Author: Susan Castro

The Academic Center for Biomedical and Health Humanities (HealthHum) is hosting a grants workshop series beginning at 10 a.m. Friday, Sept. 8 in 209 Fiske Hall.

The focus will be on proposals that center humanity in health, medicine, wellbeing and human flourishing. Faculty and staff who are working in those areas, or who would like to, should join the workshop to find collaborators and develop grant submissions. Faculty and staff from all colleges and disciplines are welcome.

Other upcoming HealthHum meetings:

• Grants workshop: 10 a.m. Friday, Sept. 15 in 209 Fiske Hall
• General meeting: 10 a.m. Friday, Sept. 22 in 209 Fiske Hall

Join an informal workshop to find potential grant collaborators at Wichita State and to discuss the grant support infrastructure needs for biomedical humanities.

The first meeting is scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 7 in 308 Fiske Hall and in Microsoft Teams. For an Outlook calendar invitation to the meeting, or to get on our contact list for future workshops, contact Susan Castro at susan.castro@wichita.edu.

Sponsored by the Wichita Center for Biomedical Humanities. Stay tuned for more information about the center.

Faculty, staff, students and Wichita State partners are invited to a biomedical humanities organizational meeting from 10 a.m. to noon Sept. 1 in the 262 Rhatigan Student Center, Herrman Room.

Biomedical humanities includes a wide range of scholarship, coursework and service. The following is a list of just some of the Biomedical Humanities work already in progress at WSU. Join and add additional interests to the list and help it organize and plan events for the 2023-24 academic year.

• Arts, empathy and creative practices in the health professions
• Constructs of health and disease in French literature
• Ethics of digital transformations in health care and biomedical AI
• Health equity for Spanish speakers
• History of epidemics/health-related law, public policy and constitutionality
• Human factors psychology and ageing
• Kinship care and population ageing
• Literature, medicine and diversity
• Medical ethics/sociology/translation and interpretation
• Minority heath and health equity
• Nutrition and ancient diets
• Obesity in vulnerable populations
• Philosophy of disability/medicine
• Psychology of health and illness
• Textual and medical technologies in the shaping of the representation and practice of medicine
• Writing for health professions

For more information, email Susan Castro at susan.castro@wichita.edu.

Faculty are called to participate in shared governance at the general faculty meeting from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Friday, March 31 in 110 Woolsey Hall. Faculty will vote on the following two agenda items:

• General Education Transfer policy implementation (note that the lists on page two are now inaccurate because the proposal was amended in Faculty Senate to exclude first-year seminar courses from buckets one through six):
  • The General Education Transfer framework was adopted by the Kansas Board of Regents on June 15, 2022. How to best implement it at WSU was initially tasked to the General Education Committee. The committee proposal was amended in Faculty Senate, then approved in Faculty Senate on Feb. 27. In order to ensure that faculty have sufficient time to research and consider the implications of amendments to this proposal, any substantive amendments should be emailed to Susan Castro at susan.castro@wichita.edu by Tuesday, March 21. Find the running list of amendments proposed in advance here.
• Policy change allowing the General Assembly to meet electronically or dual mode:
  • The electronic meeting policy was approved by the Faculty Senate in 2022 but cannot take effect until approved by the General Assembly.

Direct accommodation requests, amendment proposals and questions to Susan Castro, president of the Faculty Senate, at susan.castro@wichita.edu.

The Kansas Board of Regents commissioned an academic portfolio and workload review from rpk Group last spring. The final report is now available on the WSU Faculty Senate website.

Faculty, staff and administration can provide feedback on the rpk Group academic portfolio review section (pages 5-11) of the final written report* by completing this online form. Feedback will be accepted until 5 p.m. Feb. 17. 

The board will discuss taking action on the recommendations made in the academic portfolio review section of the final written report at their March 22 meeting. 

* This feedback is limited to the academic portfolio review section because the board will not take action on the teaching workload section of the final written report (pages 12-16). The teaching workload section is for campus review only.

It’s not too late to ask questions or provide early feedback on the workload and academic program review work being done by the rpk Group, the consulting firm hired by the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR) to evaluate our system.

Slides and summaries from steering committee meetings and other information are available on the KBOR website.

A brief update on the process can be found on the Nov. 16 KBOR agenda, (page 69 of the document).

Submit your feedback concerning the methods, metrics and data being used to evaluate your department, discipline or program in this phase of the project.

Important dates:

• Dec. 1 – First presentation of the rpk analysis and recommendations to the steering committee, data team, and faculty advisory committee
• Dec. 14 – Presentation to KBOR
• Jan. 6 – Final written reports will be shared with faculty and staff, as well as the WSU provost and Faculty Senate president
• Jan. 6-Feb. 17 – Feedback period
• March 22 – KBOR will discuss actions to be taken

The Faculty Senate Planning and Budget Committee invites you to an informal town hall to solicit your input and discuss our priorities. Please join us from noon to 1:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14 in RSC 233 (Santa Fe Trail Room).

The end of an era has arrived. The staff required to maintain the Student Perception of Teaching Effectiveness (SPTE) software is no longer available. SPTE was written in Fortran, and it won’t be cost-effective for staff members to reverse engineer it. Since pedagogy and survey methods have advanced during the last few decades, and highly configurable software with high response rates is now available, the SPTE software will retire at the end of spring 2023.

In the meantime, WSU has purchased the Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES) platform from Watermark, which they are installing for a small pilot group to test in summer 2022. During the next few months, WSU’s Faculty Senate will oversee the development of a new set of university questions to norm (per Kansas Board of Region requirements), configure the system to the university’s needs, test the system more widely and develop best practices for the new platform.

Due to this update, all WSU Departments, colleges and tenure and promotion (T&P) committees will need to update T&P policies and procedures to ensure that faculty are not adversely affected by the change. The Office of Instructional Resources is currently working to develop instructor training, including a session that will be available at the August Academic Resources Conference. Current details and developments will also be posted on the Understanding Watermark Software website.

Faculty and staff should keep an eye out for opportunities available in the future to sign up as a CES tester or to be a part of the teaching evaluation task force for fall 2022.

For more information or to ask questions, please contact David Wright, project director.

Take your work to the next level and submit your research on any philosophical topic for the Shocker Philosophy Conference Feb. 4, 2022.

Research on the following topics will be accepted?

• Ethics and social justice
• Critial reasoning: biases and fallacies in action
• Aesthetics and art theory
• Sustainablity and environment
• Ways of knowing
• Global perspectives on how to live
• Scientific explanation, reasoning and evidence

Philosophy majors who submit can receive an applied learning credit.  To submit, email your paper with subject line “Shocker submission” to susan.castro@wichita.edu by Dec. 15

Research on the following topics will be accepted?

• Ethics and social justice
• Critical reasoning: biases and fallacies in action
• Aesthetics and art theory
• Sustainability and environment
• Ways of knowing
• Global perspectives on how to live
• Scientific explanation, reasoning and evidence

Philosophy majors who submit can receive an applied learning credit.  To submit, email your paper with the subject line “Shocker submission” to susan.castro@wichita.edu by Dec. 15.

Faculty are encouraged to ask their students who’ve developed research on any philosophical topic to participate in the Shocker Philosophy Conference. Interdisciplinary work with philosophical content is welcome.

• Ethics and social justice
• Aesthetics and art theory
• Biases, fallacies, ways of knowing
• Global perspectives on how to live
• Sustainability and environment
• Scientific explanation, evidence, reasoning

The submission deadline is Dec. 15, and the conference is Feb. 4.

Please encourage your students to submit to susan.castro@wichita.edu with the subject “Shocker submission.”