January 7, 2022
And welcome to our newsletter, a new way that the Faculty Hub will be communicating with you going forward. In this newsletter, you will find our monthly schedule of events, highlights of upcoming programs, links to resources, an introduction to our fantastic staff and associates, and additional content that we hope will be useful to you. We would be happy to receive any feedback on the newsletter and our programs and faculty are always welcome to suggest new and useful programs and events.

Best wishes,
The Faculty Hub team

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Well-being in semester five of a global pandemic…

When I wrote the introduction to this month’s newsletter, we were heading into winter break. While the omicron variant was present, we hadn’t yet seen the now-familiar news about campus closures, pivots back to online and hybrid learning, and delayed starts to the spring semester that are affecting so many other campuses. It feels like déjà-vu, doesn’t it? I spent the break in California visiting my family and celebrating my father’s 90th birthday. Doing that required regular rapid testing, indoor masking in my sister’s home, and daily shifts in our logistics. In the end, five guests who had planned to attend were unable to because of the most recent surge. Instead of a catered meal in the planned venue, we had home cooking at my sister’s. It was a lovely celebration, but not what we had planned. In the end, maybe it was better, though we missed those who couldn’t be there.

So what does my family story have to do with well-being, the ostensible focus of this blog post and of our semester’s planning? Just this: well-being is not an add-on, not a program you attend once to check a box. Rather, it’s the ability to roll with the punches, to take a breath and adjust to the new, to let inessential things go and focus on the big picture.

That’s surprisingly hard work, though, and most of us don’t do it easily. We need help. We’re used to doing it all, so we’re not great at letting anything go, and we’ve been in crisis mode for five semesters now, so we’re tired and running on fumes. But, as Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber remind us in The Slow Professor, community—“intangible and fluid” though it might be—is one of the most profound incubators of well-being: of belonging, of intellectual development, and of a sense of resiliency and hope (84; see especially Ch. 4). Our offerings in the Faculty Hub this month—and, we hope, every month—provide an opportunity for ongoing community development as we share our ideas about teaching, about research & scholarship, and, especially, about how we are adapting to the ongoing shifts in our practice as we strive to educate and empower all of our students.

Some of those offerings include weekly opportunities for mindful meditation, for example; there are also brief, targeted sessions like our Morning Blends that offer a bite-sized presentation on a topic of interest, brief Q&A, and a take-away tip sheet. Longer workshops and presentations offer the opportunity to learn from colleagues and spend time with them—for me, a key part of well-being—while also focusing on the teaching and research questions that concern you. And, of course, while none of our programming is required, we hope all of it has the benefit of offering you ways to save time, or deepen your practice in ways that make your work more fulfilling—the truest measures of well-being.

As I write, the future is uncertain. But then again, it always is; if I’ve learned anything these past semesters, it’s that my well-being, and my students’, relies on my ability to slow down, take a breath, and adapt, once again, to our uncertain future. We hope the Faculty Hub can help you do that, too.

 Libby Gruner
Coordinator for Faculty Development in Teaching, Faculty Hub, and Professor of English 

Hope Walton and Roger Mancastroppa, from the Academic Skills Center, will present an interactive workshop designed to help faculty work with students who may be struggling after a year or two of pandemic learning, introducing them to metacognitive strategies and techniques to make teaching and learning easier and more effective. 

Register for the workshop on metacognition here. 

Join the Faculty Hub and members of the First-Year Seminar Committee for a conversation on proposing a First-Year Seminar (FYS). In this session, participants will discuss what it means to teach a “writing intensive” course at UR, share different models for helping students develop expressive skills, and discuss how these models align with the program’s learning objectives. We hope participants will leave this session enthusiastic about developing a new FYS course that creatively engages students.

Coffee, tea, and snacks will be available for in-person participants.
Register for the course proposal workshop here.