What is your role at the University of Minnesota? What do you do in a typical day/week?
I partner with faculty and staff at the U to conduct systematic assessments of the impact of educational innovations.
How does your work impact the University community?
I try to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about what works in post-secondary education and encourage faculty members to think of their teaching as a scholarly endeavor.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
Probably the best thing is having the chance to discover new things about teaching and learning. Sometimes the conclusions that my colleagues and I reach are relatively small, in the sense that they are bound to a particular time and place, a certain group of students, etc. But they are often things that no one knew before, and I think that sharing these findings with colleagues, and adding them to the larger tapestry of what is known about education, are valuable contributions to the academic enterprise.
What would people never guess you do in your job?
I do a surprising amount of consultation with faculty and staff from universities around the world, who want to undertake projects similar to those we've done at the University of Minnesota. With respect to two of our projects - the long-running student and faculty technology surveys, and our multi-year research on new learning spaces - I have consulted with faculty and staff from universities in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, The Netherlands, England, South Africa, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the Cape Verde Islands.
What do you like best about working at UMN?
One of the very best things is having the opportunity to collaborate with faculty and staff from such a diversity of disciplines across the University. Before working here, I was a professor of philosophy, and I never associated with anyone who works in engineering, or chemistry, or educational psychology, or agricultural economics, or veterinary medicine. And so I never knew how many interesting topics are studied by such a wide array of intelligent, interesting people in such a wide range of academic disciplines!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
My larger agenda is to promote a scholarly culture of pedagogy at the University, which means elevating teaching and learning to the status of an academic pursuit that can be undertaken by instructors whose disciplinary expertise lies elsewhere. So in 5 years, hopefully I will be working in much the same capacity that I am in now, but with a larger group of researchers who collaborate with faculty members from many disciplines at different organizational levels in the University - departmental, program, college, etc. - helping to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning.
What is one thing you couldn't live without?
Badminton, biking, beer, and hot sauce! And my two little dogs. OK, that was six things.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
Brew beer, play badminton, ride my bike, and spend time with my two little dogs.
What was your best vacation?
Probably a recent trip to Turkey with my partner and two close friends. It was my first trip to a majority-Muslim country, and it was wonderful to see how kind and welcoming the vast majority of Turkish people were, along with the way in which very religious and very secular Turks lived side by side in Istanbul. We also traveled to parts of the country without many tourists. I think it's a very useful, and very educational, experience for the members of a majority ethnic group - like white Americans - to visit a place in which they are very much in the minority.