Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT (ENGLISH)
When I was a reporter for The Chronicle more than a decade ago and found myself on college campuses looking
for professors to interview, I would inevitably head to the academic buildings that housed faculty offices.
[...]faculty members got as much room as before — 120 square feet — but 40 were in a collaborative space and 80
in a private office. Jeffrey J. Selingo, formerly editor of The Chronicle, is founding director of the Academy for
Innovative Higher Education Leadership, a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown
University, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
FULL TEXT
The traditional faculty office, tucked away in a different building, doesn’t lend itself to casual conversation after
class. But there are spaces that do.
When I was a reporter for The Chronicle more than a decade ago and found myself on college campuses looking
for professors to interview, I would inevitably head to the academic buildings that housed faculty offices. And on
almost every campus, I saw the same scene: long, narrow hallways lined with doors that were often closed.
As I walked down those hallways, I looked for office hours posted on the doors, and knocked only as a last resort,
to see if anyone was there. If I, a college graduate, was intimidated looking for professors in their offices, imagine
how today’s undergraduates must feel —especially new or first-generation students unfamiliar with navigating the
customs of higher education.
Colleges are under increased pressure to raise graduation rates, improve retention, and better engage students. In
response, they are spending precious budget dollars to beef up their professional advising staffs and invest in
technology that constantly tracks student performance. Yet most institutions are failing to encourage the one
practice that is widely known to boost student success: faculty and student interaction. Office hours are the
traditional place for such interactions, but the problem is that professors must wait for students to come to them.
Much as active-learning techniques have transformed teaching on many campuses, so too must faculty-student
interactions change. And that starts with designing better spaces for students and professors to meet.
Given the variety of activities professors perform, the faculty office of the future is unlikely to follow that of the
corporate world and move to open designs, with no or low partitions and row upon row of desks. Nor is the design
likely to be a standardized concept adopted by a few colleges and then copied by everyone else.
Recent research I conducted on behalf of Steelcase, a manufacturer of office and classroom furniture, illustrates
three approaches for redesigning faculty spaces that meet faculty needs for privacy while ensuring maximum
benefits for student success. Some universities are already experimenting with these ideas, but innovation is rare
because few institutions want to be seen as tampering with the personal spaces of faculty members.
The first strategy —"meet students where they are" —distributes faculty offices throughout academic buildings and
creates private "huddle spaces" outside classrooms. In studies of office-hour use, professors and students report
that the times before and after class are, in effect, unofficial office hours. But these interactions usually happen in
less than ideal spaces —in the front of the classroom, in the aisles between desks, or in crowded hallways. Huddle
spaces could provide room for those discussions, with subsequent one-on-one conversations moving to a faculty
DETAILS
Company / organization: Name: Georgetown University; NAICS: 611310; Name: Richland College; NAICS:
611310; Name: Arizona State University; NAICS: 611310; Name: University of
Washington; NAICS: 611310; Name: WeWork; NAICS: 531312; Name: Georgia
Institute of Technology; NAICS: 611310
Publication subject: Education--Higher Education, College And Alumni, Education--Teaching Methods And
Curriculum
ISSN: 00095982
LINKS
Check for full text via ArticleLinker, Check Full Text Finder for Full Text