Author: admin

Dear faculty, 

To celebrate Earth Day, Faculty Development is excited to announce that in Spring 2024 we will be offering another faculty learning community on teaching climate change and resilience! We will send a call for applicaitons in Fall 2023, so we do not have any details yet, but I want to share the good news as you consider opportunities for professional development next year. The faculty learning community is sponsored by the President’s Office and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and will be led by Dr. Mark Stemen. 

This program is based on last year’s CSU-wide FLC, which received recognition by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and was awarded the Campus Sustainability Achievement Award. 

The FLC and Mark’s efforts were also featured in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, part of their Future Trends in Higher Education, so this project has received recognition beyond just sustainability circles. 

As as you prepare to discuss climate change in your classes, as a way to recognize Earth Day, I also want to remind you that FDEV has created a webpage where resources from the FLC are collected. We hope these resources will be useful to you, and we invite you to stay tuned for more information about the FLC in the Fall! 

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D.
Faculty Development Director

Dear faculty, 

I want to use this Tuesday Tip to remind you about the Spring into Canvas for Fall day, which will be held on Thursday April 20^th both in person and via Zoom. 

You can access the program here for more details about the sessions. 

The Technology and Learning Program is planning a whole day to help faculty learn about Canvas and start getting familiar with the new learning management system. 

Spring into Canvas for Fall 
April 20, 9am – 4pm 
Colusa Hall 116, 114, 111 

Have a lot on your plate? TLP is  breaking Canvas down into bite-sized tasks. Come for 10 minutes, a single session, or the entire day. Or just come have pastries and coffee and/or lunch. This day is all about you.  

TLP Instructional Technology Consultants are hosting structured sessions and available to help you personally in a dedicated workroom. Join in-person or on Zoom. Our Canvas workroom will provide “10-Minute Tasks” that will help you get started.

• If joining us in-person, bring your laptop, your coffee mug, and TLP will help you get started with your transition to Canvas.  
• If joining on Zoom, you’ll arrive in the TLP Lab when you click on Zoom link and will then be directed to a Zoom breakout-room. 
• Can’t come at all? You haven’t missed the boat. We are here all summer and will continue to offer sessions and consulting to assist you before the fall semester starts when over 600 faculty will be using Canvas for the first time. 

I also want to remind you that Faculty Development released a Zine last week focusing entirely on Canvas. In the Zine, you can read longer pieces about the transition to Canvas but you can also access practical tips about specific tools in Canvas. 

TLP will offer more opportunities for training and support, both in person and via Zoom, later in April and in May, as well as during the summer. 

I hope you will take this and future opportunities to learn more about Canvas and I particularly want to encourage faculty teaching in summer to attend the Spring into Canvas for Fall Day and other workshops this Spring to make sure you have the proper support for your summer courses! 

Sent on bahelf of Dr. Alisa Wade, Assistant Professor of History and READI Equity Fellow

While serving as a Research on Equity, Antiracism, Diversity and Inclusion (READI) Equity Fellow this past year, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and reflecting on inclusive and equitable pedagogy. Part of the process of working toward a student-centered approach to teaching entails empowering our students as active agents and considering ways we as educators might draw on their cultural knowledge and creativity in the classroom. How might we, as instructors at a Hispanic-Serving Institution with a growing percentage of first-generation students, find ways to continue to support our students and encourage them to take ownership of their own learning experiences?  

In Active Learning Strategies in Higher Education: Teaching for Leadership, Innovation, and Creativity, the authors advocate for a pedagogical approach that “promotes creativity, imagination, and emotional depth of students along with knowledge acquisition and development” and “cultivates a participatory culture in academia at all levels” (5-6). In this framework, the goal is to embed students actively in work of our disciplines in the classroom and to encourage them as participatory and engaged local, national, and global citizens. In turn, the process of working closely with faculty members can help them learn and grow in new ways, build confidence, bolster their academic success, and give them relevant skills for their academic and professional careers. 

One program on campus designed to facilitate this process is the Adelante Postbaccalaureate Pipeline. The Adelante Program’s mission centers on supporting Latinx and low-income CSUC students, and includes a Summer Research Program for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in a “faculty-mentored, funded research experience” that will give students a hands-on opportunity to engage in—and, later, present on and consider publishing—their research under the guidance of their faculty research mentor. Applications for this summer just opened last week, and the deadline for submissions is April 24, 2023. For those in Agriculture, Engineering, and the Natural Sciences, CSC² offers additional student resources, including a Summer Undergraduate Research Program. 

For details, tips, and resources on encouraging students as active classroom agents, take a look at the FDEV teaching guide for building student agency. 

