New Modules: USP and Faculty

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

It was difficult. For a long time, for many of the inquiry-tier modules, we were reliant on joint appointees. It’s not necessarily a limitation, since it does promote integration of USP with the rest of the university. From a resource point of view, USP is situated in a big research university so it should utilise them. I have some personal experience here: when I was deputy director of academic affairs, I was tasked with bringing joint and full appointees on board. Specifically, John Richardson wanted me to bring on more science joint appointees.

I was quite lucky: during those years, I would go to the university’s teaching academy, which gathered faculty members who had won teaching awards and are interested in talking about teaching, so I would target some of them. It wasn’t a resounding success, but I got Prof Ho Han Kiat, Prof Saif Khan, and a few others. It can be a long and involved process and sometimes just administratively challenging; many times it’s about making that one-to-one connection. I pitched in a couple of ways: one of them was to emphasise that you can do the class you always want. For example, Saif Khan wanted to do fluid mechanics for non-engineering USP students. It’s about listening to what they want to do, pitching the USP curriculum and its highly motivated students, etc., and helping these potential joint appointees to imagine how their vision can be realised in the USP. USP doesn’t have unlimited resources, but it can support you if you want to teach in ways that are less conventional. For example, you can do a class that involves a trip to Yogyakarta if that’s the best way to conduct the class.

These USP-department relationships take a bit of time to cultivate, but when they work out well the professors enjoyed the opportunity to do something that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. I didn’t necessarily promise it, but some of the professors reported that they learned a lot of tricks in teaching that they could bring back to their department. That’s the way it should be, it’s also a process for growth and professional development for them. Saif Khan, for example, has gone on to be quite prominent in the university GE committee. I can’t say if there is a direct link between his experience in USP and in the GE committee, but at least you could suspect that teaching in USP could have made him more interested in teaching modules to students from different backgrounds.

I would be targeted when deciding who to approach. As you know, not every NUS faculty member is as focused on teaching, some of them are more interested in research which is totally their prerogative, but some would be more interested in teaching. If I were to look back at something I learned, sometimes you also have to catch someone at the right moment. Realistically – though sometimes it’s a bit lamentable – with academics there is a point at which you can afford to start focusing on teaching. If you’re fresh out of graduate school and on the tenure track, in the early days there’s a lot of pressure for you to get publications out to secure your tenure. It’s not a great time to be teaching new classes, so I took those into account. I would look for people that are 5 to 6 years into their career and are ready to take on new challenges.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

In the CRC process, you talk to people, help them put the module proposal together, then it goes through approval in the committee. The CRC offers a lot of comments for the proposer. I think – though I can’t get any credit for this – the CRC always gets a lot of good feedback on how it works. There have been lots of people who said CRC discussions were helpful for them to learn what it’s like to teach in USP. Part of the reason we could pay so much attention to individual module reviews is that USP is a small programme, in a semester we may get 3 or 4 instead of 50. What might be a weakness – our size – is actually a great strength, and the CRC itself has been quite a strength of the USP.

The CRC is not uniform in terms of its specialisation, and the conversations were not always about the content. As I’m trained in English, I can’t offer many comments to someone proposing a class on civil engineering. My comments will then focus on module design and pedagogical methods. To this day, I have a fond memory of Prof Kuldip Singh and Prof Huzir Sulaiman when the latter was proposing his playwriting module From Lab to Stage: Writing the Science Play. You see the two of them engage in a very intellectual way from their perspectives. The CRC has been quite a strength of the USP programme. Most of the time, people proposing the module get constructive comments, do some revision, and usually it goes through.

The CRC is meant to be the “gatekeeping point” where you first help people understand what teaching is like in the USP. It’s not meant to be the only gatekeeping point, but the CRC’s attention to the aftermath of module approval hasn’t been uniformly systematic. Ideally after someone proposes a module and mounts it, there should be more sustained help for these faculty members, and it has not consistently been the case. Sometimes it’s tricky: with the people that I’ve worked with, they are open to talking about teaching and are generally not resistant to feedback. However, many of these are established teachers and you don’t want to hover over their shoulders during the semesters. But the faculty has thought about whether there should be some kind of follow-up meeting, should there be a review and feedback after they first teach the module, whether they want it, etc. Informally, the deputy director also runs the board of examiners, so they look at the grade reports of the modules and talk to the faculty member about how the class ended up working. Historically, USP does try to provide joint appointees with a lot of support when they come in, and it seems to be generally welcome.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

I personally have no issues with branding exercises; I think there have only been two of them. The first one I felt was quite thorough, they did hours of talking to students, both prospective and current, to understand what they were looking for. They did a good job of having everything be clearly motivated. For example, the USP blue – it needn’t be explained, but the branding company found out from their interviews that NUS, obviously, was the most recognisable brand. So if that’s the case, it makes sense to have USP to tied to NUS. An independent observer will be more likely to understand “NUS University Scholars Programme” than if you tried to position “USP” as an independent entity. Well, it then follows that you choose an identity colour for the USP that conveys this relationship. It’s a cyan blue, so it’s visually connected to the NUS blue but different enough of a shade to be its own entity. Another example is that the branding company came up with the idea of encouraging every student to identify with the tag, “Major + USP”. It sounds neutral and simply informational, but subtly gets across the idea that USP is a value-adding programme.

I think the USP had a bit more room to do that branding only after some years of self-development. NUS College just has a different history and there is probably an immediate imperative that we need to talk about our identity from the get-go. But hopefully it will also develop, and a few years down the line, they’ll do another branding.