Career Readiness CAIT

TEP, the UO Career Center, and the College of Arts and Sciences have drawn together from across UO’s schools and colleges for a new CAIT about integrating career readiness skills into courses and curricula. As the COVID pandemic impacts how faculty and students teach and learn, how workplaces function, and the career opportunities UO graduates face, these skills and the work of this Career Readiness CAIT are highly relevant–students need assignments and occasions designed to help identify and develop these skills.

And as UO builds sophisticated remote and fully online courses, sharing of career readiness and other core skill assignments and activities is timely, creating potential efficiencies for individual faculty as we draw on and amplify one another’s creativity.

CAIT members will build and refine an archive of resources, encourage units to adopt and assess career readiness learning outcomes, and consider ways UO can support students as they face uncertain internship and job prospects. 

Fellows:

Teaching Leaders CAIT

In an effort to provide additional support as we teach through the impacts of the COVID pandemic, TEP and the Office of the Provost are forming a Teaching Leaders CAIT representing each school and college, as well as the three divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences. Fellows in this Teaching Leaders CAIT will build UO’s teaching support capacity by acting as bridges between central resources and their units, which will help to ensure the goals and concerns of their colleagues are met, understood, and reflected in TEP and UO Online offerings.  

Specifically, fellows will  

• Help TEP and UO Online monitor a Q&A discussion forum for faculty in their area or host a weekly office hour in Zoom;  
• Offer a Course Tour in which they share some of their own remote teaching choices in a 30-minute Zoom interview hosted by TEP;  
• Allow colleagues to observe a Zoom session or selected parts of their Canvas course; 
• Attend ~six meetings as a fellows group during the academic year and 30-minute All Hands meetings every other week. (The Provost’s office convenes this All Hands group of faculty, administrators, teaching support staff, and IT experts to more tightly connect around the policy, planning, pedagogy, and technology undergirding our teaching during the COVID pandemic). 

Alternatives to these ideas could be own developed in conversation with TEP.  

We value a broad definition of “leadership in teaching” and welcome faculty committed to teaching excellence, as well as faculty who value connecting colleagues with additional resources and relationships. We know many of you are already doing some version of this work, and we are excited to partner with you.  Fellows:

College of Education Bertranna Muruthi 

Alison Schmitke  

College of Design Maile Hutterer  

José Melendez  Lundquist College of Business Leah Schneider Josh Skov  School of Law Sarah Schoen-Adams Mohsen Manesh  School of Journalism and Communication Donnalyn Pompper Lori Shontz  CAS-Humanities Katy Brudan, Comparative Literature 

 CAS-Natural Sciences Tom Greenbowe, Chemistry Philip Matern, Human Physiology

Coming Winter 2021: Writing and Assessment CAIT [Draft Cahrge]   The UO Composition Program, Department of English, and Teaching Engagement Program seek to form a faculty learning and leadership group to examine and possibly revise the course and program objectives for the writing sequence and articulate the essential and promising experimental teaching methods linked to these objectives.       Moreover, the group will develop rubrics that highlight levels of attainment in relation to these objectives and, with TEP, launch a two-year UO Assessment of Student Writing that begins with a collegial event for English and Composition faculty and GEs to introduce and test the new rubric(s) against students essays from WR courses. The CAIT group may then revise the rubric—and potentially the learning objectives themselves—with that larger conversation in mind. Then, a group of writing faculty and faculty campus-wide will repeat the exercise with essays from across the curriculum. The exercise will be hosted a third time, this time in partnership with the Career Center, and include employer readers and workplace writing artifacts. During these widening rounds of the assessment project the rubrics and learning objectives will continue to be critically examined and sharpened with Composition expertise.

Important to this work will be the program’s longstanding commitment to “ethical argumentation,” as the group determines how to deepen that commitment in the operational documents it is creating, learning objectives, essential and experimental methods, and rubric(s): what does “ethical argumentation” mean in 2020 and beyond, as the nation protests to protect Black lives and BIPOC students at UO continue to face opportunity gaps and report stress and alienation in UO classrooms?     

Another overriding question is how does UO’s Composition Program and objectives/criteria articulate with Core Education goals, especially for “written communication” and “difference, inequality, and agency.”