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Editor’s note: “Notes from a great conversation” continues with members of the Academic Futures subcommittees, who are updating the campus on their early work to identify key themes and transformative ideas submitted by the campus community during the fall semester.

This week features associate professors Fernando Rosario-Ortiz and Alexis Templeton, writing on behalf of the faculty success subcommittee.

Associate Professor Fernando Rosario-Ortiz

Associate Professor Alexis Templeton

As Academic Futures articulates our collective campus mission and guiding values, as an institution of learning and discovery, how do we ensure faculty can succeed in all of their roles?

First and foremost, we recognize the faculty experience should be one of continual growth amid changing contributions to the university. How do we best design practices that are aligned with such development? How do we provide enough flexibility in how we approach our research and educational enterprises that allow faculty to succeed across that entire spectrum, depending on their intentions and needs? How do we codify this flexibility and impact in our promotion and tenure processes, as well as in our faculty governance?

One area that has emerged through our discussions is the need to start with our hiring practices. We need to hire faculty who are prepared to immerse themselves in the specific mission of the University of Colorado and embrace our expectations of teaching, scholarship, service, mentorship, diversity and willingness to engage in long-term growth. It is essential to recruit and develop diverse faculty, who can then, for example, develop diverse learning environments in a way that is integral to our educational, research and creative missions.

A second area that has resonated with us strongly is the need to establish a developmental framework for teaching excellence. Several Academic Futures white papers have identified the need for a clear understanding of what excellent teaching looks like, with a focus on learning outcomes and research-based best practices in teaching.

We need to comprehensively support faculty in their efforts to understand how to educate diverse learners, become better mentors, develop courses that promote student engagement and create a community of fearless, active learners. Fortunately, there are numerous high-quality and effective programs to assist faculty in our educational mission on campus. The next stage of our campus evolution is to develop a coherent framework for faculty development that effectively draws together these innovations.

Several of the fall discussions, as well as the white papers, spoke to the artificial distinction some make between teaching and research. It is clear we need to look at both enterprises more holistically and recognize the ways in which they are intrinsically linked. Our academic structures need to reflect and value this synergy.

When connecting our research and teaching missions, it is also imperative we look beyond the tenure-track and instructor rank faculty to the large cohort of research faculty on our campus. Many of these research faculty work closely with our undergraduate and graduate students and train them in the practice of scholarly work. In many ways, these researchers are not fully integrated into the educational mission of our campus, and many of them would like to be. We, as a community, would benefit enormously if we could find a path for them to do so.

The ideas put forward through the Academic Futures conversations in the fall and through the white papers have begun to paint a picture of how deliberative thinking with regard to faculty success could enhance the university as a whole. We’re looking forward to continuing these discussions through the spring, further clarifying how these values might shape Academic Futures’ exciting destinations.

Fernando Rosario-Ortiz,
Associate Professor; Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering

Alexis Templeton,
Associate Professor, Geological Sciences