Category: From the Chair’s Desk

The first week of June from the  Chair’s Desk looks very different from the first week of August. The waves of unread and unanswered email have subsided dramatically this week. The stacks of forms and papers are slowly shrinking and I can see sections of the surface of my desk. The first year in this post has revealed a lot to me about the nature of higher education, the importance of literacy and the value of people. I’m sure I already knew all of these things that were revealed this year, but this experience has enriched my worldview in ways I could have never anticipated.

Wins and Losses

In my methods classes I sometimes teach Bill McBride’s Entertaining an Elephant. The main character, a mid-career high school English teacher named Mr. Reaf, is in survival mode at the beginning of the story. A great illustration of his survival plays out in the first chapter as Mr. Reaf counts his “wins” on one had and his “losses” on the other. The goal: have just one more win than losses at the end of the day. What constitutes a win? If the class works steadily throughout the hour without disruption. Throughout the story, with the gentle guidance from an unlikely source, Reaf begins to reflect on more meaningful interactions with this students, and he ultimately finds new life in his teaching practice.

At the risk of sounding like Reaf, I find myself at the end of my first year as Chair reflecting on the successes, and some failures. I am going to choose to celebrate the successes and learn from my failures.

We’ve made remarkable progress this year as a team. Our year began with the department coming together to cast a vision of what we would like our department to be. Themes of unity, cohesion and collaboration. This really set a positive tone for the year ahead and everything that happened afterward is a direct result of the vision put forward by the department. Some of these larger accomplishments include:

• In the fall I asked each division of the department to prepare Staffing and Curriculum Priorities reports. These reports revealed a great deal of positive ideas for the department. Most notably, the literature division devised several areas of international literatures that could be added to our curriculum through future hires.
• Throughout the year we also examined our learning outcomes to see if there was, perhaps, room for consolidation and reprioritizing. The English Department wrote over sixteen outcomes eight years ago when the college developed a comprehensive program assessment plan. Sixteen is a lot of outcomes. With the help of everyone in the department we were able to propose a new assessment plan that measures five outcomes across all divisions in the department.
• The development of a new Teaching English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL) college certificate program. We are excited to begin offering the new courses in this program to advance Elizabethtown College students’ application of the language arts in such a way that will lead to meaningful life work.

On Enrollment

It’s no secret that many, though not all, private colleges will struggle for the forseeable future to determine how many students it can reasonably enroll and serve given the resources available. I have believed for some time that our English Department has the capacity to enroll more students. Throughout the year our department participated in a number of recruiting events and made purposeful attempts to invite and engage prospective students to join our community. Did it work? I don’t know, but I have one year of data to examine.

The enrollment model suggested the English Department would enroll 9 incoming students this year. As of May 1st we have enrolled 16 who have declared English or English: Secondary Education as a primary major and 10 more indicating English as a second major. I’ll take this as good news for sure.

I am under no illusion that a small bump in enrollment is going to solve all of the concerns and problems we face in the humanities in higher education. This one small positive data point is not indicative, yet, of a roaring comeback we have been looking for in the last eight years. It is, however, an indication, a sign of life, and that may be just enough to muster the energy and enthusiasm needed to make it happen again next year.

At the beginning of the year I posted a brief reflection on becoming a chair, a phenomenon that my four-year-old is still trying to comprehend. In that post I said, “I have found that I love this work. It is challenging, it is engaging, and it is important.” Now, at the end of the first year I still love this work. In fact, I think I love it more than I did in October. Are there parts of it that are unpleasant and nasty? Sure. But that is true of just about any other job out there. The positive aspects of the job, however, are truly inspirational in the most meaningful of ways.

There’s a saying that goes, “he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” It means that someone is so focused on the details of a particular project or aspect of an organization that he (or she) is missing the bigger picture. I have been guilty, for sure, at being so focused on the individual trees that I lose track of the larger mission, but I have been lucky, in some cases, to zoom out just in time and adjust my thinking to work toward the bigger goal.

A few weeks ago, while preparing for a guest lecture in a business writing class, I came across an article about a new art installataion at the National Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan called “Forest of Numbers.” The installation was designed by Emanmanuelle Moureax, and his work was to mark the 10-year anniversary of the museum by visualizing ten years into the future. You can read more about Moureaux’s work here: https://vimeo.com/203244686

I love this art installation. Its sheer size and scope are amazing. Thousands of paper numbers in a full spectrum of colors hung by hundreds of volunteers. The magnitude of this piece only amplifies its message: we are living in exponential times. There are, indeed, great waves of data streaming into, throughout and around our routines and rituals. We create data in our buying habits, our viewing habits and our seeping habits (checking my Fitbit now). And all of these data points inform our managers, the retailers we frequent and online advertisers.

