UW-Parkside
Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, Theatre Arts, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 1987-1988
OPID Director, 1998-2008
My story will be different from other former participants in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars programs. My connection to SoTL is not as a practitioner, but rather in my role as Director of OPID from 1998-2008. I will, therefore, briefly discuss my career trajectory from my time as a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 1987 and then go on to discuss my role in the development and support of the UW-System SoTL Initiative, the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program, and the relationship between the work being done in Wisconsin with the national and international movements in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
As mentioned above, I became a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow in 1987, following my second year of full-time teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. That program was still relatively new and was focused on helping junior faculty to grow and develop their understanding of pedagogy and the sharing of practices from individual disciplines. The second aspect of that program was to create a community of faculty who could learn from one another and grow both individually and collectively. There is no question that my experience in the WTF program changed my career trajectory, and my life. It led to my continued interest in the development of my own teaching and understanding of student learning. Equally importantly, it introduced me to an entire world of knowledge, experimentation, discussion, and collaboration around these issues which were so important in my growth as a faculty member. Like so many other instructors who participated in the WTFS programs over the years, I also found great satisfaction in being able to take on a leadership role in developing communities of practice at my own institution and, later, across the state and beyond.
One of the ways in which that happened was through the wonderful mentoring that continued after the program ended through my relationship with Beecham Robinson, one of the co-directors of the WTF program and, coincidentally, a colleague at Parkside. We often talked about the value of that program for me and other Parkside faculty and hoped for something local that would meet the learning for more instructors on campus. There was a great need on my campus for faculty development programming, along with a place where people could come together to talk about teaching – not only in the traditional classroom but also in the laboratory, the studio, the rehearsal hall, and in co-curricular settings. In 1991 the Parkside administration supported the birth of a new Teaching Center, and I became the inaugural director from 1992-1994. As part of that role, I became the Parkside Administrative Representative to UTIC (Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council, later to become OPID) and began to meet and work with those in leadership positions for faculty development from across the UW-System. While I had to leave the Teaching Center role when I became Department Chair of Theatre Arts at Parkside, I continued as the faculty Rep with UTIC and realized how important that community and that work was for me and my own development, both as a teacher and as a campus leader.
In 1998, the long-standing Director of UTIC, Susan Kahn, left that position. I applied and was hired as Interim Director and in 1999 became Director of that office. Within a year we had changed the name to OPID (the Office of Professional and Instructional Development) as we determined that our focus was no longer on teaching improvement but rather on student learning, and that the name needed to reflect the ways in which this system-wide organization would support the growth of teachers and institutions in their understanding and development of new methodologies for improving student learning. In addition, it was clear that being facilitated through an office in System Administration, rather than a ‘council’, was politically important to the longevity of the organization.
While the setting and the people were different at the System level, I was still using many of the same skills I had used as a teacher – creating an environment for people to learn and grow through the sharing of ideas and the exploration of what’s possible. I loved the work. As director I found myself in the enviable position of working with a wonderful council of faculty and faculty developers from around the UW System who were all interested in creating a campus and a system framework for working on student learning and the development of effective and passionate teachers. Meeting with administrators from all the UW System campuses also gave me a unique opportunity to understand campus frameworks for teaching and learning to see how we could help to share resources and expertise, as well as provide support and information to these campus activities. As director of OPID, I was able to lead the organization in developing and sponsored system-level initiatives in such areas as:
- the scholarship of teaching and learning
- student understanding
- faculty roles and rewards
- first year experience
- teaching with technology
- department chair training
- lesson study
- diversity and inclusion
- Liberal Education
The focus of all these activities was to bring faculty, instructional staff, academic staff, and administrators together throughout the UW System to improve undergraduate education. Planning and implementation at the system level allowed for a wonderful inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary exchange of ideas, along with the sharing of resources and the possibility of all participants learning from the experience and talent of each unique institution.
Through all the initiatives and planning that I was involved in, I saw my job as one of building relationships, finding ways to sustain and grow good ideas, and creating a framework for the creativity and learning of others. These are the very same skills that I used as a director in the theatre, and as a teacher. In fact, I found that my success largely grew out of my leadership and facilitation skills and that these were as important as my content knowledge. I didn’t need to be an expert in first-year experience programs, but I needed to develop that knowledge and find ways to bring others together to brainstorm and share experiences on what was working on various campuses, and how those experiences could be shared and built upon by others. Creating relationships across the system was crucial to my position, but equally important to my success was the building of relationships nationally and internationally – with individuals, institutions, and organizations that were doing similar work. That relationship building was crucial to the growth and success of OPID during those years and made us a model across the country. I am very proud of this work. It certainly isn’t something that I did alone, but my goal was to build and nurture those relationships. As former WTSF participants became leaders on their own campuses and demonstrated the importance of OPID programming and collaboration, campus administrators began to see the increased value of the WTSF program for their own institutions. This went a long way to sustaining our shrinking resources and creating opportunities for institutions and individuals to share the great work being done throughout the University of Wisconsin System.
