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How many of you have seen your DAC document
in any kind of forms?
Does anyone know what that acronym is?
Okay, every department has something called, the full title
is the departmental application of criteria.
For those of you who are unit A tenure line faculty,
this is the document that determines your retention,
promotion, and tenure.
Okay?
Get use to that word DAC because that's what everybody
calls them on campus.
Most of those now have space in the research portion
for research on teaching.
And for those of you in the education disciplines,
obviously you are going to be doing research on teaching,
but for the rest of us it was a little bit of a challenge
to come up with a way to do this.
And even if you're not in a tenure line, there are still
ways that you can do research on your teaching that will make you
a better teacher and improve the lives of your students.
And also, putting on the undergraduate research hat that
Dr. Pearson was talking about, engages our students
in the practice of research as well, because they are
sometimes depending on the kind of studies designed,
actively involved in that research of teaching.
So I think it's important that we try to make the lives
of faculty members manageable by overlapping some of these
things, so that you can be doing research on your teaching,
particulary early on, so that you can get that research credit
which is very important for those of you who are going to be
applying for tenure down the road.
Also, Eastern is a teaching institution, we value research,
we support research, we encourage research,
but Eastern is a school where we teach.
And teaching is at the upmost importance and we are very good
at it, and we want to be even better.
And that's why the scholarship of teaching and learning
is so important to Dr. Lord.
And so a number of us have been looking at different ways
to incorportate this into our practice.
I, unfortunately, I am a full time administrater now,
but I still teach a course, and I am probably just about
the luckiest person on this campus because I deal
with honor students, almost exclusively.
I do have contact with other groups of students who are in
a variety of programs, but the course I teach is a course for
Presidential scholars program, it's the top 20 freshmen
entering the institution every year.
They are required to take it, a seminar that I do teach
with Dr. Methven of biological sciences.
Use to teach it with Dr. Fischer, but then he left me
so I had to find a substitute and Andy's a really good guy.
Yep, so what I've given you here are a couple of references on
the teaching of learning and the scholarship that surrounds that.
And you'll notice that some of this stuff is a little bit dated
but I wanted to give you some of the seminal works on the
scholarship of teaching and learning and really lay it out.
And what practicitoners in the field talk about is,
it's not just being reflective and thinking about your teaching
but really analyzing it the same way we do go about doing any
other kind of research.
Again for those of you in the education disciplines,
there's not going to be a whole lot new here, except perhaps
the audience that you're using or the subjects
that you're using.
And so it will improve our teaching,
improve our students learning.
It will help us publicize the teaching and learning we do
on this campus by getting publications out there
in this nation from people at EIU talking about teaching.
And that's a really important thing to me too,
because the higher we raise the profile of this institution,
the better it is for all of us.
We get different kinds of students, we continue to recruit
excellent faculty, and people really want to stay here
and engage in the work that we do.
And so I think it's important that we all get, you know our
name out there in various ways.
Now I know you all have different academic disciplines
in which you are to be doing research obviously, but this
is another way to really highlight that teaching function
that we do so very well.
And as I already said to integrate our roles of academics
at this institution.
So if we continue through the packet a little bit,
I'll show you just a few things that I've given you to consider.
"The Scholarship of Teaching", this article by Randy Bass
is a really good one talking about why we do it, but how
we design the study and how we kind of continue to build
a project from that, and we'll talk about a little bit about
that today as well.
That would be a good topic.
Then I've given you a handout and I'm not going to read
all of this today obviously.
"Ethical Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning".
Those of you who are in education fields
and in psychology know that if you are using human subjects,
well that considers some of your fields to right, kinesiology,
human subjects means what?
IRB, the Institutional Review Board.
When we first started talking about this scholarship
of teaching and learning, we didn't have a formal IRB
on this campus, and we were all in workshop and they're saying
you go to your IRB office and you do this
and we were saying, uh-oh.
So, that all has been taken care of now.
We started with the animals, and then went to people, maybe not
the right way to do it, but we now have all that.
And so on the backside of this bright handout, I'm not even
sure what color this is, down at the bottom of the page
is the website for our compliance officer that has all
the paper work that is intended I believe for applying
for IRB approval.
For those of you who don't know what that means,
if you are going to use any kind of human subjects if you
were doing a study that involves your students and it's going
to be published somewhere, they are human subjects
in your research correct?
Now there are some solo projects you can do that may not entail
IRB approval, but I wouldn't want anyone to get too far into
the process before they checked that out.
So we do have a compliance officer.
There's a tutorial that you can take online, forms to fill out
that explain the kind of research you are doing, and
then they issue that approval from the office of research
and sponsored programs.
Okay, so that is a step that you will need to take when you kind
of design a project that will entail anything
with human subjects, but particularly your own students.
The next handout we've got here is, it's a little bit dated.
It's from 2005, but the reason it's from 2005 is because
the Carnegie Foundation which use to fund solo projects,
very specific ones, has moved on to other issues.
So they're not bringing in the same cohorts of people.
It use to be that you could apply for a Carnegie grant
or fellowship and they would give you some funding to support
research in the scholarship of teaching and learning
and this cohort of students or faculty, really,
would get together periodically and compare notes
on their projects.
But the reason I give you this handout, is it gives you some
examples of solo projects in a lot of different fields.
So there are english, I think there's a humanities example.
We've got science example, social science, a few just
sort of scattered across the board.
To tell you that regardless of your discipline, you can come up
with something to actually do some research on your teaching.
What I usually tell people is that a lot of time these
projects start with a faculty member who is frustrated
about something in their class.
Something is just not going the way you want it to go.
What do you do about it?
You know, the past was trial and error, well that didn't work
let me try this.
Or you know, the person down the hall does this and that sounds
like a really cool idea, let's see if I can do that.
Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't, I mean
we all are very idiosyncratic when it comes to teaching.
We all have our own style, we all have our own strengths.
I am very much a seat of my pants kind of a teacher.
I go in with notes, but I really depend on my audience.
It's a student centered, democratic type of classroom.
Other people, my spouse is one of these, wants structure
and has most of the entire class planned in three minute
increments about what's going to go on in his classes.
Now a little bit depends on what you teach.
If you teach something that's very skill based,
sometimes that structure is better.
My husband is I think sharing an office with these women,
he teaches freshman English.
I'm not sure if you're in that office or not, are you in that
office with Barry Hudek?
(female speakers). Yeah.
(Bonnie). Ned Huston is also
in that office, he's my spouse.
(female speakers). Oh, okay.
(Bonnie). And because he has
very specific goals he wants to achieve with those
writing students, he's got very structured things.
I'm having interdisciplinary philosophical conversations with
my students, and so if I go in there with a very structured
plan it's not going to work, and it also doesn't work for me
and my teaching strengths.