I believe Moureaux has created a near perfect setting for us to consider the vastness of the human experience that we can expect to unfold in the next decade. And, as overwhelming as this may seem based on the pictures and video, I look at this installation and I think, “So what does the future hold for English majors?” And, I found an interesting answer from a very unlikely source, billionaire media mogul Mark Cuban.

Earlier in February Mr. Cuban gave an interview to Bloomberg News at the 2017 NBA All-Star Technology Summit in New Orleans. In this interview he had a rather grim prediction for the future of jobs in America. In short Cuban pointed to automation as the ultimate job killer as business owners continue to choose robots and computers over humans. When the interviewer asked Cuban what fields he would encourage young people to pursue, he didn’t recommend finance. He said,

Not finance. That’s the easiest thing — you just take the data have it spit out whatever you need. I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. And so having someone who is more of a freer thinker.

Think about that for a moment. Automation has essentially begun to replace even those who gather and crunch complex financial data sets. The processes have become so streamlined that in the near future the greatest demand is going to be for those who can look at the automated results and provide a unique analysis and perspective. In other words, those who can “see the forest” will be in higher demand than those who can only see the invidual tree.

English majors have a particular knack and training to look a large pieces of literature and develop an analysis that brings new meaning to a text.  If Cuban is right, and English majors become more highly sought after in the next 10 years, just as computer scientists were 10 years ago, then we needed to be thinking about how we teach and prepare English majors about five years ago. Because my colleagues in the Phyics Department have yet to develop a time machine, so they tell me, I am inspired to consider how we in the English Department should be changing to meet the growing need for “freer thinkers” and big data analysts.

We will need more faculty to “see the forest” if we are going to succeed.  But the good news is that I believe we are well positioned to get a bigger view of the landscape and adjust where needed.

 

 

I kissed my kids this morning as I left for another full day at the office. I love my job. In fact, I can’t tell you how long it has been since I have loved a job more than I love this one. It is a job that occupies my mind almost every minute of the business day, and sometimes beyond. But I love it. It is remarkable.

“Are you going to be at work all day and night today?” My six-year-old asks.

“No, I’ll be home for dinner. But I have a lot of meetings today, so I need to get going.” I said.

“Why do you have so many meetings?” He asked.

“That’s the life of a Department Chair.” I said.

“You’re a Department Chair? How can a person be a chair?” My three-year-old, and very observant, daughter asked.

What a great question.  How does one become a chair?

I know what she was asking, but the question posed in the voice of my three-year-old made me think, “How did I ever end up here?”

From Reluctance to Opporutity

I began my career as a college professor nearly 8 years ago. I was hired as an Assistant Professor of English at Elizabethtown College and six years later I was promoted to Associate Professor and awarded tenure.  Seems straightforward enough. I had set out to become a college professor after a brief four-year stint as a middle school English teacher, followed by a 2-year residency Ph.D. program at the Kansas State University College of Education.

In my pursuit to be a college professor I had but a few goals:

• develop great classes for students,
• write things people actually want to read, and
• contribute to my college community in a meaningful way

You will note that I never set out to be a department chair, hold leadership positions, or seek fame. I didn’t have time for these things I thought, so they weren’t even on my radar.

But shortly after I was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Elizabethtown College the topic of when, not if, I were to serve as department chair became a conversation of some concern among me and my colleagues. There was a moment where I felt completely reluctant to even consider the idea. However, I quickly came around to realize this was a remarkable opportunity that I could not pass up.

There is No Training Like On-The-Job Training.

Larger colleges and universities probably send new department chair recruits to conferences and workshops on how to lead an academic department. Moderately-sized colleges might even host a series of meetings on campus to train new department leaders, but that is not part of my experience. And I believe this is the most important aspect of daughter’s question above. How did I become a chair, I just did–without much training or mentorship I assumed the role on July 1, 2016.

I did a fair amount of reading before taking over the department. I read over the most recent external review conducted right before I was hired in 2009. The extensive report written by outside reviewers provided important context. I saw the perceived areas of growth and read the criticisms as potential areas of developement.

I also found Jeff McClurken’s “Open Letter to 2010-2011’s New Department Chairs.” I think what I appreciate the most about Jeff’s letter is that he gives the new department chair a moment to reconnect with her/his/their humanity. At the end of the day, every department chair is only human, and humans make mistakes. Almost nothing that I set out to do will be perfect, though I have committed to do my work in this capacity with pride and keen sense of quality. There is, after all, nothing easy about this job. They take away nearly half of what you love–teaching, and they give you double of what you loathe–meetings. But I have found that I love this work. It is challenging, it is engaging, and it is important.

