Full Professor Promotion CaseNarrative
• Teaching Details • Professional
Writing Scholarship • Poetry Performance Humanities
Faculty Narrative Randy
M. Brooks, Ph.D. Introduction
& Teaching Narrative & Scholarship
Narrative & University Service Narrative
Being an active Humanities faculty, I am engaged in long-term research in three areas: (1) professional writing curriculum, (2) contemporary haiku poetry, (3) technical communication and writing theory. I have been a frequent contributor on national and regional levels on professional writing curriculum and technical communication. I have received international recognition and national awards for my work in haiku writing, editing and publishing. I am also very often involved in editing, writing, translating, and consulting in these areas of expertise. I often share my expertise in editing, publishing and technology as professional service. I enjoy involving students in these professional activities. Often the result of my research and development is an essay, a publication, a web site, a workshop, or oral presentation. These products reach a wide audience—students, other faculty, professional colleagues, and the general public. I am stimulated by interdisciplinary work, so I find ways to interact with a variety of disciplines—natural science, business, technology, Japanese literature, social science, nursing, graphic arts, and of course, English studies. I enjoy teaching a variety of courses and developing new courses to meet the needs of English majors and university-wide requirements for all students. As you will see in my teaching portfolio and teaching narrative, I have been innovative and pro-active in implementing university curricular initiatives, such as service learning, off-campus learning, teaching with technology, and the redesign of courses for sequential elements of the Millikin Program for Student Learning. I am one of the few faculty members at Millikin who can claim to have developed and taught all four years of the sequential interdepartmental courses—IN150, IN151, IN250, IN350 and IN450. I genuinely enjoy the challenge of developing more active learning opportunities for our students—internships, hands-on learning experiences, international and community based studies, client-based service projects and multicultural perspectives. I take great pride in the fact that Millikin students know how to read AND how to apply their understandings in direct, pre-professional actions and activities. While much of my professional service has taken the form of editing, publishing and leading workshops for professional colleagues, my university service has primarily taken the form of curriculum and faculty development. I have served on several curriculum reform efforts—implementing service learning, reforming the majors, planning and implementing the University Capstone, teaching with technology and leading the writing in the disciplines effort. It has been especially rewarding to be a leader among faculty development efforts to "teach the teachers" (primarily in the areas of integrating technology into teaching, service learning, writing in the disciplines, student publishing and active learning approaches). Of course, I have also been very active in traditional university service, serving as Chair of the Humanities Division, Chair of the Council on Curriculum, Information Technology Advisory Committee and others such as the Pre-professional and Tabor Graduate Education committees. In addition to promoting service learning for my students, I have been an active member of my community—seeking ways to serve with my writing, editing, publishing and teaching skills. I provide a great deal of pro-bono services and volunteer assistance to service groups, my church, area schools and non-profit organizations. "Teaching
is a calling—it teaches I love teaching. I love teaching because I learn so much every time I teach. I love teaching a variety of people—children, undergraduate students, professionals, fellow educators and adults in my church. Each group challenges me as a teacher in different ways and each group provides their own lessons of discovery for me. I love teaching because I receive so much through the process of giving to my students. I give my students guided opportunities to explore, to inquire, to consider, to question, to think and to create. And my students always take that exploration beyond my own expectations or boundaries, so they continually teach me as we inquire into various unknown learning journeys together. I also enjoy the challenge of curriculum development. Curriculum is, of course, more than the development of individual courses. It is the development and integration of a wide variety of learning experiences and possible sequences of courses that will help the student develop knowledge and abilities necessary for success in a discipline and beyond that, in the process of lifelong learning. I view a curriculum as a road map with a carefully planned itinerary of learning moments. Each stop is an extended exploration of that topic and area (a course or an internship or an independent study or research project). So even though I am discussing individual courses in this report, I am aware of the importance of the overall, integrated learning experience afforded by curriculum—the English majors, the university-wide sequential courses, and related programs. In this teaching narrative, I will report on several of the courses I have developed, how I improved these courses over time, and how I shared my pedagogical development with others through conference presentations, essays published in refereed journals, and through faculty development workshops or seminars. ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT Writing Major Curriculum. A great deal of my curriculum development work has focused on efforts to design and develop the writing major as an option in the English department. When I was hired in 1990 to be the Director of the writing major, my first task was to study and reform the writing major curriculum. I examined various programs and proposed a new organization of the curriculum into three tracks—professional writing, creative writing and journalism. Each track would offer a possible sequence of introductory to advanced courses, with all writing majors taking a core consisting of EN270 Computer Aided Publishing, EN310 Writing Theory, and EN410 Senior Capstone Writing Portfolio. This curriculum assured that all majors were familiar with professional technology in the discipline, introduced to theoretical issues, and completed the major with a senior project in the Writing Portfolio capstone course. I developed and taught these new courses and also coordinated the professional writing internship program, which continues to be an important element of the writing major at Millikin. My work on the writing major curriculum development has been shared with professional colleagues through several conference presentations and essays. At the national CCCC conference in Washington DC in 1995, I presented the Millikin University writing major curriculum and resulting courses in a presentation titled, "Designing The Undergraduate Writing Major: A Rationale for Multiplicity Versus Specialization." An essay on the senior writing portfolio course, "Publications Portfolios: Credentials for Professional