Critical Media Practices
Intro by Jeff Cox
- Intro on teaching and reaching visioning
- Laying out of fall work
- Role of Committee and Report
Intro to A&S Strategic Planning Process by David Brown
- History of A&S process
- Work of committee to date鈥攄raft vision statement
- Schedule for committee鈥檚 work
Comment: The Critical Media Practices program is designed to be an interdisciplinary program.听 Some of the institutional barriers to interdisciplinary work that have been identified so far are:
- Budget and funding models 鈥� the current formula is based on majors 鈥撎� a model based on majors plus 鈥渟tudents in seats鈥� would be better for inter-departmental teaching
- Cross-listing courses
- Finding space/rooms that work for interdisciplinary courses
Q. Is diversity of faculty and student body a priority?
A. Inclusive excellence is a particular focus of this process.听 It is one of the topics and the conversation will be about practices, classes, pedagogy, etc.
Comment: On-campus childcare should be considered for attracting and retaining younger faculty.听 Childcare costs are prohibitive on an assistant professor salary.
Q. Are we considering a model where students can create their own majors?
A. We want to discuss any idea and are open to looking at this.
Comment: We need some infrastructure and funding for cross-disciplinary team teaching and connecting all of the arts on campus. Examples 鈥� visiting artists who are not tied to one budget, getting the various graduate students together.
Comment: Space is a big concern
- Need different spaces than standard classrooms
- Need to be nearer to our co-partners, as proximity helps foster community and creativity; need places to gather, participate, and converse; where do we find out what each other is doing?
- Current disjoint model is not sustainable
- New teaching methods need a way to try new methods and see what works
Comment: ATLAS no longer seems to be available, need to get back to the spirit of ATLAS 鈥� the need and desire still exists and remains unresolved; we keep building different labs across campus with different technology, versions, etc.
- Need technological rooms built and managed centrally for collaborative use at all levels 鈥� undergraduate, graduate and faculty
- Need centralized management to cover the different technology needs, manage software versions, and fix and upgrade technology
- Different departments can contribute in various ways
Comment: We do not want 鈥渋nterdisciplinary鈥� used as an excuse to create more bureaucratic and/or centralized hierarchy, for example budgets 鈥� we still need departmental operating budgets to react quickly.
听
听
听