Month: March 2021

Evaluation, Higher Education, Hope

Continuous Improvement

Missy Alexander

With the Passover and Easter upon us and the daffodils beginning to push through the soil, it is that time of year when I feel the joyous rebirth and renewal that comes with spring. It is always a welcome sensation that helps lift me up from the endless to-do lists as I take the opportunity to reflect on all we have accomplished this year. As is natural to our structure, we are heading towards an intense period of productivity – exams, papers, grading, annual reports, assessments, and even a few accreditation visits. It could be too much, except we all know there is a break at the end, so we push ahead in this fury of activity, breathless, exhausted, and I hope, proud.

I have been thinking about our reflective practices a lot lately. In higher education, we have a way of broadening our students’ perspectives while unintentionally narrowing our own. We introduce ideas and worldviews with the passion we feel for our disciplines. We strive to develop the habits of inquiry that have served us so well as scholars, and perhaps even as citizens. But we are also specialists, focused on one field and even one aspect of our field. We train ourselves to attend to the details of that specialty and sometimes we miss the connections to other things that are so important.

If I am totally honest, we also get a little insular, not just in our field, but also within our universities and our departments. This insularity can lead us to think we are better than elsewhere or, much more commonly, thinking that we do not measure up. Neither of these are productive positions for educators. So, as the rituals and rush of spring are upon me, I am thinking about the value of external perspectives on our work.

When I began teaching in an undergraduate program in communication, our department had a habit of cultivating student research so that they might attend the professional conferences in our field. Several of my colleagues routinely took students to the regional and national communication conferences. There was an expectation that I would do so, too. I succeeded in doing so, starting at the regional level, but I must say that I was terrified. I was worried that the work was not good enough and that I had inadvertently set my students up for embarrassment. This did not happen. Participation in this experience showed me that my students were within the normal range of work, some exceeding expectations, and others solidly in the normal range. This boosted my confidence as a professor and did wonders for my students. It was an amazing peer review experience.

Soon I was involved in program review. I contributed to the department report and listened carefully to the feedback from colleagues from two external programs that our department admired. At that university, the norm was to select visitors from programs that we aspired to be. This, too, can make inspire insecurity. Our admiration for the visitor’s programs made us think we were somehow second rate. Yet, the experience was incredibly helpful. There was lots of positive feedback, and some good suggestions for how to improve. We took those suggestions to heart and the impact was clearly visible in our evaluation of our learning outcomes the next year. It was another eye-opening experience.

These days, I spend a lot of time reading reports written for accreditors. While I am fully onboard with regional accreditation, I confess that I have some misgivings about the many discipline specific accreditations that we ascribe to in higher education. Defining the norms and expectations of a field at a national level is incredibly helpful and I have zero doubt that this is productive and supports continuous improvement. What gives me pause is that some of these require overly complex evaluations and, well, the costs are not insignificant. I am not all that convinced that the results are more powerful than the simple peer review provided by colleagues from programs we admire. Nevertheless, there is value in the reflective process and the external perspective that these accreditation processes require.

Really, there is value in all of our self-assessments, external reviews, and even our annual reports. These tasks and processes force us to look up from our to-do lists and think about all we have accomplished. They force us to look around and ask ourselves how we fit into the higher education landscape. They ask us to consider whether we measure up to the expectations of our fields. Best of all, they provide an opportunity to think about what we might do better. For me, that last bit is where the fun begins.

Yes, I said fun. Amid the drudgery of doing assessments, writing annual reports, and preparing for site visits, the excitement is in the possibility for growth. We might revise a course or a program. We might find an opportunity to expand or re-focus our offerings. We might see room for building interdisciplinary partnerships within the university or with external programs and organizations. We might get a new idea. Nothing is more exciting than a new idea.

So, as we welcome spring and face the big race to the finish line, I am inviting everyone to see their to-do lists through this lens. We are not just finishing things; we are looking for opportunities to grow and improve. This is the why of it all and the true opportunity for rebirth.

Dialogue, Engagement, equity

An Invitation to Consider Difficult Things

Missy Alexander

About 15 years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate course focused on the ethics of communication. This was one of the core courses in a sprawling discipline that addresses all sorts of human interactions from our internal monologues to mass persuasion. In an effort to help our students understand the power and responsibilities of our communication practices, both personal and professional, our curriculum included this course to provide a framework for thinking through the ethical issues that are part of all communication. It was a challenging but rewarding course.