Writing Majors" was published in the 14th Annual Practical Conference on Communication, Society for Technical Communication, October 1990. Another essay on directing internships "Observation & Reflection in Internships" was published in the refereed journal, National Society for Experiential Education Quarterly, 19.1, fall 1993. As a result of these presentations and publications (and related work in Writing in the Disciplines), I have been called on by several other universities to help them reform or to create writing majors. I have provided consulting services on similar curriculum reforms at the University of Tennessee, University of Missouri at Rolla, Western Missouri University, Central Florida University and the College of Wooster. Reforms of the Writing & English Major. The writing major curriculum was revised following the MPSL guidelines for reform of majors. We already had a good developmental sequence of courses culminating in a capstone course, but the missing curricular element was a lack of freshman level introductory courses in the writing major. In order to address this missing curricular element, I developed a one-credit writing workshop that could focus on a variety of genres or approaches to creative writing each time it was offered. Over the subsequent years, I have offered sections on writing for children, folklore writing, tornado tales, haiku, poetry, and general workshop projects. This course development was shared with professional colleagues in an essay, "Tweaking the Writing Major Curriculum: The Role of One Credit Workshops" which was presented at the 32nd Annual English Articulation Conference, sponsored by the University of Illinois on April 12, 1996. Writing Theory Course Reform. MPSL reform of all English majors resulted in a change in the Writing Theory course. Originally, the writing theory course I developed was an historical survey of writing theory from Western Classical Greek to contemporary theories of rhetoric. The English department needed a course on contemporary approaches to teaching writing for the English Education majors, and so the Writing Theory course was changed to focus on contemporary theories of writing and contemporary approaches to teaching writing. In order to provide awareness of the Classical Greek writing theories, the department asked me to revise Major World Authors 1 into a new course, EN241 Western Classical Traditions. In this new version of the course, first taught in 1999, the students explore the origins of Western poetics and rhetoric—an introduction to literary theory and writing theory. Using primary texts by classical authors, we learn about the transition from oral literature to a culture of writing, and how this dramatic shift introduces the value of being able to read, to write, to be analytical, and is connected to the birth of education and democracy. This integration of the literary and rhetorical is one of the core values of the English department’s revision of the majors, according to MPSL guidelines, so a course in classical traditions is required of all English majors. A unique element of my approach to the Classical Traditions course is that the students continually experiment with original writing based on the theories and models of primary texts being studied. While we are reading classic oral literary works, the students are writing an oral folklore tale passed down for several generations in their own families. When we study Plato’s dialogue about the ethics and motives for writing, the students are writing about their own goals and ambitions for their life’s work as writers. Writing and reading are integrated into a coherent whole experience of the past and made relevant to the present. Even though several non-English majors take this demanding course, in addition to English majors, it has consistently received high ratings from students completing the SIR evaluations. MEDIA ARTS CENTER CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT In order to implement the computer publishing instruction for the writing major, we needed essential technology infrastructure at Millikin—a computer-publishing classroom or lab. In 1991 I wrote and received a grant from the George I. Alden Trust, (Boston, MA) to build our first computer-publishing classroom. This was created in Shilling 407 and became the center for a great deal of experiential learning with writing, editing and publishing. The first course I developed was EN270 Computer Aided Publishing, which was presented at the annual convention of the Association for Business Communication. The presentation, "Developing Three Roles for Computer Aided Publishing: The User, the Designer, and the Tutor" emphasized my approach of emphasizing practical computer skills, the theory of publication design and the ability to teach others about skills or good design. I also integrated service learning into the computer-aided publishing course. Student teams sought clients in the community in need of publication design and completed client case projects. I presented this approach in the essay, "Service Learning in Writing and Publishing Courses" at the 1995 Council of Independent Colleges National Institute on Learning and Service. Additional advanced courses in hypertext and online documentation were developed and taught in the computer-publishing classroom. As with other courses, I shared the pedagogy with colleagues through presentations and workshops such as "Teaching Online Documentation: A Collaborative Approach" which was presented at the 1993 annual CCCC conference in San Diego. It is available in the ERIC ED database on teaching item 359-563A. In a 1995 honors seminar, "Computers in Society: The Mind Tool" my students explored a multidisciplinary approach to new electronic media such as CD-Rom publishing, web publishing and hypertext interfaces. The honor students studied the history of writing as a technology, analyzed the cognitive processes of using a variety of new media, and created a hypermedia, multimedia or web site online publication. This course and others on hypertext led me to the realization that the contemporary electronic publisher needs to know graphics, text, computers and users. We would have to integrate our educational experiences if we wanted students to be prepared to be significant contributors to this new web-based media. Media Arts Center Established. The success of the computer-publishing curriculum led to additional internships, additional opportunities to assist with university publications, and encouraged students to develop related skills in the graphic arts or video editing. However, by 1995 the computer-publishing classroom was in need of significant updates, and at the suggestion of Dean Ditzler and Dean Fiol, the English department and Art department and Communication departments planned to integrate media arts instruction within a single updated facility. With an emphasis on the potential of an integrated media arts classroom, we wrote and received a $250,000 grant from the Lumpkin Foundation to establish and maintain the Media Arts Center. Web Publishing Course. Computer-aided publishing and advanced courses in literary editing were already established, but the new area of development in media arts was web design and publishing. First piloted as a team-taught course with MIS professor, Dr. Paul Dorsey, in 