Present: Deb Breen, Sarah Hanselman, Sarah Madsen Hardy, Laura Heath, Lauren Kirby, Christina Michaud
11/4 FIC Meeting Minutes
1. Old business/brief updates
—by-laws: Christina and Tom will follow up with Chris on these before the end of the semester to see where we are in the process.
—promotion process: Senior Lecturers are currently using a “promotion overview form” developed in part by the FIC last year to assist in their review of candidates for promotion. We decided it would be useful to survey the faculty involved on the usefulness of this form and the promotion process in general; Christina will make a quick survey and also compile the emailed comments.
—union: Deb reported on the bargaining sessions, explained how to get access to an email list for ongoing negotiations, and volunteered, along with Sarah M-H, to help with the flow of information back and forth from the FIC to the union.
2. Current business/main areas of focus
—diversity training: Chris has offered us a few different options for continuing our program-wide focus on diversity and inclusion. There will be a “jumbo seminar” in the spring, with several FIC members (Sarah H., Lauren, Laura) involved, and though that is voluntary for participants, it will still be a good venue for continued discussion of these issues. The “reading group” will be tabled for now and Laura will devote her energy to the seminar for the spring, possibly picking the reading group back up again next fall. Chris has also offered us the First Friday meeting for Fall 2017, possibly using Visions, Inc. as trainers, and we are excited about that possibility. Tom and Christina will follow up with Chris on this in February.
—evaluation of teaching: We’d like to move beyond evaluating teaching using just the numbers on the evaluation form. We decided that rather than merely retooling a few questions on the form or adding a supplemental question or two, we have the opportunity to think bigger, to really make some positive change on a larger scale. We decided that the FIC should be involved in writing two “blurbs” (official working name) related to evaluations. Christina and Tom, using the information in last year’s FIC report, will produce a very rough first draft of each, to be reviewed and revised by other members of the committee at future meetings:
Blurb #1, to be shared with (read to? handed out in writing? not sure) students prior to their filling out the evaluations, would be a simple paragraph that emphasizes the purpose of these evaluations and their audience, explaining the real-world power of them. It would encourage students to be honest, of course, but also to think about how these evaluations are used (vs. an online review, which is intended for other students to read).
Blurb #2, to be included by the program on any and all releases of official evaluations for any purpose (promotion, extension of contracts, merit reviews, etc.) would be a (maximum) one-page document that summarizes the literature on the problematic nature of numerical teaching evaluation forms, suggests that evaluation forms count for no more than 50% of the total evaluation of someone’s teaching, and emphasizes that the program sees evaluation forms as merely one of a larger set of tools for this purpose, including observation reports, a teaching portfolio, and a teaching practices questionnaire which faculty would fill out once a year and would be attached to this blurb.
3. New issues:
—handbook: The question of a program-wide handbook came up tangentially to many of the issues discussed today (by-laws, union, promotion); we did have an internal faculty “handbook" (though it had historically been called a “guide[book],” mainly because we use the term instead to refer to the student grammar/usage handbooks) going back to 2003 (or earlier, though we don’t have records then). Christina has hard copies of this from 2003 and 2004 as well as an electronic copy going back to 2005. It seems that now all this information exists on the WPNet, and though it is not, there, formally called either a “guidebook” or a “handbook,” we do in effect have one. There was some discussion of whether we could/should share handbooks with other programs that have a large number of lecturers, in order to learn from other programs and possibly to standardize things with regard to the union, but nothing was officially decided.
—faculty assembly: Since we discussed having an informal FIC “rep” to the union, we also discussed taking full advantage of the two WP faculty who happen to be on the Faculty Assembly, and asking them (James Pasto and Rebecca Kinraide) to help facilitate the flow of information back and forth from the FIC to the FA. Both Rebecca and James like the idea, and we will work something out with them.
—committees/chairs: We touched upon the subject of involvement in committees in the course of discussing other issues (gender, etc.) and agreed that for the sake of program continuity, it would be helpful to have a program-wide policy to the effect that, in general, no one will be appointed a chair of a committee without demonstrating prior involvement in that committee. No decision was made about whether to try to submit this to Chris directly, add it to the by-laws, advertise this on the listserv to recruit people to committees now, or some other response.