Northwest Five Consortium Stephen Thorsett, President

Willamette University 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301

Annual Report to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation January 1 - December 31, 2013

Grant: 41100697 * March 27, 2014

I. Introduction With the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Willamette University, Whitman College, Reed College, University of Puget Sound, and Lewis & Clark College are engaged in collaborative efforts through the establishment of a new regional alliance, the Northwest Five Consortium (NW5C). Working toward the regular sharing of expertise and resources, the mission of the NW5C is to enhance the student academic experience at our five liberal arts colleges through enrichment and development of faculty as teacher-scholars. In service of this mission, the Consortium provides the infrastructure to support collaborative efforts among its member institutions, and strives to create a vibrant and sustainable intellectual community of scholars in the Pacific Northwest.

The NW5C has been very active in the second year of a four-year implementation grant following a 2011 planning grant. This report highlights information regarding NW5C events such as the annual conference and faculty workshops, report-outs of completed projects from the 2013 Fund for Collaborative Inquiry (FCI) grant cycle, an overview of the grant cycle for the 2014 FCI faculty projects, confirmation of the NW5C governance structure, the developing connections between the NW5C and other regional initiatives and national organizations, consortium participation statistics, and the further development of NW5C assessment protocols and review. The progress realized in our initial work together demonstrates the value in our increasing inter-connectivity.

II. Project ComponentsTo date, over 140 consortium faculty and staff members have attended NW5C events. Based on the responses from participants, the annual conference and faculty workshops make a significant impact by increasing peer contacts. Deepening relationships are also developing over time through project work, sharing resources, and co-teaching opportunities, and with assistance from technology tools to bridge the physical distance between our institutions. In these first years of the Consortium’s development, such regular events and face-to-face meetings allow the NW5C to foster cross-campus, collaborative enterprise and ongoing peer relationships.

A. Annual Conference The second NW5C annual conference was held September 27-29, 2013 at Skamania Lodge, Columbia River Gorge, in Stevenson, Washington. Over 70 faculty and staff members participated. This year’s conference theme, The Global Campus, was developed to bring faculty and staff together to examine issues related to creating learning environments and opportunities that foster students’ development toward active “global citizenship.” The breakout sessions included collaborating with partners abroad, area studies, the global curriculum, integrating study abroad with curricula, global citizenship, and faculty-led overseas programs.

By discussing core themes with their professional peers, participants learned more about colleagues’ home campuses, exploring opportunities for shared programs and collaborative solutions. Conversations throughout the conference seeded ideas for joint projects and courses, leading to the creation of project pre-proposals for the 2014 Fund for Collaborative Inquiry.

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

Conference participant responses from both the 2012 and 2013 annual gatherings indicate the events effectively provided

a) informal opportunities for faculty members to network with colleagues from other institutions who shared common interests

2013: effective to very effective = 96.8% 2012: effective to very effective = 75%

b) concrete ideas for collaboration (on a scale of 0 – 4, with 4 being most effective)

2013: 3.46 2012: 3.18 Colleagues attending the 2013 annual conference also indicated that

I loved the conference and it provided a great way to network with colleagues informally. This is really crucial, and I now have others to contact with similar interests in the NW region.

I really appreciated getting a chance to speak with faculty members from other universities. My interest in the themes of this conference far exceeded my area of academic expertise and so I happily found plenty of people with whom to converse. B. Thematic Workshops 1. NW5C 2013 Faculty Workshop: Better Collaboration through Communication & Technology Working collaboratively on program development across a region of 34,000 square miles presents a range of challenges, from requiring online tools and a centralized repository of resources and materials to assist and support groups of faculty and staff working together across campuses, to the complex technology needed to deliver synchronous distance-learning courses. This workshop sought to address these issues. Fifty-five faculty and staff participants came to the Puget Sound campus for a two-day meeting. NW5C staff with expertise in technology, digital literacy, and course enrollment, attended and offered guidance on the developing projects and on the collaborative toolkits that are needed to support programs across institutions. The workshop opened with a plenary presentation on available technologies and included demonstrations of collaborative tools; technology framed the round-table break-out sessions. The NW5C library and instructional technology experts, who have been collaborating successfully for many years, also offered workshop closing remarks, re-emphasizing their unequivocal support for faculty-led and other consortium initiatives, and reflecting on the idea of consortium itinerant experts. The NW5C represents a common pool of expertise available to the consortium, with mobility (which is at times accomplished through technology), increasing the expertise on each campus. Action items from the spring 2013 workshop included the sharing of co-teaching experiences and content-sharing arrangements between faculty, models and ideas for collaborative courses, and ongoing cataloguing of technology tools available for collaborative work. A technology liaison group was formed to work directly with faculty on FCI collaborative projects; the further review of video-conferencing tools to determine a standard platform across the consortium, and the convening of regular meetings for NW5C academic deans and technologists are in progress. 2. NW5C 2014 Faculty Workshop: Supporting Faculty of Color at Liberal Arts Institutions During June 4-6, Lewis & Clark College will host our 2014 workshop which focuses on faculty of color. On each of our campuses, we have relatively few faculty members of color; a workshop goal is to collaborate on ways that these colleagues receive appropriate institutional support as they work toward tenure. Each campus will send at least one administrator whose work is related to faculty diversity and up to ten faculty members. All faculty are welcome, whether they identify as “faculty of color” or as allies. The two-day workshop will consist of breakout sessions chosen to reflect participant interest as well as

