Announcements
- Virtual Happy Hour has been reinstated — Fridays at 4 pm. Happy hours are (IMHO) a good mix of talk about work and life (books, movies, pets). At the last meeting, as it was winding down, Zack and Tina and I had a pretty deep discussion about contradictions or paradoxes (complications?) at the heart of Inoue’s “labor-based grading contracts” and related issues about teaching (or refusing to teach) “standard English.”
- The Program Review Update is sort of on hold as the process for migrating from TracDat to eLumen is finalized. Jeremy said that I can expect the instructions for Program Review toward the end of October. I will get a survey out as soon as I know what we’re asked to do for our update. (Like last year, the survey will include everything that is relevant to the update, but all questions will be optional so that respondents can focus on the things they have insight about.)
- The Rotation Schedule has been given the thumbs up by Carla, so (last I heard) it’s in Sara’s and Kristi’s hands for update the rotation spreadsheet and Self Service. I meet with Walter tomorrow and will ask if there’s any further update — until the changes have been made, he is refusing to take credit for getting further than any of our previous deans.
- Spring 2022 schedule update – I didn’t mention this during the meeting, but I though people might want to know: this semester, only 8 of our part time faculty received courses (and one of those was offered only one course, rather than the two that she has return rights for). Seven (or eight, depending on how you count) didn’t receive a course. This is partly due to low enrollment, which is a state-wide issue; we also have a little less release time among us. However, we also have one full-timer on sabbatical. Until enrollment bounces back, assuming it does, I fear that this will be an ongoing problem.
Decision-ish items
These are items where I said, “If there’s no objection…” If you did not attend but think you do have an objection, or if you’d like to be sure we consider something before finalizing the decision, please let me know right away.
Faculty Staffing Request request
Walter sent out a call for faculty staffing requests for 2022-23. Included in that request was a strong encouragement for Art (who lost three faculty to retirement) to apply, as well as gentler encouragement for other departments with only one faculty member (Speech, Music, Foreign Language, ESL).
I would argue that English needs more faculty less than Art, for sure, and possibly for the others. I also can’t imagine that we’d appear high in the ranking process. For both reasons, I recommended that we not bother to request a position for the upcoming year. Everyone seemed to agree.
C-ID Changes for 1A, 1E, and 1C
The course descriptors for the C-ID versions of our 1A, 1E, and 1C have all changed to reduce the word count from 6000 words to 5000 words. Since C-ID descriptors are meant to include the minimum requirements that our courses should meet, there’s no problem with us keeping our 6000-word requirement.
I recommended (affirmed in a discussion with Carrie) that we not worry about revising these courses at this time. When the courses come up for their periodic update (as required by our curriculum processes), we can include the discussion about a word-count change in that more general discussion.
GE Humanities Degree “ownership”
At the end of last semester, the Curriculum Committee approached me to find out if the English Department would be willing to “take ownership” of the GE Humanities degree. We discussed this lightly at our final meeting, but didn’t have enough information to make a meaningful decision.
I emailed Elena and Lore asking for further information, and here’s my best understanding of what would be expected. (Two notes: 1) their actual answers are in a document I attached to the email that announced this dept. meeting; 2) the stuff below includes discussion from our meeting.)
- They do not anticipate that this “ownership” would require that we write Program Review for the GE degree (in part because the college has never before done Program Review for such degrees). (My own view is that such a requirement would make me vote a hard “no.”)
- Our primary responsibility would be assessing Program SLOs. I’ve sent an email requesting confirmation that we’d be assessing PSLOs (as opposed to developing them) — a question that is important because we couldn’t find PSLOs listed in eLumen yet.
- Currently, at least, “assessing PSLOs” involves mapping Course SLOs to Program SLOs. The other main question we had, then, involves what we’d be expected or authorized to do if we believed that a course’s SLOs don’t in fact map to the Program SLOs. If taking ownership is to be more than just doing grunt work to ease the Curriculum Committee’s load, then bleh — we’d expect ownership to involve a level of responsibility and stewardship.
Those present at the meeting lean toward accepting this responsibility, though much will depend on the answers to our questions. I’ve already sent an email to Elena and Lore. When I get a response, I’ll send out an email with their answers and a request for input on the question of whether or not we should accept this responsibility.
4th SLO for ENGL 1B
There are some issues with eLumen right now, so I’m not 100% sure that we haven’t already developed a fourth SLO for ENGL 1B. (Remember that the Outcome Committee’s recommendation was for us to have one SLO for each unit, and ENGL 1B just converted from 3 to 4 units.) I am, however, about 90% sure, which means I think it’s likely we’ll need to have this discussion at some point.
Shawn told us that she’s shepherding the development of an “SLO Only” workflow in eLumen so that we don’t have to go through a full Curriculum Committee process just to change SLOs. We decided that it would be fine to wait until next semester until we see how that pans out. So I’ve got this on my list of backburner items to return to next semester.
Points of Discussion
We had two things we discussed — one of which had been on the agenda, the other of which had not.
Data sent by Carla regarding completion rates
On the email that announced this department meeting, I attached a copy of the email that Carla sent, which include a screenshot from a dashboard that the state has made available to us. Aside from my bitching about data being dropped in our emails without context, three things from the meeting seemed noteworthy from our discussion (if someone was there and you found something else noteworthy, let me know and I’ll update this — I may just have forgotten it):
- On the attachment, there is a live link to the state Chancellor’s Office’s dashboard. It is a good resource, and fairly flexible. If this screenshot raises questions for you, they might be answerable elsewhere in the dashboard. It’s worth checking out.
- Though we may come in a bit under average with the completion rates overall, we are in surprisingly good shape when it comes to Disproportionate Impact. Of course, there are groups that aren’t listed (e.g., Asian Americans), and in some cases the information is challenging to understand (e.g., our “-32%” DI regarding Native Americans is hard to understand since we have so few Native American students. Is this one person? A handful? A dozen?)
- Zack noted that he had taught at both Sac City (well below average) and Sierra (above average) at the same time, and that it was notable the difference in affluence between the two schools. This insight might focus our attention less on what we’re doing (or not) and more on discovering what kinds of economic support students who are not in affluent areas might need.
Support for AB 705 changes, esp. embedded tutoring
In a recent District meeting about AB 705, I complained about my sense that we weren’t adequately supporting the shifts needed to support students, and used the issue of embedded tutors as an example. Jeremy expressed some frustration at that characterization and asked that I meet with him to discuss it.
I would like to enter that meeting truly as a representative of the department, so if you have areas in which you’d like to see more support — especially if you feel the support has been less than expected — please send me an email with that information. That way I know more than just my narrow experience.
Carrie pointed me to the requests we’ve made in Program Review for some time — computers in the classrooms, smaller class sizes, classes with tables, and so on. I will certainly draw on them. I will also be contacting a few of you — Kiara, Brian J, and Shawn at the very least — about embedded tutoring and the challenges we’ve encountered. If you have additional ideas, especially about embedded tutoring, please let me know.
[As I was writing this, and email came from Walter noting that there is some money available for classroom renovations. Feel free to deluge Walter with ideas. To his credit, he began his search for ideas in Program Review — though apparently Dr. Dotson wants us to “think broadly.”]