Day One

Today I begin a one-month professional leave to draft my Ed.D. treatise proposal. I've nearly as absent from my treatise work as I have from this blog over the last several months. Now I have a luxury I've never had before - time away from work while in school. Granted, I have taken small chunks of vacation time to work on various projects. I have never, however, had 31 days at my disposal to focus on school work.

This leave is breaking some long (too long, I think) ground in our library system. Since we implemented the Academic Professional status about seven or eight years ago no one has applied for a professional leave. The professional leave option was written in as a substitute for a research leave/sabbatical, which is, of course, available to tenured faculty. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to focus on professional development along with the loss of the option of tenure for librarian. So I'm happy to turn over this sod, and also feel an added sense of obligation to make this endeavor produce results.

I have done some work over the last few months on the treatise. Most notably I've moved from planning a qualitative research methodology to a quantitative project. I always expected I would do a quantitative project until I got mired down in a path that led to lots of faculty interviews. I feel that my current trajectory of using existing data sets will be a better fit. I plan to use data from the Faculty Survey on Student Engagement (FSSE - pronounced "fessy"? "fussy"?) and LibQUAL+ (short "i" for those of us steeped in phonetics during our elementary days, long "i" for others) to explore disciplinary differences and local departmental culture.

Here I go...