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

working sessions where faculty will discuss possible ways that the Consortium might help to support faculty of color on our campuses. One potential outcome of the gathering is a faculty-generated proposal for a formalized network for faculty of color in the NW5C.

C. Fund for Collaborative Inquiry (FCI) Central to the work of the NW5C is the exploration of collaboration. The Fund for Collaborative Inquiry provides small grants to seed the support of academic innovation and efficiency through cross-institutional, faculty-initiated projects. Funded projects involve faculty from two or more of the five colleges. The five deans of the colleges review proposals together and decide which projects to fund. Since its inception, the Fund for Collaborative Inquiry has supported 16 projects involving over 200 faculty and professional staff.

1. 2013 FCI Faculty ProjectsCompleted 2013 projects have produced

● a shared course, Food Systems Northwest, to be piloted in summer 2014 (see Appendix I for course description);

● the inaugural regional Visual Culture Colloquium to be held in fall 2014;● the ongoing sharing of course and curricular information and plans for an undergraduate research

symposium in the Environmental Sciences;● plans for a regional conference among Peer Tutoring programs in spring 2015;● and regular interaction among Gender Studies faculty, including the sharing of curricular

information and video-captured guest lectures for cross-consortium distribution.

FCI grants supported project goals to capitalize on efficiencies of scale and to improve the quality and scope of similar courses, to meet and identify areas for collaborations, to deepen relationships and establish regular communications and strategies for continuing collaborative work, to discuss pedagogical issues and impacts to campus life and culture, to share and catalogue program and curricular information, and to enhance the Pacific Northwest regional identity, within disciplinary field work and within the consortium itself.

Along with fulfilling specific project objectives, faculty teams have created websites, group email distribution, workshop programs, and funding-source listings, providing communication and resource models available for other project teams.

Working collaboratively on projects, faculty gained increased engagement with their consortium colleagues, accomplishing increased interaction between programs’ resources and activities, as well as realizing additional cross-disciplinary resource sharing. Faculty participating in collaborative projects have commented that

Our project…in laying a foundation for the social and technical network to facilitate distributed inter-campus communications and resource-sharing, promises strong leadership in fostering a robust infrastructure for the NW5C more broadly.

These types of workshops and meetings are absolutely essential to forging new relationships and new collaborations.

It made me eager to seek out continued opportunities for exchange…I am re-arranging my personal and professional schedule so that I can be sure to participate.

2. 2014 FCI Faculty ProjectsThe FCI 2014 call for proposals yielded 12 completed proposal submissions, with each of the five

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

colleges and over 100 faculty and professional staff represented on proposal teams. We awarded funds to seven projects and three workshops, and one proposal was adopted by our steering committee as an administrative initiative to be completed by the coordinator and deans of the colleges.