This morning, as I read that Boise State has suspended its mandatory course on diversity amid concerns the potential discomfort some students may feel, I remembered my experiences in Communication Ethics. The narrative about the course at Boise State is one we’ve heard countless times over the last several years, with assumptions about discomfort, blame, and even accusations of disloyalty. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not really buying the stories of classrooms that call out certain groups, asking particular students to absorb that blame. Reports of that kind of behavior usually end up being a misquote, or a selective piece of conversation that doesn’t fully represent the full discussion. These stories generally reflect a politicization of higher education that distorts the real work going on in classrooms all over the country. Nevertheless, there are moments when our conversations about diversity and equity do lead to tough realizations about our own biases, no matter what culture or group we feel we represent. At some point someone will feel uncomfortable.

As I think about the conversations that are really going on in many classes, not just a mandatory course on diversity, I am remembering the most profound experience I had when I was teaching that communication ethics course. We had lots of the usual debates around honesty, ends vs. means, situational ethics, and ideal vs. real world ethical challenges. They were fun, but they stayed a little abstract. There were no real risks in the classroom version of these decisions, so students participated but were not necessarily transformed. I hoped it was going ok, but I wasn’t thrilled. Then we came to the chapter about stereotypes, and the conversation shifted.

Stereotypes come up in communication classes all the time because they are ever-present and generally relevant to the topic at hand. You cannot consume media without noticing stereotypes. You cannot conduct research in communication without wrestling with decisions about categories of analysis, which leads to conversations about stereotypes. You cannot produce communication thoughtfully without considering stereotypical messages. All of this is true, but there was still a kind of detachment in our approach to this topic. You see, my students knew that “stereotyping is wrong” and so felt that they could just dismiss the conversation right there, with that morally absolute but practically impossible sentence. I needed to find a way to break through.

I had an idea, and I took the risk. Instead of starting the conversation about stereotypes with an introduction to the topic and the usual discussion of archetypes vs. stereotypes, I invited my students to participate in an exercise. I asked everyone in the room to write down five stereotypes that they felt had been applied to them. I suggested that no matter who we are, something applies, and it is likely that we had experienced a moment of discomfort because of this. Students began writing and so did I. Then, when everyone seemed done writing, I shifted the assignment. I asked everyone to look at the five they had listed and consider when they had used those stereotypes to categorize others. Eyes looked up, uncomfortable giggles ensued, and there was a hesitation to begin. I reassured everyone that I was not collecting those pieces of paper, nor would I ask them to report on what they wrote. I got busy addressing my own list.

This proved to be an incredibly powerful moment in this course. The simple “stereotyping is wrong” no longer worked as a dismissal. I did share some of mine to help mitigate the shame everyone was feeling. It became clear that stereotyping is what we are in the habit of doing and it needed to be examined. It also made everyone understand that we all have work to do. This was an invitation to engage, not an accusation and assignment of responsibility. What I hoped for was that the engagement would help us determine our responsibilities and, ideally, our next steps.

My little exercise is one of many that my colleagues have developed to help us have rich and informative conversations about power, oppression, and what a just society might look like. These conversations happen in biology and chemistry, history and art, or education and accounting (and everywhere else), because the truth is, we find assumptions that stem from stereotypes everywhere. In many ways, stereotypes are the easiest path to discovering structural problems around power and influence. These conversations frequently lead to moments when some of us realize we have held ideas (categories/stereotypes) that may be supporting a less than just society. These are hard moments, and they sometimes lead to discomfort. But these conversations aren’t about blame or about marginalizing anyone: They are about discovery and, in the best cases, finding a path forward.

It is easy to find a bad sentence in a textbook or a syllabus or a lecture. As far as I can tell, social media demands bad sentences on all topics, especially those that might divide us. Selective information dominates the headlines about equity on college campuses. This selectivity is easy fodder for outrage and a clear misrepresentation of what we actually do.

What is much harder to do (and absolutely rejected by news and social media), is to take the time to see words and ideas in context and navigate the challenges to our world views that they might represent. This is the challenge and the luxury we have in the classroom. We are not speaking in tweets or 10-, 15-, or even 60-minute increments; we are using a semester and even a full four years to think about these things.

I am sorry to hear that the course at Boise State was suspended because I cannot believe that stopping the conversation is an appropriate answer. We need to have lots of these conversations, not to oppress but to enlighten. These conversations take time and continued exploration. They are the very opposite of headlines, and must remain so. These conversations are education.

