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Welcome to our August 2022 Faculty Success Newsletter!
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The Office for Faculty Success extends a warm welcome to new faculty joining SJSU and to our returning colleagues. We hope you had a great summer. This monthly newsletter is where you will find the latest opportunities, announcements, important dates, and more related to faculty life, so be sure to read it all the way to the very end! And don’t worry if you missed an edition, we have them archived.
For many reasons, this academic year represents a fresh start, especially as we resume some activities, such as on campus meetings, at a pace that approaches the Before Times. As a friend recently observed in Inside Higher Ed, “[M]any of my colleagues seem to be experiencing a mix of emotions as we transition back to campus for the start of a new academic year: excitement to see one another and return to pre-pandemic projects, some feelings of burnout and grief at the many losses we have experienced, and a tender vulnerability as we try to adjust, yet again, to new ways of working together.”
It is in this context that I encourage us all to practice greater self-compassion in the coming weeks and months. Take a moment to reflect: How self-compassionate are you? Well, what does it even mean? Educational psychologist Dr. Kristin Neff explains that “self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings...[and] that you honor and accept your humanness.” She has a great site with a short quiz to help you assess your self-compassion and tools for guided practice.
For me, practicing self-compassion also includes the ability to adjust my expectations and free myself from self-imposed “must”s and “should”s. Here is a very recent example:
After 2.5 years of avoiding COVID, my luck ran out at the end of July. While I recovered in time to participate in SJSU’s new faculty orientation, I still have been feeling exhausted at the end of each day. Months ago, I committed to a speaking engagement on the East Coast; now, post-COVID, I knew I did not have the energy to travel so far. Expressing my concerns to a colleague, I admitted, “I really wish I didn’t have to travel next week.” She caught me off guard with a matter-of-fact response: “Who says you have to go? Cancel your trip, get some rest!” Until she spoke those words, it would not have occurred to me to have the self-compassion to change my plans; I was overwhelmed by guilt at the prospect of letting the organizers down. Yet, as soon as she encouraged me to rest, I realized it was exactly what I would have told her if she were in the same situation. I immediately reached out to the organizers and discovered that I could give the presentation remotely. I was relieved to have found a way to both honor the commitment and my wellbeing.
If, like me, you are only human and early in your journey to greater self-compassion, it is all the more imperative to connect with friends and colleagues who encourage you to treat yourself with greater empathy, who remind you of what’s truly most important in life (#1: your health!), and who keep you grounded with their care.
Here’s an idea: What if we start the semester not only by setting ambitious, meaningful goals, but also by making a list of at least three things that we can let go of, say “no” to, or flat-out cancel, if needed? Let’s give ourselves the permission to take on this year’s challenges with greater self-compassion.
Wishing you an excellent start to your semester,
Magdalena Barrera,
Vice Provost for Faculty Success
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Updates from the Center for Faculty
Development and eCampus
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Welcome back everyone, and welcome, especially, to our new colleagues. We have had the honor of getting to know many of our new faculty hires, both tenure track and lecturer, and it’s clear our students will be learning from the best. Your dedication, care and regard for our mission, our students, our scholarship, and our community is what makes our university so transformative for so many.
Your Center for Faculty Development and eCampus is comprehensive, which means we are here to support you in teaching excellence and student success, but also excellence in all aspects of your academic assignment, including your RSCA (Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity) and leadership--as well as your health and well-being. This includes workshops and confidential consultations related to the personnel processes you'll navigate at SJSU (including annual and cumulative evaluation; range elevation; Review, Tenure and Promotion; and sabbatical/difference-in-pay leaves). You can always arrange a confidential consultation or observation, reserve some time in our faculty computer lab, or meet with our media producer to develop or refine an individual or course instructional video archive. Our eCampus instructional designers are here to support you in all aspects of your course design; they are ready to be creative and innovative thought partners with you, whether you are revising your syllabus policies to provide more grace and flexibility or learning how to make your Canvas Studio videos more interactive and engaging.
We have a long history of transformation and innovation at San José State University. Our university is routinely recognized for its quality, affordability, and for the meaningful difference we make in the lives of our students and their families (SJSU Shines in 2022). Our excellence is deeply intertwined with our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and our legacy of social justice and activism (Racial and Social Justice at SJSU; CSU Graduation Initiative 2025).
While we may be profoundly diverse, committed to equity and inclusion, and work in large and small ways to support a sense of community and belonging with and for our students, we cannot realize truly inclusive and effective learning without careful, intentional effort to strengthen accessibility. This year, we will focus our efforts on supporting you in instruction that is culturally relevant, equitable and accessible.
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Beginning Fall 2022, Ally is integrated in all Canvas courses! Ally assists faculty in creating fully accessible Canvas courses and automatically provides alternative formats of course content for students.
The SJSU 2-Hour Course Accessibility Challenge started on August 1st! Complete the challenge to earn an Ally Course Accessibility Groundbreaker Certificate and Badge! We will also enter all who complete into a Gold Point Card drawing, for award amounts ranging from $25 to $100.
Review the Challenge Form to learn more and register.
