Bruce Burgett (IAS), Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren (IAS), Ron Krabill (IAS), & Elizabeth Thomas (IAS)
We are writing to report on our work this year as a research circle and to thank you and your office for continuing to support this important campus-wide initiative. Over the course of the year, the four of us met regularly to discuss readings and to collaborate on writing related to our co-authored article, "The Affirmative Character of Cultural Studies," to be completed and submitted for publication this summer. The article examines the relation between cultural critique and cultural practice, drawing on the authors' work on the M.A. in Cultural Studies at UW Bothell, the direction of the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students (housed in the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities), and the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective (a multi-year, inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Simpson Center). An early version of this article was presented by Bruce as an invited lecture at St. John's University (April 2006), and a different version will be delivered by Bruce and Ron at the upcoming International Cultural Studies Association meetings in Istanbul (July 2006).
Jean Eisele (Education) & Jerelyn Resnick (Nursing)
For my Research Circle, I joined Jerelyn Resnick, who helped me considerably as I focused on a program evaluation of the UWB Education Program. There have been a number of questions asked by the faculty over the past several years, and Amrit Zahir and I worked together to establish a systematized process through which to answer them. We set out to discover what relationships existed between students' application materials and their eventual career success, between their placement school and grade level and their job offer, between our mission statement and our course offerings. The faculty also wanted to know things like the percentages of people starting the minor and continuing all the way through an M.Ed. Amrit and I followed an evaluation process called Taking Stock (1997), by Bond, Boyd, Rapp, Rapahael, and Sizemore beginning by "framing the evaluation," then "defining goals and objectives." We compiled data collected previously; identified needs; strategies; resources; objectives; evaluation strategies; developed a process chart for ongoing evaluation of demographics; intern and graduate success; and program quality. Next year, we will continue with this evaluation. The next steps in the Taking Stock process include "finding evidence," and finally "making sense of the evidence." We will then begin official implementation of the process we recommend.
Diane Gillespie (IAS), Bruce Kochis (IAS), & Bill Seaburg (IAS)
We worked on several ongoing research projects. Diane worked on an article entitled "Ambivalence about Leadership: A Qualitative Study of Undergraduate Students' Participation in Multiple Small Groups" (in press). Diane and Bruce co-authored an article entitled "Conceptual Metaphors as Interpretive Tools in Qualitative Research: A Re-Examination of College Students' Diversity Discussions" (currently under review). Bruce developed the first draft of an article, "On Defining Human Rights," and will be submitting it over the summer, and is re-working another article, "The Bully Pulpit: How Presidential Rhetoric Works." Bill started on his next project, tentatively titled "Ghosts Dance in an Empty House and Other Oral Narratives by Coquelle Thompson." This is a book manuscript of historical, ethnographic, and personal experience stories--a sequel to his book "Pitch Woman and Other Stories." He has completed the editing of eight of the projected twenty-six texts in the collection.
Leslie Bussert (Library), Mark Szarko (Library), & Suzan Parker (Library)
This has been a very productive year for the librarians' research circle. One of our significant projects was co-authoring a book chapter "Interdisciplinary Inquiry through Collaboration" for the forthcoming library and information science textbook: Primer on Instructional Services in Academic Libraries. Our chapter focuses on models of collaborative teaching and learning, learner-centered pedagogies, and interdisciplinary research methods in BIS 300: Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Leslie Bussert and Mark Szarko also provided valuable editorial advice for Suzan Parker and Laura Barrett's forthcoming case study, "A Picture Worth a Thousand Words: Visual Literacy Through Critical Inquiry" to be published this summer in Teaching Information Literacy Skills to Education and Social Sciences Students and Practitioners: A Second Casebook of Applications. Finally, our work will culminate in an upcoming presentation at the LOEX of the West information literacy conference in Hawaii where our group will present on "Using Cultural Artifacts as a Pathway to Information Literacy."
Amrit Zahir (Education), Peter Littig (IAS), & Mike Gillespie (IAS)
Though our academic backgrounds and research interests are distinct, we found our participation in this research circle engaging and worthwhile because it allowed each of us, in different ways, to use our time together to initiate transitions from work previously done to new projects in research and writing. Professor Littig, for instance, explored ways of building upon his graduate work to formulate writing projects in mathematics and to begin to expand his research to include the social, historical and cultural conditions of mathematical creativity. Additionally, he continued the work begun in his thesis and is currently writing up recently obtained results on the combinatorics of the affine Weyl group associated to a compact Lie group. Professor Zahir extended her dissertation research on the role of education in cultivating human agency which focused primarily on reorganizing chapters into articles; writing conference proposals and papers for presentations that address how educational theories and pedagogical approaches can foster a sense of agency that lies embedded in relations of mutual regard. Professor Gillespie's writing attempted to take previous work in new directions, emphasizing especially the intersection of philosophy with environmental issues and art and medicine.