Community, Higher Education

Collaborative Cultures

Missy Alexander

This morning, as I sipped my coffee and scanned the headlines of Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle, I found myself reading a lot of non-news or news irrelevant to leaders of public, regional comprehensives. Another admissions scandal–not my problem. Those are always targeted at elite schools. More quarantine orders and teams excluded from basketball tournaments? I care, of course, but it isn’t news; it is our daily reality. Yes, there were important articles about equity, articles I continuously scour for new ideas, but, well I didn’t see any new ideas this morning. Then I came across a provocative essay by Janae Cohn, entitled, “Faculty and Staff Often Don’t Trust One Another. How Do We Fix That?” This one woke me up.

Cohn is an instructional designer, and much of this essay reflects the difficult position of this role on most college and university campuses. Although highly trained in pedagogy in general and continuously engaged in learning new strategies for integrating great teaching practices into online environments, her role is one of support, not partner or leader. In the most recent crisis, we might have seen this shift, but we didn’t, at least not on my campus. Cohn goes on to suggest that there are many members of our campus community that have valuable insights and skills that are regularly kept from true engagement in the decisions about the future of the university. She is so right.

When I started at WCSU I was duly impressed with the governance structure. To start, we have University Senate, not a Faculty Senate. Membership includes faculty representatives from the academic departments and the library, student affairs, enrollment services, the student government association, and administration. Everyone has a vote and a voice in the issues under discussion. The standing committees also have a blend of these constituencies, at least to some extent. This governance structure is a powerful signal that our ideal version of ourselves is an un-siloed, collaborative campus. Unfortunately, the signal isn’t the reality.

The truth of the matter is that in nearly nine years on this campus, almost no initiatives that did not come from teaching faculty have come forward. The balance of representation on our committees makes it very clear that the faculty representatives hold the final authority. The message is clear enough that little has been offered for consideration by committee members who are not teaching faculty. While they offer feedback and commentary on proposals, they rarely offer proposals on their own. Since I converse with people from all parts of our campus community, I am quite certain that those who are not teaching faculty have ideas that we might want to consider. But they bring them to me, not to the elected committee structure. I think we might have a problem.

Now, I never raise these issues without considering my own part in creating them. So, let me start by noting that most of my attention does go to the concerns of the teaching faculty. After all, they are the experts on the academic programs we offer, with advanced degrees and research programs to support that ongoing expertise. They bring valuable insights into the teaching and learning environment because they are in the classrooms (virtual or otherwise) with our students. They know the realities of student engagement and attendance. They understand the core skills and habits of mind that any student should master, and ultimately, they define (and should define) what our graduates should know and be able to do. This is normal and indeed what we hire our teaching faculty to do. As the overseer of the quality of our academic programs, it is also normal that this is where most of my attention goes.

Nevertheless, I have learned to listen to other members of our community. For example, it was our coaching staff that really raised the alarms about how our first-year students were faring in our online asynchronous courses. As they worked hard to boost the morale of our athletes who were unable to compete this season, they had a first-hand look at who was thriving and who was not. Their input helped me support more remote instruction as opposed to the online-asynchronous courses appropriate for more mature learners. I should add that this group frequently tries to clue me in about some academic programs that we should consider adding. While they claim no expertise in the content of those programs, they are part of our recruiting team and they hear things from our future students. I’m listening.

It was both the IT help desk and the academic advising group that pointed out that the path to our online classes was unclear. Now, it was a pandemic and our transition to a mostly online campus was abrupt to say the least. We did not really have time for the thoughtful planning that an “online strategy” might entail. Faculty were doing their best, but our students were lost, and we were not fully considering their needs. Allowing for multiple content “classroom” locations (Blackboard, TEAMS, Zoom, WebEx) was a nightmare for our already traumatized students. In normal times, I might want to encourage a controlled testing of these many platforms, but when everything is online, well some uniformity would have been helpful. As IT and academic advising fielded the troubled calls for help, they encouraged me to nudge faculty toward a uniform location to log in, even if they wanted to move to other platforms from there. These groups have direct and frequent contact with our students with a perspective that transcends the department view. Their voices should be heard.

And what about those with expertise in academic support (tutoring, advising, orientation, etc.)? Well, they have lots to contribute as they routinely interact with students as they thrive and as they struggle. Perhaps their insights into how we have organized our services might be meaningful? Indeed, these folks have degrees and continued professional development in the areas of student support. We might want to listen to their ideas.

The same goes for our instructional designers. We have them on committees, but they continue to be relegated to the support rather than leadership roles. The Career Success Center is noticing gaps in our students’ abilities to articulate the value of their degrees. Perhaps we should listen and find a way to bolster the relationship between the academic and the career experience for our students. Our police department might have insights we should hear. Our facilities team might see bottlenecks in our planning. The registrar’s team has a critical point of view. And so on.

