Digital Faculty Development Editorial Board Thoughts Digital Faculty Development Cinthya Ippoliti INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | JUNE 2019 5 Cinthya Ippoliti (cinthya.ippoliti@ucdenver.edu) is Director, Auraria Library, Colorado. The role of libraries within faculty development is not a new concept. Librarians have offered workshops and consultations for faculty for everything from designing effective research assignments, to scholarly impact, and open educational resources. In recent months however, both ACRL and EDUCAUSE have highlighted new expectations for faculty to develop skills in supporting students within a digital environment. As part of ACRL’s “Keeping Up With…” series, Katelyn Handler and Lauren Hays1 discuss the rise of faculty learning communities that cover topics such as universal design, instructional design, and assessment. Effective teaching has also recently become the focus of many institutions’ efforts in increasing student success and retention, and faculty play a central role in students’ academic experience. In addition, the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report echoes these sentiments, positing that “the role of full-time faculty and adjuncts alike includes being key stakeholders in the adoption and scaling of digital solutions; as such, faculty need to be included in the evaluation, planning, and implementation of any teaching and learning initiative.”2 Finally, Maha Bali and Autumn Caines mention that “when offering workshops and evidence-based approaches, educational development centers make decisions on behalf of educators based on what has worked in the past for the majority.”3 They call for a new model that blends digital pedagogy, identity, networks, and scholarship where the experience is focused on “participants negotiating multiple online contexts through various online tools that span open and more private spaces to create a networked learning experience and an ongoing institutionally based online community.”4 So how does the library fit into this context? What we are talking about here goes far beyond merely providing access to tools and materials for faculty. It requires a deep tripartite partnership with educators and the centers for faculty development, as each partner brings something unique to the table that cannot be covered by one area alone. The interesting element here is a dichotomy where this type of engagement can span both in-person and virtual environments as faculty utilize both to teach and connect with colleagues as part of their own development. The lines between these two worlds suddenly blur and it is experience and connectivity that are at the center of the interactions rather than the tools themselves. While librarians may not be able to provide direct support in terms of instructional technologies, they can certainly inform efforts to integrate open and critical pedagogy and scholarship into faculty development programming and into the curriculum. Libraries can take the lead on providing the theoretical foundation and application for these efforts while the specifics of tools and approaches can be covered by other entities. Bali and Caines also observe that bringing together disparate teaching philosophies and skill sets under this broader umbrella of digital support and pedagogy can help provide professional development opportunities for faculty, especially adjuncts, who may not have the ability to participate otherwise. This opportunity can act as a powerful catalyst to influence their teaching by implementing, and therefore modeling, a best-practices approach so that they are thinking about DIGIAL FACULTY DEVELOMENT | IPPOLITI 6 https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i2.11091 bringing students together in a similar fashion even if they are not teaching exclusively online, but especially if they are.5 Open pedagogy can accomplish this in a variety of ways. Bronwyn Hegarty defines eight areas that constitute open pedagogy: (1) participatory technologies; (2) people, openness, and trust; (3) sharing ideas and resources; (4) connected community; 5) learner generated; (6) reflective practice; and (7) peer review.6 These elements are applicable to both faculty development practices, as well as pedagogical ones. Just as faculty might interact with one another in this manner, so can they collaborate with their students utilizing these methods. By being able to change the course materials and think about the ways in which those activities shape their learning, students can view the act of repurposing information as a way to help them define and achieve their learning goals. This highlights the fact that an environment where this is possible must exist as a starting point and it also underlines the importance of the instructor’s role in fostering this environment. Having a cohort of colleagues, for both instructors and students, can “facilitate student access to existing knowledge, and empower them to critique it, dismantle it, and create new knowledge.”7 This interaction emphasizes a two- way experience where both students and instructors can learn from one another. This is very much in keeping with the theme of digital content, as by the very nature of these types of activities, the tools and methods must lend themselves to being manipulated and repurposed, and this can only occur in a digital environment. Finally, in a recent posting on the Open Oregon blog, Silvia Lin Hanick and Amy Hofer discuss how open pedagogy can also influence how librarians interact with faculty and students. Specifically, they state that “open education is simultaneously content and practice”8 and that by integrating these practices into the classroom, students are learning about issues such as intellectual property and the value of information, by acting “like practitioners” 9 where they take on “a disciplinary perspective and engage with a community of practice.”10 This is a potentially pivotal element to take into consideration when analyzing the landscape of library-related instruction, because it frees the librarian from feeling as if everything rests on that one-time instructional opportunity. The development of a community of practitioners which includes the students, faculty, and the librarian has the potential to provide learning opportunities along the way. Including the librarian as part of this model makes sense not only as a way to signal the critical role the librarian plays in the classroom, but also as a way to stress that thinking about, and practicing library-related activities is (or should be) as much part of the course as any other exercise. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | JUNE 2019 7 REFERENCES 1 Katelyn Handler and Lauren Hays, “Keeping Up With…Faculty Development,” Association of College and Research Libraries, last modified 2019, http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/faculty_development. 2 “Horizon Report,” EDUCAUSE, last modified 2019, https://library.educause.edu/- /media/files/library/2019/2/2019horizonreportpreview.pdf. 3 Maha Bali and Autumm Caines. “A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development via connected learning.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2018): 3. 4 Bali, “A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development,” 9. 5 Ibid, 3. 6 Bronwyn Hegarty, “Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources,” last modified, 2015, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Ed_Tech_Hegarty_2015_article_attri butes_of_open_pedagogy.pdf. 7 Kris Shaffer, “The Critical Textbook,” last modified 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/critical- textbook/. 8 Silvia Lin Hanick and Amy Hofer, “Opening the Framework: Connecting Open Education Practices and Information Literacy,” Open Oregon, last modified 2017, http://openoregon.org/opening- the-framework/. 9 “Opening the Framework.” 10 “Opening the Framework.”