Scaling and Sustaining Change and Innovation: Lessons Learned From The Teagle Foundation's "Faculty Work and Student Learning" Initiative

This guide distills key lessons learned about scaling and sustaining innovation from ten projects involved in the Teagle Foundation's "Faculty Work and Student Learning in the 21st Century" grant initiative. The grants were awarded in 2012-2013 to consortia and collaboratives of colleges (not formally a part of a consortium) as part of this initiative. The key focus of these grants was: how can and should faculty work change in response to the changing conditions—indeed, the changing nature—of undergraduate liberal education? And, how can liberal arts colleges maintain a quality, highimpact learning environment within a changing and challenging environment that requires innovation? The grants generally focused on ways to use technology and alter faculty roles/work in ways to address external challenges and maximize new concepts.This guidebook aims to help campuses overcome common barriers as they embark on significant initiatives and provide a blueprint for a smoother pathway through the complex process of change

Presidents Leading: The Dynamics and Complexities of Campus Leadership

While the work of academics—teaching, research, and service—is the core of an institution, they need someone who can attend to the following: 1. Manage their finances and budgets and provide key services, such as payroll, and health and retirement benefits 2. Serve as a go-between to the scholars from different disciplines and coordinate individual course offerings to create a coherent curriculum 3. Act as a conduit to outside councils, government agencies, alumni, donors, and communities when representing, as well as defending, the academics 4. Steward, but more importantly increase, the available financial resources 5. Oversee facilities and ensure their maintenance 6. Serve periodically as a target for academic ardor and aggression The nature of this position requires a single individual to be a leader, academic, planner, mediator, politician, advocate, investment banker, conductor, showman, church elder, supporter, cheerleader, and, of course, manager. These roles, and many more functions-including providing leadership; setting institutional strategy; planning; financing; and ensuring compliance with multiple regulations, laws, and policies (and politics)—are the domain of a campus head, a position labeled president or chancellor, vice-chancellor or rector, depending on the continent and system

The Dynamic Tensions of Service Learning in Higher Education: A Philosophical Perspective

Senior faculty in a peace and justice program at a small liberal arts college reject the efforts of a student affairs professional to help the faculty connect their teaching to practice through service activities in the local community. One faculty member openly wonders how out-of-class activities such as community service have anything to do with interdisciplinary theories of social justice. A director of an office of community service is upset because the provost has decided to develop a Center for Community Service Learning. The director sees this as an attempt to usurp the good work of student affairs and feels that attempts to engage faculty will be difficult, if not futile. A department chair in an American Thought and Language program at a large research university asks an associate professor being considered for promotion to full professor to explain in writing to the promotion and tenure committee the relevance of his research on service learning. Both the chair and the committee are apprehensive about service learning as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry. And finally, a local social service agency in a university town has had its till of student volunteers after repeatedly receiving complaints from clients about patronizing attitudes expressed by the students

The Interesecting Authority of Boards, Presidents, and Faculty: Toward Shared Leadership

This chapter explores the leadership dynamics of universities through the lens of governance and the three groups of actors that play dominant roles — trustees, presidents, and faculty.3 While we recognize the important contributions of students or staff,4 this chapter focuses on the three groups most consistently influential and that are part of the formal governance structure. In addition to describing the leadership of boards, presidents, and faculty, it explores the organizational and environmental contexts of leading in the academy, select theories of leadership that pertain to higher education, and the intersection of faculty, trustee, and administrative influence

Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States

For too long in higher education, different worker groups have conceived of themselves as separated by distinct, even competing interests. The isolation between groups reduces communication, fosters unawareness of common interests, and hinders their ability to effectively collaborate in solidarity, as does the divided and largely independent structure of the unions and bargaining units representing them. Without greater collaboration and solidarity, members of the higher education community are less able to resist the harmful trends that have been transforming the sector over the previous decades, subjecting them to increasingly similar working conditions and distancing higher education from its student learning, community service, and research missions. We propose a combination of elements from anarcho-syndicalist and social justice organizing approaches, centering intergroup solidarity and a flexible commitment to shared missions, as ways for higher education workers to build greater power and have a greater influence on the transformations occurring across higher education

The Gig Academy: Naming the Problem and Identifying Solutions

Over the past few decades, workers (staff, faculty, postdocs, graduate students) in higher education face working conditions and employer relationships that are increasingly similar and exploitative. Higher education has seen the implementation, spread, and refinement of technologies of labor exploitation that have proliferated in the broader economy often termed the gig economy. In this article, we posit and articulate the features of the Gig Academy – a unique iteration of the gig economy. We first describe the shifts in employment structures that make up the Gig Academy. We then describe how this transformation of the academy has eroded community, shared governance, collective action and student experience and outcomes. Lastly we describe some ways that higher education change agents can resist this trend and help to turn the tide working within new forms of collective action. The ideas set forth here are reviewed in greater detail in our book – The Gig Academy

Improving Sign Recognition with Phonology

We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition accuracy on the WLASL benchmark, with consistent improvements in ISLR regardless of the underlying prediction model architecture. This work has the potential to accelerate linguistic research in the domain of signed languages and reduce communication barriers between deaf and hearing people

Learning for Organizing: Institutional Reading Groups as a Strategy for Change

Organizing for learning is an important emphasis for AAHE, and rightly so. Colleges and universities should make institutional changes that promote better and more effective learning. Our experiences — from a national perspective at the American Council on Education (ACE) and ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education and from a campus-based perspective at Portland State University — suggest that before institutions can organize for learning, they must first learn for organizing