The Office of Faculty ADVANCEment (OFA) hosted its inaugural Faculty Grow Workshop on April 9 th, 2024. With approximately 50 faculty participants, and through the lens of a “charette-style” workshop, we began to create a shared vision of the future of faculty success at Clemson. With speakers, a faculty panel, and active engagement and conversation, individual faculty members and the Office of Faculty ADVANCEment team left with a stronger understanding of faculty needs and opportunities for growth and success.
Dr. Shontavia Johnson, Intellectual Property Counsel for the Savannah River National Laboratory, a Department of Energy-funded research and development center, described her faculty journey and emphasized the value and importance of creating your professional brand or identity throughout your academic career. Our panel of faculty members, Dr. Billy Bridges, Dr. Christopher Norfolk, Dr. Dara Park, Dr. L. Kaifa Roiland, Dr. Natan Teklemariam (see faculty affiliations below), shared their own diverse professional stories while highlighting their unique approaches to faculty success and barriers to avoid along the way. Finally, working closely with Professor of Architecture and Director for the Community Research and Design Center (CR+DC), Dan Harding, we asked faculty a series of 4 questions:
- What motivates and inspires you in your work at Clemson?
- What makes you a unique faculty member at Clemson? What do you need to cultivate your uniqueness at Clemson?
- What does it mean to thrive as a faculty member at Clemson?
- What questions should the Office of Faculty ADVANCEment be asking?
Visualizing each individual response as a part of a larger institutional whole (see picture below), Professor Harding asked faculty members to record responses to each question on hangtags and then work together as a group to hang and balance all the diverse ways individual faculty
members view these questions. We are excited to share the results in upcoming newsletters. In the context of Clemson’s new strategic plan, “Clemson Elevate,” and a growing community of faculty and students, the OFA is excited to continue to develop and implement programming and resources that support faculty on their own individual and unique academic journeys.
Faculty Panel Members:
Dara Park, PhD- Professor, Extension, Plant and Environmental Sciences
Natan Teklemariam, PhD- Assistant Professor, Political Science
Christopher Norfolk, PhD – Principal Lecturer, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
L. Kaifa Roland, PhD- Associate Professor, Anthropology
William Bridges, PhD- Professor, Statistics and Mathematical Sciences
