More activities and workshops to improve students’ education are in the works this year, organized by the 1976 Foundation Faculty Fellows.
Seven total faculty members including Dr. Stephanie Povlosky, Dr. Nicholas Rademacher, Dr. Alia Sheety, Dr. Dawn Francis, Dr. Melinda Harrison, Dr. Courtney Smith and Dr. Maya Gordon make up the 1976 Foundation Faculty Fellowship. Lisa Ratmansky, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, will assist the faculty in developing their projects.
“It is a program that really looks to get faculty to work collaboratively together around issues that impact engagement of the students,” Povlosky, assistant professor of business administration, said.
“Each year or every two years, we have these programs where there is money given out to groups of faculty that collaboratively work together around a particular topic or issue by the Hamilton family,” Povlosky said.
According to the program description, Peter Hamilton, director of the Foundation Faculty Fellowship, generously created the 1976 Foundation Faculty Fellowship that offered Cabrini College a welcoming opportunity to endow fellowships that support ongoing, innovative faculty enrichment.
“It is a larger grant that they provide money to faculty to really work to engage students around whatever the topic may be,” Povlosky said. “However this particular year is on leadership to get them to either understand and apply, to revise courses, or to look at courses through a different lense. But the ultimate goal is to engage students and have more of an impact for students around a topic,” Povlosky said.
Each year there are a number of full-time faculty members that apply to be considered for the foundation where they would then submit proposals describing the projects they would like to undertake focusing on that particular year’s special emphasis.
“I partnered up with Dr. Francis and we have been working together to combine social media, which is something so important to students these days with the leadership lenses and we are looking at courageous followership through social media.”
Each proposal develops new approaches to teach the existing undergraduate courses, design new or enhance ongoing courses that enrich the undergraduate experience and create new or existing campus initiatives, according to the program description.
This entire project is SEPCHE based. SEPCHE is consortium of eight independent higher education institutions in the Greater Philadelphia region where projects are created to effectively collaborate to improve the efficiency and quality of programming, access and development.
These projects will be run and produced by the faculty and administration in early Feb. of 2014.
According to the program description, the Faculty Fellows will meet once a month to share ideas, offer feedback and encouragement on each others’ projects, develop best practices and grow together as a highly collaborative working group.
“Teach through a workshop and then apply that and then hopefully to follow back up with students in a post-study to see did the study have an impact and were they able to use it in other platforms around other passions or injustices.”
Povlosky talked about which social media website they will be working with and her response was Twitter.
“You could be a follower of Twitter and also have an impact and then turn into a leader, without realizing that a lot of students are leaders. So it is really about engaging students to say you are a leader and you have followers in this social media platform and how impactful that is and how to spread that and expand your followership base and to expand to other perspectives as well,” Povlosky said.
“A lot of times students think, ‘Well no I’m just a person on here tweeting,’ but what are you really doing? Are you starting a movement? Are you letting others know about an issue or an injustice? And to really build that impact that students see themselves through a different lense, to see themselves as a leader,” Povlosky said.
Povlosky stated, “We are hoping that students gain a skill set and even more than that, we are hoping that they are going to become more aware of the skills they already have and be able to bring them out and utilize them more, and to realize that they are leaders.”