As the journey continues throughout the year I may look back on this post and think, “Look at that starry-eyed idiot waxing on and on about how his work is engaging and important…” But until I reach that point I’ll simply say this: I have found one becomes a chair when he or she finds (or develops) a passion (or love) for his or her discipline, his or her colleagues, all students involved and the collective work of the entire unit. This has become the fuel that burns every day that I wake up to do my job, and it is the guiding principle behind every decision I make–even the difficult decisions that often keep me up late at night.

Paulo Freire once examined education as “an act of love.”  I believe this is something I need to examine in a future post about becoming a department chair.

I would first like to thank the dynamic members of my department.  In this day and age when resources are thin and the workload is heavy it is doubly taxing for a full-time member of the department to take an entire semester away from teaching, advising and administrative work. So while I was focusing for a time on my own professional pursuits, I also recognize that my colleagues have covered for me countless times.  Thank you.

To my wife and family, thank you for “going with the flow” during the last several months.  I have completely disrupted the routine of our family by changing my professional focus for a concentrated time this past year.  Thank you for giving me space to write when I needed to write.  Thank you for celebrating each breakthrough with me along the way.

I have noticed throughout the years that it is customary for a sabbatical report to open with photographs of an academic abroad.  A landscape of a castle or a middle eastern desert.  In this case, I have no photos to share. I stayed very close to Central PA region, but the work I was able to engage in was extremely revealing.

I began my work this past semester by making a short tour of roughly twenty-five different high school and middle school classrooms in the region.  Each is headed up by an Elizabethtown College alum who is now working as a secondary English/language arts teacher.  One of the many things I have always wanted to do is visit the graduates from my English: Secondary Education program, and I was elated to finally achieve this goal to see how the careers our former students have developed.

During these classroom visits I graded papers, made copies, tutored students and even taught a couple of mini-lessons to serve our graduates in their classrooms in some capacity.  From these first-hand experiences I have noticed that the profession has clearly changed a great deal from when I was a classroom teacher 10 years ago.  In a little less than a decade the expectations on our classroom teachers have doubled.  Previously, there was something of an enculturation period new teachers could use to acclimate themselves to the profession–to make small mistakes and learn from them.  This no longer exists, sadly. Teachers are now required to be polished, refined and efficient on the very first day of their new careers–that is their perception anyway.

This one realization had a profound impact in my practice as a teacher-educator.  I am now thinking seriously about how we need to be better preparing our students before they reach the conclusion of their undergraduate licensing programs.

My work with the Life Writes Project, an educational non-profit based in Harrisburg, continues as well.  While on my sabbatical I was able to write three different grant proposals from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and internally here at Etown College to fund a summer workshop for classroom teachers.  The workshop, currently in development, will host 14 fellows from the region who want to learn more about infusing personal narrative writing and dialogical teaching approaches in their daily teaching practice.  Upon completing the workshop our fellows will receive a classroom research grant that will likely fuel a number of creative, academic and instructional functions.

This work is probably some of the most important work I could have focused on in the last year.  You see, the classroom teacher is squeezed to create a great deal of time for standardized test preparation. These priorities often require specific approaches and methods.  But what the Life Writes Project does is work directly with classroom teachers to help them develop new ways to meet the standards for their disciplines using engaging dialogical methods. We also have some privately raised funds to help those who need additional materials, supplies or technology for their classrooms.  We have opened up a process through which any teacher can apply for an instructional grant.  These grant dollars are gifts we can award to deserving teachers who desperately seek to improve their craft.

As I only have a couple of minutes remaining, and I see another colleague cueing up her powerpoint presentation, let me leave you with these final thoughts.

In my sabbatical I saw tremendously powerful growth in the people we have taught.  They are out there carrying the mission of Elizabethtown College into the classrooms across our state and our region.  Their work is extremely difficult, but each has squared his or her shoulders to take on everything that is asked of them and more.  We should never loose heart because the people we meet here at the college are taking the work we do to new and exciting places in the world.  Be proud, friends.  We are doing a great work.

 

Webmaster’s Note: Dr. Skillen has never been approved to take a sabbatical from his teaching, advising and administrative responsibilities at Elizabethtown College. In fact, he has never applied for this kind of opportunity. The achievements described here are complete fiction.  However, the goals and aspirations discussed here are truly real.  They live and burn in Dr. Skillen’s heart.