Balancing Teaching and Research in a PUI

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Balancing Teaching and Research in a PUI

• Linda S. Freed, Director
• Office of Grants Faculty Development
• [phone] freed_at_uwosh.edu

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Does Research Have a Role?

• A campus, no matter how small, that fails to
  support research and scholarship, dooms its
  faculty to intellectual death.
• Small Comprehensive State University
• Recently tenured biologist
• 2005

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Role of Research

• Invigorate instruction
• Contribute to the knowledge base of the
  disciplines
• Build institutional reputation
• Contribute to economic development and other
  needs of our communities

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Role of Research

• Its what faculty are trained to do
• Its what we value most in faculty personnel
  decisions
• Its embedded in the mission statements of most
  campuses

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UW Oshkosh Vision Statement

• Our vision is to be a national model for engaging
  people and ideas for common good as a responsive,
  progressive and scholarly public community. We
  will be admired for
• Enrichment and leadership that emphasizes
  intellectual, civic, ethical and personal
  development for students, faculty and staff.
• The centrality of the student-faculty
  relationship that is distinguished by active
  learning, mutual respect and collaborative
  scholarship.
• Teaching excellence that is characterized by
  diversity, discovery, engagement, innovation,
  dialogue and dissemination.
• Scholarly achievement that furthers new knowledge
  through diverse methods of inquiry and is
  applicable to multiple audiences.
• Partnerships that mutually serve, stimulate and
  shape the University and the broader public.

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A Question

• What message do we send to our students, our
  faculty
• when we say we are just (or only) a
  teaching institution?

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• for serious scholars committed to living in the
  world of ideas, the ability to carve out of ones
  professional obligations enough time for reading,
  thinking, and writing should be the true measure
  of whether an institution is conducive to
  research
• Kristen Ghodsee
• Chronicle of Higher Education
• May, 2008

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Achieving The Teacher-Scholar Ideal

• The teacher/scholar is at once deeply committed
  to inquiry in his or her disciplinary field and
  passionately devoted to successful student
  learning through teaching and effective
  institutional practices.
• Teagle Foundation Working Group
• on the Teacher/Scholar

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Strategies for SuccessAn Institutional Model

• UW Oshkosh We thought we were doing pretty
  well.
• Fall 2006, Chancellor decided we could do
  better.
• Two years of faculty conversations and focus
  groups to answer the question What would it
  take to do better? And what does doing
  better look like?

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Strategies for SuccessAn Institutional Model

• Points of Consensus
• We dont wannabe an R1 wannabe
• Articulation of teacher/scholar ideal as the
  appropriate model for our campus (see attached)

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Strategies for SuccessAn Institutional Model

• Immediate Steps
• External Grants Expansion Plan Team charged by
  Chancellor to
• Review programs and services
• Make recommendations to better meet needs of
  campus researchers
• Work to be informed by conclusions of preliminary
  review
• University Research Professor/Associates Program
• Funding for mid-career and senior faculty to
  build on past success

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Strategies for SuccessAn Institutional Model

• What we learned
• Identified four essential elements of
  institutional support
• Financial support
• Time
• Undergraduate Research
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

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Strategies for SuccessAn Institutional Model

• The four essential elements where do we stand?

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Strategies/Environment for Success Support

• The Positive Internal Research Awards
• UW Oshkosh Faculty Development Fund, est. 1975
  original commitment was 2of the academic budget.
• A defining characteristic of the campus.
• Proposal pressure determines distribution between
  teaching and research.
• Funding ratio 60-75 participation rate 25-30
  per cycle.

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Strategies/Environment for Success Support

• The less-than satisfactory
• Equipment and Startup Funds
• Lack of transparency/perceived inequities are
  detrimental
• Rewards and Recognition
• Work well for pre-tenure faculty
• Need to improve rewards/ recognition for
  mid-career and senior faculty to support and
  reward success

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Strategies/Environment for Success Time

• The Positives
• Curriculum Modification Program
• 1 course per semester can be reassigned to
  research w/reporting and accountability.
• Faculty Development funds can be used to buy
  out additional time, and to pay summer salary
  for research.
• Flexible calendar 6 weeks per year on-contract
  with no teaching commitments loads can be
  shifted across the fiscal year to facilitate
  research.

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Strategies/Environment for Success Time

• The less-thans
• Workload is defined in terms of student contact
  hours research time is perceived as begged,
  borrowed, or stolen
• Refer to Gappa, Austin Trice, Rethinking
  Faculty Work
• Available options are not fully utilized

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Strategies/Environment for Success Undergraduate
Research

• Embeds research into the curriculum eliminates
  the false dichotomy between teaching and research
• Builds research-supportive climate
• Faculty model teacher/scholar ideal and lifelong
  learning to their students

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Strategies/Environment for Success Undergraduate
Research

• What we do
• Collaborative Research grants (internal)
• Student research day(s)
• Undergraduate research journal
• External Grants McNair, Merck, NSF-REU Site (two
  more planned), NSF REU Supplements

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Strategies/Environment for Success Undergraduate
Research

• Room for Improvement?
• Undergraduate Research Advisory Group formed fall
  07, exploring ways to
• Build on existing programs
• Broaden disciplinary participation
• Expand opportunities to students at all levels of
  study

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Strategies/Environment for Success Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning

• An understanding of teaching and learning
  challenges as legitimate questions for scholarly
  inquiry.
• A belief that teaching is intellectual work, not
  merely the effective use of methods or
  techniques, and that discipline specialists are
  often best prepared to pose and pursue learning
  problems in their fields.
• An understanding of teaching as a set of
  reflective practices which can be advanced
  through scholarly inquiry into student learning.
• A belief that the results of this inquiry should
  be made public, available for critical review and
  accessible for exchange and use by other
  scholars.

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Strategies/Environment for Success Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning

• What it does
• Scholarly Teaching grounded in the research in
  the pedagogy of the discipline and student
  learning
• Beginning SoTL scholars learn new modes of
  inquiry, engage in cross-disciplinary
  conversations
• SoTL inquiry has engaged our most, and our least,
  research-active faculty
• For some, SoTL work has led to re-engagement in
  active inquiry in their disciplines
• For others, SoTL work has launched entire
  research agendas

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Strategies/Environment for Success Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning

• The result As teaching becomes the object of our
  scholarly inquiry, we further blur the artificial
  boundary between teaching and research.

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Research is to teaching as sin is to confession
those who have nothing to do with the one, have
nothing to say in the other.

• John Slaughter
• Past Director, National Science Foundation, and
• President Emeritus, Occidental College

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Resources

• Council on Undergraduate Research. www.cur.org.
• Gappa, Judith M., Ann E. Austin and Andrea G.
  Trice. Rethinking Faculty Work, Higher
  Educations Strategic Imperative. San Francisco
  Jossey-Bass, 2007.
• Ghodsee, Kristen. A Research Career at a
  Liberal-Arts College, Chronicle of Higher
  Education, April 25, 2008.
• Teagle Working Group on the Teacher-Scholar.
  Student Learning and Faculty Research
• Connecting Teaching and Scholarship A Teagle
  Foundation White Paper. American Council of
  Learned Societies, May 2007 http//www.teaglefound
  ation.org/learning/pdf/2006_acls_whitepaper.pdf