While on sabbatical, Chris Berni, a colleague in the English department, is gathering copies of papers, assignments, etc. college-wide and she came to the department meeting to request that we participate. The English faculty hope that by looking at our assignments, essays, and exams they can perhaps better prepare students in English 1301 and 1302 for these tasks. If you would like to help, send copies of your course materials to Chris at Northridge or via email at cberni@austincc.edu.

1. Update on Fall '05 hiring: The hiring committee members, Gaye Lynn Scott, Marilyn Yale, Kris Seago, and Stone Kumassah from Economics, have been trained by HR and will begin reviewing applications for the full-time positions. The Committee anticipates interviewing in early February and making a recommendation to the Dean on or around February 11.

2. SACS standards: In the recent accreditation visit SACS indicated that faculty who hold a Master's degree in Political Science or Government, or who hold a Master's Degree in another field and have completed 18 graduate hours in Government or Political Science are qualified to teach Government classes at ACC. They made clear that holding a Master's degree in another field, such as Public Administration, Public Policy, etc. does not qualify someone to teach ACC Government classes. The College requested that the Department officially adopt these standards, so Glen Hunt moved, Karry Evans seconded, and the department approved the adoption of these standards for all future hiring decisions.

3. Honors Program: Departments are expected to adopt criteria for faculty offering Honors classes. The current college-wide standard stipulates that only faculty members who have received "excellent" ratings on their last student evaluations can offer Honors classes. The Department is expected to add additional criteria, such as teaching experience, for example. The Department created a subcommittee (Karry Evans, Mike Gividen, Kris Seago, and Marilyn Yale) to propose these criteria at the next Department meeting.

4. ACC Foundation: The faculty briefly considered creating a department-based scholarship program to be administered through the ACC Foundation. No action was taken.

5. Faculty Advising: All full-time faculty will be expected to participate in student advising in the future. This responsibility includes posting and maintaining office hours, participating in the available training, learning how to use the online advising tools that will be available, and maintaining appropriate records of student contacts. The counseling and advising folks will begin sending students who need advising regarding Government classes and/or a degree in Government to faculty beginning in January. Please work with students on these issues rather than sending them to the Department Chair or the Dean.

6. Scholarship and forum: Gaye Lynn announced the availability of the Jack Kent Cooke scholarship for students and the dates for the Annette Strauss Institute for Civil Participation forum.

7. Enrollment prerequisites: The legislature has indicated that ACC will be reimbursed for student contact hours when students are enrolled in a class for the first and second time only. If students enroll in a class a third time (or fourth, etc.), ACC will receive no state reimbursement. To reduce the number of times students take our classes without succeeding, the faculty briefly discussed the possibility of adding prerequisites to Government classes (such as English 1301 and 1302 and/or History 1301 and 1302) and/or requiring a minimum number of completed hours before students can enroll in Government classes. No action was taken.

Each committee (Adjunct Faculty, Faculty Evaluations, Faculty Development, and Student Assessment) provided an update on its work to date. In particular, Stefan Haag as chair of the Faculty Development Committee reported the results of the faculty survey regarding preferences for professional development activities.

Faculty prefer the current system of scheduling such activities before department meetings.

Faculty want a combination of general and discipline-specific activities.

Faculty would like help in Web site creation and in the use of Blackboard. The department plans to develop a template for faculty Web pages and provide support to allow every faculty member, full-time and adjunct, to create an instructional Web page. The goal is to have every faculty member's syllabus on his/her own Web page by Fall 2005.

In terms of teaching tools, faculty overwhelming asked for help in creating active learning activities for their students.

In terms of discipline-specific content, most requests for activities related to GOVT 2305 seemed to revolve around linkage institutions (media, issue networks, campaigns, political parties, etc.). In 2306, faculty requested development activities that focused on the governor, interest groups, demographic trends in Texas, school finance, county policymaking.

The committee is considering starting a "book club" to read and discuss current books in the discipline. Faculty who participate would be given faculty development credit.

Marilyn Yale and Gaye Lynn Scott requested approval of a travel request to attend the 2005 Political Psychology conference in July. The Department approved the request.

Thank you to Kevin Temple from Longman Publishing for bringing Dr. Edwards to speak with us about the presidential election.