In my time with OPID, I was directly involved in the development of the Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program – a mid-career program for faculty that mirrored much of what the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program did but with a new focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In collaboration with Bill Cerbin from UW-LaCrosse, Tony Ciccone from UW-Milwaukee (the two facilitators of the WTF Program at that time), and Donna Silver, Assistant Director of OPID, we began brainstorming ways in which to develop a SoTL focus across UW campuses along with providing a meaningful scholarly experience for senior faculty. With the new program there was a redesign of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program so that both programs worked together to share experience, ideas, and expertise using SoTL as a framework for participant projects. While the WTF was always a strong program, the new design gave an increased sense of importance and value to it and created a growing interest and competitiveness for admission at the campus level. It also, by design, created a bridge between junior and senior faculty encouraging mentoring opportunities in both directions. Both programs, with wonderful facilitators, brought excellent faculty together from across the System to focus on teaching projects that were then shared at statewide conferences through poster sessions.
Around the time that OPID was thinking about developing a mid-career program, there were huge changes in the world of faculty development. In the early 1990’s there was a large shift in the kinds of programming being offered as the focus moved from teaching to student learning. Ernest Boyer’s 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered, followed by publications and conference presentations from others at the Carnegie Foundation was an expansion of this idea. The work of Lee Shulman, Pat Jennings and Mary Huber, and the connection with the AAHE (American Academy of Higher Education) and some of the work of POD (the Professional and Organizational Development Network) was shifting my thinking and those of my peers in exciting new ways. The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) program, developed in 1997, built on that work and it was an vibrant time with institutions and individuals coming together to explore the broad idea of scholarly work moving from the private work of faculty to a public act to be shared and built upon. As the director of OPID, I was invited to numerous meetings where ideas were being generated and shared. The Carnegie Scholars Program was a tremendous influence for us in Wisconsin through the work of Bill Cerbin, from UW-La Crosse (one of the first faculty in that Carnegie program) and then the publication of Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, by Pat Hutchings in 2000. These early examples of SoTL were novel and exciting and we began bringing Carnegie Scholars to OPID conferences and Faculty College. As Bill, Tony, Donna and I began talking and developing a framework for a new year-long program for mid-career faculty, SoTL quickly came into focus as an organizing principle for the Wisconsin Teaching Scholars program.
In 2005, OPID received a prestigious Certificate of Excellence from the TIAA-CREF Theodore Hesburgh Award for the Enhancement of Undergraduate Teaching for the Wisconsin Teaching Scholars/Fellows Programs. This award brought OPID a great deal of positive attention both locally and nationally and showed campus administrators that these programs were valued – not only by those who participated in them, but by those who heard participants present at state-wide and national conferences.
An additional piece of the SoTL organizing framework came from the opening of the SoTL Leadership Site. OPID, working with UW-Milwaukee, helped to develop and support the Leadership Site, directed by Renee Meyers, which was organized to support SoTL Scholars from across the UW System.
Through my work with AAHE, attending meetings and giving workshops and papers at conferences, OPID was invited to participate in the prestigious AAHE Summer Institute with an institutional team for four years. With the support of the Office of Academic Affairs, we took teams of 6-8 people to these 5-day workshops to focus on a variety of teaching and learning issues including some of the earliest conversations about developing initiatives in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I attended several conferences and pre-conferences developing the ideas of SoTL and came to know people at the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching and Learning. Along with others involved in OPID’s SoTL work, particularly Renee Meyers, Tony Ciccone, Bill Cerbin, and Nancy Chick, we became a strong presence at these national gatherings. These relationships allowed OPID and the UW System to take a major national leadership role in these early conversations about how to define, develop, implement, and grow programs and participation in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. We applied and were invited to be one of 12 Cluster Leaders in a program sponsored by CASTL (the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). Our cluster: Building a Multi-Institutional Framework for Advancing the Practice of Teaching and Learning through Scholarly Inquiry into Student Learning, 2001-2005, was the one group that was not content specific, but rather focused on how a state system could do this work. Carnegie, impressed with what we accomplished over those four years in CASTL, invited us to lead a cluster in their second iteration, which would bring our expertise to other state systems to continue to facilitate this systemic approach. We were the Leadership Program Cluster, System-Wide Collaboration Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, continuing the work with the UW-System, and adding the University of Colorado System, Miami-Dade College, the City University of New York, and the University of North Carolina System from 2006-2009. The UW System led this group and facilitated the work and our meetings. I was responsible for bringing together this disparate group of leaders from multiple institutions for meetings at conferences, conference calls, and daylong workshops at various places across the county. With Renee Meyers and Tony Ciccone (who was then Senior Scholar and Director of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), we shared what we had done in Wisconsin with these other systems. More importantly, we spent time thinking systemically about how to initiative, promote, resource, and sustain both SoTL and faculty development programming in a time of diminished funding. As our institutions were very different from one another, the task was often to help the leaders of the various groups reframe their thinking to be open to new ways of knowing and seeing: trying to move from ‘we can’t do that where we are’, to ‘what are the ways we might take those ideas and make them useful for us in our situation.’ There was some very creative thinking about how to take what one system was trying to do and mold those goals to very different institutional settings.
