Provost's Address
Christine Wiseman, J.D.

Faculty Convocation - September 13, 2009

Notable Librarian John Cotton Dana, who pioneered a patron's right to browse the stacks, organized the first children's library, and worked to make libraries vibrant community centers, is probably better known for his quote: "who dares to teach must never cease to learn."

These days, however, learning has assumed a different dynamic than the traditional faculty lectures that dominated the classrooms of John Dana's era - where instructors were the conduits of information transfer and the sole source of student information. If you attended the Sixth Biannual Focus on Teaching Workshop at Loyola this past August, you heard Anthropologist Dr. Robert Rotenberg — author of, "The Art and Craft of College Teaching. . . ,"¹ — suggest to all of us that learning today is really about collaborative education - the kind of education that views the classroom as laboratory, where students work with students to achieve a common goal and the instructor becomes a facilitator of inquiry; where seminars gather students with other students in sustained conversation. Because when students are given the opportunity to act like professionals, to use the tools and communication appropriate to professionals, they learn the skills they will need to serve competently as professionals in a world many of us will only imagine.

But just as collaboration is the paradigm which marks the learning process for our students, so it is with all of us for whom teaching is both vocation and profession. We collaborate:

• with each other and with our students
• across our three campuses and across our community
• within our classrooms and within our research labs
• across the different cultures of our students and across the different cultures of our disciplines.

Last year and this we have spent hours at department and unit meetings and at school and college meetings - plumbing the data on teaching loads, and parsing the number of Core, undergraduate and graduate sections taught by tenure-stream, contract, and part-time faculty. All in an effort to manage the variables of student success and student retention.

But as we plumb that data to learn the promise of our future, we must not lose sight of the strength of our past: who we are as faculty - and the reasons we gather in all our diversity each year to teach another generation of students. And so this summer, a number of us came together - from the Provost's Office, the Center for Faculty Professional Development, the Office of Learning Technologies and Assessment, and the School of Education - to develop a year-long program of celebration and collaboration that will bind us together as an academic community of teacher/learners who share their successes and their expertise with each other — so that we can meet our aspirations to deliver the premier undergraduate educational experience in Chicago - and an innovative and high-quality professional and graduate education as well.

The result of these gatherings is Collaboration in Learning: a celebration and enhancement of Loyola's way of teaching - facilitating improvement while honoring and celebrating the excellence that is our past.

Through a series of conversations and resourcing events, this year-long program seeks to encourage dialogue about the impact of pedagogy on content; to focus on new and concrete resources that might energize our work; and to inspire each of us anew with the stories of excellence that already permeate our ranks. It's a plan to build on what we have and who we are - as resources to each other. From best practices in building new courses, to best use of classroom time and assignments, to gathering formative and summative feedback. It is designed to serve all populations of faculty and to include all populations as presenters: the part-time, the full-time, the tenure-track, the tenured, and the emeriti — who still teach, mentor faculty, and serve on our advisory boards.

Materials also are planned for particular use in departments and professional schools. And already, faculty have begun to share "teaching tips" that are collected on a resource website and spotlighted in Inside Loyola Weekly. In fact, if you read Friday's issue of Inside Loyola, you found Tip #3 on STUDENT FEEDBACK AND ASSESSMENT, suggesting that it is better to solicit regular feedback from students on how a course is going than wait until the end of the semester.

One faculty member in particular suggested sending students emails periodically to ask how they think things are going, and to let them know what's been planned for the upcoming class.

Another distributes a weekly "Critical Incident Inventory" in which students are asked to identify their most engaged moment; their most distanced moment; the most affirming or helpful action; the most puzzling action; and the most surprising action. Student responses are read over the weekend and a faculty response is posted on Monday. Most effective.

Our programming will culminate with the annual Academic Forum on April 30, which will ask panelists to demonstrate how classroom teaching can generate scholarship and how ongoing scholarship can enhance classroom teaching.

At the apex of all these efforts, under the direction of Peter Gilmour and Tim O'Connell, we have produced a host of short narratives from faculty across our University describing transformational moments that changed the way they thought about their lives as teachers - the calling to which they've devoted their lives. Our hope is that we learn from each other's transformational moments how to re-surface the passion that makes us the Loyola narrative that our students remember. To quote one international award winner for teaching excellence: "Good teaching is as much about passion as it is about reason. It's about not only motivating students to learn, but teaching them how to learn, and doing so in a manner that is relevant, meaningful, and memorable. It's about caring for your craft, having a passion for it, and conveying that passion to everyone, most importantly to your students."² You, the faculty, are paramount in the lives of our students. To paraphrase Fr. Howard Grey, Special Assistant to the President at Georgetown University who spoke here at Loyola last May, your presence to them in University is critical because it is here in University that you form their memories of who they want to be.

As I close this address, I'd like us to take a few moments to hear some of those transformational narratives (video plays):

(Note: Video is available at https://webapps.luc.edu/ignation/video_detail.cfm?id=1846043830).³

To these I hope you will indulge me the addition of one more transformational moment:

The first woman lawyer in the State of Wisconsin to represent a death row inmate, she is also a Marquette University law professor who accepts an appointment in Texas and takes two bright directed research students on a seven-year odyssey through the hazards of death row representation, convinced that a man who stood 5 feet, 11 inches in height with coal black hair and piercing black eyes could not be executed for the murder of a cafeteria worker committed five years earlier by an assailant who stood over 6 feet in height with medium-length reddish-blond hair and a two-inch red goatee. She braves initial disdain from an unsympathetic administration and returns to her class of 150 Criminal Procedure students the morning after the execution to talk about the personal and professional failure of her best legal efforts.

She explains that as she stood in the black rainy mist across from the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas, joined still by one of those law students turned Quarles & Brady lawyer, she wondered what purpose had been served by the execution of this fifty-one year old man. And when there was nothing more they could do as lawyers, they stayed on to do what they could as human beings, lending a quiet dignity to the end of a life and joining a family in their grief.

But she also explains that on that dark rainy morning of February 16, 1995, there was no God standing there holding her hand or sense of justice calming her soul. She was alone with her failure — as she had never been alone before. But she shares those personal, private moments of failure with her students, hoping that they will take away from her "raw presence" at that moment the essence of what it means to be a Jesuit-educated lawyer.

Transformational moments that become their memories of who they want to be.

Thank you for all that you do to make transformational learning a reality for our students.

   

¹ Full title of the work is, THE ART AND CRAFT OF COLLEGE TEACHING: A GUIDE FOR NEW PROFESSORS AND GRADUATE STUDENTS.

² Dr. Richard LeBlanc, a Professor of Corporate Governance and Ethics at York University in Ontario - and a graduate of the University of Detroit Mercy -- wrote on article on the top ten requirements for good teaching after he won a Seymous Schulich Award for Teaching Excellence in their School of Business.

Available at:
(http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/topten.htm)

³ All of the individual videos, each about four minutes in length, will continue to be posted, one a week, and announced in Inside Loyola Weekly. And the videos are being archived and available at: http://ignation.luc.edu/storiesoftransformation/.