A Culture of Curiosity

Chris Blankenship, Director of Learning Outcomes Assessment, Salt Lake Community College

Chris Blankenship, Director of Learning Outcomes Assessment, Salt Lake Community College

A couple of years ago, I was hiring for a new position in my office. Standard procedure for the college was to advertise widely, so after narrowing down a highly qualified pool of applicants, it turned out that our top candidate was a Mexican citizen still working in Mexico, an unusual occurrence for a community college in northern Utah. Even so, I was enthusiastic about the candidate’s qualifications and upon her acceptance of the job offer, I immediately started the hiring process with our HR department.

Once we reached the background check requirement, I was informed that we needed the candidate’s social security number. Since she was still working through the employment visa process, she didn’t have a Social Security number. I told my HR rep as much and asked for a substitute procedure. I was told that there was no alternative and that she should apply for a new social security number upon securing her visa and submit the background check form then. I balked at this for two reasons: first, this would take at least several weeks, delaying a vital increase in my office’s capacity; and second, would a background check on a freshly issued social security number reveal any of the potential red flags that such a check is designed to find?

I wondered how other institutions handled such matters, so I contacted the company contracted to do our background checks. I thought that perhaps they had an agreement with another company capable of working internationally. Quickly, I learned that, in fact, this company did do international background checks themselves and the applicant simply had to fill out one additional form. Within a day, I had informed HR about this alternate procedure, obtained the completed form and had the process moving along. Within the month, my new employee had relocated to Utah and been onboarded into her new role.

“I wanted to create a “culture of curiosity,” encouraging assessment as a form of scholarly inquiry into curriculum and pedagogy and a demonstration of commitment to student learning”

As a recent transplant from faculty to staff at the time, this experience prompted a moment of reflection. “I wonder,” I asked myself, “how often people at the college say ‘I wonder’ in their everyday work lives?” Coming from the discipline of Writing Studies, a field dedicated to communication, pedagogy and deep analysis of the written word, I never would have completed my PhD without constantly wondering about the systems I found myself working within and that approach has served me well in my career.

That question stuck with me and as I continued to develop in my new role, I began to more intentionally bring the “I wonder” mentality into the work that I did with learning outcomes assessment at the college. Many faculty, despite having similar kinds of training in intellectual inquiry that I had, saw the work of program assessment to be purely about compliance with accreditation requirements, largely due to the messaging from the office before I started as director. Despite this history, I wanted faculty to see assessment as an opportunity to see how their students were learning across the courses within their programs. To do so, I needed to make some changes.

First, I changed the language in our messaging. In higher education, there’s often a push for creating a “culture of assessment,” a phrase generally used to mean that assessment is built into the institution's mindset, with the aim of continuous improvement at all levels. It’s an admirable goal, but the aims of assessment, accountability and compliance have become blurred in recent years. Anyone who has tried to get faculty involved in assessment work has seen the skepticism and resistance that it elicits. So, instead, I wanted to create a “culture of curiosity,” encouraging assessment as a form of scholarly inquiry into curriculum and pedagogy and a demonstration of commitment to student learning. Accreditation compliance was a byproduct of assessment, not the point of it. The language in all office materials and presentations reflected this change in framing.

Second, I worked to restore faculty agency in assessment. Most accreditors hold to the principle that faculty own curriculum and instruction and therefore assessment. However, accreditation compliance and reporting often exist outside of academic structures and these offices can frequently push to create standardized rubrics and nice, neat quantitative metrics for institutionwide data aggregation. Assessment, for this reason, is often a process that is disconnected from curriculum and instruction, its separate measurement purely for an external audience with little to no relevance for the day-to-day work of teaching. Instead, I encouraged faculty to ask what they needed to know about their students. What kind of data was most meaningful to them, both as individual teachers and as academic departments? They could then collect and analyze that data using epistemologies and methodologies that were meaningful to their disciplines. As the assessment expert, I was there to support these moves where needed, but I wouldn’t be providing college-wide rubrics, mandating methods, or pushing towards oversimplification for easy aggregation. In my mind, agency wasn’t simply the technical authority to make decisions that could then be easily abdicated to an administrator like me; it was also the knowledge to make effective decisions and the confidence to do so.

Ultimately, curiosity is a goal we already have for our students: to view the world with open eyes, to ask questions and consider all of the things that they don’t yet know. It’s something that we can also cultivate among our faculty and staff as well. Cultural change takes time and commitment, but for something as fundamental as this, it’s as easy as starting with two words: I wonder.

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