Tag: Zine

Spring into Canvas (…for Fall!)

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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 20th 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! 

Lecturer Mentoring Program

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Dear faculty,

Yesterday I announced in the FDEV Zine the selection of a new mentor, Tiffani Anderson, who will work with FDEV to support lecturers. I want to use this Tuesday Tip to share more details about this new program and to make sure you have all links and information available. First of all, I want to highlight the possibility to schedule an appointment with Tiffani to discuss matters pertaining to lecturers’ questions and support.

Faculty Development has renewed its commitment to targeting resources and support specifically to lectures, because while all lecturers are faculty, their needs, questions, and concerns might differ from those of tenured and tenure-track faculty. The Lecturer Mentoring Program was created in this spirit and I want to offer some tips on how to navigate this page.

Resources

  • On the webpage you find a useful infographic, created by Aaron Draper, that clarifies the type of support different offices can provide.
  • Below the infographic, under Lecturer Council, you find contact information and bios for the lecturer representative in each College. We encourage you to contact your lecturer representative if you have specific questions that pertain to your discipline or Department/College.
  • Orientation offers links to the video recordings and all slides that were shared during the lecturer orientation. These links allow you to re-watch those presentations  and explore the information or access them for the first time if you could not attend the orientation. These are good links for lectures that might not be new but still need to access this information.
  • Resources offers additional links to information that you will need as you join the Chico State faculty community, including accessing the system, important deadlines, etc.

Lecturer Academy

Faculty Development is working with Tiffani Anderson, Aaron Draper, and Erin Horst to plan a full-day lecturer academy on Friday April 29th. The academy will include a series of informational and interactive sessions followed by a reception in the evening. SAVE THE DATE for this important event and we will send more details as we have them available.

We hope that lecturers will take this opportunity to explore the website and to reach out to both Faculty Development and Tiffani Anderson to share your questions!

Lecturers, You Belong Here!

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Dear faculty, 

It is not uncommon in Faculty Development to receive emails from lecturers asking for clarification about whether the programs and events that FDEV offers are open to lecturers or not. 

I always found those emails and questions incredibly strange: “why wouldn’t they be open to lecturers, I wonder, since lecturers are faculty?” 

Talking to colleagues who are lecturers and asking for clarification, however, I came to realize that this question really hides a more nuanced and problematic concern. What lecturers are really asking me is: am I welcome to these programs, as a lecturer? 

Frankly, this more complex reading of the question has both humbled me tremendously and broken my heart, because this concern ultimately sheds light on the fact that several lecturers do not feel like they belong at our institution. And this is the part that is particularly hard to digest as faculty development director. There is a quote in this article (“Striking a Major Blow to Adjunctification”) that matches this sentiment: “After moving to the city’s Eastside, I worked as an adjunct for three years. I commuted an hour north to a beautiful, prosperous, hypermodern campus, where I squatted in a borrowed office to eat my lunch, make my lesson plans and meet my students, as is common for contingent faculty. (One semester, a kind administrator advised me to squat in the conference room instead, though I had to hide my belongings in the filing cabinet when real faculty needed the space).” (Wyman, 2021). 

I want to assure you that in Faculty Development we consider all faculty as “real faculty,” and while lecturers certainly face different experiences depending on Departments, Colleges, disciplines, etc., Faculty Development offers a space where every faculty belongs, independently of rank or other factors. For this reason, I am excited to announce a number of FDEV resources and initiatives to support lecturers: 

  1. Faculty Development will be offering a Friday Forum on lecturer resources and support on Friday, October 29th, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. This is a chance to hear about resources on campus available from different units and offices. 
  2. The November issue of the FDEV Zine will entirely be dedicated to lecturers’ information, conversations, and sense of belonging. The Zine will be released on Monday, November 1st. 
  3. Faculty Development has committed funding to create a lecturer mentor position for spring 2022. A call for applications will come out in the next week or so. 
  4. Faculty Development has also committed to planning a full-day lecturer academy event in spring 2022, in collaboration with the lecturers council. We will send more information in early spring. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the lecturers that have educated me about their experience, that have opened my mind about how different a lecturer’s experience can be when compared to that of a tenure-track or tenured professor, and ultimately have given true meaning to the question “are FDEV programs open to lecturers?” 

Add a comment below to share ways FDEV can support you as a lecturer.

Teaching & Storytelling

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Dear faculty, 

In high school, I had the pleasure to learn from a teacher of ancient Greek and Latin who was as strict and terrifying as he was intellectually stimulating, challenging, and incredibly dedicated to those disciplines. What I remember most about him was his endless love for the Classics and his ability to get students engaged through his storytelling skills (and Greek and Latin literature certainly offered many opportunities for fascinating stories). 

