VKP at YSU

The Visible Knowledge Project has been very successful at YSU.  The ideas and activities involved in VKP have enriched the intellectual and classroom lives of the participants, offered opportunities for faculty outside of the campus team to reflect on their own teaching, and contributed to various developments not only in the American Studies, which hosts VKP at YSU, but also in team members’ home departments.  A list of specific activities follows, but we want to emphasize the ways that VKP has influenced us and our colleagues. 

While we have spent some time exploring uses of technology in the humanities classroom, which is one of the key focuses of VKP, we have been most engaged by the ideas about student learning and the nature of knowledge that have formed the focus of a significant part of our conversations as a team and our work with our colleagues.  This discussion has its roots in the VKP Summer Institute in 2001, in Alexandria, where we first heard about John Bransford’s model of the challenge cycle and began to pursue a conversation about the differences between expert and novice understanding in our fields.  This idea, together with conversations with the director of YSU’s Reading and Study Skills Center, helped us explore a wide range of ideas about how students learn, what learning looks like, and how we could apply our increasing understanding of learning to our work as teachers.   

Every member of the team, regardless of the focus or progress of our individual research, has taken ideas from our conversations into her classroom and her research.  For Melissa, for example, this has generated new thinking about how learning styles and motivation affect student learning in foreign language courses, and it has prompted her to revisit her discipline’s already well-defined rubric for language proficiency.  This reflection raises an intriguing question, one that may lend itself well to the existing model of scholarship of teaching and learning:  if we and our students understand at the beginning that they will not achieve language proficiency in the typical course series, then what is the purpose of taking a foreign language?  And how do we address these alternative purposes in the language classroom?  For Stephanie and Martha, these issues of student learning have guided their development of a series of projects for American Identity, a general education course in the American Studies program.  The common language that we have developed for thinking about student learning has facilitated their collaboration and allowed Melissa and Sherry to serve as critical friends, reviewing samples of student work and exploring ideas about how to align learning goals, assignments, and assessment of student learning.  The discussion of student learning has helped Sherry deepen her work on students’ learning in interdisciplinary courses.  Among other things, it has helped her analyze more carefully approaches that didn’t work, theorize new strategies, and make the process of analyzing student work more manageable.  

We have involved our colleagues in many of these conversations, whether informally as visitors to our regular VKP meetings or as participants in workshops we’ve offered.  In the three years that we’ve been meeting, we have had about 10 guests, including colleagues from Education, Foreign Languages, Economics, Music, and Business.  We have engaged about a dozen of our colleagues in a series of discussions about disciplinary knowledge and the differences between how we, as faculty, think about knowledge in our fields and how our students see the key ideas of the field.  
At the same time, we have used the ideas generated through our discussions to contribute to course and program development in the programs and departments related to VKP.  The History Department has significantly revised its sophomore-level American History courses, incorporating more active learning, more primary materials (including those available on-line and in digital form), and placing more emphasis on helping students develop a sense of the structure of history.  These ideas emerged from Martha’s experiences with VKP, and she was able to cite research and national trends in the field to help persuade her department to accept these changes.  In addition, the skills she learned in VKP have helped her analyze available data to show that the revised course contributes to improved scores on the social studies portion of the Praxis exam.  In the English department, we are beginning a project to create a common document that will identify an historical framework and a key set of terms for use in introductory and upper-division courses, a model based largely on our VKP group’s conversations about how experts in the field rely in part on structures that allow us to access information easily.  It is likely that within the next few years, Melissa will have to draw on this knowledge to defend the general education requirement that students take foreign languages.  Certainly, our work in VKP has also contributed to the American Studies Program.  Three of the four members have studied American Studies courses, and we have applied ideas from VKP to our courses in a variety of ways.  This year, we are developing a new assessment plan for the American Studies as a whole and for the American Identity course (that Steph, Martha, and Sherry all teach).  Everything we’ve learned in VKP will help make that process easier and more effective.  This year, we are also working together in various ways on the development of a new MA in American Studies.  VKP has helped to create a stronger sense of cohesiveness within that program, and it helps make this exciting new degree possible.

During the past three years, YSU has seen significant growth in institutional support and interest in scholarship of teaching and learning.  While we do not claim that VKP is responsible for this growth, we do believe that our work has contributed to it.  We have helped to build faculty interest in  SoTL, engaged our colleagues and our departments in conversations about teaching that are grounded in research (not just anecdotes),  and served as an example (to the Board of Trustees and other campus groups) of existing faculty engagement in SoTL.  

Our work together has also had a strong affective result.  VKP has allowed us to function as an informed and engaged teaching support group.  But it has also allowed us to develop a strong network that has helped us both personally and professionally.  We have cheered each other on in moments of success and encouraged each other through struggles.  During the past three years, we have experienced the death of parents, a divorce, family and personal illness, and we have supported each other through these difficulties just as we have through good times.  That sounds trite, perhaps, but the result matters.  

Activities

Presentations
Unitarian Universalist Church (Martha, Melissa, Steph)
YSU Board of Trustees (Sherry)
YSU Teaching Lunch Series (Everyone)
American Studies colloquium (Everyone)
College English Association of Ohio (Steph)
American Studies Association (Sherry)

Workshops
Three sessions on disciplinary knowledge and expertise (Everyone)
Lunchtime workshop on strategies for making good use of technology, guest presentation by Bret Eynon

Individual Awards
Melissa – 2002-2003 Sabbatical, 2003-2004 Reassigned Time (awarded through college-level competition)
Stephanie – 2003-2003 Sabbatical 
Martha – appointed to National Council on Social Studies Review Board
Sherry – named Ohio Professor of Year for 2003