26, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1-3
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
WINDING down from the ADFL Seminars, I am always caught up in a whirl of ideas punctuated by remembered remarks, interjections, and bits of dialogue. That's what the seminars are all about: chairs of foreign language departments getting together to talk about what they know best, about their intellectual passions and their lifework—that is, the state of foreign language teaching, what works and what doesn't, and how to manage within the department, the institution, and the educational context of the country. Because of their positions of responsibility, they are people who can make a difference. They have the opportunity to think and act creatively in the face of the challenges that confront foreign language study today.
The program of an ADFL Seminar combines specialized discussion groups with plenary sessions at which members deliver papers; the format is intended to encourage the flow of information and permit maximum interaction among participants. The ADFL Executive Committee selects topics for both kinds of sessions from written comments collected at the past summer's meetings. Slightly over half of the essays in this issue of the ADFL Bulletin come from the two 1994 seminars, held in Monterey, California, and Rensselaerville, New York. These essays give an excellent sense of the typical range of subjects covered at the seminars. Members addressed this year's theme, Taking the Lead in Curricular Change, with papers on the uses of technology, issues about cultural elements in course work, assessment and accountability, articulation and student placement, and the responsibility of the chair in maintaining professional relationships among department members. These presentations based on written texts not only demonstrate the intellectual dimensions of the meetings but also are easily revised for publication in the Bulletin.
Much more ephemeral and resistant to written reporting is the work of the discussion groups. Designed to elicit individual points of view, these sessions provide a safe space in which attendees may informally air problems and exchange information about one of four preselected topics from which they may choose. To ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and that the theme is developed thoroughly, the groups are limited to about twenty participants and meet twice over the course of the seminar for a total of three hours. On the last day, the groups are reconfigured by type of institution—two-year, BA, BA-MA, and PhD-granting—for a third session, in which they consider issues germane to their particular settings. The time allotted in the schedule and the preselected topic make it easy for those who have never met one another to begin conversations that can then continue outside the scheduled sessions.
From our evaluations we know that the opportunities to share professional experiences with those in the same situation are some of the most appreciated the seminars offer. This chance to talk shop with other foreign language chairs is rare—for some participants, unique. Many seminar participants have no colleagues—that is, no other foreign language chairs—at their institutions. Who else shares the concerns about the management of this kind of department? And it can be lonely at the top. As John Schillinger points out in this issue, chairs must maintain the respect of but guard against close relationships with department members if they are to perform their duties responsibly.
The titles of the 1994 discussion groups—“Recruitment and Retention of Faculty Members and Staff,” “Professional Service and Outreach,” “The Proactive Evaluation of Teaching,” and “Standards for Student Outcomes”—show a common concern about evaluation, which became the subtext for the theme of curricular change. While the topics overlapped, each group was distinctive. Some groups were highly structured and others more improvisational; some reached conclusions and recommendations, while others, no less useful, left ends untied. None, however, had a script. It is the interaction among members from a broad range of professional backgrounds that makes these experiences so valuable and so difficult to capture.
The focus of the discussion group “The Proactive Evaluation of Teaching” merits a detailed discussion. The topic was clearly seen as central to the profession, since more people signed up for this group in both seminars than for any other. Indeed, participants agreed at the outset that evaluation lies at the heart of faculty accountability, which is one of the chief issues in academia today. Paradoxically, they noted that most departments have no evaluative policy or procedures in place. The participants also agreed that performance evaluations should reflect the nature and quality of teaching and that a policy of proactive evaluation should focus on ways to develop pedagogical expertise that in turn would lead to productive curricular change. They identified two problems: the first was how to define good teaching. Rather than attempt a definition (an effort that would have taken up the rest of the allotted time and would still be going on), the leaders referred participants to such publications as Heidi Byrnes's “Faculty Assessment and Evaluation” and the ADFL “Statement of Good Practice: Teaching, Evaluation, and Scholarship,” both from ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1994). But the participants saw the development of a statement delineating standards and expectations for faculty members as a crucial step; some recommended that such a statement be made accessible to department members and that it provide the basis for tenure and merit review as well as for faculty searches. The second problem was participants' lack of information about objective means for faculty evaluation. It was generally agreed that student evaluations are not enough and can be misleading. Departments, the group believed, need procedures that are accurate, informative, and diagnostically and developmentally valid for improving performance.