1996, I developed and taught this course every year since that time, seeking additional means of integrating graphic and text design skills into a unified web-design course. In this course I emphasized the history of technology related to writing and publishing, so that the students learn lifelong design goals as well as the current skills associated with current software and hardware for web design. Seeking real-world learning opportunities for my students, we designed web sites for campus and community clients. This approach has been shared with my colleagues at several conferences and in workshops. For example, at the 2000 Association for Business Communication conference in Indianapolis, I presented, "Teaching the Web Site Development Consulting Process: A Service Learning Approach." I also emphasize a web portfolio approach in this course, so that students complete a variety of case studies and service projects, culminating in an annotated collection of work, which can be shared with potential clients or future employers. The public performance of their work adds a dimension of responsibility and motivation which results in higher quality work than if they were merely completing the assignments for a grade. I mentored Dr. O’Connor in the teaching of Web Publishing several years ago, so now he and I offer the course every other semester. We have also conducted numerous workshops on web design and integrating web resources into college courses through the Associated Colleges of Illinois faculty development seminars. Some of my web design students have had remarkable successes. For example, John Schleppenbach continued to work on web design issues in his honors project, a web-based hypertext on Copyright Law and the Internet. As a result of this work, he and I were co-presenters on the "Use and Misuse of Copyright in the Classroom" at the Certified Nurse Assistant Nursing Instructor Fall Conference, held at the Millikin Institute in 1999. Technical Writing & Advanced Web Design Courses. Several Millikin students have expressed an interest in a career in technical communication, but without a base of technology courses common at engineering schools, this is difficult to offer within Millikin’s course offerings. I have developed and taught a course on technical writing, but it rarely has been able to attract more than about ten students, so I have pursued a two-pronged strategy for developing advanced technical communication abilities in some of our students—(1) the one credit technical tutoring internship in the Media Arts Center, and (2) advanced web design courses taught during summer school or immersion sessions. The technical tutoring course is a weekly course in which students learn to document various processes and procedures in the Media Arts Center. Each tutor creates demonstrations and tutorials for users coming to the center. We share our questions and tutorials in the weekly meetings, and the interns serve as tutors in the lab during posted hours throughout the semester. Sometimes tutors are scheduled to assist with certain courses, such as the video production course, so that they develop expertise providing immediate help with users struggling to learn a new technology. These experiences are fundamental to careers in technical communication. I have also developed and taught two advanced web design courses—Advanced Web Graphics and Advanced Web Animation. These immersion courses emphasize the rapid development of skills with the contemporary technology—Photoshop, ImageReady, Macromedia Flash and related web design hardware. These courses also require that each student create an extended web-based tutorial documenting these new advanced web design skills. The students complete the course tutorials to acquire these skills, and they simultaneously create an online guide for others to be able to do the same skills. Designing tutorials is a primary task of technical communication professionals, so these courses develop both user skills AND technical writing abilities. You may see several examples of these tutorials off the course pages on my faculty home page. My experience and expertise teaching web publishing has led to conference presentations, essays, and workshops to numerous to include in this short teaching narrative. I enjoy teaching the teachers as well as teaching technical writing professionals through these presentations, demonstrations, and intensive workshops, such as the recent Society for Technical Communication workshops on web design and advanced web graphics. See my research portfolio for more details on the many ways I teach the teachers and teach the professionals the same skills I teach my students in the Media Arts Center. SERVICE LEARNING CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT I integrated service-learning into the computer-aided publishing course, in the form of community publication design clients as early as 1992. So when a committee of faculty was formed to develop service learning at Millikin University, I was, of course, invited to participate in the planning and developing of our university-wide program. In 1995 I was a member of the team of Millikin faculty who participated in the Council of Independent Colleges National Institute on Learning and Service. From this original service learning development team, I helped write the Service Learning CAPHE Grant that we received to fund the development of the Millikin program. I also served on a second faculty development team effort at the Indiana Institute on Integrating Service with Academic Study, sponsored by the Indiana Campus Compact at Indiana University, in 1996. In 1995 I developed a technical writing course in which a team of students built a touch-screen hypertext community information system. This project provided students with real-world experiences gathering and editing information about the Decatur community non-profit organizations and their services, and several of these students have gone on to pursue careers as directors of non-profit agencies. I published and presented the results of this service-learning project in a variety of forums, and subsequently received a national award recognizing it as a model project in community education. These experiences helped me further integrate service-learning experiences into the course on web publishing and other courses. From 1995 through 2002 I have supervised about sixty service-learning projects in my various Millikin courses. A few of the subsequent publications and presentations include an essay, "Technical Communication and Service Learning: Integrating Profession and Community" published in the Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, (Houghton, Michigan: CPTSC), 1996. I also presented an essay on "Integrating Service Learning into Writing Curriculum: Expanding the Learning Environment Beyond the Classroom" at the national CCCC conference in Phoenix, Arizona in 1997. I have continued to serve on the Service Learning advisory committee at Millikin over the years, and recent curriculum development efforts have been to integrate service learning into the interdepartmental University Capstone course, IN450. I will discuss the development of that course and service-learning element in the next section of my teaching narrative on interdepartmental course development. INTERDEPARTMENTAL CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT I have a strong commitment to a liberal learning approach to education, so I have been very involved with several Millikin University efforts to build a more coherent, interdisciplinary four-year learning experience for our students. Writing in the Disciplines. From 1991 through 1995 I was a faculty mentor then director of the Writing in the Disciplines program, sharing my expertise in professional writing with faculty from all disciplines at Millikin. The WID program was an effort to teach the teachers, so that there would be a lasting curriculum change at Millikin, with all faculty taking more responsibility for the quality of student writing beyond the freshman year. Each department worked to integrate additional writing experiences in the their courses, including an advanced writing requirement for each major. This curriculum reform experience was very helpful when we undertook the larger challenge of transforming our entire university-wide curriculum, now known as the MPSL. Millikin Program for Student Learning. In academic year 1994-1995 I served on the liberal learning study group on the majors, resulting in a report offering strategies for redesigning the major as disciplinary home. As the Humanities division representative and later chair, I served on the Council on Curriculum during the first years of the MPSL curriculum reform which means that I helped review and pass the proposals for all pilot courses, new courses, and reforms of the majors. As chair of the Council on Curriculum, I served on the oversight committee on the New Program of Student Learning from 1995-1997. Therefore, it should not be surprising that I have developed new interdepartmental courses and helped with faculty development for teaching new interdepartmental courses for all four years of the sequential elements of the MPSL. Teaching IN150 and IN151—Critical Writing, Reading and Research. Each year we piloted a new sequential element, followed by another year of full implementation. In 1995 I served on the New Program Pilot Course Development Committee, and we were working on the new first year courses. I helped plan general guidelines and then taught Interdepartmental 150, Critical Writing, Reading & Research 1, 1996, 1998, and 1999. This course integrates reading, writing and research around an inquiry topic. My inquiry topics included the future, the impact of technology on society and science in fiction with cohort faculty from the business school and sciences. My approach is to help the students move from personal expertise and direct observation as the basis of their writing content to interviews with others, including experts, and finally, learning to use published expertise and documenting those sources fully. We also experimented with a web-based hypertext writing assignment and electronic portfolios, two elements of my instruction that were shared with colleagues in two presentations: (1) "The Rhetoric of Hypertext: Possibilities for Freshman English Courses" at the Summer Seminar in Rhetoric & Composition in 1998; and more recently, "Formative Evaluation of Electronic Portfolios: Constructing A Bridge Between Writers and Readers" at the 18th Annual Computers and Writing Conference held at Illinois State University, 2002. In the fall of 2001 I redesigned my approach to teaching IN151 to include a more intentional sequence of Personal Knowledge Management skills—inquiry management skills connected to the extended research writing assignment common to all sections of IN151. These seven lifelong inquiry and knowledge creation skills include: retrieving information, evaluating information, organizing information, collaborating around information, analyzing information, securing information, and presenting information. Working with reference librarian Susan Avery, students followed a sequence of cases and exercises to experience and improve each of these skills through the course of their extended research project. This approach to the IN151 course was shared with other IN151 faculty at the fall CWRR faculty development workshop in a presentation titled, "Teaching IN151: An Inquiry-management Approach to Critical Writing, Reading and Research." This pedagogical approach was also the basis of a presentation with Susan Avery at the Teaching and Learning Mentor Institute sponsored by the Associated College of Illinois and the Ameritech Faculty Development Technology Program, "Personal Knowledge Management: Enhancing the Inquiry Process with Technology," August 3, 2001. This approach was also featured in a poster exhibit (with Dr. Dorsey) at the Association of American Colleges and University conference on Technology, Learning & Intellectual Development: Challenges at the Crossroads of the Education Revolution, (Baltimore, MD), November 1-4, 2001. Teaching IN250—United States Studies. I developed an interdepartmental US Studies course, Modern American Poetry: the Imagists and Harlem Renaissance Poets, and have taught it twice. In this course students studied the cultural contexts of early modernist American poetry. They examined the Imagist poets and their search for new poetics based on objective perception, and they examined the Harlem Renaissance poets and their search for new poetics of identity in the modern American city. This course fulfills the IN250 course guidelines by focusing on an historical period of the United States and exploring multicultural elements of that history. In this course students build a web resources page for one of the poets studied, write original poetry based on the modernist approaches studied and respond to a large body of primary works. Another innovative element of this course is the use of biographical videos of several of the leading modernist poets and historical videos about the art and culture of this time of transition in American society. I have not shared this approach through publications nor presentations, but the course web site includes many examples of the resulting student poetry and web resource projects. Teaching IN350—Global Studies. For my 1997 sabbatical research project I studied the global haiku tradition in depth, conducting interviews and researching the history and development of English-language haiku. A British publishing house, Iron Press, published the resulting book, the Global Haiku Anthology: 25 Outstanding Poets, in 2000. From 1999-2000 I was the Hardy Distinguished Professor of English. My proposed research for the Hardy professorship was to continue my studies on contemporary global haiku, and to develop a new Global Studies course, an IN350 course based on the global haiku tradition. In the spring of 2000 I taught IN350, Global Haiku Tradition, for the first time, launching the new course with a Global Haiku Festival at Millikin University. Over 90 leading haiku writers, editors, and scholars came to Millikin to share their research and original works. Leading haiku writers, editors and scholars from around the world give presentations on haiku traditions in Japan, England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe and the USA. April 2000. See the web site at: http://www.millikin.edu/haiku/global. The students interviewed contemporary haiku writers and wrote web profiles and essays about their poetics and their work. I have now taught the course every spring since 