Student-Faculty Interaction
Wittenberg University is a private liberal arts college located in Springfield, Ohio, with an undergraduate enrollment of 1,950 full-time students. The institution promotes student engagement through shared leadership and collaboration. President Mark Erickson created the President’s Task Force to study student engagement in the academic and co-curricular environments on campus. Along with the task force, three other committees were formed to focus on the long term institutional goals of education and communication, social context and values, and community standards and compliance.
For the Wittenberg task force, student engagement informed a rubric that targeted efforts on student learning and academic growth. To advance these efforts, the student engagement committee developed action plans based on the Inventory for Student Engagement and Success (ISES) (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt, 2005), a self-guided framework for conducting a comprehensive, systematic, institution-wide analysis; carried out more in-depth analyses of their NSSE data; and followed-up these activities with a climate study. It was hoped that such efforts would provide evidence to show whether Wittenberg had increased levels of student engagement. The institution also intends to study engagement trends over time, to compare their NSSE results with selected peers, and to consider how other colleges engaged faculty as key partners in the assessment process.
A challenge Wittenberg faced was encouraging faculty investment in the student engagement concept. Leaders of the student engagement committee carefully chose faculty representatives from across the campus who had a strong commitment to students and to service. As they began to understand that student engagement was rooted in academics, the selected faculty members became more invested in the charge of the committee. Faculty then carried out a particularly useful exercise using several prompts from ISES framework to identify functional areas of the institution that helped to strengthen and promote student success. They talked with students, faculty peers, and administrators about these areas to further promote understanding of the concept of student engagement. These discussions were felt to increase commitment to student engagement among faculty, administrators, and students at Wittenberg.
