Taking Veterans Research to Veterans: On Launching the Veterans’ User Guide for College

Angie Mallory

All but two of the existing books claiming to be college handbooks for veterans are written for university employees. My own work has contributed to that trend and it’s time to change that. I’m here to report on my progress and to solicit feedback from those who may have gone farther down this road than I have‚ in any community.

In 2011 I embarked on a research project born of my own struggles: find out what military veterans were experiencing in the writing classroom, noting especially how their experience with hierarchical leadership roles impacted their classroom interactions. In 2014 I designed a FYC course by veterans for veterans, where our commonality was the type of writing we did in the military. Additionally, we analyzed our own weaknesses on a risk scale, attempting to find the areas that would trip up our success in college, then designed a mitigation strategy for these risks. My hope was that my classroom could become a lab of sorts, dissecting the challenges these student veterans had in their classrooms and interactions, together learning to be better communicators. Now, as PhD in Rhetoric, a Navy Veteran, a technical communicator for the Army, and a freelance technical writer (note the absence of university association there), I seek to take this research I formerly published for academic use and make it accessible and applicable to veterans in/preparing for college.

I have all the material I need to write this book, including topics I crowd-sourced from wonderful veteran friends. The challenge, and the rhetorical piece of this, is the process to produce and market not just a book, but the book as fuel for an international conversation among veterans. My plan is to utilize a self-publishing venue that includes marketing services, and to publish in as many mediums as possible, both to reach more audiences and to account for disabilities. For example, some people only have time to listen to books on audio, and some have difficulty reading; having my material in an audiobook form too helps meet a multitude of needs.

At the same time, I have to think about cost: making the book affordable for veterans and being able to recoup some of my costs since I’m sponsoring the project myself. This is difficult since a PhD in Rhetoric and TechComm doesn’t include much education on how to make money while saving readers money. Another challenge is the idea that a book isn’t just a product that you put out into the world but a tremendous opportunity to start and facilitate conversation; this is not a new idea, but it is enacted differently than if the book were for academics. Therefore, while developing the book I need to prepare a website, blog, and social media accounts to reach a much broader audience than if I needed to only reach my field with its journals. These all seem like very commercial endeavors, and that flies in the face of the penniless ethics of a humanities’ academic who learned how to do everything in relation to an educational institution.

I Am Now a Person Who Has Run Two Different Civic Service-Learning Courses At the Same Time and Mostly Survived: Ideas and Failures

Stephen Carradini

Service-learning courses vary widely, from individuals working with clients they found on their own to student groups working with multiple clients provided by the faculty to a whole class working on one project together provided by the university. I recently found myself in the wholly-new-to-me position of running two service-learning courses in the same semester that worked on separate projects for the same university-provided client. This presentation reports on the project with the goal of offering some experience and potential advice for those who may not have run two different large-scale service learning projects at the same time and for those who may not have worked with a university-organized project before.

The presentation will take a chronological look at the processes of joining the service-learning project provided by the university, planning for day-to-day work of the two projects, and managing the two projects simultaneously.

The project revolved around two sections of a Social Media in the Workplace course that was contracted (yes, contracted) to work with the City of Glendale on revamping the City’s social media presence. One graduate course composed a policy document to govern use of the City’s social media; the undergraduate course created a social media plan to guide the City’s social media use and speedily onboard the new social media manager.

The project began with an ongoing partnership project where faculty matched local cities with university classes so students could create work of civic import for the cities. In this part of the presentation I will explain how different the process of working with a city was than working with individual clients. The communication processes, expectation level, and numbers of people involved were all different than service-learning projects I had run before.

Planning for two courses to run service-learning projects simultaneously required thinking carefully about how to structure the semesters. The 7.5-week nature of the graduate course added a further wrinkle to the planning. In this part of the presentation I will talk about the scaffolding I did in the courses, the relationships between the two courses, and the varied client review processes I set up for both courses.

Managing two courses on two different schedules doing two different projects for the same client was a struggle. In this part of the presentation, I will show how I was able to achieve the scaffolding fairly well, somewhat manage the relationships between the two courses, and mismanage client review into an almost-total failure of the document review process.

I conclude by noting that even if you think you are able to take on two courses’ worth of service learning at once, your client may not be able to; no matter what happens, though, the students and the faculty will gain valuable project management insights.

If I Build It, Will They Come? Leading a Faculty Development Center

Jennifer Veltsos

Since the fall of 2002, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) has supported the University’s faculty in their efforts to improve student engagement, design more organized courses, create better student learning outcomes, and enhance their teaching careers. With a full-time reassigned faculty director, a graduate assistant, an administrative assistant, and two conference rooms, the University has demonstrated its commitment to supporting continuing preparation. But participation data from 2016 to present shows a persistent downward slide. Faculty prioritize teaching, research, and advising, so professional development and service to an ever increasing list of university initiatives compete for their remaining time and energy. Most clients are tenure track faculty because CETL programs are free, local, and flexible options for criteria 1 (teaching) and 3 (continuing preparation) of the required professional development plans. Participation by post-tenure faculty wanes as they become more confident in their teaching and acquire greater service and advising responsibilities.

Faculty insist that they prefer traditional face-to-face professional development experiences, but a 2017 gap analysis and informal conversations indicate that they really want professional development on demand. Asynchronous professional development options include email, curated website content, podcasts, and online training. This presentation will describe some of the options in development and seek suggestions from participants for ways to persuade faculty to make better use of this university resource.