Midcareer Faculty Development Workshop, 2011

  • Event Date: Fri Feb 18th 2011 – Sun Feb 20th 2011
  • Registration Deadline: Fri Jan 14th 2011 Registration Closed
  • Facilitated by: Jeanne Narum, Director of the Independent Colleges Office and Karen Pearson, Consortium Director

Are you past your tenure review but not yet a full professor? Are you in a bit of a professional slump? Has the blush of tenure faded? Are you buried under additional administrative duties such as department chair or committee service? Do your courses feel routine and in need of an injection of fresh ideas and energy? Has your scholarship lost the momentum it had right around tenure-time and is your latest manuscript or research project gathering more dust than new results? Well…if you answered yes to any of those questions, then we’d like to invite you to attend a workshop hosted by the Midstates Consortium at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL from February 18-20, 2011.

This workshop will bring together associate-level faculty, who want to re-energize, re-imagine and re-invest in their academic life. Jeanne Narum of the Independent Colleges Office (ICO) and Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) is going to facilitate this meeting with Karen Pearson the Consortium’s Director. Jeanne and Karen teamed up for a similar career-planning and visioning workshop for mid-career faculty three years ago at Macalester College.

Participants will be asked to complete one pre-meeting assignment/interview and come ready to discuss their conversation. Much of the rest of the weekend will be spent in a combination of individual time for reflection, working within a cluster and open discussion with the full group. We’ll focus on helping the participants develop an individual strategic professional plan for the next 2-3 years of their career. These plans might be related to their teaching or scholarship, but will certainly have specific goals and actions for the next few years.

At the end of the weekend each participant will leave with:

  • a concrete action plan for some aspect of their professional lives or the next 2-3 years.
  • an enlarged network of colleagues at other Consortium campuses with whom they might collaborate or use as sounding boards.
  • strategic planning tools they can share with colleagues on their campuses.

Augustana College has a lovely, wooded, hilly campus in Rock Island, IL, one of the quad-cities right on the border of Illinois and Iowa. Rooms have been reserved for participants from out of town at the Holiday Inn in Rock Island for Friday and Saturday nights. Please let us know if you do not need lodging. The workshop will begin Friday evening at about 5pm with an opening session and a working dinner. We’ll wrap up before lunch on Sunday so participants can travel home that afternoon.