Cycle of learning
Sabbaticals enrich teaching and heighten University's reputation
Reed West says he uses many of the technical techniques he learned on previous sabbaticals in his work at Richmond.
By Barbara Fitzgerald
To the world outside academia, a sabbatical sounds a lot like a semester or year-long paid vacation during which a professor can fly to the Cote d’Azure, sack out on the sofa, enjoy hobbies, watch all the DVDs of Six Feet Under, visit Cousin Dick in Oregon, read the latest mysteries, get in some fishing, winter in Florida and try to catch the wind—in other words, do all the things that the rest of us would do if we had a year off with pay.
The image is an inaccurate one. As the world inside academia knows, a sabbatical is a prolonged period of work and study that might be paid, partially paid or even repaid—a hiatus from classroom teaching to enable research or other teaching-related goal to enrich and further the professional life of the professor, ultimately enhance the educational experience of students and reflect well upon the reputation and standing of the University.
At Richmond, rules and procedures for a sabbatical leave are many and well-defined in the Faculty Handbook. Full-time tenured faculty are eligible after six years of service, with the sabbatical to be taken in the seventh year. Subsequent eligibility normally recurs every six years. For a one-semester leave, faculty members receive full salary; if a one-year leave is granted, one-half salary is paid. Applicants are encouraged to apply for grants from outside sources to help fund travel and other professional expenses that might incur during the sabbatical period.
Application is made an academic year in advance, and approval is not automatic. First the department head must sign off on the application, and then it travels to the dean, the provost, the president and finally to the Board of Trustees, who consider it from a number of perspectives: Will the leave help enhance the faculty member’s professional status? Will his or her effectiveness as a teacher and scholar be heightened? Will it contribute to the needs of the department and the University? Will the teaching program at Richmond be seriously impaired by the professor’s absence?
So much for fishing and Six Feet Under
While a sabbatical is hardly a vacation, it can be tremendously enjoyable to the professor. Several Richmond faculty members contacted by RichmondNow regarding current or proposed sabbatical leave were eager to talk of their experiences and expectations, and enthusiastic about the opportunity to devote an extended period to their research and studies, from which they expected to return to class renewed and reinvigorated.
Dr. Jennifer Nourse, associate professor of anthropology and women, gender and sexualities studies, is already anticipating the joys of her upcoming sabbatical. “The time I spend on my research project and on my writing rejuvenates me and makes me even more excited to get back to teaching,” she says. Nourse says that semester after semester of teaching “can leave one stale, unable to think of new ideas, exhausted from grading and balancing research and teaching. In the process of doing research, I run across ideas and articles appropriate for teaching, and I often think, ‘Hmmm—I wonder what students will think of this?’”
After several months of being on sabbatical, “working alone,” Nourse says she’s anxious to get back in the classroom and try out new ideas and see what others think. “There’s no doubt,” she says, “that the sabbatical is a wonderful opportunity to renew and reformulate one’s approach to teaching through one’s research.”
Nourse’s research will take her to Indonesia, where she will be researching and writing about women’s reproductive health. She is studying the ways in which national and international policies have been implemented at the local village level with respect to traditional midwives and how those programs, which she describes as “coercive” in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, may have turned women off from other national programs that could save their lives. She expects her research to impact her classroom teaching in many ways, to serve as “fodder for student discussion and to provide examples of how prejudice and bureaucratic discourse can have dire consequences even when people have the best of intentions.” She is also hopeful that students interested in similar issues might decide to collaborate with her for work on related topics here in the United States or in a completely different country.
From Indonesia to the Alhambra, the Vatican to Dublin
Dr. Doug Hicks, associate professor of leadership and religion and director of the Center for Civic Engagement, is in Granada, Spain, as part of his year-long sabbatical. Hicks received a research fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to pursue a book on public leadership amidst religious diversity. Although the book’s focus is on the United States, Hicks says “it is fascinating to examine this question in a country, and in a city, so rich in history. Granada has seen Jews, Muslims and Christians living together in relative harmony—the Spanish call it ‘convivencia.’ This ancient city is the site of religiously inspired architectural masterpieces like the Alhambra and countless medieval churches, yet it has also seen bloody conflict in the name of God during century after century.”
Hicks says that the comparative context has given him time to think in a wider fashion about wise leadership in a religiously complex world. “And the results,” he says, “should produce a better book.” He adds that he is also collecting many new anecdotes for his courses next year, both his Leadership and Religious Values course and Justice and Civil Society.
Hicks, like other Richmond faculty who have taken sabbaticals, sees the experience as personally broadening and enlightening. “Being here with my family is an educational opportunity for all of us,” he writes. “Our three-year-old son, Noah, is enrolled in a local preschool and comes home every day with new Spanish words!”
His stay in Granada is the second semester of Hicks’ sabbatical year. He spent the first semester in Richmond, teaching a course to master’s candidates at Union Theological Seminary. “That experience—not as ‘exotic’ as Granada—also added an important comparative context to teaching undergraduates,” he says. “Sabbatical has made possible a professionally and personally enriching year.”
Dr. Joanna Drell, associate professor of history, will use her sabbatical leave to continue her research on cultural and ethnic issues of medieval Southern Italy. She will be spending time in Rome and Naples, consulting manuscripts and other sources in the Vatican Library and in the State Archive of Naples. Drell expects her work to influence the classroom experience in her Medieval Frontiers course in particular—which is altogether appropriate, she says, since her students have already influenced the tone and direction of her research. “Students tend to ask pure questions, and that directness gets you to look at, to see the goals of your research with more clarity.”
Drell’s research may end up as a book or a series of articles. She also will present a post-sabbatical paper at an international medieval congress next summer and deliver speeches relating to her sabbatical research in the United States. A new course on the medieval Mediterranean is also in the planning stages.
Reed West, associate professor of theatre and dance, will spend his sabbatical next year in Dublin, Ireland, with the Abbey Theatre, studying how the experts there do their design work and exchanging ideas with others on all aspects of technical theater, especially sets, lights, sound and props. This is West’s third sabbatical, so he knows that the experience will be valuable to him and his classes. His other sabbaticals included work at The National Theatre in London and at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon. “I’ve learned so much,” he says. “Getting inside the head of another designer is the best way to become a better designer yourself.”
West can list easily a number of ideas brought back from previous trips, including some useful painting techniques in London that he’s been using ever since. “And from exposure to the use of pneumatics at Stratford, I was able to invent my own pneumatically lifted caster to use here. I have stolen mercilessly from processes I’ve been introduced to on sabbaticals.”
Clearly professors benefit and students benefit from sabbaticals—but what’s in it for the University? Andy Newcomb, dean of arts and sciences, says that at a university like Richmond, “our reputation as an institution is based both on the quality of our teaching and learning and on the reputation of our professors. And the reputation of our professors is based at least partly on their producing new knowledge in their professional fields. When a professor goes off on a sabbatical with a fellowship to produce a book or hold an exhibit in New York, those things will enhance the professor’s reputation; and, by association, the University’s reputation and rankings go up, too, along with the value of a Richmond degree.”
“Sabbaticals are in no way a paid vacation,” says Newcomb. “They’re part of a continuous cycle of learning and growing in which everyone at the University benefits.”