The Mellon Tri-College Forum Faculty Development Initiatives

Description
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant to Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges to create a Tri-College (Trico) Fourm to strengthen the roles of liberal arts faculty in a changing world and throughout their changing careers. Highly selective liberal arts colleges like Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore share a common vision of an academic community distinguished by the excellence and accessibility of a faculty who are committed to a complex balance of roles as teachers, scholars, and collegial participants. We believe these roles to be related: scholarship, for example, demands a probing intellect, a mastery of methods and materials, and a sharpness of mind that serve a wise teacher in the classroom. The dialogue sustained between teacher and student, scholar and colleague, helps to clarify understanding and hone an argument. The intellectual quest moves naturally from classroom to library, from professional conference to hallway conversation, from research laboratory to late-night seminar. In our liberal arts colleges we hope that the dialectic of learning and teaching may resolve itself into an exchange where everyone learns, and the authority of teaching flows naturally from one authorized and enabled voice to another. In this conflict and collaboration of ideas we come to cherish the life of learning, and like the Clerk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, "gladly learn and gladly teach."

Dialogue is a way of life for us. Our colleges are communities which challenge and enrich, test and value, shape and sustain the rich and complex life of the mind. None of us can afford to inhabit an isolated spectrum of interest or accomplishment. Here the inquiry naturally takes place among colleagues and students, between departments, across disciplines. A poet sits down with a physicist to explore the mathematics of scansion or the poetry of photons. A biologist and a philosopher team-teach a course on the ethical issues raised by biotechnology. A symposium on the nature of the mind leads a classical philosopher to study Freud or a computer scientist to rethink neural networks. What we do best is to share our intellectual passions with students and colleagues who respond from a rich variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Exploring new fields and expanding our disciplines help to keep our scholarship strong and our teaching engaged.

The Mellon Tri-College Forum will provide a wide variety of faculty development activities designed to "widen the dialogue" about and among faculty at liberal arts colleges. It will provide opportunities for faculty dialogue not only about intellectual and pedagogical topics, but also about issues of structure and governance at the three colleges. It will address more broadly the issue of faculty development at various stages of the life course. Interconnected themes of the Forum may include:

a. Making and modeling change that will sustain the liberal arts as an energetic and influential voice in contemporary education;

b. Support for lifelong faculty learning, both in traditional scholarly fields and in innovative, transformative, often interdisciplinary research, teaching, and curricular development;

c. Continuous renewal of the intellectual community and revitalization of the ideals we share;

d. Greater flexibility in the definition and balance of factors--teaching, scholarship, and service--that shape a faculty member's role;

e. Encourage faculty from the three Trico colleges to work together on projects of common interest.

Administration of the Grant
Frances Rose Blase is currently serving as director of the faculty forum grant. The Director is responsible for overseeing all Forum programs. With the assistance of the Faculty Steering Group, the Director will establish goals for, and monitor the effectiveness of, all programming on an annual basis and coordinate adjustments as needed. The Director is also responsible for overseeing the preparation of annual reports to the Mellon Foundation as well as the report at the end of the three-year period, providing assessment of the overall program as well as recommendations for future improvement.

Advising the Director on a regular basis is a Faculty Steering Group composed of one or two faculty members from each of the three colleges. Members of the Steering Group serve staggered terms (normally two years) in order to provide continuity. The present Steering Group includes Fran Blase, Ana Lopez-Sanchez of Haverford Collge, Kate Thomas of Bryn Mawr College, Carina Yervasi of Swartmore College, Program Administrator Joanne Kimpel (jkimpel1@swarthmore.edu), and Grants Administrator Nadine Kolowrat.

For further questions about the grant please contact Joanne Kimpel (jkimpel1@swarthmore.edu).

