Pathways to Presencing Fellows Project – FAR Framework

Today I spent a wonderful afternoon with colleagues engaged in the Pathways to Presencing Fellows program talking about our projects and sharing ideas. The fellowship program gives “space and time” for us to engage in ways we are enacting the Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) framework.

CPIL seeks to “empower staff and faculty to put their values into intentional practice by aligning institutional practices with the values that animate university life” (Fritzsche, Hart-Davidson, & Long, 2022). Empowering all members of our community to engage in this endeavor requires us to develop a framework for individuals in a variety of university roles to excel in their careers by identifying their core values, setting career goals aligned with their values, cultivating pathways toward those goals, and enabling them to seek support along the way.

My project for this fellowship has been the development of the Formative Annual Review (FAR) Framework. While CPIL itself is a framework, the FAR framework actions CPIL into an academic reporting apparatus that facilitates formative feedback and growth. FAR helps to balance future aspirations with current needs, goals, and requirements by helping to situate what we are currently doing within our short-mid-long term goals while also acknowledging and showing our contributions and impact to our current jobs and
unit. This is especially important for those of us in positions outside of the tenure system, and doing jobs that combine applied work on our campuses, alongside more traditional scholarly endeavors such as teaching and research.

Rather than an end-of-year, reactive (or even passive) process — reporting under the FAR framework happens at one or more of several regular checkpoints during the year as a natural part of the reflective process. Reporting occurs as a function of telling a story of where you are going, what you are doing to move forward, and telling the story about how you got to the space that you are.

My short presentation on the FAR Framework gives an overview of the main components of the framework – Critical Planning, Reflective Practice, and Context Making. These components support identifying and pursuing relevant and meaningful work, redefining what scholarly work is for us, and connecting with individual professional objectives, and unit mission/goals.

I’m in the process of developing a workshop on the framework that can introduce colleagues interested in applying it to their own work. The workshop involves engaging in better understanding your digital presence, doing long-term planning, starting a reflective practice, surfacing your process, and creating artifacts as a way of telling your story, and conducting a short-term planning process.