February 17, 2005
Fund recipients cross disciplinary boundaries to move forward
The first awards from the Fund for Innovation and Redesign, made last year, are facilitating groundbreaking discussions and work across disciplines, according to the interim reports submitted by 11 awardees.
“I’m impressed with the level of interdisciplinary collaboration,” says Acting Provost David Thorud. “We all know that the UW values the ability to work across disciplinary boundaries, but we should never take that for granted. This fund allows bright, energetic people to push the envelope, and to identify the challenges that occur when people with different habits and institutional cultures try to work together.”
The fund provides temporary money for innovative projects, both administrative and educational in nature, with the average two-year grant less than $100,000. Here is a progress report from fund recipients:
English in the Workplace, a program of classes for UW staff who speak English as a second language, has been in great demand in its first year as a campuswide offering. In the first two quarters, 67 students have taken classes, which are 10 weeks long and meet twice a week, with classes of just nine students per section.
Currently, 153 employees are on the waiting list. Reaching all employees who might need language training has been a challenge, according to Karen Long, director of Payables Administration. “We know that employees will come if the classes are available,” Long says. “We’re starting to think creatively about possible sources of supplemental funding to meet the demand.”
The Interdisciplinary Program in Humanitarian Relief is off to a “flying start,” according to Elaine Chang, acting director of the Marc Lindenberg Center for Humanitarian Action, International Development and Global Citizenship in the Evans School of Public Affairs. The program had a series of kickoff events in October, bringing experts from non-governmental organizations concerned with relief efforts together with representatives of the private sector, military and university to discuss issues such as communication, coordination and logistics for emergency response to international disasters.
The tsunami threw these issues into much sharper focus. “This needs an academic field,” commented Mark Haselkorn, professor of technical communication. “This is an industry with 80 percent turnover, with a total annual budget in the range of $20 billion to $40 billion, but it has no academic component. We plan to reach out beyond engineering and public affairs, to the rest of the campus, as we broaden our academic offerings and our research.”
The Diversity Research Institute is moving along in its planning process, according to Rusty Barceló, vice president for minority affairs and vice provost for diversity. The purpose of the institute is to generate new interdisciplinary knowledge about diversity. The planning process includes developing an inventory of current diversity research at the UW, identifying trends in diversity research that could serve as the emphases of the new institute, engaging scholars in developing a model for the institute, and funding three interdisciplinary teams of scholars to develop extramural proposals in support of the institute’s priorities. David Takeuchi, professor of social work, has agreed to serve as the institute’s interim director.
A diversity minor is being developed in the College of Arts and Sciences with the aid of an innovation grant. The minor, scheduled to be offered next autumn, will require a minimum of 25 credits, including one course from an approved list of foundations courses, plus one course each from four of the five approved minor categories. Rick Bonus, associate professor of American ethnic studies and program director, reported that the organizing committee has already held three faculty workshops on teaching diversity. The curriculum infrastructure for the diversity minor has been created, including the list of possible courses and the course descriptions.
One grant is aiding with the creation of an interprofessional health sciences certification, which will certify practitioners in a common set of core skills through a performance-based clinical examination that crosses the traditional health care disciplines. The exam will focus on skills specifically required for individuals to collaborate on interprofessional health care teams. The work in the first year is on developing the model cases that will be used in exams.
A challenge that the project faces is to find time for this exam in what are already very crowded curricula, and in rewarding faculty who participate as evaluators, according to Lynne Robins, associate professor of medical education and biomedical informatics. Success in solving these issues will make the UW a model for interprofessional collaboration nationally, Robins says.
A three-campus digital image collaboration with the University Libraries, the UW Image Bank, is aiming to provide University-wide access to digital images of art, architecture, and historical and cultural materials. The team of visual resources curators, librarians, and faculty has been working to create an online digital image database, while also strengthening local infrastructure to support the use of digital images, said Denise Hattwig, curator of visual resources at UW Bothell.
All three campuses are now using MDID, a software tool that supports the use of digital images in the classroom. The group has established an image repository in the Libraries to enable the sharing of images across departments and campuses. Over 500 images have been contributed to the repository from local collections so far, and these images will be made available in the online UW Image Bank database in Fall 2005. The team will be conducting a Digital Image Use survey in April, and will use the results to determine additional content to be included in the UW Image Bank
The Graduate School wants to make the admissions process more efficient, thus permitting the 113 graduate departments more time for substantive reviews of the applications, says John Drew, Director of Computing and Information Resources for the Graduate School. The project coordinators are creating a Web portal for applicants using MyUW and centralizing the capture of information for distribution to departments. When the portal is completed it will contain not only application information, but a host of other resources, including a funding opportunities database, mentoring resources, and access to housing locators and child care resources.
They are also surveying the different programs and convening focus groups of those who review applications regarding central capture of narrative portions of the application and online letters of recommendation.
Eleven smaller schools and college are working together to find ways that central information systems can serve their needs better. Their efforts are focused on the information to create statistical reports, and how these reports can be created more efficiently. For example, a department completing a program review requires student data that comes from several sources, including local databases and hard copy files. A typical report can take at least eight hours to complete.
A Process Improvement Team has been established, and Michael Eisenberg, dean of the Information School, predicts that their innovations will result in the savings of hundreds of hours of staff time – and that the results will benefit all colleges and schools, both large and small.
A new program for community college transfers to UW Tacoma will function essentially as an academic minor. The Global Honors Program will be structured so that an upper-division student takes a seminar each quarter on an issue of global significance. The minor will culminate with a thesis or project which demonstrates the student’s competence in dealing with global issues.
Each student will be expected to participate in an international experience and encouraged to gain proficiency in a second language. The first cohort of students is being recruited now, according to Bill Richardson, director of UWT Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.
The project to develop a joint JD/MSW degree is encountering some unexpected challenges, according to Lisa Kelly, director of the child advocacy clinic at the School of Law. Despite these challenges, Joseph Kumi, the School of Social Work’s project coordinator and practicum instructor, is confident and extremely committed to finding innovative solutions to these surmountable hurdles.
Students from social work are supposed to participate in a practicum with law students as the centerpiece of the program. However, before establishing the practicum, the organizers must address the different codes of ethics that the professions have: Social workers operate in an environment of mandatory reporting, while lawyers work under an ethic of confidentiality. So the organizers must address the issue of what happens during a practicum, if discussions with clients result in an issue being raised that is potentially reportable under social work ethics.
Besides addressing this thorny subject, organizers are planning undergraduate mentorships as part of the service learning courses in social work, and are also dealing with challenges of introducing new material in curricula that are very tightly prescribed. Both school representatives are collaboratively drafting several service delivery protocols, such as how to handle access to files and information and how to provide joint supervision, in order to ensure that social work students become full partners with lawyers in a law firm setting.
