Summary
Oct 4, 2023 Chairs’ Workshop
Task
Chairs were grouped into multi-school teams and asked to review emerging proposals so far, weigh possibilities for collaborations and curricular innovation, and identify advantages, disadvantages, and gaps. Teams used the guiding discussion questions below and then reported out.
Discussion Questions
- What are the advantages of the partnerships you are seeing? How will these partnerships support collaborative curriculum development or team-teaching opportunities?
- How might these partnerships support teaching experiences across departments? Think about disciplinary training and department matches (e.g. history, sociology, physics, etc).
- How do these groupings support our larger mission as an HSI liberal arts and sciences university? (e.g. sustainability, arts, technology, social justice, allied health, education, etc.)
- Who is missing in these groups? Where might they fit?
Interesting Groupings
- School of Transformative Studies and Global Education: appealing name and forward looking, liked how education-related programs were coming together. Cross-listed courses and social justice themes
- Math and Philosophy- to bring together critical thinking and quantitative reasoning
- School of Economics and Sustainability: Departments of Economics, GEP, Engineering
- Nursing/CALS/NAMS; Global Studies (program) with Modern Languages; Spanish makes sense to be included in professional programs given our status as an HSI and the overall market
- Physical science builds on existing connections and sharing lab-based and research-infused curriculum
- Computer Science, Communications, and Marketing- a school on digital design and production
- Philosophy and Business, along with Engineering and Computer Science = AI (with some Psychology collaborations
- Communications/Media Studies and English- could look promising to prospective students
- All credentials into one school; put all teacher preparation programs under one school and use that as a brand
Disadvantages, Gaps, or New Questions
- Groupings seem to be happening based on people that are here now and maybe we are not paying enough attention to what would happen if the people in a department were to change.
- Some groupings didn’t seem very exciting- like nothing collaborative was really happening (e.g. School of Physical Science).
- A College or School of Professional Programs might be too big of an umbrella.
- Lumping Creative Arts into one large school might dilute the potency of the performative arts and also be difficult to manage administratively.
- We need to make sure our first-year and second-year learning communities thrive under the new structure- we may need to rethink how these work.
- Maybe the schools should be more COPLAC-y. Are students looking for “islands of safety?” With radically different types of schools are we removing islands of comfort?
- How do the department groupings/schools reflect that we’re an HSI?
- How do we catch the eye of folks that wouldn’t be captured by traditional departments? Do we actually understand how minoritized students pick majors?
- Could a School of Transformative Studies be too large to effectively manage?
Other comments
- It’s important to remember that despite final groupings, there are still multiple ways that departments can collaborate across the new schools and colleges. We need to keep this in mind to keep breaking down barriers to these types of collaborations.
- Partnerships can lead to important university wide themes.
- Could faculty or programs end up moving departments?
- Some departments have programs that fit best with different programs in different departments.