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.

Graduate Teaching Fellows Program Ending (Too Soon)

After 20 years, the Graduate Teaching Fellows program at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching is coming to an end this year. The GTF program is a fantastic professional development opportunity for Vanderbilt graduate students interested in faculty and/or faculty development careers. GTFs facilitate teaching consultations for graduate students, design and lead workshops on various teaching topics, and partner with CFT senior staff on learning communities and writing projects and more. GTF alumni have gone on to all kind of positions around (and outside!) academia, including several who are now working at centers for teaching and learning.

Sadly, Vanderbilt’s Provost is cancelling the program as part of an effort to ensure six years of graduate student funding through students’ home departments and programs. That’s an admirable goal, but for grad students with a keen interest in the teaching missions of colleges and universities, the end of the GTF program is a loss. For many of our GTFs, serving as a teaching assistant for a sixth or seventh time wasn’t going to improve their CV, but having the chance to work at a teaching center for a year helped launch them into academic careers.

I posted the above on LinkedIn, where I am connected with a number of alumni of the program. Several weighed in with comments about what the program and their time at the Center for Teaching meant to them professionally. Here are a few of those comments:

• “My GTF work coaching my peers and introducing international grad student instructors to the US classroom is still something that I rely on as a lawyer advising clients and coaching colleagues. The things I learned observing the way instruction worked outside my wheel house are still valuable to me when I dig into a new industry or expert report.” – Jeff Sheehan, GTF 2004-2005
• “I would not have finished my degree if I could not have balanced the disciplinary pressures with reminders of “the outside world” by working at the CfT. Not to mention the friendships I would missed out on! Time away from the department has value beyond lines on a CV.” – Jessica Riviere, GTF 2013-2014
• “my GTF experience made me a better faculty member, and now (since leaving my faculty position) made me a stronger candidate for my current role in workforce training. My CFT experience was what attracted industry employers to invite me for interviews, which was critical when we consider the lackluster state of the humanities job market.” – Danielle Picard, GTF 2014-2016
• “I wouldn’t have gotten my three jobs in academia without the CFT, which also prepared me for my current college admissions position. This is such a shame!” – Alexandra Oxner, GTF 2018-2019

And here are a few more endorsements of the program, which I’ve copied from the program webpage while it’s still available:

• “Having the opportunity to focus on and talk about teaching and best practices and become familiar with research and the literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning is an invaluable experience for any future educator.” – Lily Clairborne, GTF 2010-2011
• “In deep discussion, collaboration, and teaching practice with colleagues and mentors at the CFT, I grew as a teacher to become better equipped to tackle the social, political, and intellectual challenges of contemporary university teaching. These personal and professional experiences instilled a desire that remains with me today: to develop further as a scholar not only in my field, but also as a teacher in my field.” – Christian Ehret, GTF 2014-2015
• “Being a GTF required me to critically reflect on my pedagogical choices and to think deeply about the kind of teacher I wanted to be, which prepared me for tough interview questions on the job market and for my first year as a professor. Several search committees commented on my teaching experience and the ways that serving as a GTF made me a more competitive candidate.” – Robert Marx, GTF 2018-2019

Personally, as an assistant director and later director at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, I enjoyed getting to know, to mentor, and to learn from our Graduate Teaching Fellows. I was at the CFT for 17 of the program’s 20 years, so I worked with most of the GTFs! They added so much to the work of the CFT over the years, and I’m proud to see what all they’ve accomplished after their time in the program. The end of the program is a loss for graduate students at the university.