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MY CONSIDERATIONS of faculty assessment in the first volume of Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department emphasized three points: (1) conceptualizing assessment in terms of professional growth instead of as adversarial judgment; (2) turning assessment into a joint and mutually supportive activity among faculty members, the department, and the institution; and (3) contextualizing assessment by balancing local criteria and expectations against idealized standards holding in the discipline at large.
In the intervening years a gratifying professional consensus has developed on the above points, and that consensus has given rise to additional salutary developments. In particular, department chairs can now benefit from sophisticated levels of awareness in the professional literature regarding assessment-related matters. From those sources I single out three interrelated areas: the nature of assessment processes and procedures, the changing rhythms of faculty members’ professional lives, and the mutuality of rights and responsibilities in faculty assessment. All three reflect a new awareness of the situatedness of faculty assessment, of the possibility of diverse interpretive stances, and of the increasing preference for participatory and dialogic approaches.
Just as we are finding that assessment of our students’ learning a foreign language gains from a “multiplism” perspective (Shohamy), so too does faculty assessment benefit from differential approaches and their interpretation under varying conditions and purposes of use. For example, as a way of helping teachers address the bewildering options in foreign language testing, John Norris recommends matching testing alternatives with intended test use and makes three general recommendations: focus on assessment and not on tests, specify intended test use, and evaluate the outcomes of assessment themselves. Therefore, key questions are: Who uses a particular assessment? What information should the assessment provide? Why, or for what purpose, is the assessment being used? and, What consequences should the assessment have?
Similarly, faculty assessment cannot remain a decontextualized unitary event but must have a readily discernible purpose beyond the act of evaluation itself. Currently the teaching evaluations rendered by students are more akin to student satisfaction statements than they are to an assessment of a faculty member’s teaching ability. But, Paul Trout states,
should the goal actually be to improve instruction, then several steps should do the trick: have smaller classes, periodically solicit written comments from students, offer fewer lectures and more group discussion, create a professional development program [. . .] and develop a university system that rewards classroom rigor at each stage of an instructor’s career. (60)
Multiple perspectives would also recognize that different stakeholders in faculty assessment have not only different goals but also changing expectations throughout any given faculty member’s career. As a consequence, different formats for gathering and reporting information are called for, and different levels of importance are being attached to that information at different times. While including multiple perspectives may sound cumbersome, humanities departments and their faculty members should be particularly receptive to emphasizing the interpretive nature of assessment and the consequent need to determine who or what we are interpreting. At the most basic level we know that teaching, scholarship, and service take varying amounts of faculty time and require highly different forms and levels of expertise at different stages of a career. Our assessment practices should explicitly acknowledge this well-known fact, which would be a step toward creating more equitable and useful forms of assessment and perhaps also a way of evaluating our assessment practices themselves.
Variable assessment practices would also acknowledge two other realities in contemporary higher education: increasingly longer careers and increasingly more diversified societal needs to which the academy is being called to respond. Among the possible sources and manifestations for such shifts and, by implication, among the possible consequences for faculty assessment which we should take into account are these:
The Origins for Shifting Priorities
Both professionally motivated and contextually motivated shifts in priorities can be identified. The growing need to incorporate technology is particularly significant because it requires that faculty members make a considerable investment of time and energy if they are to achieve the levels of expertise that result in valuable contributions to teaching, scholarship, and service. Likewise, departmental, institutional, and professional demands often require extended years of commitment, with little to show for the work other than the satisfaction of having attended to an important problem in an appropriate fashion.
A Shift in the Content of Our Field
Another kind of change arises from shifts in the content of our field, with interdisciplinarity or the development of new subfields requiring the freedom to pursue new research approaches and methodologies and, ultimately, even new pedagogies in ways that the limited traditional forms of assessment often do not accommodate.
Shifting Venues or Forms of Evidence
Content shifts in scholarship tend to manifest themselves in new preferred venues and forms of evidence. But even without such shifts we might examine closely the value we currently accord to certain forms of scholarship, particularly the single-author, peer-reviewed journal article. Depending on the stage of a faculty member’s career, the work involved in jointly writing articles (which has so often been looked down on), editing topically focused volumes, presenting invited papers that result in a seminal overview, preparing solicited encyclopedia and handbook articles, and producing textbooks might merit an altogether reconfigured value in assessment practice.
