The Office of the Deputy Provost hosted two and a half days of faculty development at the close of the spring semester, drawing on Drake colleagues’ expertise to facilitate conversations around “meeting our students where they are.”  More than forty-five faculty and staff gathered to learn from and with each other and participated in engaged learning about who our students are (incoming first years to our graduate and adult learners), what they’ve experienced in the past two years (with COVID-19, and changes in high school education), and how our perceptions of their preparation impact how we meet them where they are in writing intensive courses, first year courses, and STEM courses.  We spent time together engaging in improvisational learning and leadership development, and had a terrific four hours of development around making our course materials accessible to all of our students by using best practices for universal course design. We were honored to welcome the executive director of Anawim Housing, one of our community partners, as part of a design clinic in Community Engaged Learning, facilitated by that office and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Talbert (SCSS).

If you missed this opportunity but would like to know more about the work we did, there are a couple of ways to plug in over the summer.

First: feel free to watch the videos of several of the sessions, posted here.

Second: you can join a learning community on STEM education, First Year Seminars, universal course design, Community Engaged Learning, and/or Writing Instruction by simply sending an email renee.cramer@drake.edu with the subject line: Learning Community [STEM, FYS, Course Design, CEL, or Writing].  Those of us who facilitated the workshop are putting together Teams units for those groups, with electronic resources for learning and engaging over the summer and a plan for fall face-to-face engagement.

Third: you can agree to be part of mentoring cohorts that my office is launching in the fall.  These cohorts will be intergenerational and interdisciplinary, and resourced for hospitality and mutual support/learning.  Each cohort will include two or three incoming faculty, and one or two faculty at each rank (including consecutive term appointments and clinical/faculty of practice).  Email renee.cramer@drake.edu with the subject line Mentoring Cohort, and I’ll be in touch as I grow this program and the training and support associated with it.

Finally: you can think ahead to the Drake University Learning Symposium—Thursday, Aug. 18, which is on the theme of Return.  Please know that we will gather as a university to talk about, think through, sit with, even make art about (and potentially, make sense of!) what we’ve gone through as an institution and a community in the past two years.  We gather with the hope that we can Return to our classrooms, our offices, our roles reinvigorated and trusting that, like our Core Values state, we really *are* all in this together.  If you’re interested in being part of planning and programming for that day—you know it—email renee.cramer@drake.edu with the subject line Planning Learning Symposium. I will be in touch in June!

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost