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Facilitators: Christina Bradley, Biological Sciences; Thomas Cawthern, Geography and Geosciences

The Academic Caregiver Exchange at ºÚÁÏÍø will bring together faculty, staff, and students with caregiving responsibilities to discuss needs and solutions at individual, community, and administrative levels to facilitate thriving in the academic environment. This FLC seeks to create a coalition of individuals across departments, schools, and positions, who can support one another, build inclusion, and work to advise the university on best practices. There is a distinct need for broader community building among faculty, staff, and students with caregiving responsibilities and such a community can provide additional opportunities and a network of contributors. At its most basic, this FLC seeks to increase a sense of belonging in faculty, staff, and students who find themselves often isolated with at-home responsibilities and fractionated across campus by responsibilities and memberships within their own departments, schools, and professional affiliations.

Facilitators: Mike Lewis, Environmental Studies; Sandy Pope, Secondary and Physical Education

This FLC will explore the potential for using existing 1-credit courses to meet specific tagged areas in Gen Ed. A cadre of faculty is already interested in the potential of creating broader, shared, and interdisciplinary curricular experiences while reducing overall faculty workload. We will begin with existing course offerings such as the PACE205: Democracy Across the Disciplines Course and IDIS280: Changing Climate, Changing World. These courses are known to address the tagged areas of civic / community engagement and environmental sustainability, respectively.

This FLC will meet on Monday evenings in advance of those respective courses, which run 7 p.m.-8:30 p.m. throughout the semester.

Facilitators: Bibiana Koh, Social Work; Brian Flores, Early and Elementary Education; Yuki Okubo, Psychology

This is a topic-based learning community for faculty, staff, and students committed to diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, and justice (DIEBJ). The primary objective of this group is to bring folks together across the university committed to work in diversity, social justice, accessibility, mattering, equity, and belonging. This DJAM group will invoke the spirit of Ella Baker’s grassroots participatory democracy model:

“Participatory democracy uplifts voices that have been deliberately placed in the margins and seeks to organize, strategize, and mobilize through consensus building. Through meetings, reading groups, debates, and strategy sessions, everyday people were centered in their communities for the fight for justice” (Love, 2019, p. 67).

Group membership will determine the goals, time, frequency, and focus of the gatherings throughout the year.

Facilitators: Jennifer Nyland, Biological Sciences; Tina Plottel, SU Libraries

Invitees are selected based on (1) centrality of ethics to teaching and professional development, (2) leadership roles around ethics curricula across campus, (3) disciplinary diversity, and (4) engagement with existing ethics activities including the Ethics Across the Curriculum workshops. Ethics ought to be strengthened as an intrinsic component of undergraduate education at ºÚÁÏÍø. There are innumerable contemporary rationale to consider, which include: 

• Community-based research by the REACH initiative about local ethics concerns, including transparency and accountability, housing, wealth inequality, policing, and the environment.
• The prevalence of social problems such as wealth inequality, systemic racism and environmental collapse that require changes in the way we think about personal responsibility and collective action.
• Questions of transparency and access to sensitive decision points, operational knowledge, intellectual property, and other institutional barriers to public participation in decision making, highlighting an increased need for ethics training in leadership and more open government, budgeting, and administration.

This FLC will explore these topics and more as articulated by the FLC members at the first meeting of the year.

Facilitators: Tina Reid, School of Nursing; Yujia Song, Philosophy

The Health Humanities FLC brings together faculty from different schools and departments who share common interests in medicine, health, and related topics. We've had members from philosophy, communication, psychology, sociology, nursing, social work, and SU library, and we welcome new members from other disciplines and schools. The FLC is the driving force behind the Minor in Health Humanities, and since it is ultimately about faculty development, we see it as providing invaluable opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching and scholarship and highly interested in collaboration on research projects.

Facilitator: Shruti Patel , History

The objective of this FLC is to promote the development of the group members’ research agendas. This FLC will be a community of teacher-scholars where we support one another in challenges for scholarly productivity specific to teaching-intensive institutions, while keeping each other accountable in our goals and providing feedback on our respective projects. As concludes from her successful academic experiences, the antidote to faculty “vulnerability to isolation, burnout, and low morale” is structured and regular co-production with a set time/space, or what she has termed “Write Now, Right Now" (WNRN) . Elizabeth Tandy Shermer also reminds us, “it always takes an academic village to bring [one’s writing] to life” in a publication. The Humanities Writing Group FLC aims to be one such village and counter the strain of solitary work.

Facilitator: Catherine Jackson, Interdisciplinary Studies

The Interdisciplinary Teaching and Research FLC brings together faculty and staff involved in leading interdisciplinary programs and scholarship at SU. Over the past few years, the Interdisciplinary Studies programs have been among the top three fastest growing majors at SU. New interdisciplinary majors in the Fulton School of Liberal Arts are either under development or nearing curriculum approval, current majors are undergoing revision, there are four new interdisciplinary minors in the last five years (with more under development), and both the Henson School and the CHHS have developed their own interdisciplinary majors. With this increasing focus on interdisciplinarity, there is also an eagerness among faculty and staff to gather and learn more about interdisciplinarity, the impact interdisciplinary programs have on student learning and organizational structures, and the development of best practices for interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and research. This FLC engages practitioners in these conversations to apply interdisciplinary practices throughout campus.

Facilitator: Doug DeWitt, Education Leadership; Chrys Egan, Communication

The Leading the LEAD FLC 4.0 will develop and submit an SU application to The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching under the Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose.  It states that:  “Institutions that are committed to leadership for public purpose enhance the learning, teaching, and research mission of their institution by: developing leadership abilities in all institutional stakeholders; contributing to the public scholarly understanding of leadership as a public good, and understanding of the sociopolitical contexts, systems, and practices within which all leadership resides; and preparing students for lives of public leadership for public purpose in their careers, communities, and the broader society." We collectively feel it is time to pursue this initiative and work to systemically develop the leadership capacity of the organization and its individuals.

Facilitators: Derya Kulavuz-Onal, English and Mou Chakraborty, SU Libraries

This FLC focuses on exploring pedagogies of teaching in the college classrooms where there are international students. Although we acknowledge that “international students” is not a homogeneous group, we primarily define the target group of international students that we want to focus on as those who are born in another country where a different language than English is spoken dominantly, and who recently came to the United States within a study abroad program or to pursue an academic degree at the undergraduate or graduate level. In the past years, we organized several activities to build stronger connections with our international students and faculty on campus, invited speakers to share their research with us on issues related with international students and their connection and belonging on US campuses, held social events and meetings to hear more about from international students on their experiences at SU and beyond, and held campus-wide book discussions. In our fifth year, we would like to continue some of our popular social events to network with international students and faculty, engage in additional activities to further our FLC’s professional development goals and objectives, and a campus-wide multilingual event. We will continue to build more communication with international students on campus in order to explore ways of increasing their meaningful engagement and academic development on campus and continue to increase our visibility across SU campus with community building events.

For more information, please visit the .

Facilitators: Nicholas Troup, Physics;  Joseph Howard, Physics

This FLC will meet during Spring 2024.

Over the Summer of 2023, a planetarium dome & projection system will be installed outside of Henson Hall, and should be operational by early Spring 2024. We are seeking anyone interested in learning how to use this system and exploring (not just astronomical) educational and outreach opportunities this facility will offer.