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.
