Koehler Event: Women in the Academy

Keynote Luncheon & Breakout Sessions

Thursday, September 25, 2014 11:30am-1:00pm Keynote Luncheon and 1:30pm-2:30pm Breakout Sessions
Kelly Alumni & Visitors Center, Rooms Cox A-C

Keynote and Luncheon: “Smile Work” and the Double Bind

Gender expectations socialize men and women differently, and this spills over into college classrooms. Women faculty are often expected to fill in as proxy mothers and do the “smile work” of the academy – creating a nurturing and safe environment, supporting emotional needs of students, and building community. Research on the chilly climate in some disciplines, the lack of women role models in traditionally male programs, and student socialization regarding discussion participation combine to create different classroom experiences for students and faculty alike. In this keynote presentation, Pam Eddy and Kelly Ward will discuss the influence of gendered faculty roles on the classroom experience, review tactics for student engagement, and create scenarios to provide discussion of oftentimes sensitive topics regarding gender and classroom engagement.

Breakout Session: Academic Motherhood: Managing Complex Roles

Navigating work and family within the faculty career can be both challenging and rewarding. The focus of this session is how faculty members, as parents, manage work and family within the academic career context. Kelly Ward will guide this session with findings from a longitudinal research project that looks at how family formation and career trajectories integrate throughout different career stages

Breakout Session: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Building a Research Line of Inquiry from Your Class

In this session, Pam Eddy will provide definitions of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and stimulate a discussion of how faculty might combine the actions of research and teaching to meet multiple professional needs. First, we will discuss how to build a research component into your teaching to provide information and data to create presentations and publications on the scholarship of teaching. Second, we will review how your scholarship of teaching will help inform and improve your classroom teaching. A variety of forums and outlets for SoTL research will be included.

About the Speakers

Pamela Eddy is a professor in Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include community college leadership and development, gender roles in higher education, and faculty development. Eddy is the author and co-author of several books, including

• Community College Leadership: A Multidimensional Model for Leading Change
• Partnerships and Collaborations in Higher Education
• Creating the future of faculty development: Learning from the past, understanding the present
• Creating Strategic Partnerships: A Guide for Educational Institutions and their Partners
  She was a Fulbright Scholar in Dublin, Ireland and continues her research on partnerships there. She and her husband have three quasi adult children.

Kelly Ward is Chair and Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Sport Studies, and Educational/Counseling Psychology at Washington State University. Her research addresses issues associated with academic careers including how faculty manage work and family and faculty involvement in community engagement. Her most recent book (co-authored with Lisa Wolf-Wendel), Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family, draws upon longitudinal data from a broad base of female faculty to critically examine constructs related to academic work and motherhood. She is also author of Faculty Service Roles and the Scholarship of Engagement and co-author of Developing New Faculty as Teachers and Scholars. She has held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Montana and Oklahoma State University.

Koehler Event: A Framework for Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills

Thursday, November 6, 2014 12:00 pm-1:30pm

Lunch Included
Brown-Lupton University Union (BLUU) Auditorium

There is a general consensus among educators that improving students’ critical thinking skills is a major goal of higher education. There is some question, however, regarding the extent to which the educational system has achieved success in producing critical thinkers. Faculty may believe that a) an understanding of their discipline requires that students think critically, and, therefore, b) by teaching their discipline they are teaching critical thinking. However, research suggests that traditional classroom instruction has little impact on students’ critical thinking skills.

Join us for lunch as Dr. Bill Reynolds (Stockton College) leads a workshop to help faculty become more deliberate, explicit, and transparent in their incorporation of critical thinking content into their courses. This workshop will introduce participants to a critical thinking framework conceptualized by Richard Paul and colleagues, and participants will partake in model activities that are directly applicable to their own classrooms.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to: 1) explain the impact on student learning of explicit, deliberate instruction of critical thinking in subject area courses; 2) integrate the “elements of thought” into critical thinking instruction in their disciplines; 3) use the “intellectual standards” in their critical thinking instruction; and 4) explain a coherent framework for integrating critical thinking instruction into their teaching.

About the Speaker

Bill Reynolds is Associate Professor of Social Work and Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is one of the founders and co-facilitators of the Stockton Critical Thinking Institute, which provides workshops and coaching for faculty who seek strategies and activities to improve students’ critical thinking skills. Dr. Reynolds had conducted research on ethical issues of parent decision-making and informed consent in the context of pediatric medical research, and he is currently investigating the impact of faculty training in critical thinking pedagogy on student learning outcomes.