Funded Projects (see Appendix II for 2014 project abstracts) ● Hispanic, Latino and Latin American Studies Association (all colleges) ● Imagining the Global: a Platform for Hybrid Scholarship (all colleges) ● Gender Studies Faculty Consortium (all colleges) ● Negotiating the Global South (Lewis & Clark, Puget Sound, Willamette) ● Sustainable NW Food Systems Summer Program (Puget Sound, Whitman, Willamette) ● Summer Institutes in Latin America (Lewis & Clark, Puget Sound, Whitman, Willamette) ● Southeast by Northwest: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Southeast Asian Studies (all colleges) ● Visual Culture Colloquium (all colleges) ● Peer Tutoring Conference (all colleges) ● Teaching Asia in the Pacific Northwest: Asian Studies Working Group (all colleges) ● Technological Requirements for Teaching Across the Consortium (administrative initiative) ● Neuroscience & Behavior Group (all colleges; extension of 2013 project)

Funds have been awarded and FCI project work began for some groups in late 2013. Project reports are due for the above listed projects in late August 2014; faculty from funded projects will offer facilitation and provide report presentations during the 2014 annual conference in late September. D. Communication and Infrastructure 1. NW5C Website Development and Use The website currently features a searchable faculty-interests database, discussion forums, and announcements and resources; the site currently has over 125 registered users. A “Getting Started” brochure was created to promote the Consortium and to introduce faculty to the NW5C website. On-going site development includes creating a content-searching function and structural elements to increase the site capacity to categorize discussion topics and faculty projects. 2. NW5C Outreach Kristine Bartanen, Academic Vice President and Dean of the University at the University of Puget Sound recently met with Kathleen Woodward, Director of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, at the University of Washington. The Simpson Center will collaborate with the NW5C to support cross-institutional faculty teams to participate in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at University of Victoria, beginning in summer 2015. Ideally, teams will bring a prototype project to DHSI; using the funding for DHSI, rather than for other workshops or activities, allows for an intense week of learning and relationship building, while taking advantage of an existing faculty development resource. Fund for Collaborative Inquiry projects were discussed with plans to note any specific potential connections or resources related to any of the FCI humanities-related projects. II. Project Management A. NW5C Governance and Infrastructure The NW5C steering committee approved a governance structure and mission statement, initiated discussions regarding financial sustainability, and has begun to collect information on consortial membership fee structures. We are drafting by-laws as a structural first-step which will further aid with continuity during leadership transitions. The possibility of incorporation has been introduced and will be discussed at future meetings.

In addition, regular biannual NW5C steering committee meetings have been held, with meeting locations rotated among the Consortium colleges. The travel distances between Consortium institutions can add to

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

the complications of scheduling routine meetings, but steering committee members agree on the benefits of gathering in person as well as using technology for virtual meetings. Steering committee meetings were held in February and September 2013, and in January 2014. Upcoming steering committee meetings are scheduled for September 2014 and February 2015. Personnel changes within the steering committee include the departures of Pat McDougal, Dean of the Faculty at Reed College, and Arminda Lathrop, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations, Willamette University, and the addition of Nigel Nicholson, new Dean of the Faculty and Walter Mintz Professor of Classics at Reed College. B. Consortium Coordinator Carie Faszholz participated in the Association of Collaborative Leadership (ACL) institute at the Claremont Universities Consortium in June of 2013, and attended the ACL annual conference in Dallas in October of 2013. Ms. Faszholz is a member of the ACL 2014 annual conference planning committee. C. Financial Notes As our overall budgetary variance is less than 10%, we have not included a discussion of it here. If you need additional information, please let us know. D. Assessment We continue apace in our effort to develop an instrument that will allow us to track more closely attitudinal changes among faculty towards collaboration as a function of their participation in NW5C activities. Additionally this past year we introduced an end-of-project questionnaire to gather information on how collaborative work impacts individual faculty in their classrooms and in their research – or in their overall sense of affinity with peer institutions, and relationships with colleagues. A sampling of faculty responses follows.

Learning from others and being able to focus on what is needed in our curriculum was very important, as was reflection on teaching.

Stepping back from institutional exceptionalism has been a significant benefit, along with the establishment of a robust network across the five campuses.

I really loved the chance to meet colleagues in my field at other schools in the region; that kind of cross-pollination is vital, and it is a particularly valuable form of professional development since our schools are neighbors. Our grassroots approach to collaborative faculty development indicates that the qualitative nature of the surveys is useful for assessing interconnectedness, both among faculty and between institutions, and the depth and range of the impacts of the collaborative work. As collaborative activity continues to develop, our aim is to track longitudinally its impact on faculty. At this stage, our data seem to suggest several positive influences realized by faculty participating in consortial collaborations, and their utility in helping bridge the geographical distance between the campuses, in spite of faculty noting the challenge of allocating time for NW5C activities. In addition to employing faculty surveys, we queried the steering committee members through a reflection exercise, with the expectation that this type of organizational review would provide us with connections between the leadership group of deans and the NW5C faculty participants, as well as providing a feedback mechanism for steering members. Results of the reflective exercise revealed the following shared priorities: to increase academic opportunities for NW5C students, to foster a broad and active intellectual community of teachers and scholars in the region, and to realize financial savings via regular resource-sharing. These priorities emphasize the goals of the grant and remain the primary focus

