CILA Faculty Lunch Conversation
Tuesday, April 28
Assessing Professional Activity for Tenure and Promotion: What we learn from departmental statements for professional activity.
Rick Goedde, Economics and Management Studies, and former chair of the Tenure and Promotion Committee; Tonya Kjerland, Senior Research Analyst, Institutional Research and Evaluation; David Schodt, Economics, and CILA Director; Mary Walczak, Chemistry, and 2008 director of Evaluation and Assessment
(co-sponsor: Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation (IRE))
Mary and Tonya will present an analysis of changes in the content and form of departmental statements of professional activity. Rick, as a recent chair of the Tenure and Promotion Committee, will discuss how these statements are used by the Committee, and will comment on what we may learn from this analysis.
In his 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer noted that “…on campuses across the nation, there is a growing recognition that the faculty reward system does not match the full range of academic function and that professors are often caught between competing obligations…there is a lively and growing discussion about how faculty should spend their time.” He proposed broadening the definition of scholarship to include scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
At St. Olaf College, the expected standards for “scholarship, research, and creative activity” are specified by each department in its Statement of Significant Professional Activity. Last summer, the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) and the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation (IRE) collaborated on an analysis of how national conversations about changing definitions of scholarship might be reflected in our departmental statements. The project also provided an opportunity to explore the use of a qualitative date analysis program, MAXQDA, which has potential for many other projects faculty might consider.
Suggested resource:
1. Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990
2. Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, Gene Maeroff, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997
3. St. Olaf Departmental Statements on Professional Activity http://www.stolaf.edu/offices/doc/tenure/
4. Randy Bass, “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What's the Problem?” http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/Archives/feb98/randybass.htm