Discussion group members suggested a number of strategies. One of these strategies, peer review, caused considerable disagreement. Some feared it would create nothing but blame and cronyism, but others looked on visiting other people's classes and reviewing others' teaching materials as an opportunity to strengthen their own teaching and consolidate their ties with colleagues. The group did not entirely embrace or reject peer review but thought faculty members should be allowed to document their professional records in portfolios, which could contain curricula vitae, letters or personal statements of self-evaluation, student evaluations, syllabi, sample tests, writing assignments, teaching materials, and videotapes. The files could also include scholarly work and records of service to the institution and the community. These materials would be particularly helpful to the chair, who has the delicate responsibility of communicating evaluations to department members, who, though not specifically peers, are the chair's colleagues and, possibly, friends.
The discussion group at Seminar East concluded, in the words of the report by Harriet Turner and Michael Danahy, that “the conspicuous lack, in many institutions, of any established policy or procedure for the evaluation of teaching has created over all an environment hostile to good teaching” and that “fear of rebuke or reprisal among colleagues [is] the main deterrent to the implementation of an effective policy, working a definite hardship on the chair.” The group recommended that ADFL take up the issue, perhaps most effectively through the creation of a policy statement.
The directions followed by the other discussion groups, which I will try to summarize more briefly, reflected many of these considerations, although from slightly different angles, and added more to the mixture. Noting that some institutional policies and expectations do not reward teaching even when declared criteria are weighted forty percent for teaching, forty percent for scholarship, and twenty percent for service, the groups at the session “Professional Service and Outreach” grappled with new paradigms that would replace the emphasis on publishing with equal attention to all three categories in terms of intellectual work. What should be put in each category seemed an unresolvable issue. For example, a lecture might be considered research if given to a scholarly audience, teaching if given to students, and service if given to a community group. Further, the teaching duties in many institutions, which often include activities like conference planning, could be thought of as service or research. The group members reached no consensus about how to evaluate service but agreed that such evaluation would become increasingly important as communities outside the campus put pressure on institutions to bear more responsibility for the quality of life in their localities.
While in both seminars the “Recruitment and Retention of Faculty” groups reviewed the candidate screening, interviewing, and hiring processes, the discussion touched on some of the same territory covered by the evaluation and service groups. A statement of departmental goals and expectations for the faculty was recommended as a basis for selecting new faculty members and helping them meet the requirements for tenure. Most participants agreed that whatever emphasis might be placed officially on the value of teaching, publications were still the key to tenure. One exercise that produced interesting results was an effort to compare the attributes sought in job listings with the training offered by typical graduate school programs. While graduate programs equip their students well with teaching experience (usually in introductory language courses) and literary knowledge, graduate programs could better prepare future job candidates by focusing additional attention on the theory of teaching both language and literature and by offering more information on how to take advantage of instructional technology.
“Standards and Student Outcomes” was the only discussion group whose assignment was to address student, not faculty, performance. All the participants were given documents pertaining to National Standards in Foreign Language Education, the ACTFL project that is attempting to establish standards for precollegiate education. While participants thought the project important, they quickly turned to consideration of the implications of introducing standards—or goals, the term they preferred—in higher education. The group members raised doubts about whether such goals were appropriate or could be broadly enforced, since institutions are all different, but there was some support for the establishment of agreed-on performative levels that would permit easier transfer and placement of students. Participants were also eager to compare notes about how to establish departmental goals for students and faculty members, since many were involved in institution-wide assessments, usually demanded by the state.