2000, and it is a very popular course with students begging to be signed after it quickly closes. It has received very high ratings from the students on the SIR evaluations. I think this course receives such high ratings and enthusiastic response because of several reasons. First, it emphasizes not just the historical tradition and origins of the haiku tradition, but it is also an experience of the contemporary, living tradition of writing English-language haiku. Second, the students experiment with writing haiku and related haikai poetry throughout the semester while studying various famous haiku poets. Third, the students make direct contact with living haiku writers and scholars and discover their enthusiasm and lifelong commitment to haiku. And fourth, the class web site makes their work a public performance—friends and family and the haiku community watch them grown and develop as writers. They enjoy having a real audience for their writing (instead of just the teacher). The class web site is located at: http://www.millikin.edu/haiku. Each year several of my students have succeeded at getting their work published in various literary journals and haiku columns in newspapers. This course and the subsequent research and original poetry of the students in it have become well known to the haiku community. An essay on the development of this course, "Teaching Haiku in Higher Education: An Immersion into the Living Tradition—the Case of Millikin University," was published by the World Haiku Review 1.3, The World Haiku Club, (Oxford, England) in November 2001. This essay is available online or in my teaching portfolio if you would like to read a fuller account. In 2002 Dr. Guillory, the chair of the English department, nominated me for the Global Studies Faculty Award based on my work developing and teaching the Global Haiku Tradition. I will be presenting a talk on teaching this IN350 course at Xavier University this September, and I will also be presenting on it at the fall quarterly meeting of the Haiku Society of America in New Orleans. This course has become a model for several colleges and universities around the world. Teaching IN450—University Capstone. I have been one of the leaders of planning, development and implementation of the IN450, University Capstone course since its earliest conception as part of the MPSL in 1995. In the summer of 1999 I was one of four seminar team leaders who led 35 faculty through a study of "Learning outcomes and pedagogies for capstone educational experiences" at Millikin. I led the review of capstones in the majors, interviewing department chairs and faculty about their hopes and expectations for a university-wide, multidisciplinary capstone course. The results of that summer seminar was a clear vision for the University Capstone course, emphasizing the importance of transitions, reflection on the core questions of the MPSL curriculum, and the expectation that multidisciplinary teams take action on an issue of concern. In
the fall of 1999 I served on the Council on Curriculum Sub-committee on
Senior Capstone to create formal guidelines and pedagogical goals of the
course. These guidelines called for three areas of emphasis: (1) a seminar
reflecting on the core questions of the MPSL, (2) an examination of transitions
students face after graduation resulting in a personal development plan,
and (3) a contribution project proposed and completed by multidisciplinary
student teams. In November of 2000 James Dahl, Jodi Kupper, Anne Rammelsberg and I presented "Reflection, Transition, and Contribution: The Effective Components of a University Capstone Experience" at the 40th Annual Conference on Liberal Education sponsored by the Association for General and Liberal Studies, (Chicago, IL), November 2, 2000. During this first year of instruction we made many changes and adjustments to the course, as we sought ways to make the course as relevant and stimulating for the students as possible. I experimented with video journals as a means of enriching the student reflection component of the course. All of the faculty struggled with the fact that this was a new "general education" requirement for seniors who were not used to the idea of still having such requirements in their last year at Millikin, and they struggled with the fact that this course did not draw upon their disciplinary expertise as faculty, but rather on their commitment to a four-year liberal learning perspective. In the summer of 2001, I was co-leader (with Dr. George Bennett) for a faculty development seminar assessing the current state of the university capstone, and making plans for the second year of implementation. Our faculty development team continued to meet on a regular basis throughout the academic year under the leadership of Dr. Kupper and myself. To continue our mission of teaching the teachers, Dr. Kupper and I organized a forum on "Teaching the University Capstone" on October 9, 2001. Through additional University Capstone faculty meetings, we have refined the course guidelines, created rubrics for grading common assignments such as the personal development plan, and created a better acceptance and appreciation for the course from seniors. In the summer of 2002 Dr. Kupper and I both taught short-term session versions of the University Capstone course. This approach turned out much better than expected because the students did not have as many competing courses and commitments during the course, and perhaps because they could see the coherence and connections of the pedagogical strategy in a more condensed version of the course. As faculty team leader, I maintain the University Capstone web site, which is available at: http://www.millikin.edu/ucapstone The Teaching & Curriculum Development Data (since July 1995):
National Teaching Awards & Honors:
The Teaching Rating? Overall, I believe that I deserve the rating of Extraordinary for my teaching. My chairs have consistently rated me as outstanding in their evaluations. I have consistently received SIR ratings around 4.5 levels for overall quality from my students in my courses, which is considerably above the university and division levels. I include several learning reviews and student viewpoints on my teaching in the teaching portfolio which illustrate the kind of active engagement and enthusiasm from students I have sought in my teaching. I have shared my expertise in teaching with other faculty at Millikin and beyond through workshops, conferences, faculty development teams and publications, and I have received national awards for service learning teaching and international recognition for my teaching of global haiku. Although this crosses over into university service, I have been very active in curriculum development for English department courses and university-wide courses. My curriculum development efforts on (1) reform of writing majors, (2) coordinating internships, (3) integrating service learning and technology into courses, and (4) global studies of the haiku tradition have been presented at national conferences, resulting in several articles on teaching in refereed journals. I have also served as a curriculum development expert at several universities. My students have had a great deal of success—being accepted into graduate programs, getting professional editing positions, getting their work published, designing