Several opportunities are closing in the coming weeks.

1) The last chance for you to send your students to the Writing Workshop is May 8.

2) The last chance to sign up to attend a virtual lecture by Cathy Davidson on Wednesday, May 4, at 7 p.m. is …. right now (by 5 p.m. on Tuesday,  May 3).

3) The last chance to register for a May Faculty Development workshop (May 18– 20) on the theme Meeting Our Students Where They Are, is Friday, May 6.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

Mental Health First Aid is an international, evidence-based program that teaches people to identify, understand and respond to signs and symptoms of mental health and substance use challenges. Just as CPR helps you assist an individual having a heart attack, Mental Health First Aid helps you assist someone experiencing a mental health or substance use-related crisis. In the Mental Health First Aid course, you learn risk factors and warning signs for mental health and substance use-related concerns, strategies for how to help someone in both crisis and non-crisis situations, and where to turn for help. If interested in taking this course, please contact Sarah Grady (sarah.grady@drake.edu) or Christine Urish (christine.urish@drake.edu). We’ll be offering a MHFA course on Thursday, June 2.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

June 13–16, 2022, the Honors Program will offer an Honors Teaching Workshop which will meet from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (or longer if participants would like) each of these days. This workshop is for anyone who is interested in teaching Honors courses in the future and would like to be part of a community working through some of the most recent work on most effective practices for student learning.  The workshop is limited to 10 participants who will receive stipends for their time.

The purpose of this workshop is multifold.  Primarily, to encourage and prepare participants to teach more courses that will count for Honors.  Additonally, to create a community of instructors and to further each participant’s thinking about pedagogy as informed by some of the most recent (as well as some of the classic) work in the field.

Honors courses at Drake are not exclusively for Honors students and many are cross-listed within departments (and thus count toward major/minor/concentration requirements).  The defining characteristics of Honors courses are

(i) Discussion dependent: in the classroom, students are primary contributors to each other’s learning

(ii) Broadly interdisciplinary: putting into conversation disciplines which are not routinely in conversation with each other – ideally, the arts, humanities, social science and natural/physical sciences are included along with attention to professional fields.  The ideal rarely happens but the goal is to accustom students to working with different disciplines even those where they are not experts and to accustom students to talking with people who do not have shared vocabularies

(iii) Capped at 20: to make healthy discussion routinely possible

(iv) Writing intensive: critical thinking and communication skills are fundamental to learners growth and we know that routine writing improves both of these.

Another unofficial common characteristic of Honors Courses is that the instructor is a co-learner with the students. Of course, the instructor is a more experienced learner and has expertise that shouldn’t be ignored, but instructors visibly participating in the practice of learning is identified by many Honors students as important to them.

Prior to the workshop, I will send out a list of possible books to read together and ask participants to identify which books they’d like to work through together.  The Honors Program will purchase for participants books that are not available electronically through Cowles.

Please email Jennifer McCrickerd (Jennifer.mccrickerd@drake.edu), director of the Honors Program, and Charlene Skidmore (Charlene.skidmore@drake.edu), assistant director of the Honors Program, to express interest or ask any questions you may have.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

You are invited to participate in a one-week faculty/staff development workshop, sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Provost/Center for Teaching Excellence, on the topic of “Responding to Student Writing in and outside of the Classroom.” This workshop will include both FYS faculty and faculty from across the disciplines, and will be coordinated by Jody Swilky.

Participants will meet on five mornings from 9 a.m. until 12 p.m. The first three meetings will be Wednesday–Friday, May 25–27. The workshop will then break for the Memorial Day Weekend and continue Tuesday and Wednesday, May 31 and June 1.

Participants will be asked to read and respond in writing to articles that address both the theory and practice of teaching writing in a variety of classroom settings. We will begin the workshop focusing on the different kinds of response one might give to student writing, depending, for example, on the purpose of the writing assignment, the academic discipline, the professor’s goals at different points in the term, etc. We will take up issues of how to help students develop their thinking within their writing, as well as ways of addressing error and other problems students have with written expression. Since any feedback faculty provide to student writing should be considered in relationship to the assignments students respond to, we will also investigate different approaches to designing assignments.

Participants will be asked to respond in discussion to the writing we ourselves produce in the seminar, as well as to sample student essays.

Participants not on a 12-month contract will receive a summer stipend in the amount of $625. All interested faculty/staff are invited to apply. Participation is limited to ten people. First priority will go to people teaching FYS for the first time. Beyond that, preference will be given to full-time continuing Drake faculty or staff, with an attempt to provide broad representation across various schools/colleges/departments.

Please register here by April 30 if you are interested in attending the workshop.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

The Office of the Provost invites faculty and staff to a retirement reception honoring and celebrating Kathleen Richardson, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Friday, May 6, from 3–5 p.m. in the north lobby of Meredith Hall.

— Drinda Williams, Office of the Provost