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

of steering committee work. Individual reflections also highlighted the desire to build a robust communications structure to further promote the consortium, one that allows for qualitative information (through focus groups, survey information, anecdotes and stories, etc.) to be easily tracked along with quantitative information on NW5C outcomes and results. Steering members indicate a desire to leverage the growing network by guiding collaborative effort towards developing uniform technology platforms that aid collaborations and provide shared-course models across the distances presented by our geographic region. This type of group reflection demonstrates intersections, as well as reveals incongruence, and guides our process going forward. Steering committee members commented that

This work is a path-breaking journey.

Our work focuses on how best to achieve the stated goals of our primary mission via our faculty, and the continued development of creative ways to achieve this. For example, our workshop gatherings demonstrate an intellectual vitality, and as a community of scholars is built the ability for like-minded faculty to connect cannot be understated. The cross-fertilization of sharing interests is invaluable when conversations get incorporated into syllabi and new teaching strategies. By-products not necessarily directly related to the overarching goal are faculty mentoring relationships, and the increasing visibility of our schools because of consortial activity.

NW5 can provide context to maintain, reawaken, and renew faculty teaching/research through friendship/professional relationships/collaborations. The NW5 is a faculty development tool to keep people at the top of their game, to keep faculty engaged…the consortium work demonstrates how the group of five member institutions offer gains to our faculty beyond one-on-one institutional partnerships. We expect to further engage, empower, and enrich faculty relationships across the Consortium with a focus toward curricular impact and the students of the NW5C. Additionally, the blossoming NW5C intellectual community is being designed inclusive of students, evidenced by faculty projects containing components for bringing their students together. IV. Conclusion Our objectives as we continue to build the Consortium infrastructure include making a culture shift in looking to colleagues across institutions to share courses, resources, and expertise; regularizing communications and developing program delivery mechanics; strengthening our identities as individual institutions; and building on the special strengths of each NW5C institution, to enhance liberal arts education nationally. Our collaborative efforts are also inspired by meetings and joint efforts of professional colleagues from consortium institutions. NW5C chief financial officers, chief technology officers, and library directors are just some of the groups connecting on a regular basis to share information and combine resources. With ongoing interactions, we anticipate that in the future the Consortium will be able to address significant academic support issues that our colleges face collectively and individually, share resources, create an arena for developing collaborative technology endeavors, and develop other creative solutions to challenges we have not yet fully identified. We anticipate leveraging the growing network to create cost savings, weaving collaborative efforts into courses and course development, and exploring our strengths so we build upon the infrastructure available at each college. It continues to be very gratifying to witness the strength we gain in our collaborative arrangements; we anticipate being able to provide new programs as a consortium with great benefit to students that we cannot accomplish as individual institutions.

NW5C, Gatke Hall 209B, Willamette University, 900 State St., Salem, OR 97301 Carie Faszholz, Coordinator 503-370-6421 cfaszhol@willamette.edu

FOOD SYSTEMS NORTHWEST

 

Spend 3 weeks studying industrial agriculture, urban food justice and small-scale farming as we travel our region

INTEREST MEETING (with food!) Thursday Nov. 14 5:00 PM McIntyre 309

Contact:  Emelie  Peine  (Puget  Sound)  epeine@pugetsound.edu

A Puget Sound, Whitman and Willamette Collaborative SUMMER CLASS!

Sarah  Vance  photo  

Appendix I

NW5C Collaborative Inquiry Project Annual Report March 2014

Foodsystems Northwest: Circuits of Soil, Labor, and Money

Course description: Eating food is critical to our every day life, and yet, many of us have the luxury to treat the acquisition of our daily sustenance as an afterthought. The relationships of our food to soil, to labor, to markets, and to the larger environmental and social systems that sustain us are largely invisible. This experiential course aims to elucidate these interactions as we extensively and intensively explore our Northwest food system from farm to fork. Over the course of 3 weeks, we will travel between the campuses of Whitman College, the University of Puget Sound, and Willamette University, tracing the themes of soil, labor, and money across the Northwest foodscape. The course will begin at Whitman with a focus on the political economy of the food system, training a global lens on the industrial wheat farms, chicken processing plants, and large-scale dairy operations of the Walla Walla Valley. From there we will travel to the University of Puget Sound, where our focus will shift to urban agriculture and food justice. Here, we will continue to trace our three themes through questions of poverty and access to food, urban planning, and the challenges of growing food in the city of Tacoma. Finally, we will travel to Willamette where students will live and work at Zena Forest and Farm, putting the methods of sustainable agriculture into practice and exploring the opportunities and obstacles associated with smaller-scale organic agriculture in the Willamette Valley.

