January 2008 Archives

As a member of the provost search committee, I've been quite busy with search activities in the past month.  Yesterday the first of our four highly-qualified candidates was in Hattiesburg meeting with faculty, staff, students, and community members.  The day before he was on the coast meeting with similar groups.

This search is as important as any we will engage in for the next several years. Our new provost will have to lead us through the details of strategic planning, developing and implementing new budget processes, expanding both programming and enrollment at our Coast campuses, and advancing our research and creative profile!  It's a daunting, and yet invigorating set of challenges that lie ahead.

Nearly seventy well-qualified individuals applied for the position, and the 23-member committee did a great job in narrowing the field to these four talented and highly-experienced candidates. I encourage everyone to review the candidates' resumes on the website, participate in the open sessions, and provide feedback using the gold "Impressions" form. The committee will share the outcomes of these campus visits with the president, so participation at all levels is critical!

Two significant recent announcements highlight the important role our college's faculty and students play in community service:

First, the Service-Learning Faculty Fellows program, founded by Speech Communications professor Dr. Richard Conville, has been awarded a MS Institutions of Higher Learning "Best Practices" award.  The program, led by Conville, helps introduce faculty from across the university to the concept of Service Learning and helps them incorporate hands-on community service learning opportunities into their courses.

Second, two students in our American Humanics program, led by Assistant Professor of Sociology Dr. Ann Marie Kinnell, have been awarded Next Generation Nonprofit Leaders Program scholarships. These competitive awards recognize students for their prior service and help ensure that they can complete nonprofit internships and other requirements to earn certification under American Humanics. 

The College dean's office has, as one of its four goals for 2007-2008, the creation of more opportunities for our students to gain valuable practical or hands-on experiences relevant to their academic or career goals. We've been pleased to offer modest financial support to American Humanics, and moral support to the Faculty Fellows program and to similar initiatives elsewhere. We are open to new ideas and new initiatives that can continue to move our college forward as a leader in experiential and service learning opportunities.  

I've spent a fair amount of time the past few weeks preparing the materials for a new online course I will  teach this spring (PS 301-State and Local government). While I have taught the course numerous times as a face-to-face section, imagining it in the online realm was at first something of a challenge.

I've always taught it with a requirement for a high degree of student political involvement; we've  attended city council meetings and planning commission hearings, gone to county court to listen to voir dire, and required students to do community service at local agencies.  Additionally, my classes typically included a handful of guest lectures by local and state representatives; these were persons I felt were in the best position to convey the realities of state and local politics to my students.

Introducing the world wide web into my thought processes, and spending lots of "google-time," I've discovered that I really don't have to change the way I orient my course. Students can watch taped meetings, can download agendas and minutes and can read all manner of source documents. Of course, they can still be required to do some of the same observation activities on their own. As always, I'll require them to complete writing assignments to help them think through how the material in their textbook relates to the experiences and observations.

I'm actually getting excited about the prospect. I'm eager to hear how my students feel about these observations and experiences, and I'm curious to find out how both their learning and their engagement with the subject matter is impacted by the format. 

As more of the faculty consider integrating dynamic web content into their courses--whether in fully online sections or more traditional face-to-face ones--it will provide us with important opportunities to examine our pedagogies and the biases we bring to the learning process. As always, it is especially good, I think, if these ideas are shared with colleagues and refined. And so I'm hoping to schedule a few special meetings to facilitate such conversations in the next few months.