Wesleyan has recently confirmed our commitment to the scholar-teacher model by rationalizing and improving our policies and procedures for tenure and promotion and faculty recruitment. In 2014-2015, the faculty Advisory Committee reviewed the official statement of tenure and promotion expectations for each and every department and program that houses tenured faculty lines with a faculty appointment. The revisions ensure that each statement explicitly covers all expectations related to teaching, scholarship, and colleagueship at the time of tenure review and at the time of promotion to either associate or full professor. The revised statements are all available on the Info from the VPAA webpage, and the appropriate statement is provided to every new tenure-track faculty hire.
As immigration and equal opportunity laws have changed in recent years, we have updated our policies and procedures for faculty recruitment. We have instituted a template job description for faculty positions, and all postings now go through a formal review and approval process to ensure that the posting meets all of the new requirements including the current EEO statement, a description of the minimum requirements for the job (usually Ph.D. in a specific field), and a list of basic job duties. The Office for Equity & Inclusion is involved in every hiring process to ensure that a diverse applicant pool has been sought and considered, and that search committees participate in anti-bias training.
In 2015, Wesleyan added a new category of faculty: Professor of the Practice (PoP). This new position is focused on teaching, with no set research/scholarship expectation or sabbatical accrual. Over the previous few years, we found that we were hiring more multi-year visiting faculty, as well as renewing contracts for faculty who were initially hired for one year. PoP appointments begin with a three-year contract, which provides greater stability for the instructor and greater continuity for the institution than previous visiting positions have provided, while allowing greater long term curricular flexibility than tenure-track lines provide. So far, we have hired fourteen Professors of the Practice: eight at the assistant level, three at the associate level, and three at the level of full professor. Most of these hires were conversions of ongoing visiting faculty into this more stable position.
Wesleyan is in the process of expanding the faculty overall by adding a total of 14 new lines—6 new tenure-track lines and 8 new PoP lines—over the next four years (confirm after board votes in May). This expansion will enhance our teaching strength by helping to reduce class sizes and providing more opportunities for students to work with faculty on capstone projects and research experiences. It will also allow for more courses in new areas and for more experimentation with new pedagogies.
Wesleyan has been paying more attention to pedagogy over the past few years. In 2014-2015, Wesleyan launched a new Center for Pedagogical Innovation and Lifelong Learning (CPI). The Center’s mission is to support pedagogical innovation at Wesleyan in all its forms. Specific goals include incubating pedagogical innovation, building capacity among faculty and instructional staff for delivering innovative instructional materials, strategies, or programs, and helping with assessment of student learning outcomes. The Center includes the Office of Faculty Career Development, which is run by a faculty director; Instructional Design and Development, which has three full-time staff, plus a part-time administrative assistant; and Pilot Programs, which is faculty-driven but staffed flexibly depending on specific pedagogical grants. In the past two years we awarded over $24,000 in twelve innovation grants to fourteen faculty who requested funds to support innovative pedagogy in their classes.
The CPI Instructional Design staff have worked with over thirty faculty (across the divisions) in developing new project-based or active learning versions of courses. The CPI will continue to encourage a broad range of faculty to experiment with such student-focused pedagogical practices and to design inclusive instructional strategies addressing all learners, including those with cognitive or physical disabilities (Universal Design for Instruction). CPI staff have also worked with over 35 faculty who wanted assistance implementing a mid-term assessment during a course, wanted to consult regarding course design, or wanted to integrate new technology into their courses.
Through Pilot Programs we have experimented with an intensive semester in which students take each of the four courses (a full semester load) consecutively in 3-week intensive blocks. Faculty get to see how their courses can be run along project-based lines over an intensive 3-week schedule; students get to experience what it is like to focus exclusively on a single course over a three week period. This experiment has led us to consider incorporating more short-duration courses into our curricular structure on a regular basis.
Another pilot program underway is a digital storytelling project. Here we are developing an infrastructure of student support for student video projects similar to the infrastructure that currently exists through the Quantitative Analysis Center for students working on data projects. Once we have a set of students able to support and mentor students to create digital projects, faculty will be able to integrate these kinds of pedagogical projects into courses across the curriculum in place of some of the traditional papers or presentations students currently produce.
Advising is seen as a crucial part of teaching and learning at Wesleyan, and we have been making significant efforts in this area as was discussed in detail in Response to NEASC Area of Emphasis – Advising.