In this faculty development book, Pope-Ruark adapts the Scrum project management framework from software development to faculty work, offering concrete and simple strategies for managing both individual and collaborative research agendas, running committees, mentoring students and peers, and designing effective courses and team projects.

Pope-Ruark recently appeared on of the “” podcast, a production of the Oregon State University E-Campus, where she talked at length about Scrum and its relationship to faculty work as well as how to use features of Scrum, such as the Scrum board and sprints, to guide faculty to make regular, actional progress toward their most valuable goals. In an accompanying bonus clip, she discusses how to introduce a Scrum board in student group projects and use it for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning data collection.

Pope-Ruark’s approach to productivity management was also featured in of the “” podcast, in which host Katie Linder discusses how she implemented the Scrum board approach from “Agile Faculty”  in her own work in an academic research unit.

Pope-Ruark is an associate professor of English specializing in Professional Writing and Rhetoric and coordinates the pilot program. “Agile Faculty” is a result of her Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning Scholars project.

Shanks is an archaeologist and specialist in long-term humanistic views of design and innovation, a senior faculty member of Stanford’s Programs in Science Technology Science, Urban Studies, Rhetoric, and in the Center for Design Research, part of Stanford’s d.school. He has directed Stanford Humanities Lab and the Revs Program, connecting automotive heritage with contemporary car design.

While he pursues fieldwork into the Roman borders, he also serves on the Mayor of Rotterdam’s Advisory Board, envisioning the city’s future, and works with many companies and organizations in developing creative cultures of innovation.

While on campus, Shanks met with faculty across 黑料不打烊 College, the College of Arts and Sciences, introducing design thinking as uniquely connected to the liberal arts mindset, leading a workshop on design thinking ideation strategies that might be used in curriculum development, and holding discussions with leaders across the university.

Says Dean Gabie Smith, “Dr. Shanks invited us all to consider ways in which design principles can deepen our experiential learning. Faculty who have been embracing these methods are excited about bringing disciplinary expertise to bear in situations requiring trans-disciplinary collaborations.”

Shanks also met with several classes, including a classical myths course, a COR capstone seminar and the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation program. In the Studio, he led an interactive workshop on the strategy of journey mapping, which the students immediately applied in their ideation workshop with members of the Alamance County Wellness and Food Collaboratives to better understand their community partners’ interactions with the communities they serve. Students said the session was lively and useful, and that Shanks helped them connect design thinking, their work in the Studio and their futures as professionals and team members.

In his public talk, “Scholartistry, the Way of Design, and a Future for the Liberal Arts,” Shanks drew on 30 years of authoring, research, pedagogy, consultancy, academic administration and arts practice to explore how we might foreground creativity and innovation in the liberal arts, and indeed in everyday life, while remaining true to in-depth expertise and specialist disciplinary skillsets.

Arguing that in order to be “informed, active members of our communities whose thoughts, hopes, and actions matter,” Shanks said we must consider how resilient vocational and professional skills are in fast-changing complex globally-connected world. He argued that the word needs “t-shaped people” who have both deep disciplinary knowledge but also a broad understanding of the world, and to create those people, institutions of higher education must provide opportunities for students to practice adaptability, flexibility, and transgressing boundaries, all hallmarks of the liberal arts and human-centered design mindset.

Shanks’ visit was sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Fund for Excellence, the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation program, and the 黑料不打烊 by Design initiative.

Pope-Ruark also earned the 2013 Outstanding Article of the Year in Business Communication Quarterly Award for her work introducing and connecting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to the discipline of business and professional communication.

Pope-Ruark has been an active member of ABC for 10 years, holding various service positions, including her recently concluded four-year term as a director-at-large on the Board of Directors. She teaches courses in Professional Writing and Rhetoric in the Department of English.

Students in ENG 215 completed two major projects for ABC, first researching all professional communication organizations and providing detailed information about offerings, member benefits, publications and awards. Students then used that information to complete recommendations and sample marketing materials in four areas: general marketing, social media, video content, and conference materials.

Their work is being used by ABC’s executive and marketing committees to increase marketing efforts for the organization.

Hillary Dooley, Gabby Melillo, Alexa Dsych, Katie Makepeace, and Hannah Knoblauch presented this work via research poster and spoke with many attendees while helping out at the registration desk. The students developed the poster collaboratively during the first half of the semester in the Center for Undergraduate Publishing and Information Design (CUPID).

ABC Executive Director Jim Dubinsky was thrilled with their work and invited the students to return to the 2014 conference in Philadelphia.

Her summer research allowed her to understand the challenges of Agile for professionals in the trenches trying to adopt or champion this non-traditional, iterative, collaborative approach to work and project management. She collected informal interviews with Agile professionals and made contacts for a proposed book on the subject.

Pope-Ruark has been studying Agile project management strategies used in software development organizations for the last five years and adapting these collaborative strategies for service-learning courses, undergraduate research, and faculty professional development. Her work has been published in College Teaching and Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, with an article forthcoming in Technical Communication Quarterly.

Located in Alamance 318 and coordinated by Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, CUPID is a computer lab that is available as both a classroom and a productive space for students to work on projects. Primarily for majors in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric () concentration of the English major and students currently taking PWR and other English courses, it provides a variety of computer software and additional materials, as well as student assistance with document creation and design through the CUPID Associates program. In Fall 2011, the blog was created as a space for students to learn about events relating to the discipline, become engaged in rhetorical thought and expand their perspectives by seeing the application of rhetoric in diverse contexts. Every semester CUPID Associates and faculty contribute regular posts, and students in PWR classes are encouraged to contribute as well.

You can find the blog and read Emily’s post .

Please visit us with your final papers and projects. Good luck with exams!

The second article, “‘We Scrum Every Day’: Using Scrum Project Management Framework for Group Projects,” was published in the October issue of College Teaching (60.4). The article explores how to adapt Scrum project management processes used in web development companies to effectively group projects in college classes. This is the second article Pope-Ruark has published on Scrum, which is also the subject of her CATL Scholars Fellowship.

Pope-Ruark teaches courses in Professional Writing and Rhetoric in the Department of English. She is also the managing editor of the online peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring (PURM).

The new website has information about CUPID’s mission and ongoing efforts, student projects, and programs. The new blog space is a student-run forum to discuss rhetoric- and writing-related topics on campus as well as to showcase student and faculty publishing projects.

Thanks to students Victoria Doose ’12, Michael McFarland ’12, and Kristin Pinder ’12 for their dedication to bringing the new website to launch, and thanks to Mia Brady ’13 and Chelsea Vollrath ’13 for running the blog this semester.

The article was published in a new Scholarship of Teaching and Learning journal housed at Bryn Mawr College, Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education.