S4 E33: Faculty Support is Student Support

In this episode of Keystone Concepts in Teaching, host Dr. Rachel Yoho sits down with Dr. Kim Eby, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Development at George Mason University, for a wide‑ranging conversation about faculty recognition, teaching, and the changing landscape of higher education. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience at George Mason, Dr. Eby reflects on student‑centered learning, interdisciplinary teaching, and what it means to support faculty across career stages in a time of increasing complexity. Settle in for an insightful conversation with Faculty Affairs' pivotal leader as she makes the compelling case that supporting faculty success is inseparable from supporting student success in a sustainable, effective higher education institution.

Resources: Faculty Affairs website:  https://provost.gmu.edu/about/administrative-units/faculty-affairs-and-development, The Chronicle article Dr. Eby references: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-ai-is-changing-higher-education 

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Rachel 0:08

Hello, and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast, a higher education podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited to be joined by our guest today, Dr. Kim Eby. So just get us started today with this fun conversation. Can you introduce yourself a little bit further and tell us about your role here at Mason?

Kim 0:32

Sure. Thank you Rachel, and thank you for the invitation to join you all here today. I'm super excited for this conversation. So my name is Kim Eby. I am the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Development, and I've been a faculty member. I'm actually in my 30th year here at George Mason. I came to George

Rachel 0:52

Yay.

Kim 0:52

Mason in August, I know right, in August of 1996, which is hard for me to believe. And really my role as a Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Development is to promote faculty success and wellbeing. And that looks like a number of different things. The office tries to provide an integrated approach to supporting faculty in their scholarly growth, they're teaching and learning and student success growth, and other professional growth and successes. So we're really focused on career enhancement and professional development opportunities, faculty recognition for jobs that are particularly well done. The Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, as you know, has, for example, the Teaching Excellence Awards. And I guess another thing that I would say that I do have the privilege really of doing is leading a number of different university-wide committees or efforts to implement different evidence-based policies or promising practices and other kinds of opportunities to provide resources for George Mason faculty, sort of across their career stages, different kinds of faculty roles and appointment types. So it's actually a lot of fun. I wake up every day thinking, what can I do today to make faculty like better? And that's kind of what I think about when I'm going to bed. So it's a very rewarding opportunity and role.

Rachel 2:13

Yeah, absolutely. And we have lots of faculty across different appointment types. Somewhere in the 3000 range is what I've seen most recently, I think. Right? So lots of opportunity there. So can you tell us a little bit more about some of the influences on your career? So your experience, your maybe going from faculty member to vice provost, anything that led you to this position, and maybe a little bit more about what draws you to the impact of this work.

Kim 2:44

Yeah, so, you know, I think I would have to start with my first position here at George Mason University. And I was brought in as a faculty member in what was then called New Century College. And it was a college that was designed for the 21st century, right? So they'd gotten this grant in the nineties to develop a college. What would the 21st century education look like? And it was all about being student centered, and by that we meant, you know, educating the whole student. We had partners in student affairs, what we call university life here, who were part of really intentional co-curricular activities that accompanied the curriculum. Each of the courses, which we called learning communities, were interdisciplinary and integrated. They were team taught and they were focused on answering big questions. Right? We were a competency based sort of space. And we had students doing portfolios, including e-portfolios. I used to HTML coding to first year students, if you can believe that. So that they could create websites to reflect their learning. And really it was about building reflective capabilities for students, right? And focusing their, some self-awareness of what it meant to be a college student. So a lot of integrated high impact practices and experiential learning, and I say that's probably where I should start because of that very, I would say, experimental work with this new college that was created, which is where I spent the first 11 years of my faculty career. It was so rewarding to work in these interdisciplinary team spaces. It was really creative work. It was really complicated and messy to sort of talk across disciplinary lines and come to an agreement. And so it was this tremendous opportunity to learn and grow and experiment and play. And I'm kind of sad that faculty now don't have those opportunities in the same way. But what it did is it positioned me as an expert in teaching and learning over the course of my first, you know, decade plus. And so when the position, at the time it was called Associate Provost for Educational Innovation, and they were also the director of the Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence. And so when that person left and they were searching for an interim person, I got approached by the provost to take on the interim position while they did a national search. I said, sure. And then when they were doing the search, I decided to put my name in the pool. And it just ended up working out. And I think that without the experience that I had in New Century College giving me this really tremendous diverse skillset around different kinds of high impact practices and around working with faculty from across different disciplines and really trying to understand that you could create something that was, you know, where this, what do they say the sum is, is greater than the, what's that? What's that phrase?

