Service

Published in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa's collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981), Donna Kate Rushin's "The Bridge Poem" ends with the lines included in the header of this page. The speaker had reached a resolution: she can no longer serve others at the expense of herself. Yet, Rushin's poem does not begin as an unwavering commitment to self-care. In fact, her first lines express a surging frustration: "I've had enough/I'm sick of seeing and touching/Both sides of things/Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody." In higher education, teaching and research are privileged more than service; yet, this merit structure is often in conflict with the scholarship showing that women, particularly women of color, disproportionately take on service responsibilities and commit to more invisible "care" work when it comes to addressing institutional diversity needs and tending to students with personal life challenges. Given this tendency toward increased service expectations and knowing my own predisposition to want to be the bridge that connects and supports, I have had to reevaluate my service decisions frequently since accepting the tenure track position in 2014. I revisit Rushin's poem regularly, nearly each time I consider a new service commitment. As both caution and guidance, her words remind me that "The bridge I must be/Is the bridge to my own power/I must translate/My own fears/Mediate/My own weaknesses." Fortunately, UHCL has provided me with a supportive community of colleagues and quality mentoring that gave me room to serve my institution in the ways I believed were most consistent with my expertise and values as an educator. Coming into my position in 2014, the same year that UHCL expanded from a 2-year, upper-division institution to a 4-year, comprehensive university, I focused my service contributions in two areas: 1) on roles and activities that would help to stabilize the new core curriculum and 2) on supporting students from underrepresented communities. Below is a description of select service commitments that I believe reflect this intentional focus. This is a selective but certainly not exhaustive list. See my CV for more detail on additional service activities.

First-Year Composition Director, 2014-2018

• Helped create the Composition I and Composition II curriculum, aligned with WPA outcomes and Texas state core objectives.
• Created a direct and indirect assessment plan, 3-years of evaluations and assessment reports on file with UHCL's Office of Institutional Effectiveness; This was the most comprehensive assessment model in the first years of our 4-year expansion and has since influenced university-wide core assessment procedures.
• Secured $12,450 for program development activities: Coordinated 1-day workshop with Dr. Sherry Rankins-Robertson, then co-editor of WPA: Writing Program Administration Journal in 2014; Awarded Title III grant to pay eleven Writing Program faculty for 2-session, extended core assessment for Comp I and Comp II (2015); Awarded funding to support six Writing Faculty members' attendance at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2016), Awarded Title III grant to fund WPA Consultant-Evaluator Review (2017), resulting in a program self-study, 3-day consult review and follow-up report by the WPA evaluators, Dr. Susan Miller-Cochran and Dr. Chris Thaiss.
• Led monthly First-Year Composition (FYC) meetings.
• Supported four new FYC adjuncts.

Institutional, Regional, and Statewide Committee Appointments

• Undergraduate Education Advisory Committee, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2019-present, 3-year appointment
• Core Curriculum Committee, 2018-present
• Core Faculty Advisory Committee (CFAC), 2015-present; Chair, 2017-present— Although an ad hoc committee, CFAC is the longest-standing core committee at UHCL, established in 2015 by College of Human Science and Humanities faculty and administrators who wanted a dedicated group that would advocate for faculty teaching courses in UHCL's newly-created core curriculum. In 2019, CFAC expanded to include faculty from the College of Science and Engineering. Since its inception, CFAC has coordinated a 2016 Core Curriculum Colloquium Series that included sessions on teaching high-enrollment classes and on publishing/promoting student work; we successfully proposed creating a new Core Course Teaching Assistant position to support faculty with last course enrollments (2017); we organized a Story Core event to inform the UHCL general population of the kinds work done in the core curriculum (2019), and we are in the process of lobbying for language to be added to UHCL's tenure and promotion documents that recognizes the unique demands of teaching core classes.
• Co-Requisite Task Force Guided Pathways to Success (GPS) Initiative, 2015-2016

Student Support Activities

• Faculty Co-sponsor Black Student Association, 2014-2019
• Organizing Committee for participation in UHCL's first Houston Pride Parade, Student Diversity Equity and Inclusion Office (SDEI), 2018
• LGBTQ+ Experience "A Conversation," SDEI, 2018
• Panelist, Interracial Relationships Program, SDEI, 2018
• Administrator, UHCL Hurricane Harvey Outreach Facebook and Instagram profiles, 2017

Search Committees

• Writing Center Director, 2018
• First-Year Seminar Lecturer, 2015
• Writing Center Director, 2015
• Assistant Professor of Writing, 2015
• Assistant Professor of Writing, 2015