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Sharing Authority: Faculty Collaboration
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Sharing Authority: Faculty Collaboration
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Section 7: Growth and Community
Ashley Williams I’d like to ask several things. Does it change our work, and not just the work we do as teachers and as educators, but does it change other intellectual work we do? I'm also interested in asking why anyone would do this? What do we gain? Elizabeth Gunn I think we can't overlook that you could start with the personal, in a way. Are people really comfortable with collaboration, and so do they come to it willingly? Or do they have prior interdisciplinary experience? In my intellectual work, integration has been the key. I have a disciplinary Ph. D. but my research activities have always focused on knowledge integration, typically working with engineers, oceanographers and other scientists. And so I come to my teaching with the goal of helping students learn to approach complex problems with critical thinking skills, realizing that they may have to move around among different types of assumptions and frameworks. In fact, very few of the policy issues that I'm interested in can be adequately addressed by a single discipline. They're too big, and they require too many different perspectives. I have to work with other people, both in research and in teaching, to investigate the issues I'm interested in. Teresa Michals I got involved with learning communities because of some frustrations with teaching general education classes of freshmen and sophomores. That's why I first wanted to look at Links. The go-it-alone approach to teaching is fine as long as it works, but I think a lot of people in my department [English] can feel quite frustrated teaching freshmen and sophomores, and so are more willing to try something different with them. When I'm teaching majors in my field, they're basically committed to what I want to do in the classroom, but when that's less true for a population of students, I think, and the people who work in the linked program think, it's time to try another way of reaching them. Ashley Williams I collaborate because I think it makes for better teaching. But I also participate in a way that's probably selfish: I like to learn more about different perspectives. I started off as an undergraduate, moving between disciplines, majoring in journalism and minoring in English, two very different academic experiences. I'm still between disciplines: I work in composition and in literature, and in the work that I do in American regional literature, particularly now Appalachian literature, culture and interdisciplinary issues are critical. For example, in Appalachian studies, concern about economic issues is important, as is an in-depth knowledge of environmental issues. For me, interdisciplinary work and collaboration are exciting. I learn and grow, and I feel I am a better teacher, a better scholar, I hope, because of the experience. Kim Eby In my field of community psychology, you do have to learn the disciplinary tools of discovery. But the issues that concern community psychologists involve understanding the various constituencies and drawing information from several disciplines, and publishing in many different venues and to different audiences. My professional background has included work that is integrated and multi-disciplinary, and so I'm more comfortable within that framework in both research and teaching. But I want to echo that I do think it makes for better teaching. Elizabeth Patten I enjoy it because of the people. The people who are involved in, and excited about this type of teaching are really committed to the students. The teachers I connected with most in my experiences were those who shared the learning process with students. One favorite professor of English had been an engineer for many years before becoming a professor. He had so much knowledge and expertise to bring to the classroom but he also encouraged us to share what we knew and learn from each other. A special part of the University 100 program and the faculty involved is that faculty are keyed to the success of the students and finding out about the students as a whole. They don't just pour information in: they discover what each student is all about. The peer advisers are also right in the middle of that learning process themselves, and with the sharing that goes on in the classroom and in the program, I think that teaching's very motivating and very invigorating. Kim Eby That ties back to the larger point about community-building. The faculty community that is created models community-building for the students. They see the value of collaboration and leave the classroom with enhanced skills, with a model and practice at collaborating that will be helpful to them in all kinds of ways in the future. Elizabeth Gunn By working together toward shared goals, faculty from around the university develop a strong sense of community through these teaching teams. Our experience is that these emerging communities are all providing support for other aspects of our professional responsibilities on campus. Ashley Williams That's right. We're experiencing a greater sense of connection to the larger university community of both faculty and students. Previous Section: "Authority and Trust" |