What goes into a classroom?
At the first Arts and Sciences Council meeting of the year, members got a primer on what it takes to find, outfit and assign classrooms as an ad-hoc committee gears up to take faculty feedback on what changes they want to make to teaching spaces.
The space managed by the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences’ facilities management is assigned to hundreds of classes each semester.
The committee—called the Classroom Space/Infrastructure Committee—will find out faculty’s priorities for improvements to the teaching spaces and submit proposals by December, explained José María Rodríguez García, the new chair of the Arts and Sciences Council. When updates are being made to the classrooms next summer, those suggestions will be incorporated.
"This is a very complex process of deciding, through the administration, everything that has to do with space," said Carol Apollonio, chair of the committee and professor of the practice of Slavic and Eurasian studies.
The Council also heard from the registrar, the office of information technology and facilities.
After town hall meetings and brainstorming sessions, the ideas will be translated into a Qualtrics survey to be sent to the broader faculty to get their input and priorities. Then, the ideas will return to the Council to get their final input on the proposals.
In other business:
More than a year after the Council rejected a plan to re-envision the Trinity College of Arts and Science curriculum, the exact timeline for bringing those discussions back to the table remains unclear.
However, the current focus related to the curriculum is not on installing a new one but on tweaking the first and second-year experience, García said.
Valerie Ashby, dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, was originally slated to speak about the first and second-year experience at the September council meeting. But when the meeting was rescheduled due to Hurricane Florence, her address was pushed back.
García said that the council the “restart phase” for the curriculum will begin later, either at the end of this school year or at some point during the next one.
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Bre is a senior political science major from South Carolina, and she is the current video editor, special projects editor and recruitment chair for The Chronicle. She is also an associate photography editor and an investigations editor. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief and local and national news department head.
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