Associate Dean, Fulton School of Liberal Arts, Salisbury University | cnegan@salisbury.edu

     In 2020, I enthusiastically agreed to serve as the new Associate Dean of Salisbury University’s Fulton School of Liberal Arts, the largest SU academic unit, home to 18 academic majors, 40 minors, three graduate programs, and a post-Baccalaureate certificate. In addition, Fulton plays a vital role in General Education for nearly all undergraduate students, and connects to the community through the visual and performing arts, civic engagement, public lectures, and international outreach. I accepted this position in early March 2020. What could possibly go wrong? By Spring Break, two weeks later, there was no denying the global pandemic of COVID-19 as all university members were sent away from campus to continue the essential operations of a university from home.

     My first official day on the job was July 1, 2020, where my inaugural task was to coordinate strategic support for faculty to teach in the pandemic. During that summer, faculty were recovering from an unanticipated spring “pivot” to mandatory distance learning and were anxious about how to prepare for a fall semester like no other. Several SU Fulton School department chairs, led by Tim Stock (Philosophy), Emily Story (History), and Dave Johnson (English), proposed a new program committed to supporting our faculty and students during this challenging time for university instruction. Our Dean, Maarten Pereboom, was in full support as he recognized the need for faculty to collaborate on learning and sharing best teaching practices. The Fulton Remote Teaching Specialists (RTS) program was born.

     We anticipated that the fall 2020 semester required strong, networked, pedagogical support for faculty members to adapt their teaching successfully using masked face-to-face, hybrid, remote, and online models. We understood the necessity to re-envision distance learning, especially in our unique disciplines like glass blowing, ceramics, music, theatre, dance, and media production, but the challenge loomed too in our humanities and social science programs at a university that values our small class sizes, high impact practices, and close teacher and student engagement.

     The RTS program began with 15 faculty from different programs in the arts, humanities, and social science, who agreed to: 1) identify a useful resource for socially-distanced teaching, 2) lead one 90-minute applied workshop on what they learned, 3) act as a point of contact throughout the year for department faculty on instructional challenges and solutions, and 4) participate in fall colloquia to assess where we were in our instruction. During the process, we also created an open access RTS MyClasses site that has over 100 users, 35 teaching tools A-Z, 461 resource files, and 30 hours of workshop recordings.

     The 15 RTS faculty were selected to represent their liberal arts disciplines in a variety of instructional modes, using self-selected techniques or technology. Each received a $1000 stipend for their training, time, and needed resources. The RTS leaders trained from July 7 through August 5, starting with an orientation with Fulton Dean Maarten Pereboom, Associate Dean Chrys Egan, and Instructional Design and Delivery Liaison Haley Cristea. RTS met remotely with guest trainers Lee Krahenbuhl, who was then Interim Dean and Program Director of Stevenson University’s Online Program for Communication Studies, Business Communication, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Professional Studies; and Mei-Yan Lu, Professor of Educational Leadership and former Acting Chair of the Instructional Technology Department and Associate Dean of the College of Education at San Jose State University. RTS also met as a cohort to discuss their progress, questions, and concerns.

     The RTS 90-minute experiential workshops were offered the week of August 10-14, 2020 from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm in the same mode as the teaching demonstrated: masked face-to-face (F2F), hybrid, remote, or online. The schedule below indicates faculty member, department, planned fall teaching mode(s), and workshop topic.

• Monday, August 10: Fulton Remote Teaching Specialist Workshops
  • 9:30-11:00 am: Aric Snee, Art, F2F and Hybrid: Capturing Studio Demonstrations and Facilitating Group Critiques in a Hybrid or Online Class
  • 12:30-2:00 pm: Michael Desper, Theatre and Dance, F2F and Hybrid: Virtual Performance Strategies for the Virtual Classroom
  • 3:00-4:30 pm: Brittany Foutz, Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution, Hybrid: Conducting Online Simulations

• Tuesday, August 11: Fulton Remote Teaching Specialist Workshops
  • 9:30-11:00 am: Tim Robinson, History, Hybrid: Students Teams, Primary Documents, and Accommodations
  • 12:30-2:00 pm: Louise Anderson, Music, Hybrid: Engagement: Flipgrid, Zoom Polls, Google Forms, PollEverywhere
  • 3:00-4:30 pm: Catherine Jackson, Interdisciplinary Studies, Hybrid: Hyflex Classroom Activities and Discussions

• Wednesday, August 12: Fulton Remote Teaching Specialist Workshops
  • 9:30-11:00 am: Yujia Song, Philosophy, Hybrid: Getting the Most out of Canvas
  • 12:30-2:00 pm: Paul Scovell, Communication (Community and Professional), Hybrid: Canva v. Spark
  • 3:00-4:30 pm: Ryan Sporer, Sociology, Remote: Social Annotation with Perusall Co-founder and CEO Brian Lukoff

