Based on her years experience
as the director of the writing program at Richmond University and as an
Epiphany Project Leader, Hickey discussed the ways that faculty and administration
can work together to promote new ways of using technology in teaching.
The key, of course, is communication. Faculty involved must communicate
with both their colleagues and the administration, because they can only
offer support if they understand what is happening. At the same time, though,
Hickey pointed out that administrations that desire change have a responsibility
to understand what they want and to support faculty as they implement it.
Below is the handout Hickey passed around, containing
many practical suggestions for faculty, department chairs, and administators
involved in the often bewildering process of pedagogical change.
help!!
Getting Support from Them and Giving Support to Each
Other
Dona Hickey, University of Richmond
dhickey@richmond.edu
http://www.richmond.edu/~wac/
Upper level administratorsdeans and provostscan help
faculty by:
-
creating a university coordinating group such as Teaching, Learning, and
Technology Roundtable
-
providing incentives in the form of travel funds, small stipends, equipment
stipends, access to support staff and to grant writers, released time,
and technical teaching assistants
-
providing preparation time for those who are revising curricula
-
providing technical support that is "deskside" or as convenient as possible
while faculty learn, plan, and implement
-
including teachers' voices in computing and networking decisions
-
providing in-house workshops or seminars
-
acknowledging service credit for mentoring other faculty
-
assuring them that such service and media development will count during
tenure and promotion decisions as appropriate to publication, teaching,
or service record
-
providing some protection from bad student evaluations (The research shows
that instructional media development is experimental, and that incorporating
pedagogically sound technology in the classroom takes time.)
Program administrators and department chairs can help
faculty by:
-
educating deans and provosts
-
rewarding risks and certain types of "failure" in the classroom (the pilot
course)
-
rewarding training in the laboratory or participation in intensive seminars
on other campuses
-
providing departmental workshops for learning technology and pedagogical
applications
-
providing technical assistance of various types
-
creating an Epiphany Project within the department and use Epiphany materials
(http://mason.gmu.edu/~epiphany/)
-
identifying a computer specialist within the department who can coordinate
faculty efforts
Faculty can help themselves by:
-
forming campus support groups to share learning and classroom experience
(That can be two people at the start)
-
educating department chairs and program administrators about pedagogical
change and cultural shifts as a result of computer technology
-
conferring with experienced faculty outside the institution
-
participating in seminars and workshops on teaching with technology
-
learning how to interpret some perceived failure as deferred success (It
takes, on average, five semesters to integrate technology and pedagogy)
-
inviting colleagues, department chairs, and deans (not all at once) into
your classroom to observe and to participate
-
working with colleagues in Technical Services
Your colleagues in Technical Services: Meet and Talk with
them. But How?
Tell them what you want to be able to do in the classroom.
Not, "Do we have Webchat or newsgroups? But, "I'd like my students to be
able to send messages to each other that everyone in class can read on-line."
In other words, talk about the activity instead of naming the software
or platform. Technical Services may not have just that software or platform,
but they may be able to simulate it with what's available on campus now.
Please see materials prepared by Trent Batson and Dickie
Selfe in the accompanying handouts for this session. Their work informs
my own.
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