Lakers Ready

Division of Academic Affairs

May 20, 2024

Lakers Ready is sent by the Office of the Provost
to faculty and staff within the Division of Academic Affairs

In this issue of Lakers Ready

Laker to Laker

Dear colleagues,

I feel safe positing that Historian Will Durant’s observation that “people spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last six thousand years” [or on the next 200 years I would add] applies well to all of us, especially during the busiest times of the academic year. So, I hope that, irrespective of what you do in the summer, you do take time to shift gears from the most urgent to the most important, and from taking care of others to also devoting time and resources to your own needs, and your well-being and thriving. I realize that for some of our staff, the summer is the busiest time; if that is you, apologies for the anachronism.

Speaking for myself and for the rest of the Provost's Cabinet, we are deliberately “spending” time this summer on the last two years and on the coming two to five years. Student success and building capacity for student success remain major areas of focus.

Students Success: When we started and named this newsletter in August 2022, we named it Lakers Ready to pay homage to and embrace the concept of Student Readiness advocated by Tia Brown McNair et al in their book Becoming Student Ready: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success. The key notion is that, historically, universities have been designing their curricula, their pedagogies, and their services around a relatively fixed mental model of a college student. This mental model implicitly and explicitly defines a set of intellectual, emotional, cultural, and social expectations. Students who meet these expectations are deemed “college ready” and are expected to succeed. The book argues that these expectations reinforce and perpetuate inequity and exclusion. Furthermore, these expectations increasingly diverge with the changing needs and realities of incoming students. The idea that students must meet the college readiness model puts the onus exclusively on them. Being Student-Ready consists of adopting a more embracing approach, where colleges invest in a more inclusive and broader model of who can be successful in college and deliberately design for this model. That is the concept of college-readiness that we adopted as Laker-Readiness.

Becoming Lakers Ready is a hard and brave undertaking. It requires significant time-consuming work from all of us and a deliberate collaborative lift from every division of the university, especially Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Enrollment Management, and Information Technology. I am proud of the enthusiasm with which this community of faculty and staff have embraced this concept and taken on the challenge to make this aspiration a reality. We are in the midst of the labor-intensive and emotionally demanding phase of re-examining, discovering, and revising our Lakers’ model. We are redesigning curricula, pedagogies, and student services to be Lakers Ready. We are developing capacity to be Lakers Ready.

Developing Capacity for Growth and Transformation: This past year we shared several resources we have added in Academic Affairs and in Student Affairs to meet the changing needs of students. Last summer, we added 140 course sections to accommodate the growth. Unit heads and deans added teaching resources accordingly to meet these teaching needs. Most of these positions were filled by adjunct faculty and faculty teaching overloads. During this past academic year, we worked with the deans and unit heads to transform the short time hires into longer term ones and to add tenure-track and affiliate positions by approving more positions for open searches. This was the first year since 2019 that we grew the faculty size. In total, we added a net of 58 new faculty positions, by converting 23 visiting faculty to affiliates, adding 17 visiting faculty, 15 affiliates, and 26 tenure-track. These positions were distributed based on requests made by the deans, expected retirements in the next two years, and data about projected growth by Fall 2025. BCOIS increased its total faculty size by 9, CECI by 4, CHP by 5, CLAS by 20, KCON by 2, Libraries by 2, PCEC by 4, and SCB by 12. Not included in these numbers are the KCON faculty positions funded by Corewell. Again, for many years now, any position added to a college was strictly a reallocation of a position freed up elsewhere.

In the process of growing capacity to meet the incoming student population we continue to work with the deans to develop an allocation model that is as transparent and predictable as possible and that remains consistent with our mission, our identity, and allows us to make strategic decisions for the future while preserving the financial health of the university.

Have a great week everyone,

Fatma

Faculty Opportunity

The Office of the Provost is accepting applications for a faculty member to serve as a departmental sponsor for Academic Affairs on the Workday Project Management Group. In this role, the faculty member will represent the faculty voice in the development of Workday Student including, but not limited to:

In addition to attending relevant meetings on curriculum and advising, sponsors are expected to attend the All Leads and weekly Cross-Functional Meeting (2 hrs. per week). Meetings will begin in July. There is also activity occurring outside of these meetings that may involve time commitments, such as input on specific design decisions, change management topics/presentations, representing the project to other campus leaders, testing, etc. The weekly workload commitment will vary depending upon the phase of the project. 