Dear faculty, 

Starting in Summer 2020, the Office of Faculty Development has produced a number of tools and resources “on demand” – so to speak – to ensure that faculty could receive support and access information whenever they needed, to mitigate the fact that the office was not physically available during the early stages of the pandemic. 

Since then our resources have grown exponentially, so I have begun a process of curation to ensure that every faculty can access and navigate our tools easily. After all, it is useless to have a lot of resources if faculty don’t know where or how to find them. 

In this Tuesday Tip, I want to introduce a new set of resources included in the FDEV website. The Teaching Resources page offers a number of tools specific to teaching and learning, organized in six main areas: 

1. Course Design 
2. Course Delivery 
3. Assessment 
4. Inclusive Teaching 
5. Digital Learning 
6. Evaluation of Teaching 

Each area has a dedicated page that offers resources for fairly specific needs, and each page (with the exception of “Evaluation of Teaching) is organized in three columns: 

1. I need help with… 
2. Ideas for implementation 
3. Resources 

My goal was to identify specific needs, provide a few clear tips for implementation, and pair those tips with digestible resources and tools, including fillable templates. 

In addition to these new Teaching Resources, I also want to remind everyone of two additional resources page: 

New Faculty Resources: this is a page designed specifically for new faculty, and it offers broad resources, including links to faculty orientation and information on how to access our systems. 

FDEV Resources: this page includes a compilation of all resources and tools in FDEV so you can get a glimpse of the full menu available to you. 

We hope that these pages will make navigating resources easier for you, but feel free to reach out if you have any questions! 

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D. 
Faculty Development Director 

Dear faculty, 

Dean Kate McCarthy and I want to share information about a funding opportunity from the Chancellor’s Office, a call for proposals for the CREATE awards. 

Below is the broad description for the award and attached you find the full call. 

“The program invites individual faculty and faculty teams to propose plans that will transform the student experience. Winning proposal(s) will identify a common problem, articulate the ability to advance a solution locally and at scale, have a strong emphasis on equity and demonstrate the ability to institutionalize innovation across the CSU system. The award recipient(s) will be those who can creatively increase the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded, shorten time to degree and dramatically reduce equity gaps.” 

Proposals should be developed to align with one of three funding tiers: up to $50,000; from $50,001 to $100,000 and from $100,001 to $150,000. You can find more information on the CREATE Awards website, including information about past awardees, to get a sense of the type of proposals funded last year. 

Kate and I plan to host a Zoom session on Monday, March 27, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. to hear ideas from interested faculty and to see if UED and FDEV can support and/or collaborate with faculty who plan to apply. If you plan to attend, please let us know and share your idea in advance, so we can collect any necessary resource or information. Please be aware that this is not a call for funding sent by UED and FDEV, so for specific questions about the application process, please contact Dr. Chenoa S. Woods, director of Research​ and Student Success Initiatives at the Chancellor’s Office. 

The Zoom information is below: 
https://csuchico.zoom.us/j/7507777561?pwd=OWRzeUFyZERMdFJ6aldzaW5Ecjkwdz09

Meeting ID: 750 777 7561 
Passcode: 270151 

We look forward to seeing you on Monday! 

Chiara Ferrari, Faculty Development Director 
Kate McCarthy, Dean of Undergraduate Education 

Sent on behalf of Dr. Grazyne Tresoldi, Assistant Professor in the College of Agriculture and READI Equity Fellow.

Dear colleagues,  

I assume we are all familiar with the equity biases in the student evaluations of teaching but are you aware of the implications of your own unconscious (implicit, hidden) biases?  

I hadn’t thought much about it until I found this study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. In their research, teachers graded (similar) students’ written essays but were not blind to their ethnical and socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds. Essays associated with students from lower SES received lower ratings than those associated with higher SES. However, the number of objective errors identified was the same, suggesting the teacher’s judgments were biased. After this, I stumbled over many articles addressing this topic, including in STEM – where we are trained to be highly objective and thus less subjective. Our unconscious biases can only help perpetuate the inequalities and a patriarchal society. 

As a person who truly enjoys knowing students at the personal level, I have implemented a few strategies to lessen the effects of this systemic problem.  

1. Recognize my own unconscious biases. I learned about the Implicit Association Test during the CSU Avoiding Bias in Hiring training. This free test can help you to explore your attitudes, beliefs, and biases toward marginalized groups. Becoming aware is the first step toward change! 
2. Use of anonymous grading. Both Canvas and Blackboard offer the option to hide student names during grading. If grading hard copies, I require a student ID number instead of names.  
3. Grading with rubrics. In addition to helping students evaluate their own work, rubrics help us to be more objective during grading. The British study above, suggested that teachers are more likely to revert to biased judgments when there is no clear evaluation rubrics.  

