Iowa State University
 

Iowa State University

Department of World Languages and Cultures

Strategic Plan, 2005-2010

Mission

The Department of World Languages and Cultures is the central resource at Iowa State University for the teaching and study of cultures in and through their native languages.  The department’s members, grounded broadly in humanistic scholarship, literary studies, linguistic inquiry, cultural studies, and archaeology, seek to understand cultures through their texts, documents, and arguments.  The department represents the university’s diversity of ideas, individuals, and cultures.  The department is the central resource for and motivator of the university’s world-wide research, educational, and outreach mission, because it facilitates communication, understanding, and diversity.  In order to serve students and to facilitate scholarship, the department collaborates across the university to integrate its offerings with those of other disciplines, programs, departments, and colleges.

The department creates knowledge through nationally and internationally recognized original research, scholarship of teaching, and curricular innovation.  The department shares knowledge through excellence and innovation in learner-centered undergraduate teaching, and through outreach to individuals, institutions, and organizations in Iowa and beyond.  The department applies knowledge through its teaching mission and its advocacy of communication and language education.

 

Vision and Departmental Goals

Through exploration of ideas, texts, humanistic scholarship, and critical approaches to past and contemporary culture, the department strives to prepare students in all fields and disciplines for the challenges and opportunities of global cultural, economic, social, and political change.  The department’s scholarly activities explore and communicate these challenges and opportunities – and investigate their historical, cultural, and linguistic determinants – at the highest level.  The department is central to the university’s vision of developing culturally informed global citizens who lead.

The department will implement this vision through the following guiding goals:

  • The department will educate students with the most effective pedagogical, curricular, and technological tools available. 
  • The department will strive to integrate undergraduate teaching and advanced scholarship. 
  • The department will recruit and retain diverse, nationally and internationally recognized faculty, and will motivate and support their excellence with appropriate measures of performance and productivity in research, scholarship of teaching, and scholarly outreach.
  • The department will provide, in ways represented by its Languages and Cultures for Professions program initiative, means for students to integrate other professional and academic goals with systematic study of language and culture.
  • The department will maintain and expand its offerings in Chinese, Classical Studies, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian (and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies), and Spanish; and strive to support and expand further less-commonly-taught offerings.
  • The department will continue to integrate study abroad and internship opportunities into its curricula and to support and develop innovative study abroad programs.
  • The department will maintain and expand its collaboration with the National K-12 Language Studies Resource Center.
  • The department will strive to achieve savings and efficiency, including through administrative innovation, cross-listing of courses, collaborative teaching and learning, and the application of technology.
  • The department will represent and communicate the value of language study and the understanding of cultural diversity to the university, the private sector, and the people of Iowa.
  • The department will seek to support its goals through ongoing development efforts.
  • The department will assess the ongoing success of its educational mission through a developing set of measures of educational outcomes.

 

Challenges

The department’s mission is central to and constitutive of the university’s mission and strategic goals.  Nonetheless the department faces three ongoing challenges to successful integration of its mission with the university’s goals and priorities.

Firstly, the department’s tenure-stream faculty has shrunk by some twenty percent in the past several years due to retention failures and retirements.  Despite increasing enrollments, sections including Classical Studies and German will have tenure-stream faculties in 2005-2006 that are less than half the size that they were in 2000-2001. Spanish clearly cannot meet its increasing student demand with its 2004-2005 faculty size.  The department sees this situation as untenable, for it has led to an onerous increase in service duties and in (already comparatively high) teaching responsibilities by the remaining members of the tenure-stream faculty, many of whom – even at junior levels – are vigorously active beyond the departmental level in university service, in scholarship and curricular innovation, and in national and international organizations.  This stifles innovation, frustrates faculty initiative, drives away engaged students, and makes faculty retention difficult.  The department will therefore strongly seek to retain its highly-qualified members and to return the size of its tenure-stream faculty to a level commensurate with student demand and with an appropriate balance between teaching, service, and scholarship in faculty duties.

Secondly, the department currently has no graduate programs, which impedes the integration of advanced scholarship and teaching.  This tends to drive a bifurcation of the faculty between those engaged primarily in undergraduate teaching (increasingly lecturers and adjuncts) and those engaged in original research (increasingly tenure-stream faculty).  It further makes the department’s excellence difficult to measure with the metrics that are increasingly important in other fields, departments, and colleges (National Research Council rankings; sponsored funding; research space and resources).  In order to demonstrate the department’s success and importance, the department must therefore strive to develop and implement measures of excellence in the scholarship of teaching and in curricular innovation that can work together with measures of scholarly productivity like publications and citations of refereed publications and sponsored funding.  The department can also pursue funding and endowments to explore innovative employment models for the integration of undergraduate teaching with advanced scholarship, like endowed postdoctoral positions.  Furthermore, the department has identified national and regional demand for masters-level education in World Languages relating to Global Studies and to Languages and Cultures for the Professions, and will seek in the medium-term to implement an M.A. program to address this market.

Thirdly, the department does not engage directly in technology transfer and private-sector entrepreneurship, both of which are increasingly valued at the university and state level.  The department must therefore strive to argue consistently and to measure that its educational and scholarly missions facilitate entrepreneurship, technology transfer, invention, and innovation through communication, understanding, and sensitivity to diversity in Iowa and around the world.  This is the department’s mission of knowledge transfer.

Priorities

Strengthen undergraduate education

Goals: maintain and increase language program offerings; integrate language and culture with other departmental and college offerings; increase study abroad opportunities; improve assessment of educational outcomes

Measures: outcomes assessment; enrollment; retention; increase in majors/second majors/LCP students/minors; integration of language study with other fields; participation in study abroad/internships; curricular innovation (LCP etc.); student engagement

Support and increase excellence in scholarship and research

Goals: increase support for faculty research, including travel; encourage pursuit of third-party monies to support research; better integrate scholarship of teaching and curricular innovation; support cross-disciplinary initiatives to raise the profile of arts and humanities research

Measures: refereed publications; sponsored funding; refereed scholarship of teaching; salaries; professional organizations; scholarly collaborations

Facilitate discovery and technology transfer through communication:

Goals: increase integration of professional communication into language and culture curricula; facilitate collaboration across department and college boundaries; seek private-sector support – financial and otherwise – of department initiatives

Measures: programs and contacts across disciplines/departments/colleges; contacts with the private sector (LCP etc); student placement in the private sector (internships; jobs); private sector support of FLL initiatives

Partner with Iowans; quality of life in the state

Goals: increase awareness and support of language instruction in secondary schools, including teacher preparation and continuing education; highlight international aspects of Iowa’s institutions and economy

Measures: outreach to secondary educators, students and institutions; IWLA; expansion of offerings beyond traditional academic audiences; lifelong learning

Quality of life at the university

Goals: provide a model of international engagement and cultural diversity in teaching, scholarship, and service; increase collaboration

Measures: student engagement; representation and communication of the value of diversity, cultural understanding, and communication; palette of events and offerings outside the classroom

(Adopted by faculty March 10, 2005)