During the year, work related to our circle was presented or planned for the near future. Gillespie, for instance, presented "Regarding Transformation: Healing and the Perception of Integrity of Persons," one of a series of lectures in the series "Saving Faces: Art and Medicine" at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Zahir presented two papers, "Democracy in the Borderlands of Power and Hegemony: Fulfilling the Promise of Equality" at the second annual conference "Globalization, Diversity and Education", Washington State University, Pullman, WA, and "Fostering Agency and Mutuality: Human Service Professions in a Global Age" at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, "Research in the Public Interest," San Francisco, CA, and will present a third, "Teaching as Relational Work: Authority and Vulnerability in the Classroom," as a workshop presentation at the biannual International Network of Philosophers of Education conference "Philosophical Perspectives on Educational Practice in the 21st Century," University of Malta, Malta. During Fall 2006, Professor Littig will present his recent work in the combinatory seminar which is run by the Mathematics Department at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Mary Abrums (Nursing), Becky Reed Rosenberg (Teaching & Learning Center and Writing Center), & Jane Van Galen (Education)
Our work together this year focused on five main projects.
First we worked with Mary Abrums as she revised her ethnographic research to presenting the narratives of African American women for submission as a book entitled Moving the Rock. We reviewed the entire introduction to the manuscript, read particular sections, and deliberated about the organization and presentation of the book and introductory letter.
We also worked with Mary on rewriting her HRSA grant proposal for The Pacific Northwest Nursing Diversity Project. We concentrated specifically on the review of the literature.
A third project was related to the Diversity Enhancement Project in which all three of us were involved. We wrote and revised text related to Human Subjects applications and in reference to framing major themes and questions for the culminating experience for this year's fellows.
In a fourth project, we focused on our mutual interest in the analysis of autobiographical writing that we do in our classes. We brainstormed extensively on how we could use this for evaluation or publication. Becky Reed Rosenberg and Mary Abrums began the process of analyzing the four student anthologies, written in the "Women, Culture, and Healing" course to select the "best" stories for inclusion in a single anthology. We are hoping to "frame" these stories with a theoretical piece on using autobiographical writing.
Finally, Jane Van Galen completed two additional extensive revisions of a Manuscript that she and Becky first presented at the Center for Working Class Studies in Spring 2005. Both of these revisions were presented at national conferences this year, and with one final revision, the manuscript will be ready for submission for publication.
Carol Leppa (Nursing), Andreas Brockhaus (Information Systems), & Julie Planchon Wolf (Library)
We met 12 times during the 2005-06 academic year to explore issues of faculty development in relation to online teaching and learning. Specifically, our research focused on:
1. Presentation at E-Learn International Conference in Vancouver, BC in October, 2005. We presented the work of our mini online faculty institutes and discussed plans for developing an online faculty learning community.
2. We began to experiment with blogs and wikis, learning about free software and conducting mini-experiments among ourselves and with student groups.
3. Manuscript Development. We have been working all year on identifying our target journals, drafting ideas and manuscripts, and we are now working on a manuscript using free wiki software as a trial of how wikis can be used in a learning community format. Our manuscript focuses on faculty development and how the very structure of educational institutions can create significant challenges to integrating technology into the classroom. Our intention is to submit for publication during summer-06.
Sundar Balakrishnan (Business), James Miller (Business), & Gowri Shankar (Business.)
We met regularly as a research circle during the 2005-2006 academic year. The primary outcome of the meetings is an interdisciplinary research paper called "Power Law and Evolutionary Trends in Stock Markets" that is presently under review at Economics Letters. The paper combines elements of economics, finance, marketing, and mathematics. During a typical research circle meeting, we would share writing describing our own disciplines' unique perspective on issues addressed in the paper. We would then synthesize these writings into a cross-disciplinary expression of the issues. The circle meeting created an accountability and writing discipline that were crucial to efficiently completing this project. We would gladly participate in future research circles and we found the circles to be a valuable research technique that we recommend to all of our colleagues at UWB.