Students will live, eat, travel, and study together as we traverse our region exploring the full range of our food system here in the Northwest. Because the course is intensely experiential, students will be expected to bring both curiosity and a strong commitment to the success of the course. Most days will include some lecture, discussion, and/or presentations by guest speakers from our communities, as well as field trips, films, and time for individual and group reflection. Assignments will include readings, discussion, short essays and written reflection, as well as a final group presentation. The course will conclude with two days of reflection and celebration at Zena Forest and Farm in Salem.

Appendix I (continued)

NW5C Collaborative Inquiry Project Annual Report March 2014

Northwest Five Consortium 2013-2014 Fund for Collaborative Inquiry Projects

Food Systems Northwest August 2014 will launch the pilot of a summer experiential education program that examines the themes of soil, labor, and money throughout the Northwest food system. This biannual, tri-campus course takes advantage of the unique attributes of Walla Walla, Tacoma, and Salem to offer an unprecedented intensive educational experience for NW5C students. Students will spend one week at each school (and importantly, in each community) focusing on three main themes: soil, labor, and money. Students will trace these themes through three distinct units: industrial agriculture and trade at Whitman, urban agriculture and food justice at Puget Sound, and agro-ecology and sustainable production at Willamette. Students will participate in a unique experience offered by combining resources and expertise from the three colleges that will augment the institutions’ strong interdisciplinary programs. This program will also serve as a model for other NW5C initiatives, both at home and abroad.

Negotiating the Global South Through studying global inequalities and critically considering our abilities to counter them, this project assists students in thinking about thorny real world problems while closely examining their own roles and responsibilities, and integrates interdisciplinary engagement across three campuses to create applied, experiential learning opportunities for both students and faculty. This project aims to develop a model of participatory negotiations exercises in which students will collaborate to design solutions addressing a current real world problem and faculty will work across disciplinary boundaries to bring both breadth and depth to this experience.

Southeast by Northwest: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Southeast Asian Studies An interdisciplinary collaboration between Southeast Asianists at the NW5C, this initiative includes teaching collaborations at member institutions, digital sharing of invited guest speakers and workshop content, meetings to facilitate teaching efficiencies while abroad, support for faculty and student research in Southeast Asia, the provision of language-learning opportunities to students, and planning for future study-abroad collaborations. The expected long-term outcome of this collaboration is a richer and more consistent program of Southeast Asian Studies offerings within existing Asian Studies programs at NW5C partner institutions. Specific outcomes include improved course offerings, research collaborations for both faculty and students, the possibility of language study, and sustainable study abroad.

NW5C Platform for Hybrid Scholarship Imagining the Global (IG) is a proposed online platform shared among NW5C institutions that promotes innovative collaboration on global themes. IG will support and link NW5C scholarship across the arts and sciences that engages with related ideas in the context of local, regional, and international field sites. Imagining the Global offers NW5C students and faculty digital tools and resources for use in courses, scholarly projects, and field-based programs, and benefits all participants via their incremental contributions toward a larger conversation on the global. Ultimately, IG will help NW5C students develop more sophisticated global understandings and identities, and view our common Pacific Northwest setting in a larger context. Via its public-facing portal, IG will also provide a showcase of cutting-edge NW5C student and faculty scholarship. The IG project aims to support existing regional and international NW5C initiatives as well as new initiatives, and builds on demonstrated expertise in digital scholarship at Lewis & Clark College, and global theory and field-based scholarship in all five NW5C institutions.

