I am delighted to share two important leadership updates that take effect in August 2026.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Sarah Adams, who will serve as Interim Dean of Curriculum in addition to her role as Executive Director of General Education. This appointment builds naturally on Sarah's outstanding leadership of our general education program and her collaborative work with the Committee on General Education and the Academic Program Council. Her experience, insight, and commitment to academic excellence will be invaluable as we continue to advance our curricular initiatives.
I am also pleased to celebrate Dr. Mary Robert Garrett, whose transition to Associate Provost and Dean of Faculty is now officially in effect.
In this expanded role, Mary Robert will continue her exceptional work supporting faculty development while partnering more closely with Academic Affairs leadership on faculty support, academic policy, and initiatives that strengthen the faculty experience and advance the College's mission.
Both Sarah and Mary Robert bring extraordinary talent, dedication, and vision to these roles. Their leadership will help shape the future of Academic Affairs while ensuring that faculty success and student learning remain at the center of our work.
Please join me in congratulating Mary Robert and Sarah in wishing them success in these important leadership roles.
Dr. Adams
Dr. Garrett
Announcement
Provost Advisory Council
By Shewanee Howard-Baptiste, Provost
Academic Affairs is pleased to launch the Provost Advisory Council, a confidential group of faculty and staff who will serve as trusted advisors to the Provost and represent perspectives from across the campus community. Members will offer thoughtful feedback, strategic insight, and forward-looking recommendations that foster innovation, collaboration, and academic excellence across the institution.
Know someone whose perspective would strengthen this work? Nominate yourself or a colleague by sending names to Shewanee. Please include PAC as the subject line and share names by Friday, September 4th: howardbaptistes@berea.edu.
Announcement
Berea Faculty and Staff Participating in AAC&U's Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum
By Shewanee Howard-Baptiste, Provost
Beginning this fall, Drs. Sarah Adams and Rob Smith are co-leading Berea's institutional team in the year-long AAC&U Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum. The team, comprised of Abby Houston, Dr. Tréon McClendon, Joe Murphy, and Dr. Carlos Poggio, will develop a campus AI action plan exploring opportunities and avenues for integrating AI across pedagogy, curriculum, and institutional operations.
As this work progresses, initial plans and recommendations will be shared with the Berea community, with opportunities for broad-based discussion and participation. We look forward to future updates from this team!
Special Section
Meet Your Academic Affairs Leadership Team
Shewanee Howard-Baptiste
Mary Robert Garrett
Sarah Adams
Clara Chapman
Travis (TJ) Albritton
Rob Smith
Announcement
Berea Joins AI Ready Network: September Webinar Series on AI in the Flow of Work Begins Sept. 10!
Berea College is beginning its participation in AI Ready, a national initiative of the Council of Independent Colleges that offers free monthly webinars for faculty, staff, and administrators building a working understanding of generative AI. The emphasis is on application rather than speculation: practical strategies you can use now.
September's three-part series, AI in the Flow of Work, explores everyday uses such as drafting and refining communications, preparing for meetings, synthesizing research, and cleaning data, along with the practices that keep that use responsible, including human review, data privacy, and accessibility. Sessions run Thursdays, Sept. 10, 17, and 24, from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern. There is no cost to attend, and one registration covers the series: Register here.
For those who would like to watch together as a community, a space will be reserved from 2:00 to 4:00 PM for group viewing, with the hour after each webinar given over to lively discussion and sharing ideas about AI and its appropriate role in our teaching and our everyday work. The exact location is still being determined and will be announced in a follow-up email and in the next issue of this newsletter.
Questions? Contact Rob Smith (smithro@berea.edu), Berea's AI Ready contact.
Insights on the A-word
Mapping the Path Toward Student Success
By Rob Smith
Welcome back to a new academic year! I hope your summer was a restful one and your courses and programs are all getting off to strong starts. I also want to extend a warm welcome to both our returning and new faculty and staff joining our campus community this term.
