Faculty of the Future Panel @ the AAC&U Meeting
Today, during the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel entitled, “Faculty of the Future: Voices from the Next Generation,” with Netta Avineri (UCLA), Shauna Carlisle (UW), Judith Flores Carmona (U. of Utah), Elizabeth Hoover (Brown), Ilana Kramer (Long Island U.), Jonathan Rossing (Indiana U.), Wendy Wagner (U. of Maryland), and Holly West (NYU). (Learn more about each of them.)
The panel was particularly refreshing because it consisted of a Q&A-style conversation with the audience about teaching at the undergraduate level, the role of community-based learning in various disciplines, the views of today’s college students, how to retain new faculty members, and people’s perspectives on the changing American academy. I learned a lot from each of the panelists, not to mention the audience; and since our conversation this morning, I’ve been ruminating on a few things:
- Not only what people in liberal education imply by “critical thinking,” but also how that term could be re-calibrated to account for various learning modalities (including different forms of attention as well as composing through intermedia) that are not necessarily tied to writing or print.
- What community-based learning looks like in places other than Seattle, and how it’s valued or recognized in those places.
- How I can better communicate something like the digital humanities to those who are unfamiliar with it and/or new technologies.
- The ways in which people, including myself, who work at the intersection of technologies and the humanities can collaboratively establish strong and persuasive proofs of concept for digital scholarship, tools, and platforms—proofs that could be vetted or reviewed in some way. (Or, what scholarship is out there on the digital tools or platforms themselves? How are they used for research, and to what effects on disciplines, students, evidence-gathering, and forms of argumentation?)
- In the classroom, what are some efficient, concrete, and measurable ways that I can survey the educational investments of students; their expectations; their interpretations of learning outcomes, prompts, and syllabi; and what they honestly want or need from a given course?
Obviously, I don’t have answers to any of these right now; however, I’m glad that the panel became a vehicle for considering each of them. There’s plenty to unpack, and a lot of it’s relevant to both my writing and my teaching.
I also want to send a quick thanks to K. Patricia Cross and the AAC&U for sponsoring each of the panelists with a Future Leaders Award and giving us the opportunity to travel to the AAC&U meeting in D.C. Thanks also go to L. Lee Knefelkamp for moderating the panel and supporting us!