Rachel 5:43

Yeah, the hole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Kim 5:44

Thank you. Yeah. Right, right, right. Exactly. And so I feel like we did that in a lot of spaces and really to be able to impact students in that kind of way. And so, yeah, I would say that that's really the thing that afforded me the opportunity to have the interim role, which then led to me taking on and being. And when they changed into the national search, they changed it from that other title to Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Director of the Center. And so I did that for close to 10 years before another boss, another one of my bosses, the provost, who's the Chief Academic Officer at the institution, came in and said, you know, Kim, I'd like you to grow and expand your role into faculty affairs and development, and let's bring somebody in to direct the center. And that's when we brought in Dr. Shelley Reid to do that work. So, yeah. And so I think the impact of the work question, it's just very rewarding to work with faculty in this space. I don't need to you that, you have the opportunity to do this in a lot ways, right? And I know that you're super well respected for the work that you do in that space. And so when you really feel like you're-

Rachel 6:46

Thank you.

Kim 6:47

When you're really trying to help faculty see opportunities to reach students differently and to foster student success in different ways, and to embrace something maybe a little bit more creatively than maybe they were thinking about it before, it's, there's just, I don't know. It's, I find that very rewarding.

Rachel 7:03

Absolutely. I agree. I think with a lot of this, I think we're seeing a lot of the challenges that you mentioned earlier, you know, some of the challenges from even the late nineties, they're similar challenges today. You know, students thinking about themselves in these spaces as a learner, their metacognition, their thinking about their thinking. A lot of these things. You know, we may not be doing HTML coding with first year students. Maybe not in all

Kim 7:29

I dunno that I'd recommend it.

Rachel 7:32

Yeah. But with that, I think we're seeing a lot of these changes and what they look like today. Right? So a lot of things are very similar today in the way we help faculty develop these. I mean, yes, it may be in the context of AI today or some of these other global challenges or what we might call in different disciplines like wicked problems. I think a lot of these fundamentally are building on those same skills. And so seeing that development there of what you're talking about, I think is particularly impactful.

Kim 8:00

Yeah. You're right. The thread line comes through.

Rachel 8:02

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So what are some of the things that you care about most, either in your teaching personally or in education broadly? Things that you are hoping maybe to influence on that, you know, institutional or higher education scale.

Kim 8:18

Yeah, I mean, well I didn't mention, but I am a community psychologist. That's my background. So I think that's also been one of those things that has influenced the way that I approach my work. I guess I would say that in that spirit, one of the things we know, right, is that learning is social. And so one of the things that I always tried to practice and found pretty foundational and that I think is really important for a successful educational journey for our students is really to very intentionally create those communities of learners in the classroom. Our students come from so many different backgrounds, speak so many different, you know, languages, native languages in addition to English, bring so many different cultural perspectives, have so many different life experiences. We've got a lot of students who are adult learners that it's just a real joy to be in community with students in that way. When you really capitalize or take advantage of what can be the community in the classroom, because students really, it's one thing for me to make an observation about a particular phenomenon, but it's another thing when one of our students who's come in from a community college or has had a career prior to their current degree that they're pursuing and then comes in and says what their perspective is. And so to the degree that you can create that community and so that people also have relationships with each other when things get hard. So I think that's important for me. You know, your point about metacognition, I think one of the most important things that we can do as educators and something that I also tried to do in my teaching, it's been a while since I've had my own class, I sometimes bust in and share classes with other faculty, but is really helping students to understand themselves as learners. Right? One of the things that I was really playing a lot with before I got brought into this role full-time was to help students understand, you know, learning is hard. I learning is hard, and I think one of the things I was trying to help students understand is what do they do when they become frustrated or start having difficulty with a particular subject or with a particular concept, and to help them try to develop self-awareness in that space. Some emotional self-awareness about what happens in that space. So that, do they shut down? Do they get frustrated? Do they decide that they're not good at this? Do they have self-talk that sort of, you know, discourages them from pursuing a thing like what, and once they can identify it, because you can't really make an impact or change that trajectory until you can spot it, right? And so part of it was trying to help them develop a self-awareness in that space about what they do when something is hard or a challenge, and then share with each other strategies that worked for them to help them move through that challenge or help them move through that difficulty. And I find that very important because we all have different strengths. But I think that, particularly right now with students who have come through the other end of COVID and other kinds of things, you know, people are talking about, maybe they haven't been, maybe they're not quite as prepared for particular things as they would've otherwise been. And can we help students understand themselves as learner and develop the coping strategies or the recognition and coping strategies to move them through successfully?

Rachel 11:47

Absolutely, and I think these are great points. I mean, when you were talking about, you know, learning is social learning is hard, having those conversations with students, helping them see that, to understand that, that it should be challenging. That's the point. It shouldn't be traumatic or something like that. But we have these, you know, we want it to be challenging. It shouldn't just be super easy. We float through. Maybe that's not the right course, that kind of thing. I think having these conversations also with faculty.

Kim 12:17

Yeah.

Rachel 12:18

I mean, we could sub out the word faculty for students in pretty much the entire conversation we just had. That teaching is hard and learning to teach is social. We're not just born as natural teachers, let's say, or instructors or whatever. And so we have that layer that we are working with faculty or working with instructors at these different, like you were talking about these different career stages to also then ripple out and help the students with those same challenges at their different learner, professional development spaces as well.

Kim 12:50

Exactly. Exactly.

Rachel 12:52

And so as we do this, as we're thinking about maybe kind of transitioning the conversation into more about faculty, where are some of your concerns right now? I mean, like we just said, teaching is hard and so are the other aspects of faculty life, whether that's research or publishing or, especially today, getting grants, any of those things. So where are some of your concerns right now for faculty and what do you see as some of maybe the major challenges or the hurdles that we, as a center, we as faculty affairs, are working to support faculty?

Kim 13:27

Yeah. No, I so appreciate this question. Let's just start with teaching, right? Because I think that's the foundation of a public institution like George Mason University, and one of the things that we're so proud of is that we're a high access institution and our students graduate with really high outcomes. And really that's a testament to our faculty and the care and concern, and our university life and student affairs teams who are really with them every step of the way. So one concern around this sort of teaching and learning, to your point, teaching is hard. It takes some time to understand who you are as a teacher, as an educator. I think that, you know, there's a growth curve there. But you never stop reaching or striving, I would argue, for that space. You don't ever get to a place where you can sort of sit, I think, on your laurels and be like, Oh my gosh, now I've done it. Right? Now I'm a great teacher.

Rachel 14:20

I'm good, we're done!

Kim 14:20

And yeah, exactly right? Because students change.

Rachel 14:24

Mm-hmm.

Kim 14:24

And the challenges that they bring with them changes and our technology changes and opportunities to use different technology changes. And they're changing more and more and more rapidly. So, you know, one of the things that I think is just a fact is that professional development is more important than ever. We're well beyond the time when faculty could just think about people that they had as instructors and take what they liked and discard what they didn't. I mean, it's a much more complicated set of skills, and knowledge and competencies to effectively teach contemporary students, frankly. And so I do think that because of those shifting student needs and emerging technologies, we do need to make sure that people are taking advantage of great opportunities like the ones that you and others at the Stearns Center offer. And I do see faculty. So, you know, one of the concerns for them is I think that faculty are feeling very stretched right now.

Rachel 15:27

Absolutely.

Kim 15:28

they're, they're not necessarily incentivized for engaging in professional development around their teaching and learning. I think that's a challenge that we need to try to address, and I think we need to be very intentional about encouraging and rewarding professional development and those who engage in that, and then can demonstrate the impact that's had on their teaching and learning strategies and design and assessment of student success, right? All those different kinds of things. But to invest in that, there's a real, I think, scarcity mindset right now that I'm seeing as people are feeling so spread out in so many different directions and trying to do really so much. And I think that's hard. It's a hard space to live because when one is in a scarcity mindset, I think it's very hard to think generatively or creatively when you're in that space. And so how do we help faculty recognize this? In fact, I was just talking about conversation this morning with some colleagues about, you know, faculty expressing some desire to do this, but not feeling like they had the time. And we were saying, Well if you're only thinking about like, what's in front of you, like this week, I don't have that hour and a half. As opposed to thinking more broadly, like if I invest this hour and a half or whatever, right. The, the stretch of the academy or course design sessions or certificates. I know you're doing a lot of all of those things, credentials. How does that save you time? Like if you think. Two and a half years out, like the strategies that you've learned in this particular, yes, it's an hour and a half now and maybe an hour and a half here and an hour and a half there. But over the course of that, call it, I'm making this up, 10 hours of investment that saves you over the next few years because you've learned some really important strategies that saves you literally over the course of teaching hundreds of hours. And so I think part of it is just helping to shift a little bit of that mindset in that space. Anyway, so I will say I worry about faculty feeling like they've got time to invest as they might want always in their teaching and learning practices. And I worry that we're not incentivizing or rewarding professional development the way that we, I think my personal opinion should be doing. You can't have a conversation about teaching and learning these days without having a conversation about AI. And I do not claim to be an AI expert. But The Chronicle had an article said how AI is changing higher education with 15 different interviews with different scholars about how it's doing that. And I think right now there's a lot of focus and I would argue fear from some of the faculty that I happen to have conversation with about fear about how students are using it and impacting their learning and ability to perform in the course, those kinds of things. And how do you know it's authentic versus not? I would love to see us move away from that kind of conversation which is again, I think more fear-based or focused on the negative into a more generative space. Again, I understand why it's hard to think creatively and generatively right now when we feel like there's so many things that are impacting and distracting us in the broader world. So but I would love to see more conversation and thinking about the resources and potential productive uses of AI and whether that's for faculty teaching or research or, you know, those of us who spend a lot of time doing more administrative things, you know, how can it be helping us? So that's kind of the big part about teaching and learning. You mentioned research and I think that's another thing that's also changing a lot. Faculty are increasingly interested in broad work that they see as impactful, right? Work that is multidisciplinary or addresses sort of big questions that they feel like can tangibly impact the world. Right? For the good. That's often why scholars do the work that they do, and so, you know, we see a lot of scholars conducting community-based research and we see a lot of scholars and researchers engaged in entrepreneurial activities, starting companies, generating patents, those kinds of things. And I would say as an institution, but even more broadly, is higher education, I don't know that we have caught up as we might otherwise with some of the making sure that we're fully appreciating and recognizing the full scope of those contributions that faculty are making. I think we're still in a very more narrowly defined and traditional way of thinking about impact. So I do think that faculty would be more excited if they saw us as institutional leadership and really just higher ed culture more broadly. In fact, I was actually at a National Academies of Science webinar workshop about this just a few weeks back on really thinking differently about how we think about impact in that space and wanting to broaden those kinds of definitions.

Rachel 20:19

Yeah, absolutely. I think we see a lot of really good stuff here. I mean, obviously institutional culture, policy expectations, but even like what you were talking about with the time, you know, that's one of my I feel like marketing strategies of you know, if you put on this much time, it's not all about just making things better for your students. I mean, yes, that's obviously a goal. You know, we want a great educational experience for our students, but as we do that, a lot of the things that we do to improve education for our students actually improves things for the instructor as well. Whether that's our efficiency, our design, our facilitation, many different aspects, right? And so I think that's, you know, we're looking at not only the individual, but also the system, right? And part of that system is exactly what you're talking about there. What do we recognize? What do we value?

Kim 21:09

You know, I mean, as you say that, it just makes me think sort of just more broadly about the higher education landscape. Right? We are at a particularly challenging time right now in higher education. We've had a lot of executive orders coming out that there's been not always great clarity on how to interpret. As you mentioned, you know, earlier on there's been attacks on research and faculty's abilities and the research grants and funding that's been canceled, which has been interrupting their ability. And of course it's a great source of anxiety and concern. Their ability to do their scholarly work. More recently we've seen legislation in certain states that restricts what faculty can teach. The public opinion about higher education is of course concerning. And all of that is impacting the politics of higher education that impacts our academic leadership. Which means that many institutions are seeing leadership transitions and a sense of, I don't know, precariousness or uncertainty. There's a lot of uncertainty, I would argue, and that doesn't make, again, for great creative or generative mindsets. And you know, speaking of that also is student's mental health concerns, which had been accelerating pre COVID, continued to accelerate during COVID, and frankly aren't slowing down at all if you look at the national landscape. And that means a lot of faculty are actually, I don't know, first responders, maybe in some ways, right? Students bring to them concerns and so they're having to manage that. Many of our faculty have school age and college age children who might be having those mental health challenges. So I just feel like there's a lot right now. It's a lot for people. So

Rachel 22:53

Absolutely.

Kim 22:54

again, that's, it's kind of why I, why I try to focus so much on what is it that we can do as an institution to support faculty.

Rachel 23:02

Absolutely. What you were just mentioning about, when students disclose a lot of things to faculty and being that first resource or directing students to resources or even that sort of secondary trauma for an instructor, things that might for them, and that's even without mentioning mental health concerns for faculty and the stressors and all of these things kind of compounding in these spaces. So I guess, you know, maybe moving from a lot of challenges here, can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you have done to make a positive impact in some of these spaces?

