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. Shontavia Johnson, Intellectual Property Counsel for the Savannah River National Laboratory, 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, shared their own diverse professional stories while highlighting their unique approaches to faculty success and barriers to avoid along the way.
Working closely with Professor of Architecture and Director for the Community Research and Design Center (CR+DC), Dan Harding, we asked participants these 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, 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 members view these questions. We are excited to share the results of this activity, placed in the context of Clemson Elevate. As it can be observed, most participants highlighted the importance of mentoring students and enhancing student-faculty and student-staff interactions. That said, it is also important to highlight that such perspectives also varied on who was answering the questions, showing differences between lecturers, librarians, postdocs, tenure-track faculty, and staff members. Beyond the possible interpretations (and the limited statistical value, n=36), the results illustrate how people in different roles perceive their work at Clemson, what motivates them, and what initiatives they expect our Office to advance in the following years. Feel free to explore the enclosed visualization and let us know if you have any questions or comments.