NW5C - Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American Studies Association A regional association of Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American Studies will provide a framework for enhanced collaboration on research, pedagogy, cultural events, and colloquia. The association should broaden students’ exposure to a plurality of perspectives and skills and provide fora for their development as young scholars. The association seeks to harness the expertise of NW5C Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American Studies colleagues in a joint effort to create an interdisciplinary association of scholars and students of Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American Studies. This association will be instrumental in developing shared and collaborative ventures including: workshops, study groups, curriculum development, speaker series, faculty exchanges, study abroad programs, and eventually a journal and a regional colloquium.

Appendix II

2015 Peer Tutoring Conference The NW5 Peer Tutoring Conference in January 2015 will bring together peer tutors and directors of peer tutoring from all five member institutions. Peer tutoring helps students become more conscious of their own learning; skilled tutors can provide strong academic support outside the classroom that enhances students’ capacity to be responsible for their own learning. This weekend-long conference will provide professional opportunities for tutors across the five campuses in diverse areas (including writing, math, sciences, foreign languages, and ESL) to engage, share best practices, and develop a sense of community and identity as peer tutors. The conference setting will allow the directors to learn more about their tutors' instincts, judgments, strengths and weaknesses, thereby exposing potential areas for ongoing training and development. Additionally, the flow of ideas between campuses assists all NW5 member institutions with implementing innovative approaches to tutoring and to managing peer tutors.

Teaching Asia in the Pacific Northwest A gathering of Asianists from all the consortial schools will meet to discuss short and long-term prospects for collaboration and resource-sharing. This collaboration is designed to explore potential consortium-wide solutions to perennial problems facing our Asian Studies programs in terms of uneven curricular and off-campus coverage, and isolation of Asianist faculty and students. It will foster benefits on each campus as well as a regional identity, highlighting the Pacific Northwest as a place to study Asia in a liberal arts setting. Such collaboration could maximize student learning opportunities by providing greater “coverage” in area and approach; it could prove mutually-beneficial to our teaching and expand curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for students on each campus through sharing existing resources to whatever extent possible; it could help address issues of isolation on our campuses by encouraging work across campuses and across disciplines that maximizes existing faculty strengths as well as student networks on a consortium-wide scale.

Summer Institutes in Latin America This initiative seeks to promote student and faculty development through the creation of Summer Institutes in Latin America. These Institutes would build upon existing study abroad sites in Latin America currently run by our institutions—e.g., Cuenca, Ecuador and Oaxaca, Mexico—and existing student research, student-faculty research, and summer internship funds on each campus in order to foster international, interdisciplinary research and/or internship opportunities as well as cross-campus collaboration. In addition to making more effective use of our global field sites and partnerships, these Institutes would enable vibrant cross-campus, cross-discipline, and cross-cultural engagements. Individual faculty research and student mentoring at the Institute will ensure high quality participation, low-resource intensive programming, and greater engagement with local communities, and even alumni abroad. Returning students and faculty would be able to integrate these global experiences into the classroom, into projects with the wider community, and into institutional projects (like a digital library) that would all help to develop and sustain a more hemispheric approach to knowledge and engagement.

NW5C Gender Studies Faculty Consortium: Building Bridges through Gender Studies This project builds on the successful NW5C Gender Studies Faculty Consortium, and aims to create collaborations among NW5 Gender Studies undergraduate students; to strengthen and refine our course offerings to compare methodologies, texts, and structures for our Gender Studies courses; to brainstorm and compare ideas for “risky” pedagogy and other methods for teaching sensitive topics like gender and sexuality; to encourage and discuss faculty research on gender, especially with an eye to future collaborative efforts; and to consider how feminist and gender studies could reach into STEM fields, and to facilitate discussions among NW5 faculty members in these fields.

Visual Culture Colloquium The colloquium aims to bring together students, faculty members, and a nationally renowned speaker for an exchange of ideas once a year. The colloquium will address visual culture as broadly encompassing work by any discipline that addresses issues of visual representation, including but not limited to art history, studio art, anthropology, film and media studies, gender studies, politics, race and ethnic studies, rhetoric, sociology, and theatre arts. No such forum exists currently on NW5 campuses; therefore its establishment would address an important need in the training of our students and development of our faculty. The colloquium will provide opportunities for greater collaboration between the respective institutions at both the student and faculty level, support cross-disciplinary inquiry, create a broader, more diverse sense of community among participants, introduce faculty and students to resources unique to each campus, offer an ideal venue for showcasing different models of faculty-student collaboration within different disciplines, and provide a professional forum for presenting student and faculty scholarship.

NW5C Collaborative Inquiry Projects Annual Report March 2014

Appendix II (continued)