May 2022 Tuesday Tips

10th May, 2022

Dear faculty,

During this semester Faculty Development embarked on important conversations about what faculty mentorship can look like at its best.

I am proud that Faculty Development offers mentorship programs for both tenure track and lecturer faculty, and we look forward to continue expanding the resources we provide.

Mentorship of course can happen in different forms, more or less officially, but at the core of mentorship should always be some form of trust and the feeling that the learning experience is mutual, and not one directional. Tomorrow, the equity fellows and I will discuss an article by Rachel Endo, “Retaining and Supporting Faculty Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color: The Promise of a Multi-Leveled Mentoring-Partnership Model(opens in new window)” (2020).

Endo proposes a “mentoring-partnership” model that promotes “alternative paradigms for conceptualizing mentoring as dynamic partnerships with differentiated, equity-focused, and multi-leveled systems of support that explicitly center anti-racist and anti-deficit frameworks as core values” (170). I hope that all faculty will join us in exploring these concepts, whether you identify as a mentor or a mentee, and that as a university we will spend some time considering what mentorship-partnership models at Chico State can look like.

Following Endo’s model and as we prepare to launch the READI hub in the Fall, I look forward to exploring ways in which Faculty Development can embrace non-dominant mentorship frameworks, in order to be able to support and retain all our faculty.

Share your impression(opens in new window) about the article on our blog!

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D. 

Faculty Development, Director 
Campus zip: 026
Phone: 530-898-3094
https://www.csuchico.edu/fdev 
Professor 
Department of Media Arts, Design, and Technology 
Campus zip: 504 
Phone: 530-898-4647

If you’d like to comment on this or any other Tuesday Tip, visit the FDEV Blog(opens in new window).
All past Tuesday Tips are curated on the FDEV website.

3rd May, 2022

Dear faculty,

I attend monthly meetings with all the faculty development directors in the CSU, and during our last meeting one of them shared a newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Teaching: A Different Way of Thinking About Rigor(opens in new window)” (Supiano, 2021).

The author mentions the rigor wars that have originated among faculty as a consequence of the pandemic and how different camps seem to have reached irreconcilable differences in this debate: should we still thrive for rigor or should we abandon it completely?

In her attempt to reframe the debate in a more nuanced fashion, Supiano shares three important principles discussed by Jamiella Brooks (associate director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Pennsylvania) and Julie McGurk, (director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yale University’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning):

“Rigor, when defined apart from a deficit ideology, is necessary to teach more inclusively. Inadequate definitions of rigor produce poorer learning outcomes, particularly for underrepresented and/or underserved students. Rigor is not hard for the sake of being hard; it is purposeful and transparent.” (Supiano, 2021)

The principle that mostly resonated with me is the last one: rigor for the sake of rigor - harshness for the sake of harshness – is meaningless. I was educated in a similar environment, in European high schools and Colleges where old male professors lectured for hours. I confess: that approach worked well for me. I always loved learning and reading, and I loved the academic and intellectual conversations.

But the question is: should we really measure what successful and equitable learning is based on what worked for us - a bunch of scholars who love spending time reading and doing research and never or rarely struggled in class? If we are designing our courses based on what worked for us, we are probably missing the mark, and by a long shot, I must say.

So, I hope this Tuesday Tip invites us all to reconsider what purposeful rigor can look like and how we can create high expectations for our students without alienating them.

Comment on our blog(opens in new window) and share your experience in creating high expectations for students that still promote an inclusive learning environment!

If you’d like to comment on this or any other Tuesday Tip, visit the FDEV Blog(opens in new window).
All past Tuesday Tips are curated on the FDEV website.