Assembling Materials for Reappointment, Tenure, Promotion, and Post-Tenure Review

Monday April 28, 3:30 to 5:00 pm

As the semester comes to an end, we know many of you are looking ahead to compiling your materials over the summer as part of the reappointment, tenure, promotion, and post-tenure review process. To aid you in this endeavor, the Faculty Center is sponsoring its annual discussion about preparing materials for portfolios. Come ask questions and hear suggestions from faculty members who have participated in the evaluation process. At least one representative from the MSCA Executive Council will also be on hand to answer questions. We are envisioning this as a fairly informal discussion, with plenty of time for participants to share resources and strategies and to ask questions. Light refreshments will be served.

Integrating Global Perspectives in Our Courses
Thursday April 24, noon to 1:30 pm

Following on last semester's brown bag lunch entitled "internationalizing our campus" and this semester's many exciting initiatives to develop international education at the college, this Faculty Center brown bag lunch discussion will focus on how we can make our existing courses at WSC more engaged with global issues. Come learn from colleagues and share your own ideas about internationalizing our courses--anything from pairing up students with "pen pals" from another country to redesigning whole courses to incorporate more international content and pedagogies. Some of the faculty and staff who went on the Dubai/Qatar trip will be at the lunch to offer their thoughts on this subject, and at least one of the consultants from Global Education Solutions will also be there to participate in the conversation. The discussion should give us all lots of ideas to explore over the summer as we prepare for the coming academic year. Please bring your lunch and join the discussion!

Last year in the wake of Virginia Tech, College community members came together for an initial brown bag lunch to discuss safety concerns and collaborative ways to identify and connect with at-risk students. One year later, we revisit the discussion. Join members of Student Affairs, Counseling Center, and Public Safety staffs as they update faculty and staff on the steps the college has taken towards enhancing emergency response and campus safety. After these updates, we will open up the discussion to further brainstorming ideas around this critical campus and national issue. Please bring your lunch and join the discussion.

What do you do when you suspect plagiarism? What are some of the dilemmas you face? Come to this session to learn college procedures for handling charges of academic dishonesty and to share ideas about resources for detecting plagiarism. We also urge faculty members to come to this session with their own examples of the gray areas they encounter when dealing with plagiarism cases. How much “borrowing” is too much? What is our role as teachers in helping students avoid plagiarism in the first place? To what extent has our students’ use of material from the Internet fundamentally changed their attitudes toward intellectual property? Come with your questions and with your ideas and strategies for dealing with plagiarism—and come hear perspectives from colleagues in Academic Affairs, the Library, and various academic departments.

The Iraq War has just marked its 5th year, longer than any war in modern US history aside from Vietnam. Its impact has been devastating. Although a majority of Americans now oppose the war, public debate and visible opposition have been muted (unlike Vietnam). How can we address issues posed by the war in our classrooms and in diverse disciplines? What specific strategies, teaching/ learning activities, and/or readings have proven most effective? Come to an informal sharing of ideas.

Specifically, Dr. Dodge will talk about her experience this semester teaching the standard (WSC core) US history survey course “backwards” – beginning with the Iraq War and concluding with the Civil War (1865-2008). Assigned books included Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq and What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It. Student reactions to both books were extremely positive and debates lively. One of the dilemmas of a broad survey course (155+ years) is how to provide students with a strong enough foundation in contemporary history to make sense of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while doing justice to earlier eras and domestic politics. Although Dr. Dodge will be sharing her experiences teaching the US history survey, this brown bag aims to bring together faculty/staff interested in exchanging ideas and teaching about the war from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Students' Use of Technology: What It Means for Our Teaching
Dr. Charles Dziuban
Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida
Thursday, March 27th
Scanlon A

Workshop 1: 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.-Teaching Students in the Digital Age Workshop
Workshop 2: 1:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m- Technology Enhanced Education Opportunities and Challenges

Follow-up Information:
The Generations, Reactive Behavior and Information Fluency in the Digital Age (Requires PowerPoint Viewer)
Charles D. Dziuban and Patsy D. Moskal
http://www.wsc.ma.edu/facultycenter/generations.ppt
Technology Enhanced Education – Opportunities and Challenges Powerpoint (Requires PowerPoint Viewer)
Charles D. Dziuban and Patsy D. Moskal
http://www.wsc.ma.edu/facultycenter/techenhanced.ppt

