Universities of Wisconsin System
Director, Office of Professional and Instructional Development,
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow (UW-Parkside), 2000-01
2024
2003
Interconnections
Faculty College 2000 at UW-Richland Center was my introduction not only to the year-long Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars (I was a fellow), but to OPID. It was my first experience of an OPID-sponsored program, and I remember thinking, “So this is what it means to be part of the Wisconsin system!” Although I had been teaching at UW-Parkside since Fall 1997, my ABD status did not afford me time to engage in professional development. I was teaching new preps, solo-parenting a baby and a toddler, and writing my doctoral dissertation on Hawaiian-Music Radio. Thankfully my husband joined UW-Parkside after a long long-distance year. Institutional support — two course releases from a three-course teaching load in Spring 1999 — enabled me to complete my Ph.D., thus beginning my engagement with OPID, WTFS, and SoTL.
Faculty College 2000 was a turning point for OPID. After 20 years at UW-Marinette County, Faculty College relocated to UW-Richland Center. The year 2000 was also the start of “OPID,” Office of Professional & Instructional Development, formerly known as UTIC, Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council, established in 1977. Moreover WTFS 2000-01 marked the official start of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) as the guiding framework for WTFS. On the first evening of Faculty College, Carnegie Scholar Randy Bass gave the opening plenary talk based on his recently published seminal article The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?
As a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, I didn’t focus on a teaching and learning problem, but, instead, sought to understand experiential learning; many of my teaching approaches were intuitive, and I wanted to validate their effectiveness. I focused on Intercultural Communication, an interdisciplinary 300-level elective, that considered power, context, culture, and communication. How could I make the course come alive for students?
My SoTL project was a qualitative study. I invited former students to a focus group discussion and interviews. What emerged was the power of embodied knowledge and the enduring visceral memories of displacement, engagement, and empathy. Several students referenced our fieldtrip to Mitsuwa Plaza in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb, where they engaged in participant observation in a space designed for Asian expatriates. They remembered what it felt like to be in that unfamiliar space and the meaning-making that happened in our subsequent class discussions. One student revisited the moment of stepping out of the plaza into the open-air parking lot and feeling free. He caught himself and wondered – what do the workers and shoppers feel when they step outside? To make public my SoTL project I presented The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Practice: Teaching Intercultural Communication at UW-Parkside’s annual Conference on Teaching and Learning in Spring 2001.
Months earlier, in March, 2001, several Carnegie Scholars attended OPID’s 2001 Spring Conference in Madison. I was most struck by Lendol Calder, a history professor at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL, whose SoTL ideas were most relevant and adaptable to the teaching of Communication and Ethnic Studies. All of the scholars had important insights, but some taught at private Research I institutions that were starkly different from our small comprehensive public university where many students were first-generation college students, worked full-time off-campus, and were primary caregivers of children and/or (grand)parents. How could I apply their SoTL to my particular teaching context? Moreover, how could I deeply engage with SoTL when I had limited resources (time) and multiple responsibilities? In the early days of SoTL in Wisconsin, my engagement with SoTL waned once my WTFS year ended – or so I thought!
In Spring 2002, Lendol Calder visited UW-Parkside to present Throwing Out the Textbook: Uncovering Critical Thinking with Beginning Students. Lendol’s SoTL work on uncoverage explained why and how we should privilege concepts over coverage. Most importantly he gave us creative license to reframe our course syllabi, which I read as throwing out hegemony in my own teaching. While many professors focused almost exclusively on course content when thinking and talking about their teaching, Lendol had a genuine curiosity about pedagogy and understanding student learning. Why did he teach the way he did? How did he make his decisions? How did he assess his decisions as effective?
Lendol shared his sequence of introducing texts when teaching a new module. He started with a visual text, such as an excerpt from a documentary, followed by primary texts then secondary texts. This sequence appealed to me as a media scholar; it privileged visual texts as the entry point to complex concepts such as gender, race, class, and sexuality – categories of difference that framed an upper-division elective that I taught. Years later as a Fulbright Teaching Scholar at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin, West Africa, I learned that Lendol’s sequence was not universally transferrable. Electricity was not a given and neither was a darkened room for screening digital images. I improvised by bringing a battery-operated boom box to share excerpts from audio documentaries and sound portraits. Accessibility of published readings was also limited. I scaled down reading assignments and shared copies with student leaders to duplicate for classmates.
During his Throwing Out the Textbook presentation, Lendol demonstrated think-alouds with a Parkside history student to delve into the student’s thinking process. I was struck by the strategic creativity and joy with which Lendol approached teaching. He inspired us/me to play with possibilities, to engage students, and to infuse their voices into the classroom. I adopted and adapted these practices into my own teaching.
