FACULTY FORUMS: AN APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY of FACULTY EXCELLENCE
Thank you for your interest in the Faculty Forum being conducted by the Task Force on the Evaluation of Faculty Work for Promotion, Tenure, Post-Tenure Review, and Hiring. If you have not yet read the Provost’s charge to the task force, we urge you to do so. It will help set the context for this work.
To encourage participation and ensure cross-disciplinary, cross-college, and cross-campus dialogue, we will be holding forums on each campus and inviting faculty to attend specific forums. We are well aware that all of you are busy people. If you cannot attend the particular forum to which you are invited, we will do our best to find an alternative date that better fits your schedule. Please be on the lookout for your email invitation.
The Faculty Forums are being conducted as an Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Appreciative Inquiry focuses the people in an institution on the historical and existing excellence as a means of identifying extant policies, actions, behaviors, and systems that promote and support attainment of the institution’s desired outcomes. (More information on AI is available on the website link.)
The forums in September and October will focus on capturing faculty perspectives related to defining and measuring quality. They focus on the first phase in the Appreciative Inquiry cycle—identifying the “Best” of what is. We will be asking faculty to share their individual stories of excellence. In this way we can expand our collective understanding of the diverse ways that faculty engage in their work and contribute to the success of UAA. Through sharing and analyzing our stories we will:
1) Build greater understanding of the mosaic of faculty talent—in terms of scope, variety, and positive impact—of faculty work and roles across disciplines, colleges, and campuses.
2) Identify and enumerate the shared values within this mosaic of faculty work and roles.
3) Generate definitions and measures of quality that cut across all dimensions of faculty work (e.g. teaching, creative expression, craft practice, research, engagement, service)
Before attending one of the forums, faculty will receive additional information on the forum structure and guidance on how to prepare.
The summary of findings from these sessions will be submitted for faculty review and refinement in November and December. Subsequent forums in the spring will focus on capturing faculty insights and recommendations on the design of a faculty evaluation system that aligns these definitions and measures with national best practices, and UAA’s mission and strategic plan.
We have created a Blackboard shell entitled, Faculty Forum: Faculty Evaluation Task Force. It should appear near the top of your course listing on Blackboard. Through the site we hope to continue and extend the conversation from the in-person forums, and collect additional perspectives from faculty who are not able to attend a forum.