The start of the year is a natural time to think about our programs, making it a great opportunity to engage in curriculum mapping. If you haven't used it before, curriculum mapping is a collaborative process that simply helps you see "where we teach what" in our programs. Programmatically, it helps us check vertical coherence (i.e., how skills and knowledge are progressively introduced, reinforced, and mastered) as well as horizontal coherence that ensures key concepts are integrated across courses & programming instead of being left in isolated pockets of the curriculum. The collaborative process of building these maps lets us more easily spot gaps, reduce unnecessary overlap, and align our class and programmatic activities with broader program goals.
For our students, seeing a clear map of the curriculum they're asked to navigate can be incredibly helpful. The map acts as an "advance organizer," visually charting their academic journey to reduce cognitive load and clarify the relevance of individual courses and/or programs. By showing how courses or programming build upon one another, it empowers students to make much more informed, intentional decisions about their courses and the activities in which they participate.
To support you in this, you will soon receive a new, user-friendly curriculum mapping tool. This digital template is designed to let your department or program quickly develop, visualize, and maintain your own maps without any administrative hassle. It's a single HTML file that will open in any browser window and comes pre-populated with all of your SLOs/PLOs and courses from the most current Catalog.
I encourage you to explore the tool once it arrives and give mapping a try this term. Please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions or if you want to talk about mapping strategies. I hope you'll find this a useful and insightful part of your regular assessment process.
Spotlight
Building Community, Developing Leaders: Erica Woods Steps into New Role
By Travis J. Albritton (TJ)
One of the highlights of this summer was working alongside Erica Woods to facilitate a series of conversations with our newest Berea Corps staff. Using We Can't Talk About That at Work as our guide, we created space to explore what it means to engage difficult conversations with greater confidence, curiosity, and care. Throughout the series, Erica brought a thoughtful and practical approach, helping participants develop language and tools they can carry into their work across campus.
I'm delighted to share that Erica is now fully in her role as our new Associate Director of Community Engagement and Leadership Development. Her coaching background, commitment to community, and gift for helping people grow make her an incredible asset to our students and staff. I could not be more excited about the work ahead and the ways Erica will help shape and strengthen community engagement and leadership development across our campus.
Announcement
Provost and Her Backpack
It's time to invite the Provost, Shewanee Howard-Baptiste, to your fall courses! This is a special opportunity for students to connect directly with our academic leader, who is eager to experience the classroom energy, hear your perspectives, and celebrate the start of a new semester together. Keep an eye out; you may see the Provost in your class, ready to learn alongside you! If you'd like Shewanee to attend a class during the fall term, please contact Shannon Montross.
Announcement
BereaBOND
BereaBOND is a new initiative from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Be on the lookout throughout the year for opportunities to learn more about BereaBOND and get swag.
Announcement
Lactation Room Now Available in Hutchins Library
Hutchins Library is pleased to announce a dedicated Lactation Room in Room 221 on the library's main floor, designed to provide parents with a clean, comfortable, and supportive environment for pumping and nursing. Simply check out the key from the Circulation Desk whenever you need to use the space.
Feature
Syllabus Guidelines
By Sarah Adams, Executive Director of General Education and Interim Dean of Curriculum
"Each instructor is expected to prepare and distribute to students at the beginning of each term a syllabus for the course in which they are enrolled. The syllabus is to contain the following information:
Course goals
Course requirements
Nature of course content
Methods of evaluation, including the approved description of the College's grading system, and how the instructor will determine a student's grade
Course attendance policy
Office hours
Disability statement
Course goals are expected to center on desired student outcomes. Requirements should be clearly expressed. Material to be covered during the term should be summarized, though a class period-by-period outline need not be provided. The syllabus should make clear the instructor's expectations regarding class attendance, describe any consequences for excessive absences, and specify any instances in which absences may be excused."
Announcement
Give Your Course a GIFT!
