The WMU-AAUP Invisible Hours Project
Spring 2016 Pilot Project

Click here to sign up.

Background

At Western Michigan University, as at every North American college or university, faculty members are highly visible in classrooms, laboratories, performance spaces, meeting rooms, and departmental and college-wide administrative offices. They mentor students, engage in partnerships with a variety of industrial, charitable, and governmental organizations, and present their work at professional meetings. These activities form the basis for the public’s understanding of faculty productivity, but what is often overlooked are the invisible hours that faculty members spend preparing for the visible work that they conduct.

As a result, three key constituent groups — students, parents, and legislators — understandably tend to focus on the public component of faculty members’ work when thinking about issues related to higher education. For instance, it is not uncommon for politicians to advocate for increased teaching loads for research faculty without taking into consideration the amount of labor involved outside the classroom in order to prepare for even one hour of public instruction.

Call for Faculty Participants

The WMU-AAUP’s Invisible Hours project is designed to present an informative glimpse at the behind-the-scenes labor that goes into highly visible professional activities conducted by WMU faculty members. In October 2015, a group of interested faculty colleagues met to develop a pilot project designed to communicate effectively the concept of “invisible hours.”

They are now inviting faculty participants from across the ranks of tenured faculty – traditionally ranked as well as faculty specialists – to carry out the pilot project during the spring 2016 semester.

The time commitment involved will be under 5 hours per participant, but the impact will allow us to shed light upon the rewards and the challenges of our profession.

Join us! Click here to sign up.

The Pilot Project

The Invisible Hours pilot project will track the work that lies behind one visible hour of output by twelve faculty members from various disciplines across the institution. That hour could be a class lesson, a fieldwork session, a performance, a clinical supervision session, a lab session, or any other activity that is carried out in the public realm. The information collected for each participant will be displayed on a circular clock face graphic, with an inner circle describing the output for each hour, and concentric circles providing a very brief, one-sentence description of the layers of work that went into creating that hour. The result will be an easy-to-read and powerful visual representation of faculty achievement and dedication, as well as a reminder of the wide variety of work that is conducted at a public research institution such as WMU.

The Audience

At the October planning meeting, faculty colleagues from a number of colleges discussed what information they might put forward were they to participate in the pilot project. In just a short time, we learned how little we knew about each other’s visible hours, let alone the “invisible” labor that went into producing that output. As such, we realized that the first group to benefit from the pilot project would be the faculty itself: The more we learn about each other’s professional endeavors, the more likely we are to appreciate the value of our collective work at WMU.

However, the pilot project graphic could also be used at WMU Day at the Capitol, at recruitment fairs, and at any university function designed to showcase the work of the faculty. Our hope is that when students, parents, legislators, and other stakeholders see the graphic, they will be encouraged to learn more about the professional lives of university faculty members and how our work benefits WMU students and the community more widely.

How to Participate

Interested faculty can click here to sign up. Or contact the WMU-AAUP office by emailing staff@wmuaaup.net or calling 345-0151. You can look forward to hearing back from us to schedule a meeting in January to get started!