Cohn gave me a lot to think about this morning. It is clear that the authors of our governance structures understood that we should learn from all parts of the university. They must have recognized the value of shared ideas and diverse perspectives. It was an incredibly powerful and optimistic impulse. But we haven’t fully realized that vision. So, today, I am considering what I can do to help us fully engage our community to make that vision real. I am thinking about how to reorganize what I do to help us engage the full range of talents and views available to us as we define our path forward, both post-pandemic and thereafter. We need some fresh ideas and new strategies and I’m guessing they are all around us if we just learn to listen.

Change, Higher Education, Inclusion, Resilience

The Balcony View

Missy Alexander

Managing a campus under crisis conditions is, well, challenging. All campus leaders, and I mean everyone not just the academic leadership team, have been immersed in the details of health and safety and the related enrollment challenges that came with COVID-19. At the same time, higher education has been grappling with the social injustices laid bare in this environment and heightened by the events surrounding the death of George Floyd. We have been running at high speed from problem to problem for a year now, and our ability to keep running may be reaching its end. Even Olympic athletes need to rest now and then.

So, at this one year mark (our campus closed on March 13, 2020), I am taking a moment to step back and consider our next steps. I’m taking a “balcony view” (coincidentally, I have just finished a course that introduced me to Heifetz and Laurie’s (1997) work on this subject, and now it is in the higher education news), and asking myself, “In light of all that we have experienced in the last year, how should our university evolve?”

Why ask this question, now? Why not just chart a path back to “normal”? After all, the vaccination roll out in Connecticut is progressing well and I feel very optimistic about our ability to be fully open next fall. It would be easy to just focus on that project, attending to the normal recruiting and scheduling questions and reveling in the knowledge that we can finally reduce our dependence on Zoom. But I can’t do that, because COVID-19 was not just an emergency for the last year: it was a powerful tool for surfacing structural issues that were already pervasive in our society and on our campuses. No, I can’t just breathe a sigh of relief. I must help our entire campus community dig into the necessary conversations about equity that have been made abundantly clear in this crisis.

So, as I invite my colleagues to engage in questions of what we should learn from life in a pandemic, I have a list of questions.

First, how should we respond to the access issues laid bare by COVID-19?

Questions about access to education and healthcare are not new, but they sure did move front and center over the last year. Last March, as students, faculty, and most of our staff shifted to remote learning and work environments, it became abundantly clear that the distribution of technology and wi-fi was not equal. We scrambled to deploy resources to students, only to find that our faculty and staff needed them, too. In 2020, this was kind of shocking. The world of work and the work of community has been at least partially digital for many years now, so how could we have found it acceptable that members of our organization did not have the basic tools necessary to interact remotely? As we return to “normal” let’s not lose sight of this fact. As we face the many budgetary challenges ahead, let’s not forget that this access issue is our responsibility. What can we do to reorganize our priorities so that the gap in access does not return?

While we are not in the health care delivery business, we are in the health care education business. The last year has made clear to many what some of us have known all along – not everyone has access to quality healthcare. But there’s more; communities do not just have financial barriers to medicine, they have cultural histories that lead to distrust of the health care system. As we work to educate future health care providers, how might we make those cultural and socio-economic barriers to health care a central component of our student’s education? How can we bring those same issues to the forefront of the education we offer to future educators, social workers, police officers, lawyers, and politicians? Can we become an organization that keeps these realities and histories central to all that we do?

Second, what should we learn from the experience of online and remote learning?

While none of us loved the abrupt move to online everything, it has become clear that this should be available to us for specific audiences and scenarios. Some of our students really benefitted from the flexibility of online courses and are hoping to continue in that modality for more of their education. The string of snow days in February was a good reminder that having all faculty prepared to hold some of their classes remotely is important for continuity. But not all students and faculty thrive online and not all disciplines are great experiences online, so we need to really explore what just happened. Perhaps the most important questions to ask right now are 1. What should we offer online to support our students and, perhaps recruit new ones? 2. How will we discover who is ready for online learning and who is not?, and 3. How can we ensure that our course design for online learning is as robust as it is for on-ground learning?

Third, how should we respond to the social justice issues surfaced by George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movements?