web sites for community clients, presenting their research to professional groups, editing and designing a variety of publications for campus and community groups, tutoring other students and faculty in the Media Arts Center, and assisting other faculty and the broader community through internships. My scholarship follows three areas of professional interest: (1) professional writing curriculum, (2) haiku poetry, (3) technical communication and writing theory. PROFESSIONAL WRITING CURRICULUM RESEARCH My scholarship on professional writing curriculum naturally builds on my efforts as a teacher, sharing my research and teaching experiences with others in workshops, presentations and essays on the scholarship of education. The tangible products of this scholarship take the form of conference presentations, essays, faculty development workshops, and consulting with other programs under reform or development. As a leader in teaching with technology and service learning, I have made presentations or conducted workshops at 12 national conferences, 14 regional conferences and 21 local venues. My significant areas of investigation and publication include:
My scholarship related to haiku poetry takes the form of literary art—a performance work of creating original poetry, publicly sharing those works and editing original works by others. The tangible products of this creative work include publication in journals, anthologies, books, public readings, conference presentations and juried awards by experts. I have made presentations and conducted workshops on haiku poetry at 4 international conferences, 5 national conferences, 4 regional conferences and 11 local venues. I have participated in and/or hosted 41 poetry readings and exhibits at international, national, regional and local events. My significant areas of creative work and publication include:
In my own literary art of haiku, my work has explored the possibilities of haiku in English, a haiku that seeks to capture and convey the experience of being human in our contemporary world. The content areas I write about most commonly derive from my family, emotional relationships, my sense of being alive in a world of seasonal change, and from each day’s blessings or challenges weighing on my heart. I write out of my heart-felt intuitions. As I wrote in the preface to my collection, School’s Out:
SCHOLARSHIP ON TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION & WRITING THEORY My scholarship in technical communication and writing theory takes two forms—expertise for professionals in the workplace and theoretical implications for the future of technology in communication. The tangible products of this research include conference presentations, professional workshops, website design, web master consulting and essays related to hypertext and the future of communication technology. I have shared my expertise on technical writing, hypertext and web design through workshops and presentations at 9 national conferences, 20 regional conferences and 24 local venues. My significant areas of investigation and publication include:
THE IMPORTANCE OF PEER REVIEW In
each of these areas of scholarship—curriculum, haiku and technical
writing—peer review has been an essential element of my development
and successful contributions. The conference presentations, essays, poems
in anthologies and books have been selected and edited by professional
editors and their selected anonymous reviewers. For example, the Red
Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku explains their review process:
ten editors read and nominate the best haiku found throughout the year
in magazines, new books and competitions, then these nominated works are
anonymously reviewed by all of the editors and only works receiving approval
by at least five editors are included in the final anthology. Although I do not consider my professional consulting to be a form of scholarship, I do consider it another form of peer review—professional colleagues and clients must recognize the reputation and value the expertise of the consultant in order to do consulting more than once. My consulting has primarily been in four areas—(1) curriculum and faculty development, (2) technical writing development, (3) webmaster tutoring, and (4) police communication skills testing. In professional consulting, the consultant is brought in because of his or her proven expertise and skills. I view my curriculum and faculty development consulting as an extension of my teaching, because I am often brought into an organization or university to "teach the teachers." I have provided this kind of consulting to the University of Tennessee, Wooster College, University of Missouri at Rolla, Western Missouri University, and most of the Associated Colleges of Illinois. I view my technical writing and webmaster tutoring consulting as part of my professional service to colleagues and professionals in the field of technical communication. I have conducted workshops and provided individualized webmaster tutoring to a wide range of organizations including the Society for Technical Communication and Chamber of Commerce. The Research Data (tangible results):
Publication Design Awards:
National & International Poetry Awards:
Scholarship and Creative Works Rating? According to the Humanities Division guidelines on rankings in the area of scholarship, I believe that I should be ranked as Extraordinary for my internationally recognized original work in haiku and my nationally recognized scholarship on curriculum development. My scholarship and workshops on technical writing and web design have received regional recognition, so I would rate that area of scholarship as Excellent. Altogether, my scholarship reflects sustained work which is outstanding among both Millikin faculty and faculty at nationally recognized comparable institutions. Examples featured in my Research Portfolio include:
My case on service is divided into three sections: (1) service to Millikin University, (2) service to professional communities, and (3) professional service to my community. My active service to Millikin University comes from three areas of academic interest and professional commitment—(1) my strong commitment to a liberal learning approach to education which attempts to integrate and connect the disciplines into a coherent curriculum, (2) my professional interest and expertise in the use of technology in higher education, and (3) my belief in the importance of real-world learning opportunities in which students have a chance to serve others with their newly acquired knowledge or skills. Because of my strong commitment to a liberal learning approach, I have participated in and often led interdisciplinary programs and university-wide curriculum reforms at Millikin University—writing in the disciplines, the undergraduate fellows program, university-wide information technology initiatives, service learning, the University Capstone course, and the Media Arts Center. Writing in the Disciplines. I served as the director of the Writing in the Disciplines program, piloting and developing the undergraduate fellows program as a means of connecting advanced, skilled students with faculty development. This evolved into the technology fellows program and served as a model for the creation of the student undergraduate research fellows (SURF) program. Information Technology & Liberal Learning. I have also served as a leader of efforts to integrate technology into our courses and programs at Millikin University. As a member of the information technology advisory group and, in more recent years, the Information Technology Advisory Council, I have sought ways to integrate our use of technology into a coherent four-year interdisciplinary experience through web portfolios, the web-based plan of study and models of lifelong inquiry skills (PKM) now known as Inquiry Management and Knowledge Creation (IMaKC). The Interdisciplinary Media Arts Center. Another example of my interdisciplinary liberal learning approach can be found in the development and leadership of the Media Arts Center, bringing together resources and faculty from Graphic Arts, English and Communication to build a stronger learning program for all Millikin students. I wrote the original grant for the computer-publishing classroom, and I was an active member of the team implementing the Lumpkin Foundation grant for technology. Real World Performances as Liberal Learning. Finally, a common thread throughout my university service has been to develop opportunities for students to perform—to use their knowledge and abilities in the service of others. My work and leadership in developing Millikin’s service learning program was driven by this belief that students learn to value their own learning and abilities when they put it to use in the service of others. I have personally integrated service-learning opportunities in many of my classes, often in the form of "client cases" for non-profit organizations in the community. I have also been an active proponent of internships and tutoring experiences for students on and off campus. Publications and presentations are also a form of "real world" performances, so I encourage student publications and public forums. I consider it to be an important service to organize readings, advise student publications, and to encourage the development of forums for student presentations. As chair of the Humanities division I was a strong advocate for the development of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Forum. MPSL DEVELOPMENT SERVICE My active participation in the planning and implementation the Millikin Program of Student Learning has provided me with the opportunity to bring all of these commitments together. Reform Guidelines for Majors. I first served as a member of the committee examining the reform of majors at Millikin. I drafted the report on majors in the MPSL, including the guidelines chart which calls for a more carefully designed four year experience—an introductory course, development of skills and essential knowledge in the discipline, advanced learning opportunities, integration of service learning and appropriate technology, advanced tutoring or internship opportunities and culminating in a near-professional capstone experience in the major. Development of University Capstone. Following my work with the committee to create guidelines for the reform of majors, I joined the faculty group working on plans for the University Capstone course. We interviewed faculty from all disciplines, examined their requirements for capstones in the majors, and developed and implemented the University Capstone course as an interdisciplinary course calling for reflection and action beyond the confines and approaches of the individual student’s discipline. The seniors reflect on their four-year experience at Millikin, consider their personal development plans for the future, and serve others through a multi-disciplinary team contribution project. Mentoring University Capstone Faculty. The
ability to teach employing these new approaches are not easily developed
due to the fact that all faculty come out of very specialized, disciplinary
backgrounds. Therefore, a great deal of my university-wide service has
taken the form of mentoring other faculty, leading workshops, or leading
groups of faculty in the development of these new skills—service
learning, integrating technology into the classroom, and interdepartmental
courses such as the University Capstone. University Service data (1995-2002):
University-wide Service Rating? According to the Humanities Division unit plan guidelines on rankings in the area of university service, I believe my work should be rated at Extraordinary because of my substantive contributions. Several letters and sample reports in the Millikin University Service Portfolio document that my contributions are recognized and appreciated by administrators and peers as having made significant contributions. My university service contributions include:
SERVICE TO PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES I am an active member serving three professional communities: (1) professional technical communicators, (2) the global haiku community, and (3) faculty in higher education. I serve these professional communities with my editing, publishing, teaching, writing, public speaking and leadership abilities. I am called on to help plan conferences, to edit publications, to design and maintain web sites, and to teach members of these communities. I have also served as a judge of works by others in these communities—to be the peer reviewer of their proposed writings, presentations and publications. In the technical communication community I have served as Vice President of the Central Illinois Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). I have helped review proposals for the national STC conferences and Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) conferences. I have also made several presentations and published several articles for technical communicators in national and regional forums. I have also provided numerous workshops on web design, hypertext, publishing and user testing to technical communicators. In the global haiku community I have served on the boards of three national organizations—the Haiku Society of America, the American Haiku Archives, and Haiku North America conference. I have also served as the Midwest regional director of the Haiku Society of America, organizing conferences, workshop and events in the Midwest region. On an international level, I am a member of the Haiku International Association and have served as the organizer of one of four international gatherings of contemporary scholars, writers and editors. The Global Haiku Festival was held at Millikin University in 2000 with scholars and writers presenting on haiku in Germany, France, the Balkans, Japan, Canada, Africa, England and the United States. I serve the global haiku community as a publisher and editor. Brooks Books has published 50 books of contemporary haiku, including dual language editions, bibliographies, and anthologies such as the Midwest Haiku Anthology that was published in conjunction with the Midwest Haiku Festival at Millikin in 1992. Our books have received numerous national haiku book awards. My wife, Shirley, and I also edit a haiku journal, Mayfly magazine, which according to a 2001 survey of haiku experts is considered to be one of the most selective, best little magazines on the market. I also serve as the web editor for Modern Haiku, another leading haiku magazine, and I maintain two English-language web sites which feature original work and online collections: (1) the