The faculty member in this role will receive one course release for the 2024-25 academic year with the intent to continue through Workday Student Go Live in winter and fall 2027. To apply, please submit a cover letter (no more than one page) and vita to Mary Albrecht (albrechm@gvsu.edu) by Friday, May 31. For more information or questions, please contact Ed Aboufadel (aboufade@gvsu.edu) or Cathy Buyarski (buyarskc@gvsu.edu).

Faculty Voices and Recognitions

As reported recently in Forum, more than 65 percent of Grand Valley faculty members participated in the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) Faculty Job Satisfaction survey, well above the average of other institutions in the same survey class. As a result, $15,500 was donated to the GVSU Student Emergency Fund.  Moving forward, GVSU expects to receive the findings from COACHE at the end of July, which is later than originally expected, and the timetable to share results will be revised. That revision will be the first work of “version 2.0” of the COACHE Steering Committee, whose members are listed on the GVSU COACHE website.

Earlier in 2024, University Academic Senate (UAS) took up a recommendation from the Faculty Personnel Policy Committee (FPPC) to add a passage in faculty handbooks on unintentional biases, and to expand the statement provided to students before completing the LIFT surveys at the end of the semester. The passage is now included as SG policy 3.07.E, and the following statement will appear beginning this spring when students begin each survey:

This survey will take 5-10 minutes to complete. Your response is voluntary – you may leave some or all of the questions unanswered. All answers are confidential. No identifying information will be shared with instructors or teaching assistants, and results will not be released until after instructors have submitted their grades to the registrar.

At Grand Valley, we value student feedback on your instructors and the instruction you receive. Your feedback will be read by your instructor, the Department Chair, faculty colleagues, and the Dean. Your instructors use that feedback to improve their teaching and the classroom experience.

Grand Valley recognizes that student evaluations of teaching can potentially be influenced by unintentional bias based on identity – including, but not limited to age, color, disability, height, weight, familial status, marital status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sex/gender (including gender identify and expression), sexual orientation, veteran or active-duty military status.

Please write the course evaluation by actively focusing on your experience with the course (e.g. what you learned, the assignments, the in-class material) and not unrelated matters (e.g. instructor’s appearance).

This will help to ensure that the feedback your instructors receive will be meaningful and useful as they work to improve the educational experience.

Thank you for your participation.

Engaged Scholarship

Jonathan Wessell, Senior Adjunct Instructor of Geography and Sustainable Planning, published Experiential Learning in Geography: Experience, Evaluation and Encounters. This book provides insight into the importance and impacts that experiential learning has in geographic education by examining the experience, the methods of evaluation, and the encounters that students have shared about their experiences. Click here to learn more about this book.

Updates

GVSU’s Academic Affairs was the Presenting Sponsor of the 2024 Confluence Thought Series in April. The two-day event brought together entrepreneurs, founders, educators, and other community members from across West Michigan to engage in thoughtful conversation and high-level networking. Participants visited GVSU's X>STUDIO and futurEDlab downtown, which is part of the Blue Dot Ecosystem located in the Consumers Energy Building, to learn about digital twins, extended reality (XR), and augmented reality (AR). Senior AVP Ed Aboufadel was a panelist for “Understanding Social Barriers: Building an Ecosystem Based on Connection”.

We are in the planning phase of the renovations and addition to Eberhard Center to create the Blue Dot Lab. Campus leaders for the project are Karen Ingle (Facilities Planning) and Ed Aboufadel (Academic Affairs).  Earlier in 2024, an architectural team was selected, and a project Building Committee was appointed by the Senior Leadership Team. In the past month, focus group discussions were held with various stakeholders, which provided a rich set of creative ideas for the project.  Continued work this summer will lead to a programming allocation plan that will inform the design phase, and construction should begin by the end of the summer of 2025.

Important Dates and Links

Previously Shared Events 
5/29 - Faculty Sabbatical Proposal Workshops - 10:00 a.m., via Zoom

Dates
6/18-19 - Examinations: 1st 6 weeks
6/24 - Classes Begin: 2nd 6 weeks
8/5-6 - Examinations: 2nd 6 and 12 Weeks

Links
Lakers Ready - repository of this weekly newsletter and a link to submit content
Laker Family Network - repository of the monthly newsletter sent by the Division of Student Affairs to GVSU parents/supporters

During the summer, Lakers Ready will be published biweekly: May 20, June 3, 17, July 1, 15, 29, and August 12. Weekly distribution will return on August 26.