Programs Funded by the Mellon Trico Faculty Forum Grant at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges

1.  New Faculty Orientation and Junior Faculty Sessions: A new faculty orientation session each fall, along with a follow-up session in the spring.  The fall retreat includes an opening session on academic life-cycle issues, an exercise designed to help young faculty members reflect on possible activities and commitments over a five-year period, and sessions devoted to time management and resources for mentoring.  The spring session is on a topic of the participants’ choosing. This past year we invited a recent graduate of each of the colleges to share his/her experiences of liberal arts education and to reflect on teaching practices.  Nearly all of the tenure-hire or renewable-position Tri-Co faculty participate in this program. Reported outcomes include increased effectiveness in time management among junior faculty, an enhanced sense of institutional affiliation and participation, and more regular consultations with senior faculty for advice and mentoring. 

See handouts about role-playing game and mentoring session.

2. Director’s Brainstorming Fund:  Flexibly structured, this fund has been used to convene groups of faculty with common interests. Small grants of $300-$600 have been used to organize brainstorming sessions and facilitate discussion of new programmatic ideas among more than 400 faculty members. Sets of Trico departments have met together, some for the first time ever, to share curricular and research ideas and plan future collaborations.  Cross-disciplinary groups (Women’s Studies, Hebrew Studies, Foreign-born Faculty, Creative Arts, Food Studies, math Teachers Preparing Students to Teach Math) have met to explore common interests and programs.  Brainstorming of this kind turns out to be an immediately generative as well as exploratory activity--one in which faculty shift from learning who is doing what to formulating initiatives that will further their individual research.  Such initiatives may be collaborative, or they may be solo, inspired by hearing how someone else has tackled a similar research or pedagogical challenge. The outcomes of these initial meetings range from new working groups supported by seed-grant funds to extensive collaborations between departments.

Brainstorming Grants 2007-08

Religion at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford College

Mark Wallace, Religion, Swarthmore College

"The New Diaspora: African Immigrant Religious Communities
in America"

Steven Hopkins, Religion, Swarthmore College

Religion faculty, Haverford College

Tri-co Statistics Group

Weiwen Miao, Mathematics, Haverford College

Phil Everson, Swarthmore College

Steve Wang, Swarthmore College

Inorganic Chemistry Interest Group

Liliya Yatsunyk, Swarthmore College

Sharon Burgmayer, Bryn Mawr College

Jonas Goldsmith, Bryn Mawr College

Rob Scarrow, Haverford College

Alex Norquist, Haverford College

Faculty International Group

Carola Hein, Growth & Structure of Cities, Bryn Mawr College

Roberta Ricci, Italian, Bryn Mawr College

Dianna Xu, Computer Science, Bryn Mawr College

Kate Thomas, English, Bryn Mawr College

3. Seed Grant Awards:  These awards have proven an extremely successful way to help faculty at all levels to pursue new research and/or curricular initiatives.  Over 100 faculty members have been awarded grants from an eligible pool almost double that size, indicating not only keen interest but pre-existing need; almost all proposed collaborative work with Tri-Co colleagues. The grants stimulated faculty to design concrete and focused projects that used collaborative research, working groups, joint teaching ventures, and informal and formal discussions of curricula among peer departments in the three colleges to advance their research goals and enrich their teaching.  Relatively small amounts of funding go remarkably far in this program. Reports submitted by grant holders at the conclusion of their projects show significant scholarly and curricular impact.  New labs and course-units have been implemented, new languages and technical skills integrated into existing syllabi; symposia and conferences have been hosted, and substantial scholarly output is represented by articles and books published. 

4.  Across the Career Seminar The Mellon TriCollege Faculty Forum Grant will sponsor seminars annually or biennially on topics related to life issues that affect faculty members throughout their careers. Previous seminars have focuses on financial planing, planning for children's collge years, and retirement plans. In 2008, there will be a seminar discussing care for elderly parents/dependdent adults, and future seminars will focus on issues relating to same sex partnerships, and finance management.

Steering Group for the Trico Forum

Director, Frances Rose Blase, Haverford College

Haverford College
Ana Lopez-Sanchez

Bryn Mawr College
Ellen Stroud

Swarthmore College
Carina Yervasi

Program Administrator,
Joanne Kimpel
Office of the Provost
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081

Grants Administrator,
Nadine Kolowrat
Corporate Foundation and Government Relations
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081

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