Because of my connection to the national SoTL movement, I was invited to participate in the first meeting of a collective group that became ISSOTL, the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. While I was unable to go due to major surgery, I attended ISSOTL the next year in Vancouver. At that meeting I was officially elected Secretary of ISSOTL, a position that I held for the rest of my time as OPID Director. I also became the chair of the Communications Committee. My position with ISSOTL allowed me to bring other UW faculty and administrators into leadership positions in the organization. The UW System was well represented with our members giving multiple presentations and workshops at every conference. I understand that Wisconsin continues to be a significant presence where Wisconsin faculty attend and present at the conference each year. In 2009, after I’d already returned to my faculty position at UW-Parkside, Wisconsin hosted the annual ISSOTL conference in Milwaukee and I was one of the conference Organizers. I continued to be a member of ISSOTL until my retirement and attended and presented at conferences when possible. This work in SoTL and my role in that work for the state of Wisconsin was certainly an important turning point for me and significant in my growth as an educator. As someone who is not a traditional scholar, it gave me the opportunity to think in scholarly terms and to begin to do some reading and writing that I believe has contributed to the conversation about teaching and learning.
In the fall of 2014, I was part of a panel at the ISSOTL Conference in Quebec: Signature Pedagogies in Arts and Humanities. My piece was on Critique in Theatre. I was invited to participate in this panel because of an earlier piece that I had co-written with Helen Klebasedel, an artist who worked both at UW-System as the Director of the Women’s Studies Consortium, and as a practicing painter and former faculty member in Art at Lawrence University. In 2004, three UW faculty members came up with a book idea and held a meeting with a variety of former Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Teaching Scholars from across the state to come up with a framework and a series of chapters focusing on the new idea of signature pedagogies. Lee Shulman, the President of the Carnegie Foundation at that time, came up with this way of framing disciplinary teaching. He defined signature pedagogies as “the types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new profession.” All of us were really taken with this idea of exploring the ways in which the signature ways of teaching and learning specific to the discipline reflect the values, habits of mind, and practice of the profession. Exploring and critiquing the ways in which our disciplines have been taught allows us to better understand how we seek to communicate a set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to our students. Coming out of the SoTL movement, this really was a new way of exploring the ways in which we are preparing undergraduates to not only become professionals, but to think of themselves within the discipline. As stated in the preface by Nancy L. Chick, Aeron Haynie, & Regan A. R. Gurung of the resulting book: “Nothing uncovers hidden assumptions about desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions better than a careful examination of our most cherished practices.”
Helen and I wrote a chapter on “Critique as Signature Pedagogy in the Arts” for this collection, published as Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind in 2009. Not being a faculty member at the time, I was honored to be asked to participate in this process. Our chapter, therefore, became the foundation for the earlier referenced panel at the ISSOTL Conference. Growing out of an ISSOTL Humanities and Arts Interest Group, there were several others working on this idea of critique. The panel, made up of a group of people from across the country (all former Teaching Fellow/Scholars) focused on critique in multiple disciplines. Attending that panel, an editor for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education followed up with us and asked us to write for a special edition of that journal. This was published online in 2016. My article, “Signature Pedagogy in Theatre Arts,” grew from my earlier chapter, which discussed both the positive and negative use of critique in the discipline, and focused this time on the ways in which critique is fundamental to the training of young actors and ways in which it is productive and meaningful.
The work in SoTL and the amazing leadership of the University of Wisconsin over the last 25 years is something that was done collaboratively with many passionate creative hard-working faculty and Teaching and Learning Center directors. My role in that was as a facilitator – a framer who worked hard to create as fertile a ground as possible for those who were doing the work to flourish. I was never a SoTL scholar myself and, while I continued to engage with these ideas and explore them in my own classrooms while still teaching, I did not engage in the systematic research that qualifies as SoTL. But my learning from the many experiences I had as OPID Director, a member of ISSOTL, and as leader in the CASTL Program informed my practice daily. I know that I was a better teacher for it, a better colleague, and a more thoughtful and reflective practitioner in all that I continued to do throughout my academic career.
