While my focus over the last five years has been on research and teaching, I have also participated in a significant amount of service. This service directly connects with both my research and my teaching. Many of these service-based initiatives have introduced my students to new opportunities for collaboration outside of the standard curriculum.
One service project I initiated to further my agenda of exposing our students to more collaborative projects was co-hosting an Adobe Creative Jam with the Klein School of Communication. The Creative Jam brought together Graphic and Interactive Design (GAID) students from Tyler and Klein students to work in teams and create a product that addresses students' mental health issues. As part of the event, my Klein colleague and I invited alumni from each program to rank the projects and share feedback with the students.
Another university-wide initiative I am particularly proud of is my participation in creating the User Experience Research and Design: UX10 Quickfire Presentations Symposium. This symposium on UX research and design was the brainchild of myself and my department chair. Being a part of a large research university, we are often siloed within our schools and departments. This event was our effort to bring together all the different schools and staff members at Temple working in the UX field. We had ten presenters that spanned multiple schools at Temple and various administrative departments. The event had over 100 attendees in-person and was recorded to be viewed virtually.
A major highlight from my service is my nomination and acceptance into the Adobe Education Leaders (AEL). This group of 266 international educators is an exclusive community of innovative thought leaders in education who effectively use Adobe tools to promote excellence and critical problem-solving. As an AEL, I am invited to attend each annual AEL Summit. At the summit, there are opportunities to meet with product teams, test new software, share teaching strategies, and contribute to digital literacy and education conversations. We meet quarterly to share insights and often work collaboratively on initiatives of our choice. One such initiative began as the coronavirus changed our course formats for the fall of 2020. Over the summer of 2020 I shared an idea with my AEL network to create a system for AELs to attend each other’s classes virtually. A few of us built a system where AEL’s could post their courses that would open for visitors and see who else has posted an open classroom. We gathered information on the course content so folks could find the right fit. In total, we helped facilitate over thirty classroom visits. I was fortunate enough to visit four of my fellow AELs courses and had four AELs visit mine. Through these exchanges my students were able to hear feedback on their work from another subject matter expert and I was able to observe how my colleagues across the globe approach teaching design.
I initiated another sizable project by rethinking the organization of our yearly portfolio presentation event showcasing the work of our graduating BFA and MFA students. This event is the combination of a job fair and portfolio feedback session. It began as a final celebration that brought together families of our graduating students and alumni of the program, who would gather to view the student work and provide feedback. Over the years, a large number of industry players inquired about participating in the event. In 2018, I suggested formalizing the event and naming it “Create” in order to build brand awareness and marketing of the event. For the first three iterations of Create, I worked with students through independent studies to design the collateral and help promote the event. In 2020 we moved the work into a special topics course I teach, Event Design. While the branding and promotional work is currently produced as a class project, significant service is still involved in planning and facilitating the event. In addition to the portfolio review event, now held virtually, we plan and host an in-person networking event for our graduating seniors and MFA students, alumni, and industry connections.
My work formalizing Create and launching our networking event brought about my newly acquired title, Career Coordinator. In this role, I also serve as the department’s Internship Coordinator, overseeing approximately twenty 3-credit-bearing internships per year. I support students looking for an internship and host an annual internship search workshop to help students prepare and find positions. I also lead our department's industry outreach, including co-chairing a bi-annual industry round table conversation and facilitating ongoing discussions with industry connections. I am the department’s liaison between our department and Temple’s Career Center, working with them to ensure job opportunities are shared with students, and co-creating workshops for our students such as a negotiation workshop. Finally, I oversee our department’s social media presence, focusing on connecting students to employment opportunities.
As discussed in my teaching, I also hold the title of BFA Curriculum Coordinator. While some of the functions of the Curriculum Coordinator fall under instruction, others are service activities. One such item is building our department schedule. Each semester, I consult with our program head and department chair to create our course schedule of more than fifty classes taught by eight full-time faculty and about twenty-five adjunct faculty members. I assist in recruiting, training, mentoring, and supporting and assessing our industry expert adjuncts. I co-produce a meeting before the beginning of each new semester, for all of our adjunct faculty members where we share schoolwide updates and provide hands on training in our learning management system, Canvas. A portion of this training covers a Canvas course template that I created to help our students understand our approach to instructional design and to have a similar experience using Canvas across courses within our department. I also have been heavily involved in working on revamping our entire curriculum. Our work has been ongoing over the past four years, and has included competitive research, design thinking workshops with students, faculty, and industry partners, a survey for alumni, and various proposals for new degree programs, tracks, and certificates. We anticipate beginning to implement some of our changes in the next few academic years. Lastly, I participate in periodic program reviews and re-accreditation.
I also played a noteworthy role in assisting our university when Covid began in March of 2020 and we moved courses online. I was assigned to be the technical advisor for the entire Art Department at Temple. Attending their department wide meetings to share insights on teaching online, and meeting with individual faculty members to give them one-on-one help to move their courses online. I was asked to be a university-wide contact for faculty throughout the university who contacted our Center for the Advancement of Teaching and asked for assistance with the move to online learning. Once the semester ended, I facilitated meetings of our recent graduates throughout the summer to offer them extra support as they navigated finding their first jobs post graduation during the pandemic.
I often work closely with my department chair and program head, which has helped me develop a deep understanding of the administrative side of higher education. This came into play while I filled in for our BFA program head during her fall 2020 sabbatical. Being our first semester 100% online due to Covid, there were a number of unexpected issues that arose. I filled in both for the day-to-day duties of the program head, as well as countless student issues that occurred due to both physical and mental health challenges. Some of the day-to-day tasks included planning and executing our student welcome back meeting and later in the semester our advising meeting, running our weekly faculty meetings, leading the advising for our students with help from other full time faculty, and addressing faculty concerns as they occurred.
I have also served on a handful of committees. I was asked by our dean to serve on a university wide committee titled the Provost’s Online Proctoring Vendor Selection Committee. This committee began its task pre-pandemic and was looking at proctoring vendors to be used university wide. I have also spent three years on our school’s Course and Curriculum Committee, co-chairing it my second year, and chairing it alone my third year. Another appointment from our Dean was to serve as University Marshall. Finally, outside of our university, I am the Vice President of Friends of Hackett, a non-profit whose mission is to support a public elementary school in Philadelphia.
In the future, I plan to continue to use service as a tool to improve my research and teaching. I am looking forward to continuing my drive to provide service to my students, school, and community. I hope to grow my focus on collaboration and networking and find new ways to connect my service to those initiatives.