Note to COEHP faculty and staff: Visit the college’s WE CARE SharePoint site for information on applying for funding and the deadlines for submitting proposals.
Dean Kate Mamiseishvili recently announced her new WE CARE initiative for the 2022-23 academic year.
WE CARE, an acronym for Wellness and Education Commitment to Arkansas Excellence, furthers three priorities that Mamiseishvili and the college’s leadership team developed over the summer. The priorities revolve around tangible ways faculty and staff can collaborate within the college and across the state to address complex challenges in education and health. Mamiseishvili shared their vision with faculty and staff at welcome back events, encouraging them to create proposals and apply for funds associated with WE CARE.
Mamiseishvili noted that COEHP is often called the College of the Caring Professions or the College of the Helping Professions. “We prepare the next generation of helping professionals who lead with care, compassion, and empathy in times of the greatest need in people’s lives,” she said. “We care for our students and provide them with high-quality, innovative, and meaningful educational experiences. We care through our research to advance the understanding of issues in education and health. We care for the communities in Arkansas and beyond.”
COEHP leadership envisions the WE CARE initiative as a catalyst for innovative research, outreach, and educational programs.
Priority I: Extend the college’s national prominence by encouraging collaboration to address complex challenges in education and health.
Team Up for Education and Health: The college will fund interdisciplinary teams to develop research projects, outreach efforts, new organizational units, and/or new academic programs or certificates that have the potential for future funding, national recognition, and innovation.
Addressing today’s most pressing problems requires insights from multiple disciplines, and COEHP’s faculty and staff work at the nexus of two important and complex issues—education and health. Team Up for Education and Health will support innovative projects across academic programs and departments to solve complex health and education challenges. Such solutions can focus on improving students’ learning and educational experiences, creating interdisciplinary degree and certificate programs, producing research that informs and helps solve pressing problems, or serving the community in Arkansas and beyond.
Field Advancement: The college will support the disciplines of its academic programs by funding activities that lead to high-leverage academic exchange, a strong national reputation, innovative research collaborations, or new programs.
Cutting-edge learning experiences and timely and relevant research represent defining characteristics of academic programs in nationally prominent colleges. The Field Advancement initiative will support individual academic programs and their faculty in efforts that enhance the reputation of the college while simultaneously making important contributions to their discipline. With over 20 academic programs, the college’s faculty are uniquely poised to make significant contributions to disciplines vital to improving education and health outcomes.
Examples could include implementing a unique and high-impact learning experience for students in a degree program; hosting a small convening that helps plot the research trajectory of a field/subfield; collaborating with scholars (either internal or external to the University of Arkansas) in the same field to develop a grant proposal or conduct a research project; integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion into an academic program or a line of research; and collaborating with leading scholars to learn new research techniques and skills.
Dean’s Seminars: These once-a-semester seminars will focus on a complex societal challenge (e.g., mental health, college access, racial disparities in health/education, etc.) and help students develop high-leverage interventions to address the issue through the lens of education and health.
Providing original and transformative educational experiences strengthens the preparation of educators and health professionals, ultimately improving the lives of their future students and patients. These 1-credit hour elective seminars will leverage the expertise of the college’s faculty to provide students from multiple disciplines an opportunity to study topics at the intersection of education and health. The first seminar will be offered as a pilot in Spring 2023. The seminars will be collaborative, involving instructors from at least two areas of the college.
“We believe that providing our students with meaningful, unique, and transformative educational experiences strengthens the preparation of educators and health professionals and ultimately improves the care they provide to their future patients and communities,” said Matthew Ganio, associate dean of academic and student affairs.
Priority II: Advance the University’s land-grant mission by caring for Arkansas and Arkansans.
Student Field Experiences: The college will develop and fund opportunities for students to complete their internships, practicums, or clinical experiences across Arkansas.