Ethnic Studies 201, UW-Parkside, Fall 2004
While Lendol taught American History, I was teaching Ethnic Studies, which could be described as excavating hidden histories. Common themes of legalized exclusion, segregation, and deculturalization were threaded among the histories of dominated groups. Native boarding schools, the citizenship, deportation, and immigration of Mexican laborers, the CIA’s recruitment of Hmong people as surrogate U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, were a few of the hidden histories that provoked serious discussions. The continuous theme of denied access to education sparked angry resistance among a few students who later earned master’s or doctoral degrees.
I applied some of Lendol’s SoTL work into my development of an introductory course. The central question was – What does it mean to be an American? Students wrote first-person narratives and read them aloud to each other. Then we produced a public presentation: students stood on stage and one by one walked to the centrally placed microphone and recited excerpts from their narratives. The opening refrain was “My name is ….. and I am an American.” Students found this exercise extremely powerful and a few of them requested an independent study the following semester to continue their learning. Soon, the independent study group ballooned to about 10 students. We discussed readings and they again wrote incredibly honest reflections then performed them on stage. Students were writing and speaking themselves into history.
Poet Adrienne Rich’s poignant quote, which I first read paraphrased in Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, comes to mind:
When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you…when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
– Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985
Engaging Disengaged Students
There’s a story behind every seemingly disengaged student. Students may be tired from working third-shift in one of the factories and warehouses in Kenosha and Racine, or worried about assuming their parents’ mortgage after dad was laid-off, or dealing with a husband who feels threatened by their learning leading them to study in the closet with a flashlight. Students may be disengaged because they are hungry. One way to engage disengaged students, I found, was to design assignments that sparked their imaginations; it meant challenging them with experiences that were relevant, meaningful, and personal.
Introduction to Ethnic Studies: Some of our students grew up in rural towns north and west of Kenosha where there wasn’t much ethnic diversity or acknowledgement of First Nations histories. Rather than perpetuate their assumption that people of color simply don’t want to live in their towns, we studied the history of Sundown Towns by James Loewen to consider institutional forms of racism that impact where we live. Students were assigned to select a town on the companion Sundown Towns Website – a town that had personal significance in their lives. Students selected towns that they grew up in, or that their parents or grandparents grew up in, and researched the towns through archival information, interviews, and, in some cases, actually visiting the towns. They then shared their findings in class and we learned from each other. In studying the U.S. Census, one student noticed a remarkable increase in the number of African Americans in her town of choice. A prison had been built in her town.
Communication & Popular Music: One of our modules focused on Popular Music & Commerce. Students were assigned to select a commercial space and study the function of music in that space. Their findings were fascinating and, together, we learned that many commercial spaces, especially retail or restaurant chains, subscribed to corporate music programming services that were highly strategic in their music selection. Not only that, but in some retail spaces sound was accompanied by smells to influence consumers’ buying behaviors. Again, students shared their findings in class and we learned from each other. When discussing a certain fast-food restaurant we decided that music could be a way to control who and how long customers remained in the space. Rap music, for example, cleared senior citizens from the restaurant and, conversely, classical music discouraged some shoppers from even entering a space.
In the same Communication & Popular Music class, students were assigned to produce an autobiographical CD for their final project and presentation. Students loved this final project; one student even started conceptualizing his project after the first day of classes. He created a mini-documentary using his body tattoos to tell a story that linked to his experiences as a guitarist in a heavy metal band. Another student, an art major, created a playlist which she listened to while painting a self-portrait. She videotaped the process of creating art, speeding up the process into a mini-documentary. Producing autobiographical music collections was fun, but what did it mean? Much of the meaning revealed itself through reflection – reflecting while preparing to share in class, in reflective writing, or reflective speaking. Reflective practices are constitutive of learning. Without reflection, learning is incomplete, cloudy, floating. (This explains why reflection is a core component of high-impact practices – HIPs – such as internships and capstone courses. ePortfolios are an effective tool for reflections.)
In all of the assignments above, students were given a choice of what to research and their experiences were made public in our class, a community of practice.
Integrated Marketing Communication was a 400-level class that combined new digital and social media platforms with traditional marketing communication approaches. This was a Community-Based Learning (CBL) class that, for three consecutive years, partnered with the Hope Council on Alcohol & Other Drug Abuse in Kenosha. This partnership emerged after reading an obituary for a UW-Parkside alumnus with a communication degree who died of suicide from a drug overdose. His family courageously made public his battle with the disease of addiction. Our class used integrated marketing to build awareness of alcoholism and addiction at Kenosha’s public high schools where many class members were alumni.
