I am here (as is Martín and Emily) for the Fall Leadership Forum. Over the last few years, the CPD—in particular Kalie, Emily, and Martín—has been working with Rick Miranda and Cara Neth to create more productive conversations. We have talked about things like salaries, first amendment in the classroom, diversity in the classroom with a wonderful student panel (more on that below). Pretty exciting stuff!
Hey, Just a couple of quick things.
First, the students who presented about diversity in classrooms here at CSU told some harrowing stories about classroom behaviors of faculty. It’s small comfort that most (but not all) of these stories came from STEM classrooms. What each of the student said, however, was that they wanted to be able to make personal connections with their teachers. The said that getting to know a little bit about us can help them reach out to us. For many of us, bringing our personal lives into the classroom is uncomfortable, but my sense is even a couple of bits about the fact that you have a life outside of the classroom with interests and passions and concerns might make coming to office hours or a short conversation after class more possible. Next time I am in a classroom, I will be more intentional about bringing bigger parts of me to that space.
Our first C4C (Conversations for Community) is this coming Monday at 4-5 in Eddy 100. Greg Head from the Career Center will give a present on how to Make Yourself Career Ready. It is a combined meeting with the Communication Club. We will have food for the students. If you have a chance to let your students know about this, that would be great! Maybe you see them Monday before the event or you want to post the event to your Canvas shell. We are totally fine with non-CMST students coming to the conversations. We might recruit a few!
ACTION ITEMs
1)      We have our September departmental faculty meeting this coming Wednesday 11:00-12:50 in LSC 300. I have attached here the agenda and materials supporting the agenda. You will see that engaged scholarship is back on the agenda. Please read the white paper produced by the Michael Carolan (CLA’s Research Associate Dean). I would love a robust conversation about this and then let’s build code that clearly specifies what we mean by engaged scholarship and how we will evaluate it for annual evaluation and for tenure and promotion. There are other important topics on the agenda as well.
2)      We have a (very nearly) clean draft of the spring 19 schedule in ARIES. Eliza, Elizabeth, and I urge you to go to ARIES and check to make sure we have entered everything correctly. Let us know if something isn’t working for you. We will do what we can. We may not be able to make requested changes at this point, but we will do what we can!
I had dinner at a rounder with a number of folks from across the university last night. Joe Parker—CSU’s athletic director—was one of my table partners. He was asking how the department was doing. I gave a multi-minute speech about how amazing all of you are. Award winning teachers, I said, and award winning scholars. Bringing the same passion, I asserted, for study of communication to the classroom. We care, I told him, deeply about all of our students including our majors who athletes. We are, I asserted, determined to be leaders in addressing achievement gaps.
It is so easy to brag on all of you! As I said to him, your achievements and commitments have little to do with me but with the amazing care and commitment of all of you, so I can brag all day long!
I hope you all have wonderful weekends! For me a hike somewhere up the Poudre Canyon tomorrow after a quick trip to the farmers market and then reading panel proposals and essays for WSCA and doing a review for WJC on Sunday.