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Critical Media Practices

Intro by Jeff Cox

• Intro on teaching and reaching visioning
• Laying out of fall work
• Role of Committee and Report

Intro to A&S Strategic Planning Process by David Brown

• History of A&S process
• Work of committee to date—draft vision statement
• Schedule for committee’s work

Comment: The Critical Media Practices program is designed to be an interdisciplinary program.  Some of the institutional barriers to interdisciplinary work that have been identified so far are:

• Budget and funding models – the current formula is based on majors –  a model based on majors plus “students in seats” would be better for inter-departmental teaching
• Cross-listing courses
• Finding space/rooms that work for interdisciplinary courses

Q. Is diversity of faculty and student body a priority?

A. Inclusive excellence is a particular focus of this process.  It is one of the topics and the conversation will be about practices, classes, pedagogy, etc.

Comment: On-campus childcare should be considered for attracting and retaining younger faculty.  Childcare costs are prohibitive on an assistant professor salary.

Q. Are we considering a model where students can create their own majors?

A. We want to discuss any idea and are open to looking at this.

Comment: We need some infrastructure and funding for cross-disciplinary team teaching and connecting all of the arts on campus. Examples – visiting artists who are not tied to one budget, getting the various graduate students together.

Comment: Space is a big concern

• Need different spaces than standard classrooms
• Need to be nearer to our co-partners, as proximity helps foster community and creativity; need places to gather, participate, and converse; where do we find out what each other is doing?
• Current disjoint model is not sustainable
• New teaching methods need a way to try new methods and see what works

Comment: ATLAS no longer seems to be available, need to get back to the spirit of ATLAS – the need and desire still exists and remains unresolved; we keep building different labs across campus with different technology, versions, etc.

• Need technological rooms built and managed centrally for collaborative use at all levels – undergraduate, graduate and faculty
• Need centralized management to cover the different technology needs, manage software versions, and fix and upgrade technology
• Different departments can contribute in various ways

Comment: We do not want “interdisciplinary” used as an excuse to create more bureaucratic and/or centralized hierarchy, for example budgets – we still need departmental operating budgets to react quickly.