Community, Identity and Engagement

Regular readers of ASpect will notice something different about this issue of the Salem State College School of Arts and Sciences’ publication. With two exceptions, all of the articles are written by first-year tenure-track faculty. In planning this issue, we asked our contributors to tell us—and therefore you—a little bit about themselves, their research, and why they have chosen to teach at Salem State College. These questions, and the answers printed herein, form part of a discussion we are having this year about “Community, Identity, and Engagement.” That was the theme of our January 12 annual retreat, which is described further in the Navigator article on the back page. Also our podcast of the keynote talk, available at http://salemstate.edu/soas.

In addition, our departments are concluding the first round of a school-wide program review cycle. By combining the results of these reviews with our own explorations of who we are, what we do, and why we do it, it is our intention that during the next year we will begin a series of activities designed to enhance not just the “who,” “what,” and “why” of our activities but also the “where” and the “how.”

There is one other article in this issue not written by one of our newest faculty, and that is the Horizons interview with long-time Theatre and Speech Communication faculty member, Whitney “Whizz” White. He offers his encouragement for the creation of electronic portfolios to record faculty work and its results, which is good not just for promotion and tenure but also as a means of sharing what we do with a broader community.

The SOAS Communications Team

Beacon, a regular column of ASpect, features noteworthy items in the School of Arts and Sciences.