Encouraging field experiences throughout Arkansas provides students with a wider range of professional practices, a better understanding of how local communities influence education and health, and more opportunities to consider careers across the state. These experiences also increase the number of Arkansans who benefit from the college’s expertise. Student Field Experiences reduce obstacles for students participating in internships outside of Northwest Arkansas and help offset costs related to transportation, housing, living expenses, and external field supervisor compensation. These funds can support individual students or cohorts of students participating in internships, practicums, clinicals, and other field experiences ranging from a short-term duration to an entire semester.
“Encouraging field experiences throughout Arkansas provides students with a better understanding of local community needs and opens more opportunities for them to consider careers across the state,” said Michael Hevel, interim associate dean for research, strategy and outreach.
Education and Health Professionals in Residence: The college will seek educators and health professionals from across Arkansas to spend up to a semester in the college to collaborate with students, faculty, and staff on strengthening connections from research/teaching to practice and vice versa.
Learning from prominent educators and health professionals in Arkansas helps students see how scholarly knowledge is applied in practice. Hosting these practitioners can also help faculty and staff design relevant studies, establish research-practice partnerships, and create new field experiences. Educators and Health Professionals in Residence support the meaningful engagement of prominent practitioners in the state with the college’s academic programs. These practitioners can deliver guest lecturers across multiple courses, teach a course, design and conduct research with faculty, or consult on curriculum. The residency can range from multiple short visits, an intensive visit of 1-3 weeks, or a semester-long stay.
Listening and Learning Tours: The college will support trips to learn from Arkansas educators and health professionals about their communities’ needs and priorities.
Hearing from constituents representing diverse communities improves the college’s ability to serve Arkansas. Listening and Learning Tours will support faculty and staff travel to learn more about the successes, challenges, and opportunities facing communities and organizations across the state. Lessons learned from these tours may result in adaptations in academic programs and teaching and timely and relevant research.
“Hearing from constituents representing diverse communities improves our ability to serve Arkansas,” said Lewatis McNeal, associate dean for administration and diversity. “Listening and learning tours will support faculty and staff travel to learn more about the successes, challenges, and opportunities facing communities and organizations across the state.”
Priority III: Embrace an organizational culture that is agile, adaptable, responsive, and caring
We Care Together Programming: The college will partner with departments/units to plan programming and activities that will foster a sense of community and belonging and support faculty and staff across career stages.
Fostering community and shared commitments comprises a vital element of amplifying the talents of the college’s faculty and staff. We Care Together Programming provides opportunities to learn about and celebrate diverse identities, promote inclusion, and highlight talents and expertise. Monthly programming will aim to meet the needs of people at different points in their career.
Faculty and staff are encouraged to submit Ideas for potential events/programs, which will be accepted on an ongoing basis from faculty, staff, or units.
“I strongly believe that for us to be able to care for our students and communities we serve, we must also care for ourselves and each other and create a community where people feel valued, and we feel like we belong and we matter,” Mamiseishvili said. “The WE CARE Together events will help us learn about and celebrate diverse identities, promote inclusion, highlight the variety of talents and expertise in our college, and increase the overall ‘compassion capacity’ of our organization.”
We Reduce Barriers: This action item addresses college-wide processes, policies, and practices. The goal is to simplify and improve them, decrease completion time, and increase efficiency, accuracy, and innovation.
We Support You and Your Priorities: The college will provide departments, offices, and units with funding to advance priorities and create new opportunities for students, staff, and faculty. Examples could include funding a strategic plan for an academic department; planning a staff retreat to create a sense of community and improve operations; engaging in a professional development opportunity as a unit; or developing a student success program for students.
Mamiseishvili is excited about the possibilities with this new initiative heading into the fall of 2022. “The pandemic was a disruptor, but in many ways, it was also an accelerator of change and transformation,” she said. “This is our opportunity to take advantage of transformative changes that are taking place in health and education as well as on every higher education campus today. We hope that the WE CARE initiative is an accelerator of our transformation.”
