Reflecting and Tracing my Academic Fingerprints

This week as I was scrolling Twitter, as I am wont to do, I came across a tweet promoting fall registration for a program that I had helped frame in terms of curriculum at a college. I worked with the subject matter expert around outcomes and courses and made sure that everything scaffolded the way it should and that the program learning outcomes were at the right level for the program offering and provincial standards. “Another fingerprint,” I said to myself. And I have so many. There are so many programs that I have helped support and create in the college system that it’s nice to see them appear on my Twitter feed and remember them fondly.

Similar to the 2500 or so students I have taught in colleges or universities over the years (a fair number for humanities courses though I know it does not seem a lot by STEM standards), the curriculum I worked on continues being part of a larger academic trace in higher education. Or the modules for online courses that I worked on as an Instructional Designer that are now offered through Ontario Learn; modules that I ensured were as inclusive and accessible as possible. I attended a panel this week that suggested that folk with science backgrounds are great at design thinking and I am still parsing through what this means about my background in Instructional Design and how maybe my chemistry undergrad (the first one) and affinity for calculus informs my ID work. But this is for another blog post once I figure out the bigger associations.

Even the conference papers that I have delivered or workshops I have facilitated, which is top of mind right now as I prepare to leave in a few days, they have engagement and are part of outreach. How many amazing people have I met at conferences, and how many collaborations, both in terms of other conference papers or even publications, have been a result of attending a conference and speaking to the right person at the right time? We all have our fingerprint on higher education in some way and I often wonder if we spend enough time reflecting on just how large our friction ridges (the ridges on our fingerprints) are.

There is always some larger conversation about impact, especially in relation to REF and TEF in the UK. But what does that all really mean in terms of the research we do and the teaching we support? I feel it would be so fun and useful to create some sort of massive Venn diagram of impact (similar to Martin Hawksley’s TAGSExplorer). Not in a how much grant money are you pulling in, but rather what project did you work on that another person you know worked on and so on. Or the one course you taught and the one student went to graduate studies in that field, and is now supervising other students, etc. Visualizing that would actually let us see collectively how much what we do has a ripple effect on the whole system. STEM researchers would find themselves connected to arts and humanities researchers through the most interesting of ways- a shared student, or a cited conference paper.

And cool collaborations come from these fingerprints as well. I have just started an intercampus SoTL reading group with the wonderful Mandy Penney, a colleague at another university that I went to grad school with, again overlapping fingerprints. A cool collaboration pilot with tons of publishing potential that all came about because of an informal conversation at a teaching and learning conference.  So maybe take some time this Sunday to trace your fingerprints; you may be pleasantly surprised with what you find and what you have forgotten you have done in your academic career (fun fact, this is also a super great exercise for those imposter syndrome moments that we all have at some point). Happy Sunday!