Coming as they do on the last day of the seminar, the discussion groups by institutional type provide a chance to talk about the issues laid out in both the plenary presentations and the discussion groups. Participants from the PhD-granting group took up the problem of preparing their students for undergraduate teaching and expressed concern about the perceived disjuncture between graduate study and the future teaching duties of most of their students. They made two suggestions to alleviate the problem: course work on teaching methodology (some programs where such courses were already in place were cited) and more careful mentoring of teaching assistants. The group also discussed articulation of their programs with undergraduate programs in the light of some curricular changes, for example, the elimination of first-year language instruction in some colleges and the adoption of languages across the curriculum in others. There was the suggestion that models for PhD programs like French studies might prepare graduate students for a wider range of teaching positions. Participants also considered the responsibilities of graduate departments in admitting and training students for a profession with limited job opportunities and talked about support for graduate students in a time of constrained resources. Members of the MA-granting-institution group were also concerned with the employment of their graduate students as teaching assistants; they emphasized the need to use this experience as an opportunity for their students to learn about teaching as a profession. They commented on excessive workloads for full-time students and appropriate compensation in salary and tuition waivers. As the meeting drew to a close, conversation turned to the benefits of faculty development. Clark Atlanta University was cited as a praise-worthy example: it offers courses in French to the entire teaching staff with the aim of creating a bilingual faculty by the year 2000.
For BA-granting institutions, curricular revision, assessment, and articulation elicited the most response. The majority of participants recognized that the goals of students are changing; many are more interested in what the language will do for them than in literary study. The participants asked how they could accommodate those interests while still encouraging the study of literature; suggestions were made about approaches and texts that could widen the appeal of course readings. The discussion of different kinds of courses and students brought up the need for different kinds of assessment. While there was some resistance to measures other than course grades, most of the group agreed there was a need for creating departmental mission statements that would include student learning objectives and for devising a comprehensive plan to assess faculty, students, programs, and departments. Questions of articulation with PhD programs were again raised. This group thought it would be useful if BA-granting colleges could help shape graduate programs to include further emphasis on teaching without giving up rigorous scholarly training in literature, which most of those present had themselves enjoyed as students. The two-year-college group echoed this idea but also recommended that graduate departments advise their job candidates about the excellent opportunities at community colleges for those who love to teach and who may want to spend most of their energies in the classroom. They pointed out that jobs in their schools become available less predictably than do jobs at four-year institutions, and they were eager for suggestions on improving communication with graduate programs about openings in their departments. This group also discussed articulation with high schools; they had particular problems with placing false beginners and heritage speakers, and they discussed how to promote language study among the underprepared by offering one-credit course add-ons during or before the semester. ADFL staff members asked at both seminars what the association could do for community colleges. At Seminar West participants suggested that ADFL might help make the characteristics of community colleges better known through seminar sessions and Bulletin articles, while at Seminar Fast they made a more general request for ADFL to encourage communication between themselves and the rest of the profession.
What is to be made of so much talk? On the seminar evaluations most of the attendees profess they take many good ideas away with them, and one can assume that at least some of these come from the discussion groups, which they rate very highly. What surfaced here—concerns about articulation (mostly with graduate programs), about assessment and the need for documentation, about departmental statements of goals and expectations and evidence of accomplishment, and about curricular developments that can meet the changing needs and interests of a diverse student population in exciting and educationally valid ways—was not surprising. These issues, after all, are paramount to the profession and should be discussed by leaders in the field. What makes these discussions valuable to us is the insight they offer on how ADFL can better serve its constituency. Through these groups members have influenced ADFL programs and activities such as the choice of seminar session topics and the development of association policy statements. While much of the expression, emphasis, and conversational give-and-take is lost in writing, I hope I have conveyed the impressive commitment, energy, and engagement with which these individuals confront their challenges, from conceptual issues of literary study to concrete decisions on staffing and student placement.
Note
I would like to thank the 1994 discussion group leaders for their work at the seminars and for their reports. At Seminar East the leaders were Earle Clowney, John Cross, Michael Danahy, Elvira García, Cynthia Fox, Sylvie Debevec Henning, Gregory Stevens, and Harriet Turner; at Seminar West they were Pier Raimondo Baldini, Anne Brooks, Stephen Durrant, Jane Harper, William Langdon, James Reece, Virginia Schubert, and Donna Wilson.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1-3 |
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