What strategies have you implemented? I would love to hear what you do to promote more equitable grading! 

Need help getting yourself started? Reach out! The READI hub is here to help you to implement EDI & antiracism teaching practices. 

Dear faculty,

I want to use this Tuesday Tip to promote an event organized by the WellCat Counseling Center.

The center will be offering a free faculty and staff training to learn how to serve students who are on the Autism Spectrum and improve their college experience.

The training will be held via Zoom, on March 24, from 9:00 am-11:00 am. Please register here if you plan to attend. More information is available in the attached document.

I also want to take this opportunity to share a couple of resources available in Faculty Development to support neurodivergent students:

1. You can listen to an episode of the Rise Teach Learn podcast that focuses on Neurodiversity in Higher Education to learn about information and data about neurodiversity in academia, but especially at Chico State
2. You can access the corresponding Teaching Guide on Neurodiversity in Higher Education to learn about practices to adopt in your classes to make neurodivergent students feel more comfortable, including communication tips.

We hope you’ll find these resources useful!

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D.
Faculty Development, Director
MLIB 458A
Campus zip: 026
cfferrari@csuchico.edu
FDEV: https://www.csuchico.edu/fdev/
READI: https://www.csuchico.edu/readi/
Professor
Department of Media Arts, Design, and Technology
Campus zip: 504

Dear faculty, 

I heard about some racist zoom bombing episodes and other racist incidents that have happened recently to Chico State faculty. 

I have been tempted, in writing this email, to use the phrase “ needless to say” to introduce a number of paragraphs. “Needless to say” we condemn these attacks, “needless to say” in Faculty Development we promote inclusion and diversity, “needless to say” our university does not tolerate these actions. 

But then it occurred to me that it DOES need to be said, clearly, that Faculty Development is a place where we actively promote antiracism.  

• It is not enough for Faculty Development to be inclusive: FDEV must ensure that all faculty have a chance to belong. 
• It is not enough for Faculty Development to promote diversity of opinions and perspectives: FDEV must provide a safe space for all voices to be heard. 
• It is not enough for Faculty Development to condemn these acts: FDEV must dismantle systemic racism, including the one happening in academia at large.  

This is the main reason why I so strongly believed in creating the READI hub and centering EDI work in what we offer.  

In case you want to access programs that promote these values, I recommend visiting the READI workshops page. We offer series that in various ways and from different perspectives share resources on how to approach these conversations in your classes, but also among your colleagues.  

When we first began planning to launch READI, I had not fully envisioned how we could approach EDI work in Faculty Development. Working with equity fellows like Samara Anarbaeva, Lesa Johnson, and Pablo Ochoa Bailey helped me immensely in framing the kind of values the Office of Faculty Development should commit to when embarking in this work. And one thing was clear: there cannot be equity diversity and inclusion unless there is also a commitment to actively pursuing an antiracist agenda. 

The A in READI stands for antiracism, and in light of these events, I want to renew my and FDEV’s commitment to offering a space where we not only condemn racism, but we actively fight against it. 

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D.
Faculty Development Director

Dear faculty, 

I am glad no one noticed that I missed the Tuesday Tip last week….. next time I miss one, you get extra credit if you notice and email me!! 

Overall, though, I think that this new tool we have in Faculty Development was worth waiting for… so let me unveil it (virtually) to you! 

The FDEV team worked incredibly hard last semester to turn our original FDEV Virtual library into a searchable tool that can provide a much more interactive experience to those faculty who are looking for some resources for their research or their classroom. 

The new FDEV Virtual Library allows you to search books by topic (assessment, curriculum, equity & diversity, etc.) or by title, and we have included a thumbnail photo for each book, in case you have more of a visual memory like me! 

In partnership with the Meriam Library, we have selected a list of electronic publications that cover key areas of faculty interests. The best part? all books are accessible to our campus community via the Ebook Central database so you can access them through a simple login (and the same applies to your students, in case you want to assign some readings in your classes). 

We hope you will take some time to explore these resources and let us know if there are books we should include in our virtual library! 

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D. 
Faculty Development, Director 

Dear faculty, 

In light of the recent events that have shaken our campus, I almost forgot that this week is finals week. 

Students are scrambling with finishing their projects and completing exams, faculty are scrambling with grading and finalizing their courses, staff are scrambling trying to close the semester and everything that needs to be completed to submit and finalize grades. 

Finals are never easy. And this year they just got a lot harder. At the risk of sounding trite, I hope you remember to take care of each other, always, and especially during this week.  

Please reach out to Faculty Development if you need any support and take advantage of our beautiful Rose Garden Room (MLIB 459) for some respite.

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D.
Faculty Development Director