Summer CV Refresh

As you’re basking in the summer sun or working on your summer teaching or research, make time to update your CV and accompanying materials. The CV is often a summary or a snapshot of all your academic achievements and in the life of a faculty member, a lot can change in a year. If you’re in the first part of your career, your CV might focus on your doctoral research, any publications or submitted scholarly work, courses you taught as a TA or adjunct before joining the faculty, conferences you’ve attended, and service you’ve completed.

As you move further into your career, your CV will evolve – and may become quite long – as your achievements accumulate. For example, you may take your research in a new direction, apply for and win grants, collaborate with colleagues and students, and join university committees to build out your experiences in higher ed.

Updating your CV is not just for new faculty. At each stage of teaching advancement, you’ll need to submit an updated CV. Additionally, if you are nominated for an award through local, state, or national organizations, one of the required documents is often a recent CV. If you join a board, serve on external committees, or become a reviewer for a doctoral committee, you may be asked to submit your CV. Similarly, if your professional goals include moving into administration, you’ll also want to ensure that your achievements are well documented and and speak clearly to your audience. Regardless of where you are in your higher ed journey, the five areas below are a great place to begin your summer CV refresh.

1. Teaching Experience. Some faculty list the titles of the courses they have taught and courses they have designed. Course design and curriculum development are intensive projects and require different, but just as valuable skills and expertise as teaching. Additionally, taking on new courses and diversifying the levels of instruction (100-400, 500+) also looks great on a CV. If you’ve been teaching the same 3 courses for a couple of semesters, see if you can get in the rotation to teach something new. Similarly, if you have the ability to teach in another department, reach out and see what the opportunities are. Interest in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning is on the rise and it’s an excellent time to strike up partnerships and work with and learn from students and faculty across campus.
   
2. Research. Publications and presentations are certainly what we most commonly think of as going in the research section of a CV. However, there are other areas to be considered here, as well. If you’ve mentored undergraduate researchers and they’ve presented or published their work, collaborated with colleagues on creating in-house or digital resources (OER anyone?!), or written up peer-reviewed assessment reports, these are all valuable types of research. If you’ve modernized a theater production, had your work on display in a gallery, been invited to speak (on campus or beyond), or submitted a new patent, you’ve been contributing to and expanding bodies of knowledge and allowing it to impact others. Some institutions recognize achievements like these strictly as service, but there is a strong case to push back on that because what constitutes research is expanding as faculty inventiveness and creativity reaches further into the 21st century and transforms the academy.
   

3. Service. Incredibly, departments and programs typically make sure that all faculty have an opportunity to serve on institutional and program committees. Yet, if you see a need in the community and want to invite faculty, staff, students, or community members to work together to achieve a particular goal, think about formalizing your efforts into a program level or university level committee, task force, or learning community. While the institution needs and wants insights from faculty on particular areas that require online development, we also benefit from new ideas, dynamic leaders, and transformative partnerships that haven’t yet been made.

4. Digital tools and technology. Your CV is a great place to keep track of digital tools and technologies you’ve experimented with, by choice or by requirement, and gained proficiency in. Blackboard Original, Blackboard Ultra, Banner, Self Service, Perusall, VoiceThread and Yuja are tools we can use with regularity to enhance, organize, and support learning opportunities. Beyond that, if you’re building proficiencies with computer languages, gen AI tools, web development or blogging, editing software, research software, or translation tools, consider listing those on your CV, as well. Believe it or not, in the 21st century, some faculty have not transitioned to optimizing their use of digital tools for learning and development. Yet, when you’re applying for a job, attending a conference, or being nominated for an award, your ability to use digital tools is paramount. Faculty often assume that students have greater knowledge of academic digital landscapes than they actually do, just as institutions assume faculty have greater knowledge and experience with academic digital landscapes than they actually do. The good news is that CAIFS offers year-around support, training, and guidance on what our digital tools are and how to use them. Jump into a self-paced CAIFS course or attend some of the short, dynamic PD opportunities coming up this year. We are also always happy to meet with faculty one-on-one to support individual needs and interests.

5. Teaching philosophy. Before I became a full-time professor, I wrote a fluffy teaching philosophy to apply for my first jobs. And at the time, I truly believed everything I wrote. Yet as I moved through my first few years of teaching, I realized fluff was not enough to impact student learning and success the way I had hoped it would. On reflection, it’s more valuable to identify specific, impactful teaching episodes and then to reflect on why they were impactful for us and for our students. It’s just as valuable to recognize what doesn’t work, what worked for us but doesn’t work for our students, and to craft a narrative of bold experimentation and application for students learning in our classrooms today, tomorrow, and in the future.

If you can ground your teaching philosophy in theories like those of Mezirow, Mishra, Maj, or others, and build it out over time, you may have the exciting result of increasing student engagement, abandoning practices that no longer serve 21st century learners, and increasing your own enjoyment of teaching and practice. Teaching philosophies get a lot of attention at the beginning of our careers, but really, they should be a living document that follow us and evolve with us, reinforcing our commitment to engage with the changes and challenges of our times. Additionally, the USC Upstate Inclusive Syllabus template includes a placeholder for a brief teaching philosophy statement, inviting your students to learn about the motivations, goals, and practices that drive your teaching. This statement, too, will likely evolve over time and change as you take on different courses and different modalities of teaching (online, face to face, hybrid).

Enjoy whatever summer is to you and know we’ll look forward to seeing you back here for an amazing fall 2024 semester!