Faculty of Arts Academic Restructuring Initiative (FAARI) Consultation Questions

Questions to generate discussion and reflection (prepared by the members of Dean’s Executive Council and Chairs’ Council)

  • What excites you? What concerns you?
  • What disciplines and programs from beyond your Departments does your scholarship (research and creative undertakings) have the greatest affinities with, and where might productive differences be located?
  • Where are the faculty members located who share the methodological orientations, objects of inquiry, or intellectual investments that are central to your teaching, research, or creative output?
  • What does faculty-member identity (i.e. what is in a signature) tell us about allegiances to and relations between different people?
  • Are there program-level learning outcomes that map onto one another in ways that suggest interesting affinities?
  • What do student choices (of major, 2nd major, minors) show us about how students perceive what things belong together?
  • What big questions do faculty members or programs and courses pursue that might bring adjacent programs into conversation?
  • What is the academic peril that most worries faculty members in your discipline?
  • What structures and governance might we need to have in place in order to address concerns such as distinctive academic identity and visibility?
  • What areas of expertise are necessary to ensure curricular and evaluation mechanisms are equitable and appropriate?
  • What sort of groupings or visible affinities might be compelling to existing and prospective students?
  • Are there interesting or productive interchanges possible between seemingly dissonant approaches, such as performance-based creative work and quantitative research, community-engaged scholarship and literary analysis, etc.?
  • What are potential common denominators for re-grouping, what do we share that will bring us together in new ways?
  • What do student career goals and realities tell us about a potential structure for the Faculty?
  • What will success look like and how do we measure it?
  • Is there a way to think about interdisciplinarity in a manner that doesn’t first maintain disciplinarity?