Would you like to get midsemester feedback from your students? Joe Murphy, Director of Educational Development, can come to your course and facilitate the Group Instructional Feedback Technique (GIFT). In this ~30-minute session, students will reflect on what is supporting their learning well, and how they think things might improve. They'll discuss as a group, so they can consider their own experiences and others'. Joe will give you an anonymized summary of the class's opinions and meet with you to discuss, and you'll debrief with the students to keep the conversation going.
A GIFT session is a great way to check your impressions of how a class is going, have transparent conversations about the choices you make as a professor, and build a constructive class environment.
Friday, August 28th · 2:00 to 4:00 PM · 3rd Floor Lincoln Hall
Have a thought, question, or idea you'd like to share? Join us during Academic Affairs Office Hours. No agenda, no appointments, just an opportunity to connect and strengthen our campus community together. We would love to hear what's on your mind. 🩵
Announcement
How Do You Engage Your Students?
Office of Academic Affairs
As we deepen our strategies for determining how our students learn, we invite you to share how you engage students both inside and outside the classroom. Please reflect on how you create an inclusive classroom, your teaching strategies, and the development of course materials. Your feedback will directly inform future professional development opportunities on campus and enhance how we best engage our students in learning. To contribute your reflections, follow this Teaching Practices survey link.
Announcement
Snacks & Strategizing: Mid-Career Mentoring Program for 2026-2027
By Mary Robert Garrett, Associate Provost and Dean of Faculty
I'm delighted to invite you to Snacks & Strategizing: Mid-Career Mentoring, a new series launching this academic year to support one of the most important and most overlooked stages of a faculty career: the years between tenure and full professor.
We'll gather in Draper 307 over coffee, tea, and snacks for focused, low-pressure conversations on the topics that matter most right now. Each session stands on its own, so please join whichever topics speak to you; you don't need to attend every one to belong at any one.
Please visit the registration site for session info. The first session meets Sept. 16.
Snacks & Strategizing 2026-2027 session schedule
Session
Topic
Date
1
Re-imagining Your Scholarly & Creative Agenda
Wed., Sept. 16, 3 PM
2
Navigating the Service Load
Fri., Oct. 16, 10 AM
3
Mentoring Without Burning Out
Thu., Nov. 19, 9 AM
4
Sustaining Yourself: Work-Life Integration at Mid-Career
Partner with Hutchins Library for Smarter Student Research
Want to see stronger bibliographies and sharper source evaluation in your students' work this term? We're here to help! Book a session today, or reach out to Amanda Peach (peacha@berea.edu) for further information.
Announcement
It's Time to Submit Your Course Reserves!
Fall semester is here! If you haven't submitted your course reserves yet, now's the time. Please use the course reserves request form to submit any materials you'd like placed on reserve for your class.
Updates & Announcements
Attendance Tracking
Please use the Attendance Tracker to take attendance in your course. By entering your attendance into the Attendance Tracker, Academic Affairs can easily access the information we need for enrollment and financial aid records as well as for supporting the student support efforts of the NEST.
Non-Attendance on First Day of Class
Instructors may drop any student who doesn't attend the first day of class and doesn't provide advance notice of their absence. If you would like to drop a student who does not attend the first day of your course, please email the Office of the Registrar and provide the student's name and B#.
Future Hire in Academic Affairs
Academic Affairs will post a Dean-level position in fall 2026 to support the division and advance key academic priorities. This re-envisioned role will carry forward many of the responsibilities previously held by the Dean of Curriculum.
I also want to thank Dr. Scott Steele for his leadership and partnership, particularly during my first year as Provost. We are grateful for his many contributions and wish him a rewarding sabbatical.
Upload Syllabuses to the Syllabus Repository
Under the "Teaching & Advising" tab in myBerea, you will find a link to the "Syllabus Repository" on the "Course Resource Management" tile. Please follow that link to upload the syllabus for each of your courses by Aug. 26. If you encounter technical problems, please reach out to Scott Heggen; if you do not see your course listed, please email Anna Stamper.
Fall Convocation Calendar
The Convocations Committee welcomes all faculty, staff, and students to this term's events!
Provost Howard-Baptiste
Dr. Adams
Dr. Garrett
