PROFILE

Winter Institute Focuses on Collaboration, Evidence,
and Writing and Representation
By Michael Coventry

At this year's Winter Institute, held on the campus of Cerritos College February 27-28, 2004, about 25 faculty from the VKP and a few interested colleagues from West Coast colleges joined together for two days of sharing projects, brainstorming collaborations, and considering ways to represent the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning(SoTL).

The three main themes for the conference were collaboration, evidence, and writing and representation. These themes encapsulate both where individual project participants are in their work and where many groups of faculty are in the project.

The entire weekend was framed by an opening plenary talk by Randy Bass. Randy outlined the concept of "cycles of inquiry" in the SoTL. Cycle of inquiry is the notion that there are multiple stages or "nodes" of engagement in scholarship of teaching and learning work. This overview was especially valuable to the members of the audience who were Cerritos College faculty but not involved in the local VKP group and to the colleagues in attendance from North Seattle Community College , Seattle, and Glendale Community College , Glendale , California, and Loyola Marymount, Los Angeles.

Across the two days of the institute, VKP faculty shared their own individual examples of evidence. Much of this conversation was seeded by the Friday morning session about the concept of the "inscription" from the sciences. Inscriptions are representations of experimental phenomena. In the scholarship of teaching and learning, inscriptions can be adapted to include the notion of representations of student learning.

Moving from this conversation on inscriptions, Ceceilia O'Leary (Cerritos College) showed a group of digital stories from her course. Participants spent some time thinking about and working through her assessment rubric, evaluating the rubric in light of the student evidence presented. They then shared many useful ideas for how Ceceilia might revise her rubric to better assess digital stories, to allow the rubric to more effectively shed light on the nature of the "inscription" of student learning contained within the genre of digital stories.

Focusing on their collaborative project, the Cerritos College group presented their concern with the issue of teaching students to use evidence to support a claim. They are working with students in different disciplines around this central concern. The group shared their experiences as a part of the Crossroads Online Institute. They also introduced a collaborative rubric they are developing, looking for points of connection across their individual approaches to the question of assessing how students use evidence.

Continuing the theme of collaboration, Melinda deJesus shared the experience of the "multivalent group." This is a group of faculty from three campuses of the VKP who were in the same working group at the Summer Institute (Melinda de Jesus, Cecilia O'Leary, Gilbert Neri, and Gloria Harper Dickinson). They are each interested in using technology to provide multiple points of entry for non-minority students into multicultural studies. They have been collaborating on writing an article about their individual project and serve as an example of a group who are working with a similar question, across some similar evidence (usually constructivist web projects), but from very different perspectives.

Melinda shared a piece of student evidence-in this case, a small webpage on ideological racism and Barbie in a larger web-based project-which she had been discounting. When she was showing it to her group, Gloria Harper Dickinson drew Melinda's attention to it. After looking at it, Melinda discovered that it was a really intriguing and interesting piece from which she could learn a great deal about her students' learning. Melinda used this piece of evidence as a way of opening up a conversation about the benefits to individual faculty members of having a group look at their student learning evidence as well as providing an example of the kinds of questions which can serve as building blocks for collaboration.

The rest of the day Saturday was spent considering various kinds of evidence and how we represent it in our work. The closing plenary showed examples of various models-from the Peer Review of Teaching Project and the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation as well as examining the various ways people in the VKP have dealt with evidence in their writing during the writing residencies.

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March 2004

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