Resources

This essay, the first in a series about the priorities of the professoriate, offers a vision of the new American scholar. The first part of the essay examines the numerous activities that surround faculty work and how they relate, in a changing external environment, to the role of the scholar. The stage is set by defining how higher education relates to the larger purposes of American society and by noting the assumptions and consensus within which academic professionals have traditionally operated. The essay then examines how the contexts of faculty work are being transformed in the 1990s by financial constraints, the technological environment, and basic assumptions about work itself. The second part of the essay deals with how these changes affect and necessitate rethinking faculty careers. It discusses changes in the academic workplace, the shifting concept of scholarship, the interdependence of teaching and research, the relationship between personal and professional needs, interactive approaches to learning, working within a collaborative organization, the career implications of crossing knowledge domains and moving in and out of the academy, and tenure and alternative employment arrangements.

This paper will discuss some pedagogical principles and practices that can be employed in a particular type of distance learning that I refer to as asynchronous learning networks (ALNs). ALNs are courses offered exclusively on-line via the internet or a remote server in an asynchronous mode that involves no face-to-face interaction and no conventional classroom sessions. The pedagogical techniques described below were developed while participating in a Sloan Foundation supported distance learning project at the State University of New York at New Paltz (under the auspices of the SUNY Learning Network) and teaching a ALN sociology course titled "Social and Economic Development". Many of the ideas and strategies presented stem from conversations with, and the advice and comments of, teaching colleagues in the SUNY Learning Network and instructional developers at the Center for Learning and Technology at Empire State College.

Applies the quality concept of continuous improvement to academic departments. The goal of a continuous improvement initiative is for a department to become self-regarding, self-monitoring and self correcting – confident of the quality of their graduates’ knowledge. Idea Paper no. 35, from the series developed by the Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, Kansas State University.

The primary objective of this article is to provide readers with guidance for designing effective group assignments and activities for classes and workshops. In doing so, we examine the forces that foster social loafing (uneven participation) in learning groups and identify four key variables that must be managed in order to create a group environment that is conducive for broad-based member participation and learning. We then discuss the impact of various types of activities and assignments on learning and group cohesiveness. Finally, we present a checklist that has been designed to evaluate the effectiveness group assignments in a wide variety of instructional settings and subject areas.

The task of theological education is not always clearly understood in the church -- or it is understood in different ways by various constituencies. We invite five seminary professors to reflect on their vocation, especially on its relation to the life of faith in the church and to the church's effort to be faithful to the gospel. We asked them to consider the ways in which they seek to hand on Christian traditions and also the ways in which they seek to provide students with skills to critique aspects of those traditions.

In much the same way that men are not taught to acknowledge all the ways they are privileged in society, whites are not taught to recognize how their status as white people confers on them many privileges. Arguing that male privilege and white privilege are interrelated, and that both types of privilege are unearned and unjustified, this paper begins by reviewing several layers of denial that men have about their privilege and that work to protect, prevent awareness about, and entrench that privilege. The paper goes on to present parallels from one woman's personal experience, with the denials that veil the facts of white privilege. Forty-six ordinary and daily ways in which this one individual experiences having white privilege within her life situation and its particular social and political frameworks, are listed, and ways in which the list applies equally to heterosexual privilege are also pointed out. It is concluded that all the various interlocking oppressions take two forms: an active form which can be seen; and an embedded form which members of the dominant group are taught not to see. To redesign the social system therefore requires acknowledgement of its colossal unseen dimensions. (DB)