As I became an instructor, I’ve always looked at storytelling as one of the most engaging pedagogical practices to use in the classroom, and a technique that can help students relate to the material more strongly and directly. Storytelling: Bringing the power of stories to your teaching provides some information about the benefits of using storytelling in instruction, while also offering some tips on storytelling techniques. Our University has unlimited access to Learning Through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using Reflection and Experience to Improve Learning, and lastly, “Reflections on operationalizing an anti-racism pedagogy: teaching as regional storytelling” (2019) offers insights into using storytelling as a fundamental tool in anti-racist pedagogy. 

In relation to this topic, I am excited to promote our next FDEV Zine (to be released on Monday, April 5th), which will focus on teaching as a form of storytelling. I hope you will explore the resources above and you will enjoy our next Zine! 

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

Some News from FDEV!

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My last Tuesday Tip on December 15th included a teaser about some news brewing in Faculty Development. I am excited to share them with you today as you prepare to come back tomorrow to start the Spring semester. 

New FDEV website design 

First of all, we made a few changes to the main FDEV page and we restructured the way you can access our offerings by identifying four major areas: Programs, Workshops, Tools, and Resources. Under each main title you find the list of the specific resources included in each page. You can access those pages by clicking on the corresponding photographs. We also added some icons that will take you directly to a some interesting new resources (and I will speak more about these below). 

New FDEV Faculty Fellows 

Dr. Jamie Linn Gunderson was selected as the FDEV Faculty Fellow for Spring 2021. Jamie will work with three other faculty fellows, Paul Bailey, Dustin Bakkie, and Dr. Chris Crews, to produce content for the FDEV website. I am excited to be working with this group of faculty and to increase what FDEV can offer. 

New FDEV Resources 

FDEV is excited to launch an FDEV Podcast and FDEV Zine (these pages are currently under construction, but save these links for the future). The FDEV Podcast will be hosted by Dr. Jamie Linn Gunderson and will be released twice a month, on the first and third Thursdays, starting February 4th. The FDEV Zine will be released on the first Monday of each month, starting on February 1st. The Zine was designed with the hope to attract some artistic work from faculty, students and staff. I will reach out to specific departments to see if we can establish some collaborations, or you can reach out to me directly (cfferrari@csuchico.edu). These new resources allow us to have an official FDEV Week now, since every day we are excited to be offering faculty some resource or opportunity for development: 

The FDEV Week: 

Monday: FDEV Zine (first Monday of each month) 

Tuesday: Tuesday Tip (every Tuesday) 

Wednesday: GO Virtual Community (every Wednesday 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Zoom) 

Thursday: FDEV Podcast (every first and third Thursday of the month) 

Friday: Friday Forums (twice a month) 

New FDEV Tools 

FDEV is also excited to launch two new tools that we hope will provide valuable help to faculty. We created a Model Course Design database that allows searching concrete examples of course design. If you click on the blue icons you will be able to access individual course portfolios created by Chico State faculty. Similarly, we created a page to search for Teaching Guides that offer tips in a variety of areas of instruction. Modeling Universal Design for Learning (UDL), we made the teaching guides brief, clear, easily accessible and applicable, and we organized the resources in four areas (explore, listen, watch, and read), offering additional information in various formats (websites, podcasts, videos, and articles). More instructions on how to access these tools are available on the respective pages. 

New Teaching Climate Change & Resilience Series 

In collaboration with the Campus Sustainability Curriculum Subcommittee, FDEV is happy to offer a new Teaching Climate Change & Resilience Series. The campus community will also have access to a number of books on climate change and resilience that are available on the series’ page. I want to take this opportunity to also promote our Teaching Racial & Social Justice Series. The next workshop, “Data displays and interpretation: linking the practices of our fields to social justice issue” (led by Dr. M.E. Matthews), will be held on Tuesday, February 2nd, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. The schedule for the other spring workshops will be finalized next week. 

Upcoming Events 

Lastly, I want to promote a couple of events happening this and next week. Tomorrow we will have a chance to come together as a community for the third Tipping Point Summit. The focus this year is on Virtual Realities, and I hope that everyone will join us to learn about our virtual experiences and share your own. Next week (Friday, January 29th from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.) FDEV will organize a Friday Forum on How to Showcase Evidence of Teaching Excellence. Faculty will discuss their experience in class evaluations (both synchronous and asynchronous) and will share how to showcase evidence of teaching excellence in the RTP dossier. 

We hope that you will find these resources useful and we encourage you to reach out to FDEV for any questions you might have. 

We wish you a wonderful start of the Spring semester!