The Deep Dive

The story of my sabbatical: an inconvenience rightly considered: (AKA "Passport: Beyond the Adventure" – A Forty Year Reflective on "At-Risk" Youth & Families in a Therapeutic Wilderness Program.)

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. - G.K. Chesterton

“Passport for Adventure” was a therapeutic wilderness program for “pre-delinquent” and “at risk youth” that ran from 1972 through 1993. Early in my social work career I had been a senior guide / counselor in this program. In 2017 I learned that all of the original program files, including initial screening assessments of all participants, as well as of control groups still existed. This created an almost unheard of opportunity to conduct a 40 year follow-up / outcomes study of programs participants.

In the first week of the sabbatical study, a significant “inconvenience” to the completion of this project emerged.

Starting AY 2018-2019, Park began using Faculty180 for full-time faculty annual performance reviews and professional development plans. There will be several learning opportunities during the spring semester to learn more about the new system.The first of these sessions was a Deep Dive hosted by FCI on March 29, 2019.

The session covered:

• How to add activities for AY 2018-19 to generate the annual accomplishments report;
• How to access and complete the self-assessment; and
• How to access and complete the PDP.

Please contact faculty180@park.edu with any questions on the new system.

Many instructors in the quantitative disciplines struggle to find meaningful ways to engage their students with discipline-specific writing. In fields traditionally dominated by numerical information, writing, at least as it’s long been construed, has often taken a second seat. However, every discipline, no matter how number-heavy, has its own writing conventions, and with a few aptly chosen exercises, students can begin to learn those conventions and become skilled writers in their chosen fields.

This presentation will provide instructors with a number of “out-of-the-box” writing activities that are adaptable to a variety of classrooms, including those in quantitative fields. Some of the activities are short, “low-stakes” exercises that students can complete in minutes and others are lengthier, multistage projects that help students develop a deeper understanding of disciplinary writing as a process.

Faculty across all stages of the academic career often struggle with how best to manage the increasing work demands placed upon them in relationship to their ever-changing demands in their personal lives. Too often, however, we focus our attention only on pre-tenure women faculty with young children, assuming that this is the only group that needs attention and assistance. Work/life management is important to faculty members across the career span, for both men and women, and for faculty in both tenure and non-tenure positions. This talk examined how a range of faculty, with different identities and in different phases of the career, manage work and life responsibilities. Special attention was paid to how institutions like Park University could facilitate work/life integration through policy and practice.

This Deep Dive presentation will explore the resources and tools available to you on MyPark, and will also provide a more in-depth explanation of the unique advising system here at the university.

Amanda Bryant, Coordinator for Student Advocacy, discussed what to do when you are concerned about a student.

Types of concerns that were addressed included, but were not limited to:

• personal issues affecting school (illness, homelessness, family concerns)
• financial concerns (can’t afford textbooks, financial aid issues, military benefits)
• academic struggles (academic integrity, disability services)

 
Participants learned how to respond to these issues and what resources are already in place, including forms Park has for some of the processes. In addition, participants understood why it’s important to be “involved” in what’s going on in a student’s personal life.