Video of Dr. Dziuban's presentations:
Workshop 1 The Generations, Reactive Behavior and Information Fluency in the Digital Age http://www.wsc.ma.edu/facultycenter/Dziuban1.wmv
Workshop 2 Technology Enhanced Education - Opportunities and Challenges
http://www.wsc.ma.edu/facultycenter/Dziuban2.wmv

Charles Dziuban is Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where has been a faculty member since 1970 teaching research design and statistics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Since 1996, he has directed the impact evaluation of UCF's distributed learning initiative examining student and faculty outcomes as well as gauging the impact of online courses on the university. Chuck has published in numerous journals including the Internet in Higher Education, the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and the Sloan-C View. In 2000, Chuck was named UCF's first ever Pegasus Professor for extraordinary research, teaching, and service and in 2005 received the honor of Professor Emeritus. He has co-authored and edited numerous books and chapters on blended and online learning including Handbook of Blended Learning Environments, Educating the Net Generation, and Blended Learning: Research Perspectives, of which he is the co-editor. In 2005, Chuck received the Sloan Consortium award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual. In 2007, he was appointed to the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Policy Council.

Racism is among the most charged issues facing us today and all members of society are shaped by it. However, most research that addresses race has traditionally focused on the racially “different,” leaving White perspectives, experiences and identity normalized and unexplored. Scholars of Color have long challenged White scholars to turn the “gaze” back on ourselves, and Whiteness Studies have arisen from this challenge. The research Dr. DiAngelo will present at this Faculty Center event is grounded in Whiteness Studies and concerned with the racial disconnect between the teaching force (over 93% White) and the students they teach. Dr. DiAngelo uses Critical Discourse Analysis to explore how a group of White pre-service teachers engaged in an inter-racial dialogue about racism with students of Color.

Follow-up Information:
Research in Whiteness Studies Powerpoint (Requires PowerPoint Viewer) http://www.wsc.ma.edu/facultycenter/whiteness-diangelo.ppt

Robin DiAngelo, PhD., is Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education at Westfield State College. She comes to WSC from the University of Washington. She was appointed by the Mayor of Seattle as the co-lead of the City of Seattle's Race & Social Justice Initiative. Her research is in White racial identity development, and she has published recently in the periodicals Teachers College Record, Radical Pedagogy, and InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Her essay "I'm leaving!": White fragility in racial dialogue" appeared in the collection Inclusion in Urban Educational Environments: Addressing Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice (edited by B. McMahon & D. Armstrong).

With the advising season upon us (it begins March 3!), the Faculty Center will be hosting a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of advising. Come share ideas with Carlton Pickron (Academic Achievement) and faculty and staff from departments across campus. Specifically, we’ll discuss making advising sessions meaningful, even given the time constraints we all face during the advising period. This is a great opportunity to hear from a variety of colleagues about different approaches to the advising process. Bring your ideas, questions, concerns--and lunch!

Discussion Facilitators: Susan Leggett (Communication) and Jane Mildred (Social Work)

Qualitative researchers frequently encounter challenges to the legitimacy of their work. If you teach research methods, conduct or might conduct qualitative research, or are just interested in the topic, please join Susan Leggett (Communication) and Jane Mildred (Social Work) in a conversation about issues and trends in qualitative methods. Susan and Jane will share examples from their own work and offer ideas about how to teach action research, participant-observation, and other ethnographic methods. Please bring your lunch and join the discussion.

Our students spend many hours each day connected to the Internet, and we often complain about the misinformation they find there. But how might we re-imagine our use of new media in our teaching? This brown bag lunch discussion is intended to bring faculty members together to share creative ways for using the Internet in our classes and for helping students learn through contributing to the Internet knowledge space. We'll talk about how to make use of the sites students frequent (Facebook and YouTube, for instance), but also how to empower students to create blogs and contribute to wikis. Come share your experiments with the Internet in your teaching! Bring your lunch and join the discussion.