events, individual consultations and your feedback are always welcome in the Faculty Hub.

Best wishes as you prepare for the start of the semester and as we welcome all who are new or returning to our campus community.

Linda Boland – Director, Teaching and Scholarship Hub