Twenty-five years after we started our SoTL initiative through OPID, it is rewarding to see how much SoTL research has become accepted in Higher Education. While I have not been active on a college campus for a number of years, my sense is that SoTL is seen in many places as significant scholarly activity, accepted and valued by departments and rewarded by tenure and post-tenure reviews on many UW campuses. There has been significant work done in this time – across disciplines, across institutions, and internationally. ISSOTL is alive and active, publishing Teaching and Learning Inquiry, facilitating Interest Groups, and creating awareness of the diverse faces of SoTL work. Programs like the WTSF where faculty present their work in their departments, across campuses and at state-wide events, have promoted this type of scholarship, including in disciplines such as my own where creative activity has traditionally been thought of as practical and artistic, and faculty are not generally trained in research methods and don’t see themselves as doing ‘scholarly’ work. Now, there are multiple examples of what SoTL can look like and how it can be defined. Instructors across a wide spectrum of disciplines are asking all kinds of questions about what is happening in their own classrooms, collecting data, and making significant discoveries about student learning. As the early leaders in this movement hoped, this scholarship is making inroads in advancing the larger profession of teaching locally, state-wide, nationally, and beyond.
I am a teacher/practitioner. As a theatre professor and director, I have had the luxury (from my perspective) of having my creative activity directly linked to my teaching. I have been retired for 6 years and as I reflect on my career, both at UW-Parkside and at OPID, I see my strengths as facilitating learning in a variety of ways: through dialogue, through performance, through research and through collaboration. In my discipline of theatre, building relationships and creating a safe space for difficult discussion, new and often challenging concepts, and personal growth have been at the heart of my teaching. As with my work through OPID, I saw myself as a facilitator, creating a community of learners who are stronger in their growth as they learn from one another. Had I not had the initial opportunity in the WTF program, I imagine that my career would have been very different and not nearly as successful or as fulfilling as it was.
BIography:
Lisa Kornetsky is a nationally recognized artist/educator recently retired from the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside where she worked for 22 years. While there she received a Regents Teaching Award and twice won the campus Stella C. Gray Teaching Excellence Award. Lisa spent 10 years as the Director of the Office of Professional and Instructional Development for the UW System where she won the Hesburgh Award for Faculty Development programming, and the Eugene Craven Award (given each year by UW System to a staff member for service.) A founding member of Upstart Theatre, Lisa has also directed at the Piccolo-Spoleto Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and several community theatres. In 2011 she directed a production of Bus Stop at the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre in collaboration with UW-Parkside. Lisa is enjoying her retirement and continues to direct theatre productions and staged readings on occasion.
Related Publications:
“Signature Pedagogy in Theatre Arts,” in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. Sage Publications, 2016.
Co-authored chapter, “Critique as Signature Pedagogy in the Arts,” in Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind. Stylus Publications, 2009.
Presentations/Workshops Given:
ISSOTL Conference, Quebec, October 2013:
Panel: Signature Pedagogies in Arts and Humanities – Critique in Theatre
ISSOTL Conference, Milwaukee, October 2011:
- Using the Faculty RPT Process to Reward Faculty Engagement, co-presenter
- Faculty Perceptions of the Nature & Value of SoTL
ISSOTL Conference, Edmonton, CA, October, 2008:
System Level SoTL: Successes, Challenges, & Opportunities, co-presenter with Renee Meyers
Multiple presentations to the UW System Board of Regents on such topics as: SoTL, Lesson
Study, Faculty Development
AAC&U National Conference: Liberal Education and the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning: An Integrated System-Level Approach, January 2008:
Panel with Rebecca Martin, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, UW-System; Rebecca Karoff, Senior Academic Planner, UW-System; and Mary Huber, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
ISSOTL Conference, Sydney, July 2007.
Connecting SoTL to Institutional Priorities
UW-System Department Chairs Workshop: November 2003
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
National and International Positions:
Secretary, ISSOTL, 2005-2008
Chair, Member ship and Communication Committee, ISSOTL, 2009-2011
Coordinator, CASTL (Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)
Leadership Program Cluster, System-Wide Collaboration Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, working with the University of Wisconsin-System, the University of Colorado System, Miami-Dade College, the City University of New York, and the University of North Carolina System. 2006-2009.
Cluster Leader, CASTL Program, Building a Multi-Institutional Framework for Advancing the Practice of Teaching and Learning through Scholarly Inquiry into Student Learning. 2001-2005.