Shifts in the Weighting of Our Primary Assessment Areas: Teaching, Scholarship, and Service
Although two important MLA reports have specifically suggested new ways of thinking about teaching as well as about service, scholarship continues to be privileged, most particularly in tenure decisions. Yet one could equally consider growth in teaching ability to be an important indicator for tenurability, a consideration that would require institutions and departments to make explicit the place teaching has, the design mechanisms that are in place for evaluating it, and the support they provide for faculty development in materials creation and pedagogical innovation (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching). Similarly, once service is accepted as an instance of “intellectual work and academic and professional citizenship” that is “fundamental to the academy’s mission and well-being” then even service can become a critical assessment criterion, particularly for more senior faculty members (MLA Commission on Professional Service 162).
Perhaps one of the most contentious developments in faculty assessment to have arisen in the years since my earlier report is that of posttenure review. While state systems have taken the lead in instituting this process (e.g., the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Georgia), the issue itself has caused much concern throughout higher education (see esp. “Post-Tenure Review”). Understandably, the fear is that this form of faculty accountability has the potential for being particularly damaging to academic freedom, faculty scholarly creativity, and collegiality. Yet, even the highly skeptical stance taken by the AAUP acknowledges that it is possible for posttenure review to be conducted in a fashion that protects these faculty rights and privileges while assuring the worthy goal of maintaining the quality of education. After an extensive consideration of arguments in favor of or opposed to posttenure review, the AAUP concludes that, by and large, “well-governed universities already provide a variety of forms of periodic evaluation of tenured faculty that encourage both responsible performance and academic integrity” (65) and that instituting a comprehensive posttenure review may therefore be “a costly and risky innovation, which may fail either to satisfy ill-informed critics on the one hand or to protect professional integrity on the other” (66). However, if modes of assessment can be found that avoid managerially imposed reasons for and procedures in assessment and that assure a central role for faculty members “in a form that properly safeguards academic freedom and tenure and the principle of peer review, and if funded at a meaningful level, it may offer a way of evaluating tenured faculty which supports professional development as well as professional responsibility” (66). A number of state posttenure guidelines I have reviewed indicates that this is in fact the direction being taken.
And that brings us full circle. What at my earlier writing was a desideratum or a novelty is now readily acknowledged, namely, that situated, participatory, and dialogic faculty assessment should be a cornerstone for supporting and allocating resources for faculty development. Although the following statement by Kathleen Hart focuses on teaching, it applies equally to all areas of faculty work: “We think that a well-conceived system of performance appraisal is an important first step in the process of discovering what conditions and circumstances motivate individual faculty members to modify their teaching in ways that can improve learning” (1). Reflecting those purposes, portfolio assessment has overcome its original experimental forms and has been well honed through the extensive research and foundation efforts concerned with the improvement of postsecondary education. Four components stand out in a well-devised portfolio plan (see Hart 2):
With such an approach we would have arrived at a system of assessment that should go a long way toward enabling faculty members to reach their full potential in teaching, scholarship, and service.
Hart, Kathleen. “Faculty Performance Appraisal: A Recommendation for Growth and Change.” Accent on Improving College Teaching and Learning. Natl. Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. University of Michigan, 1989.
MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching. Draft of report. 11 Oct. 2000.
MLA Commission on Professional Service. “Making Faculty Work Visible: Reinterpreting Professional Service, Teaching, and Research in the Fields of Language and Literature.” Profession 1996. New York: MLA, 1996. 161–219.
Norris, John M. “Purposeful Language Assessment: Matching Testing Alternatives with Intended Test Use.” English Teaching Forum 38.1 (2000): 18–23.
“Post-Tenure Review: An AAUP Response.” Academe Sept.-Oct. 1998: 61–67.
Shohamy, Elana. “Evaluation of Learning Outcomes in Second Language Acquisition: A Multiplism Perspective.” Learning Foreign and Second Languages. Ed. Heidi Byrnes. New York: MLA, 1998. 238–61.
Trout, Paul. “Flunking the Test: The Dismal Record of Student Evaluations.” Academe July-Aug. 2000: 58–61.
University of Georgia. Office of Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. Policy for Review of Tenured Faculty. Aug. 2000. 19 Dec. 2000 http://www.uga.edu/vpaa/polproc/revtefac.html.
University of Texas at Austin. Post-Tenure Review Documents. 13 Apr. 2000. 19 Dec. 2000 http://www.utexas.edu/admin/evpp/faculty/post.tenure/index.html.
University of Wisconsin. Faculty Handbook. Madison: U of Wisconsin, 1994.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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