Outstanding Faculty Service Award Citation for The Science Faculty Learning Community

The Outstanding Faculty Service award honors those members of our community who live out a pillar of faculty life: service to the institution.  If you look at the recipients of this award over the years, you’ll note a common thread of commitment to collaborative engagement with each other, with staff, students, and administrative colleagues.  These faculty members improve the ways in which we live out our mission and choose to do so via collaboration and engagement, by supporting each other, by lifting us up. 

Given the unique disruption of this semester that has tested our understanding of community, we thought we might depart from our traditional practice of honoring a single member of the faculty.  Tonight, we choose to honor a group of faculty, the Science Faculty Learning Community. 

The FLC has met five times a semester since the fall of 2017.  Greater than 75% of the science faculty have participated for at least one semester.  The sessions start by discussing any individual students of concern who are shared by multiple faculty members, either in courses or through advising.  Participants complete a selected reading before the meetings of the FLC and then undertake active learning approaches to more fully explore the material.  These active learning approaches include completing surveys and worksheets, and both small and large group case study discussions.  The goal is to leave each FLC meeting with actionable items for both the individual faculty member’s classroom or mentoring and for larger institutional-wide initiatives. From these meetings, faculty have implemented interventions that range from small changes in their classes, advising, and research labs through large scale initiatives, such as a new study skills course, changes to first year housing, a proposed summer bridge program, and the Science Center food bank.   

The following faculty members participated in at least 1/2 of the faculty learning communities held over the past four semesters taking into account if they were unable to attend because of the learning community meeting at the same time as they had class.  That is if they could not attend the faculty learning community a particular semester because it interfered with one of their classes then that semester’s learning communities were removed from the denominator when determining the 1/2.  Sabbaticals and not yet being on our faculty were treated similarly.