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In combination with Ally, a tool within Canvas that will provide you with feedback to help you enhance the usability and accessibility of your course materials, you may also access a new tool called TidyUP. TidyUP provides a quick way to check for and delete unused files and pages in your Canvas courses. To learn more about TidyUP and to get started using it in any of your courses, please review the TidyUP User Guide.
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The mission of SJSU Online is to expand higher education access and bachelor’s degree attainment for working individuals, with particular emphasis on Californians with some college experience but no degree, and to reconnect with students who left SJSU and have been unable to finish their degree. The importance of this mission was highlighted by a recent report from California Competes (February, 2021) that noted as many as 2.5 million Californians have completed at least one year of college, but are not progressing toward their bachelor’s degree. Moreover, without their degree we know that these potential graduates:
- earn 54% less than those with bachelor’s degrees,
- are half as likely to hold jobs in higher-paying managerial positions, and
- are more likely to be unemployed than college graduates across race, ethnicity, and gender.
The special session, degree-completion programs offered through SJSU Online will meet these potential graduates where they are, offering flexible 100% online pathways for degree attainment focused on the needs of the working learner, including multiple admission cycles, eight-week academic terms, and a per-unit tuition structure that is cost effective for the part-time learner. The inaugural SJSU Online programs opening this spring 2023 are: Anthropology, Economics, Interdisciplinary Engineering, and Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in Educational and Community Leadership. Information Science and Data Analytics will also join SJSU Online in spring, although they will continue to offer their courses using the more traditional semester model.
Faculty from these programs receive course development stipends and work collaboratively with our newly established SJSU Online instructional design team in the Center for Faculty Development and eCampus to employ evidence-based instructional design as they create effective learning environments for the online learner. The figure below highlights our vision for this collaborative process. This partnership will continue throughout the offering of these courses as opportunities for small refinements emerge, but will begin again in earnest every three years during the scheduled course refresh opportunity.
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Dr. Funie Hsu
Associate Professor,
Humanities
Dr. Hsu has received a Spencer Foundation grant to fund a project that will investigate the ways that school district policy and curricula related to mindfulness may actually contribute to the othering of Asian Americans as foreign and dangerous. Despite being labeled as secular, mindfulness draws from Buddhist practice. The literature on mindfulness in schools is abound with “apologetic” statements that attempt to distance mindfulness from its Buddhist foundation and/or rely on a scientific framing that ignores the Buddhist roots, to assuage fears of students being inculcated into a “foreign” religion. Dr. Hsu’s project examines school district policies on mindfulness and the discourse of Mindfulness-Based Program material for cultural erasure, commodification, and implicit racialized messages about Asian Americans and Buddhism. In the context of a new wave of anti-Asian violence in the US, this work will examine whether problematic racial conceptions of Asian/Asian American otherness and Buddhist foreignness are embedded in secular mindfulness education programs and policies.
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Dr. Jonathan D. Gomez
Assistant Professor,
Chicana and Chicano Studies
Dr. Gomez received a Humanities for All Project Grant from California Humanities for The Cultural Work of Poetry: A Reading, Writing, and Community Discussion Series in San José, CA. The project builds on uses of poetry in the service of community-making, democratic dialogue, and creative expression to work across academic-civic boundaries. In partnership with the San José Public Library, the Culture Counts Reading Series (CCRS) at SJSU, and other community stakeholders, the project will organize twice monthly poetry reading, writing, and discussion workshops in different spaces across the city that revolve around a body of work authored by alternating featured poets from across California. The project aims to create new democratic spaces where people from across diverse axes of identity listen and learn from each other, and practice a form of poetry in community that documents, describes, appreciates, and advances their needs, hopes, and dreams for the world they believe they are worth living in.
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August
30: RTP: Chair’s Descriptions due to candidates
September
2: RTP: Deadline to submit names of RTP candidates submitting for early review to UP-Faculty Services
5: Labor Day (campus closed)
9: Range Elevation and Sabbatical: Deadline of intent to submit application to UP-Faculty Services
12: Sabbatical: Applications due in eFaculty by 5:00pm
12: RTP: Dossiers open to Chairs/Directors for review and candidate guidance
14: CSU Online Department Chair Training and Orientation (9 am - 1 pm)
15: New combined Add/Drop deadline for students
19: LEAD Convening for Chairs and Directors, 12 pm
22: Range Elevation: Applications due in eFaculty by 5:00pm
22: Sabbatical: Chair Statement due
29: RTP: Candidate dossiers close in eFaculty at 5:00pm
October
17: LEAD Convening for Chairs and Directors, 12 pm
18: Sabbatical: College committee rankings and recommendations due
21: Range Elevation: Chair and department-level recommendations due
25: RTP: Chair and department-level recommendations due
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It’s Not (Always) the Students’ Fault: “[N]ew semesters present chances for fresh approaches to old material. They also present chances for failure as well as the opportunities that such failure brings.”
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Do you have a story, highlight, reading, or tip that you would like to share in this newsletter?
Please reach out anytime to
faculty-success@sjsu.edu
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Contact Us
Magdalena L. Barrera, Ph.D.
Deanna Fassett, Ph.D.
Jennifer Redd, Ph.D.
Follow us on our socials:
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