Blurring Curricular and Extra-Curricular Spaces
Directing the Center for Ethnic Studies taught me that learning is not limited to the classroom but often takes place in extra-curricular spaces. Moreover, learning can be amplified when several classes converge in a common space. A month after 9-11, veiled Muslim women in our community and around the country reported being harassed in public spaces. One of our white English professors wore a veil in solidarity with Muslim women and had disturbing interactions with strangers. This led to a panel discussion followed by small break-out discussions with panelists. Many audience members experienced their first face-to-face conversation with a Muslim woman. It was a transformative moment.
The Center for Ethnic Studies also sponsored national speakers, such as Prof. Manning Marable from Columbia University who addressed African American Slave Reparations, Amer Ahmed who presented Islam 101 (he grew up a Muslim American in Springfield, Ohio), and Christine Sleeter who shared her family genealogy overlaid with hidden histories of Native Americans. We sponsored filmmaker Katrina Browne whose documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North revisits the slave triangle from Rhode Island to Ghana (slaves) to Cuba (sugar and molasses) to Rhode Island (rum distilleries), where the filmmaker’s slave-trading family reflect on their lives and privileges. In addition to a film screening and Q&A, Katrina participated in a fishbowl discussion with students and community members.
Although the CES had an annual budget of less than $2000, we succeeded in producing large-scale programs by collaborating with other university offices that shared common goals and concerns, and tapping mini-grants from OPID. Ideas and community can transcend budgetary limitations!
My work with the CES also confirmed that equity-minded teaching and learning is not natural or normal. Faculty and instructors needed professional development to strengthen their understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The ideal approach was creating a long-term community of practice. During four consecutive summers from 2007-2010, the CES sponsored Summer Institute: Diversity in the College Classroom, a program partially funded by the UW System’s Office of Academic Affairs. First-person narratives by participants were collected and published in Diversity in the College Classroom: Knowing Ourselves, Our Students, Our Disciplines (2016).
Reflecting
Lake Wingra, Madison
My 20-year teaching career at UW-Parkside ended in August 2017, when I was hired to direct OPID’s three signature programs – the Spring Conference on Teaching and Learning, Faculty College, and the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars. When I joined OPID, its Advisory Council had an established commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and soon created a committee on anti-racist pedagogies. In November 2017, the UW System was selected to participate in TS3 — Taking Student Success to Scale — an initiative to promote equity-minded high-impact practices (HIPs) led by the National Association of System Heads (NASH). Guest speaker Jillian Kinzie of NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) posed a thought-provoking question: How do we empower faculty to embody equity-minded teaching & learning? This question guided our OPID work. We invited equity-minded educators to speak at OPID programs — Ada Deer (Menominee), Lisa Brock, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead, Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Metis), Bryan Dewsbury, Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, and others – to empower our faculty and instructors to teach critically, to be student-centered, and to be courageous. As I write this, my mind is troubled by a recent news story about the former president of Doctors Without Borders, Joanne Liu, who was scheduled to speak at her alma mater New York University. The night before her presentation, NYU claimed that two of her slides might be interpreted as antisemitic and/or anti-governmental, and she was abruptly cancelled: scrubbed.
Much of what I reflected on earlier about engaging disengaged students, directing the Center for Ethnic Studies and strategically producing university programs for multiple classes inform my role directing OPID. In recent years, digital platforms, such as Teams and Zoom, have reconfigured how we produce educational development programs and how we address emergent themes, such as teaching with generative artificial intelligence. In Fall 2024 and Winterim 2025, for example, OPID sponsored a Webinar series facilitated by Jose Antonio Bowen, co-author of Teaching With AI. Digital media collapses time and space in cost-efficient ways.
This illustration was created during Faculty College 2024 to reflect the communication flows among Center for Teaching and Learning directors, faculty, and instructors. Initially the map simply featured 13 stars — one for each of our 13 universities. Being in a vibrant space with 130 faculty and instructors from 13 universities inspired a re-visioning of the map to include relationships between and among our 13 universities. Collectively the interconnections form an OPID constellation – sparkling, luminous – that sustains the spirit with which OPID was founded in1977. This map illustrates the beauty of our UW system.
References:
Fujimoto, E., Akindes, F. and Mason, R. (Eds). (2016). Diversity in the college classroom: Knowing ourselves, our students, our disciplines. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing.
Biography:
Fay Yokomizo Akindes directs systemwide professional & instructional development with and for our 13 Universities of Wisconsin. Previously she taught at UW-Parkside for 20 years. Prior to graduate studies at Ohio University, she worked for 11 years in broadcast marketing and promotion in San Diego (NPR) and Honolulu (CBS-TV and PBS). Born and raised on Molokai, she is the great-granddaughter of farmers who immigrated from Fukuoka, Japan, to Hawaii in the 1890s. She has lived in Kenosha since 1997.