Dr.
Patrick Novotny
Professor
Political Science
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Patrick
Novotny |
Background
I am honored to have been asked by the Center for Excellence
in Teaching to be a featured faculty member and am glad to share some
of my own reflections and thoughts on the experience of my teaching and
its relationship with my scholarship at Georgia Southern University. Arriving
in Statesboro in the Fall of 1995 from my doctoral studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, I was immediately impressed by the commitment
to and the importance of classroom teaching at Georgia Southern. My Department
Chair in the Department of Political Science, Dr. John Daily, who went
from his position as Chair to his later role as the founding Director
of the CET, emphasized the importance of my classroom instruction and
teaching, this at a time when I had only recently completed my doctoral
studies in a research-focused setting where teaching had comprised only
a small part of faculty and graduate student commitments and time.
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Within the first few years of my arrival at Georgia Southern, I was able to watch the emergence of the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) which came about at a time when I had begun to establish my own expectations as a teacher. Happily, the arrival of the CET at Georgia Southern provided a place for me to explore the use of instructional technology that I used with growing success in both the classroom as well as in my scholarship, a relationship that over time blended together as they so often do as we settle into our academic careers. In the CET I soon found a willingness to explore the uses of technology and its application in the classroom in creative and innovative ways. Faculty colleagues, including John Daily, as well as Alison Morrison-Shetlar, now at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Steve Bonham, were a source of great encouragement and enthusiasm about the resources available through the CET and together they spent many days looking at innovative ways of using instructional technologies in the classroom.
Teaching,
Learning & Scholarship
| "I saw my classes more and more as a place to explore ideas in my scholarship with my students, inviting them to think about the same questions I was thinking about in my research." |
With the encouragement and the support of the CET and faculty colleagues, I gained a renewed sense of confidence in my teaching, one that more and more blended classroom instruction with the research projects I wanted to pursue. I learned by the end of my 3rd or 4th year at Georgia Southern that bringing my research and my scholarship into the classroom was a rewarding and satisfying way to find my balance of teaching and scholarship. I saw my classes more and more as a place to explore ideas in my scholarship with my students, inviting them to think about the same questions I was thinking about in my research.
Even more significantly for my teaching by this time was a commitment I made to rethink and to rework my teaching approach to my Department’s course in the Core Curriculum, POLS 1101: Introduction to American Government. For my first several years at Georgia Southern, I had reinvented the course every time I taught it. I continually tried new ways of making the course interesting and relevant for my students. I experimented with new topics, incorporated different exercises, something that in retrospect I came to realize took an incredible amount of time as much as it was rewarding to myself as an instructor and, I hope, my students.
| "I cleared my desk and reinvented the course as a series or a sequence of narratives or vignettes." |
It was at approximately the time of my promotion to Associate Professor that I took a very different turn in the teaching of POLS 1101. I cleared my desk and reinvented the course as a series or a sequence of narratives or vignettes. I grew more comfortable than I had ever been in teaching POLS 1101 as a series of interrelated yet largely stand-alone narratives or stories which built upon each other.
I integrated instructional technology into the classroom. In developing these narratives in my lectures in POLS 1101, I made a decision to include what is now considerably less than half of my instructional or lecture material in PowerPoint slides, allowing students to write down key information from PowerPoint slides (which often incorporate photographic or related images as well as text) and then lecturing with much more material than is on the slide. Students can write down the text of a typical PowerPoint slide in my class in approximately 1 to 2 minutes, allowing me to then expand upon the text and incorporate much more material that I deliver in the lecture itself. Students learn from the first day of the class that most of the course materials will come from my lectures and not the PowerPoint slides, which, pedagogically, encourages me to engage the students with lectures and material that encompass but go into much greater detail than the text of the slides themselves.
Winning
the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) Award
for Excellence in 1999-2000 and then the 2004-2005’s Wells Warren
Professor of the Year was success unimaginable to me even just a few years
earlier and I think much of it is a reflection of my confidence in working
on and developing my POLS 1101 course. In recent years, I have adopted
and incorporated much of what I learned from my POLS 1101 course into
my Upper Level courses, adopting teaching strategies that incorporate
instructional technologies in ways that free students from over-reliance
on taking notes and that emphasize listening to lectures and then having
time to ask questions and react to materials.
I consistently
schedule days entirely dedicated to student discussion, debate, and classroom
exchange in all of my Upper Level courses, days which allow the students
to broaden and deepen their understanding of the materials. My Upper Level
courses also have a significant component of writing which is done in
multiple rough drafts throughout the semester so that students and I interact
throughout the semester on their research projects. Working with the required
multiple rough drafts gives me the chance to assist students to broaden
their arguments and deepen their research. In Spring 2008, I began experimentation
with the development of a “Wiki” for student writing and research
in my Upper Level courses, creating a collaborative online environment
where the students have created their own topics and develop their own
content that can then be read, edited, modified, or expanded upon.
| "...the news of the day and the headlines in the morning newspapers become the very stuff of my teaching and writing." |
Every day, I keep my eyes and ears open for everything and anything that I can incorporate into my classes, scholarship, and writing. I think the true reward of having decided, as an undergraduate, to change my major from Computer Science to Archaeology and, finally, to Political Science was the reward of an academic life where the news of the day and the headlines in the morning newspapers become the very stuff of my teaching and writing. I always tell my students that my favorite part of teaching is when I read a story in the newspaper that I can incorporate later that same day into my lectures or course discussions. I think my own excitement at finding a story or anecdote in the morning’s newspapers or the late night’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart that I can bring to into the classroom, thinking on my feet in the moment of the lecture, is something that, in the eyes of many of my students, is seen as enthusiasm for sharing with students a love for my work.
Contact
Information
Patrick
Novotny
pnovotny@GeorgiaSouthern.edu
phone: (912) 478-1391