English-language Haiku site, and (2) the MU Haiku web site featuring Millikin student writing and research on haiku. I also have served the global haiku community as a judge and book reviewer. I have judged and coordinated several haiku and haiku book awards over the years, including the prestigious Harold G. Henderson Award sponsored by the Haiku Society of America. In 2001 I served on the nominating committee for the International Shiki Haiku award, an award of approximately $30,000 which goes to a prominent lifetime contributor to the haiku community. I have served faculty in higher education primarily through workshops and presentations on integrating technology or service learning into the curriculum. Through national and regional conferences, I have been able to share pedagogical approaches and theoretical concerns. On individual campus and through regional workshops sponsored by organizations such as the Associated Colleges of Illinois and the Council on Independent Colleges, I have been able to teach the teachers about service learning and teaching with technology. Professional Service data (1995-2002):
Professional Service Rating? According to the Humanities Division unit plan guidelines on rankings in the area of professional service, I believe my work should be rated at Extraordinary for my haiku community service which is national and international in scope of participation and for my technical writing service and faculty development workshops that have been, primarily, regional in scope. Overall, my record of professional service includes examples of the specified criteria for a rating of Extraordinary in the unit plan:
Professional
Service to the Community I enjoy serving my community, especially when I get to employ my professional Humanities skills in the service to my community. As an excellent writer, editor, web designer, publisher and teacher, I have a variety of meaning-making tools to assist area organizations and groups. For example, I have always been active in my church, Central Christian Church, where I have served for several years as a Sunday School teacher, chairman of the public relations department, editor and publisher of the church history, editor of annual Advent Devotions, and web site design leader. I enjoy serving my community in these ways. One of my most significant professional service contributions to the community has come out of my efforts to develop internships, service learning opportunities, and real-world learning opportunities for my students at Millikin University. As a junior faculty member, I sought and received the opportunity to participate in the Decatur Leadership Institute, which helped me establish a network of community leaders. This network of community friends has led to numerous opportunities for my professional service as well as service from my students. In 1995 I had a faculty service learning internship with Communities in Partnership, in which several Millikin students and I conducted a survey of all nonprofit service organizations in the Macon County area. We created a database and designed a hypertext touch-screen kiosk system for public access to this information and helped build a stronger partnership of non-profit organization services in the Greater Decatur area. I later converted this information to web pages, which are currently being maintained by the United Way of Decatur. The combination of my professional service and student service learning was recognized as a model program for community education initiatives. Gannet News Service flew me to Washington D.C. to receive a national award, the Community Solutions for Education National Award sponsored by the Coalition on Educational Initiatives, for collaborative development of The Answer Machine, a community information touch screen kiosk. This program and award was featured in USA Today on April 17, 1996. Subsequently, I made several presentations at national and regional conferences promoting service learning projects as well as more technical presentations on various aspects of developing the touch screen community information system. I also joined the board of a statewide program promoting community information systems, sponsored by the National Supercomputing Center (NSCA) at the University of Illinois. I continue to serve my community by helping to build web sites and information systems, having provided professional consulting services to the City of Decatur, the Visitors and Convention Bureau, The Chamber of Commerce, The Decatur Housing Authority, Baby TALK, the Macon County Health Department, Mount Zion Library and several other area organizations. I have provided grant writing assistance to several community organizations as well, and served on several boards and grant review committees. I also provide professional service to the Decatur Police Department. I organize and conduct police officer candidate communication skills testing, with national standardized tests as well as video report writing tests developed from the department report writing needs. I also test the communication skills of all officers seeking promotion to sergeant. Another goal of my professional service to the community is to encourage and develop Humanities programs for the general public. I have actively promoted and helped develop two such ongoing programs in our community—(1) the biennial Decatur Area Writers Fair at the Decatur Public Library and (2) the Decatur Breakfast Optimist Club’s annual children’s play produced and directed at Millikin University each year. The Optimist Club is dedicated to promoting and supporting the youth of Decatur, and Millikin faculty member Denise Myers enjoys directing the children’s play (which gives the Millikin students an opportunity to produce and act in children’s theatre each year). The Optimist Club promotes the event to the community and sells tickets to bring a full house to the show. Many tickets are provided to youth organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club. Everybody wins—the children, the student actors, the Optimist Club and the community. The club could do any variety of fundraisers, but this is the one that I especially enjoy because it enhances the literary opportunities for our children as well. The Decatur Area Writers Fair takes place every other year, and I have been an active member of the planning board from its inception. This event brings area writers together with readers at the Decatur Public Library to celebrate writing, reading and books by local authors. Each fair features a successful writer, such as the first fair’s keynote author, Richard Peck, winner of the Newberry Award for children’s books. I serve on the planning board, help coordinate participation by area writers, help with public relations and design the web site for the fair. We had excellent media coverage at both of the first two fairs, and an excellent crowd of participants. Although this is a local event, I am especially glad that we are building a network of area writers and an awareness of the Humanities in our community. Professional Service to Community Rating? According to the Humanities Division unit plan guidelines on rankings in the area of professional service to community, I believe my work should be rated at Extraordinary because my record includes:
© Randy Brooks • last updated August 27, 2002 |