Reflections on Faculty in Residence

by Donna Reiss

from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 28-30

Abstract

A one year VCCS faculty-in-residence in instructional technology provided many opportunities, challenges, and accompolishments.

Why should any of us leave the familiar environment of our colleges to spend a semester or two in a cubicle on the 15th floor of the James Monroe Building in downtown Richmond? Why did I? These questions seem most important a year later as I reflect on my own two semesters as 1995-1996 Faculty in Residence for Instructional Technology for the Virginia Community College System.

The opportunity to do concentrated research on an exciting, evolving aspect of undergraduate instruction was a major appeal to me. Convinced of the instructional benefits of computer communication and frustrated by the difficulty of incorporating many of these benefits into my own teaching—primarily from inadequate funding and corresponding lack of equipment, networks, and technical support—I wanted to explore other teachers’ experiences, both in the VCCS and elsewhere. Fortunately, I was able to devote much of my residency to investigations of those issues, to consultations with colleagues in Virginia and elsewhere about ways to deal with them, and to development of resources to improve information and access. And coincidentally, during my term in Richmond, the legislature provided funding that would help increase access to instructional computing across the VCCS.

The projects that would be expected of me during my year at the system office also appealed: to serve on the New Horizons conference planning committee; to visit colleagues at their campuses to see what they were interested in doing with instructional technology; to conduct independent research into the use of information technology for instruction across the curriculum; and to suggest professional development activities for instructional technology in the VCCS.

The year as Faculty in Residence brought me some benefits I had not expected as well as some frustrations I had not anticipated. Among the benefits was observation of the daily workings of the Virginia Community College System offices in Richmond, in particular of the academic Services and Research area and its Instructional Technology team. One of my first and ongoing observations was the under representation of faculty and students in many, though not all, of the initiatives generated there. I decided to add to my list of duties this refrain: “You should have more faculty representation.” As a result, one contribution I think I made during my year’s term was an increase in faculty representation on a few committees.

Serving on the New Horizons Planning Committee offered many rewards, among them the opportunity to expand the training options for instructional applications of technology at this annual conference. The CyberParlor, which I established with David Richardson, gave many people in the VCCS their first experience with the World Wide Web and led to on-site training opportunities at the next year’s conference.

Another benefit for me was the chance to visit several colleges in the VCCS. I was received graciously with tours of campuses, where my perception that the use of computers for instruction varied considerably throughout the system was reinforced. At some campuses, I met teachers using computers for interactive instruction, to foster collaboration among departments, and to deliver courses to students who could not attend campus and who might otherwise be unable to pursue higher education. In contrast, at some campuses teachers did not have computers in their offices or had outdated computers and software. I visited campuses where computers were used primarily for mechanical drill-and-practice and rarely for the kind of communication-to-learn that information technology facilitates so well. At some campuses, students and faculty had little or no access to the Internet, despite that medium’s becoming the major information resource for academic and occupational research while other campuses were already on line.

Of particular interest to me as Faculty in Residence was the time to conduct research in and to offer workshops in the use of communications technology to enhance learning across the curriculum. Every teacher with a fifteen-hour teaching load knows how little time is available for conducting independent research. This gift of time led to the establishment of several World Wide Web resource lists, including Electronic Resources for Virginia Community Colleges, Computer-Supported Communication Across the Curriculum, and Electronic Resources for English Teachers in Two-Year Colleges and Undergraduate English Studies.

The workshops I conducted at several colleges modeled for teachers the use of electronic mail and the World Wide Web to foster reading, reflection, and collaboration and as a means to guide students to think about and share their ideas about the content of their courses. Such content might include responses to the reading of case studies in education or business classes, discussions of difficult concepts in geology or geography, ideas about controversial issues in political science, or interpretation of data in statistics, or imagery in literature. At the end of my two-semester residency, I organized a system-wide workshop that brought together teachers from all our colleges and a wide range of disciplines to practice some of these techniques.

The year gave me the reward of professional development as well as opportunities to participate in System activities. By the end of the residency, having accomplished most of my research and development goals, I looked forward to returning to my campus. Although I enjoyed working with the VCCS staff, I missed the company of students and colleagues. Because my residency had given me firsthand experience with Scott Langhorst’s plans for the VCCS Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable initiative, I was better able to participate actively in that program at TCC. The VCCS supported my participation in the Epiphany Project, a national grant-funded project for faculty development in computers and writing; as a result, I was able to collaborate with the project coordinator at our campus. And the resources I had developed for Virginia teachers also were useful for workshops I gave on my campus and at other colleges in the VCCS and around the country. One of these resource lists was named among the ten best resources for computers and writing by Todd Taylor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

You are invited to contact me for more information, either through the Web, http://www.tc.cc.va.us/tcresourc/faculty/tcreisd/index.htm, by E-mail,
tcreisd@vb.tc.cc.va.us, or by phone 757-427-7364.

Donna Reiss teaches writing and literature at Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach Campus, where she incorporates computer-supported communication into all her classes and conducts classes over the World Wide Web. She founded the annual Grammar Hotline Directory and coordinated communication across the curriculum activities while director of the campus Writing Center from 1981 through 1994. Donna now is coordinator of the college-wide Teaching, Learning, Technology Roundtable. She is exploring the intersection of computer-supported communication with writing-across-the-curriculum and collaborative learning, is a consultant for Epiphany Project workshops for writing instruction, and has presented and conducted workshops at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, National Writing Across the Curriculum, Computers and Writing, and the National Writing Centers Association. She will be presenting at the 1997 Modern Language Association and will be a featured speaker at the 1998 NCTE Summer Institute on the Teaching of Literature. With Dickie Selfe and Art Young. She edited the forthcoming book Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum, and with Young she is writing a chapter, “WAC Wired,” for the forthcoming book WAC in the Next Millennium. She is editing with Dona Hickey a collection on innovations in teaching literature. In order to devote more time to interactive instruction and the World Wide Web, she is semi-retired from more than twenty years of editing and writing for regional publications.