Kim 23:37

Yeah, I mean, I think that there are a lot of successes. So, I mean, I think the thing, I'm still leading a lot of these university-wide committees and it's, and it's important to call attention to the good work that's happened. And a couple of examples. I mean, one would be we have had for many years a very active term faculty committee. And these are faculty members who are full-time with the institution who've got primarily instructional roles or primarily clinical roles or research roles. And, you know, that committee was really about trying to pursue meaningful pathways for career progression, and to recognize the varied contributions, whether it's teaching or research right or clinical work that those faculty members are making to our institutional mission. And so, one of the things we've done over the past five years is get language into the faculty handbook that has created clarity around those expectations around career progression. And so the promotion cycle has been standardized, I guess I'll say. The promotion cycle has been standardized for those faculty members. So there's a sense of, I think, legitimacy that folks didn't feel before. And certainly folks have expressed gratitude to me for work in that space. So, you know, there are faculty members, if you actually look at the data, it's kind of fun about the number of faculty in this particular appointment type who've been promoted in the past five to seven years. And it's extraordinary and the data tell a very fun story about the success of putting that kind of policy and practice and procedure into place and creating some clarity through the faculty handbook, right, through our governance structures to make that happen. So those are the kinds of things that are super rewarding.

Rachel 25:24

Absolutely. Yeah. And there, I mean, it's very important to know, is this going somewhere? Can this go somewhere? What does professional growth look like even in the medium to longer term, to not just be in a position that is, we'll think about it, or something along those lines.

Kim 25:40

Exactly. Exactly. And I'm working very hard with a group over the past, gosh, 12, 13 years, called the Learning Environments Group. This is a group that several, many provosts ago put me in charge of when we knew we were gonna have all these buildings coming up and to be thinking about learning spaces of the future. And so we worked hard with our colleagues and it was very, very interdisciplinary with our colleagues in facilities and with our colleagues in classroom and lab technologies and ITS and the registrar's office. And did a lot of research in this space and faculty feedback and focus groups at the beginning and now surveys to try to understand better about what's working and what isn't. And so that kind of feedback has really informed kind of the baseline standards for our contemporary classrooms. And that's been exciting to watch. And so, you walk through Horizon Hall or down at the Fuse at Mason Square or over in the new Life Sciences and Engineering building over on the SciTech campus. And you'll see the artifacts, like the physical artifacts that you sort of walk into a classroom and there's whiteboards all the way around the rooms and the furniture is movable into different spots. And you can say, Oh, I'm being invited to do something different here. Right? This is a learning space that I might be able to create that sense of community, that wouldn't happen in a sort of fixed seat lecture hall, or I might be able to create these student engagement activities or opportunities to really work together or team-based learning or things like that. And I think it's really important, right? It's not just about the policies and the practices, but if you're really gonna create culture change, it's about disrupting the assumptions. Active learning classrooms is not a front of the room. That's a huge, that's a huge assumption--

Rachel 27:27

That's a shift.

Kim 27:27

Yeah, we disrupt and not everybody's comfortable with it. And I get it, and it's not for everybody, but I think that when you get into these spaces, you're actually creating tangible, physical, cultural artifacts that say something different, something more engaging, something more community oriented, something more collaborative might be possible here.

Rachel 27:47

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think this really wraps up our conversation well for today. I think these make really good points about not only just the ideas, but even the translation to physical spaces or other modalities. It might be a fully online course as well, but we have opportunities. We have, you know, the learning management system. We have all of these different things, and so as we connect back to our keystone concepts for today, I think we're looking back to what you were saying a little bit ago of, you know, learning is social and learning is hard. And so as we think about those, that's both for students and how do we help our students navigate these different situations. But it's also for faculty and instructors across all different appointment And I think as we're doing this, I think this is a great opportunity also for us to maybe shout out some of the other ways to engage. Obviously, the shameless plug is the Stearns Center programming, but we're not the only ones out there doing stuff, right? So even at Mason, we have other offices who put on faculty development work within their specific areas, but also maybe some of the opportunities to engage with committees or groups within different departments. These are opportunities to maybe influence some of that culture, to be in community, to have those social aspects that are part of the work. And maybe looking at this from the perspective of, you know, small investments now and the rewards later.

Kim 29:12

I love that. I love that.

Rachel 29:14

Yeah, so I think these are great ways to think about it is social, but it is hard. And so as we do this, where are the spaces that we can make a difference for ourselves as well as for our colleagues? So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your time and sharing your insights in this episode.

Kim 29:30

Well, thank you for having me. This has been truly fun, really wonderful. Great to chat with you.

Rachel 29:36

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much and please catch our postings every two weeks during the spring and fall semesters with new episodes. So thank you so much for listening.