As we struggle to have the important conversations about race and equity in the United States, we must remember that these issues are not new. The differential experiences of communities of color in all social institutions has been real forever. As important as the questions around policing are, and they are incredibly important, the reality is that we should be focused on our own practices, practices that are re-enforcing inequity. So, while I do ask that my colleagues dedicated to educating law enforcement professionals carefully scrutinize the ways in which they are addressing social structures and racism, I am looking in the mirror first.

Among the things we should be considering are differential outcomes that cluster around race (retention, graduation, debt, and, yes, who enrolls in each major). We should be asking ourselves if the curriculum we offer reflects, at a minimum, the interests and histories of our students? We should be asking ourselves why we are still struggling to attract and retain faculty from diverse backgrounds? In other words, we should not let a demonstration last summer, end in a demonstration last summer. How can we keep ourselves engaged in meaningful and frequent examination of our own practices so that we progress toward greater inclusivity and equity?

Yes, it would be easier to “go back to normal” now that we can see the light at the end of the pandemic. But going back to normal is not a good idea. The pre-pandemic normal was not adequate or fair or just. So, I’m looking at this moment as the end of a yearlong sprint and the start of a marathon. We’ll just call that sprint the training I needed to go the distance, because I don’t want to go back to normal. I’ve taken the balcony view and I see at least part of the big picture. Now it is time to get back into the details and work with my colleagues to find some answers.

Inclusion

Women’s History Month

Missy Alexander

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I discovered that I was a girl. Well, sort of. I discovered what it meant to be a girl. Prior to that age, I was lost in the delusions of equality. You see I am the oldest of four siblings, the first three of whom are girls. A child of divorce and raised by my mother, it was clear that a woman was in charge. I was often regaled with tales of my grandparent’s participation in the fights for votes for women, civil rights, all with a pacifist twist. I was proud of my heritage. Foolishly, I thought that the path to equality had been completed.

Then it happened. I was on the gymnastics team and it was a tight budget year. The school put forth a budget that eliminated girls’ sports. This was infuriating on many levels, not the least of which was that in that particular year, we were the only team winning anything. As the battle for funding went on, I discovered something even more infuriating. For years I had been selling candy bars and calendars to fundraise for the team. This never struck me as odd, I thought all the teams did it. But what I discovered was that my team was raising money to purchase the old floor mats from the wrestling team. The school had purchased a new set for the boys’ team, but we had to buy the old ones from them. I was pissed.

This aha moment was my first clue that the fight for my rights wasn’t over. I had several more discoveries about the work still necessary for gender and racial equity, as I started to notice the sorting in my high school, and later when I accidentally rented a house in a segregated neighborhood (I moved as soon as I figured it out). The blissful bubble in which just a few hold outs were still biased against me was burst.

When I became a parent, I saw the inequities even more clearly, for my kids and their peers. There was so much privilege in my experience. The fact that there ever was a bubble gave me a kind of power and confidence that other girls didn’t have. The fact that I was white protected me from the immediacy of knowing my status in the hierarchies of the world, a protection not afforded to my African-American and LatinX peers. As my children discovered the histories of race and sex in America, I noted that they too had a bubble of protection from me, a bubble many of their peers did not have.

So, here we are in Women’s History Month, and every year I wonder if we still need a separate month. Honestly, I kind of resent it. After all, we have always been here, and we have always been essential to the success of the species. Shouldn’t we be ever-present, instead of relegated to attention in March? Well, here are a few important things to take notice of:

Given that these statistics are in higher education, where we seem to believe we are a meritocracy, it seems like we might need to do a little reflecting on our practices regarding both race and gender. The statistics in higher education are just the tip of the iceberg. There is work to be done.

So, like every other year, when I think about having a special month to notice the contributions of women, I feel a sense of pride in the women who managed to thrive in the face of the obstacles they experience, but I continue to be disappointed that we need to do such a thing. I feel the same about all of the histories we find the need to pull out and celebrate with a special month. Those months reveal the biases we’ve had all along.

Nevertheless, I am thankful this year. I am thankful to see a woman elected to the second most important position in our government. When Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn in, I wept. I wept for all of the young girls of color who see themselves in her face. I wept for me, too, a white woman in my fifties, because I see myself in her face, too.

I am hoping that the electing of Vice President Harris will accelerate our paths towards greater equality in country. I am hoping that this next step forward will help us scrutinize all that we teach, encouraging us to weave in the contributions of all people in every discipline. I am hoping that we are ready to do the hard work of reimagining the paths to leadership, correcting for the obvious biases that are pervading our choices so far.

I am hoping that pretty soon we won’t need a special month anymore. But we’re not there yet.