• Thursday, August 13: Fulton Remote Teaching Specialist Workshops
  • 9:30-11:00 am: Adam Woodis, Modern Languages, Hybrid and Online: Canvas Conference Features and LightBoard Usage
  • 12:30-2:00 pm: Jen Cox, Communication (Media and Journalism), Hybrid and Online: Zoom, Panopto, and Kahoot
  • 3:00-4:30 pm: Lilia Dobos, English, Remote: Enhancing Community and Writing Experiences

• Friday, August 14: Fulton Remote Teaching Specialist Workshops
  • 9:30-11:00 am: Echo Leaver, Psychology, Remote: Padlet and Professor Presence Online
  • 12:30-2:00 pm: Shane Hall, Environmental Studies, Hybrid: Managing Sensitive and Controversial Topics
  • 3:00-4:30 pm: Sarah Surak, Political Science and Environmental Studies, Remote: International Exchange and Education of Global Students

     Although the Remote Teaching Specialists were from the Fulton School of Liberal Arts, we opened the workshops to all SU employees, having 416 attendees over the weeklong sessions. In addition, we hosted a follow-up hybrid practice class with 35 faculty to try out the classrooms’ new Zoom cameras, while simultaneously speaking to people on Zoom and in the classroom, while wearing masks. Recall how unfamiliar this experience would have been for almost all teachers in August of 2020, especially in a mask.

     Throughout Fall 2020, we held three 90-minute RTS colloquia Zoom sessions with panelists grouped by allied disciplines. We invited all SU members plus local public-school teachers to attend. In early October, RTS faculty in the humanities explored what we had learned so far, and what we wish we had known earlier, over the first month of the semester. Our social science faculty considered our teaching innovation progress in November, including remote international education. In December, our arts colleagues shared innovative practices for visual and performing arts, and multimedia education.

     Although the official RTS training concluded in December 2020, RTS faculty remained available to support teachers throughout the academic year. Additionally, four of us decided to share what we learned by presenting at teaching conferences, including Salisbury University’s Teaching and Learning Conference, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore’s Innovation in Teaching and Learning Conference, and the University System of Maryland’s Silver Linings Conference. I served as the panel chair for these sessions, which featured Paul Scovell highlighting Canva and web portfolios, Brittany Foutz illustrating case studies and student engagement, and Echo Leaver exploring Padlet and professor presence. These conferences allowed us opportunities to trade ideas and experiences with different faculty.

     One lesson I believed that most faculty learned about preparing to teach in the pandemic is that we worried about some of the wrong things. Our initial anxieties, beyond the health risks of the pandemic itself, were not knowing how to use the new (or new to us) teaching tools and techniques needed for distance learning, and how the educational content would translate in alternate teaching modes. Initially, we worried about not embarrassing ourselves in front of our students as we attempted to use the Zoom camera and features, but we became pros (except for occasionally still forgetting to unmute ourselves). Yet we discovered that you can direct an avant garde online theatre production and a creative symphony orchestra concert with masked players. You can teach modern languages online, including instructing French from SU to students in China. You can, and perhaps now prefer, to have your whole class read and annotate articles together online.

     We started off fretting over Panopto, Perusal, and Padlet, but soon came to realize the real concern was about people. We discovered ways to keep our and our colleagues’ morale up as we taught sometimes to less responsive rows of black boxes or weary, masked faces. We became increasingly attuned to student mental health and our own unpaid labor bracing ourselves, families, and communities. Some of us simultaneously oversaw our children’s online K-12 education as we taught our own college courses. However, through these experiences, we gained new perspectives on how to lead ourselves through crises.

     Perhaps the most profound silver lining of working in education during the pandemic was the undeniable emergence of our strong, successful self-leadership, “the leadership we exercise over ourselves” that can influence others (Neck, Manz, & Houghton, 2017, p. 2). Traditional, pre-pandemic higher education leadership understandably tended toward the leading of others in a visible, expected hierarchy. Revisioning socially-distanced education during a pandemic required the awkward transition to self-leadership as internal and essential. Faculty, staff, and students had to engage in “inside-out” leadership discovering their confidence and competence (Bryant & Kazan, 2012) through trial-and-error deductive processes (Neck & Houghton, 2006). As a result, educational leadership and instruction have been transformed. Our understanding of teaching, learning, and leading in higher education have expanded beyond previous boundaries.

References

Bryant, A. & Kazan, A. (2012). Self-Leadership: How to become a more successful, efficient, and effective leader from the  inside out. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Neck, C. P. & Houghton, J. D. (2006) Two decades of self‐leadership theory and research: Past developments, present trends, and future possibilities. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21(4), 270-295.

Neck, C. P., Manz. C. C., & Houghton, J. D. (2017). Self-leadership: The definitive guide to personal excellence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.