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Leadership

At Bucknell

Many of my most impactful contributions have been through service to the College of Engineering and University. Below are some select leadership roles.

Teaching and Learning Center Director (2018 - Present)

I have a long history with the Teaching and Learning Center. From 2005-2006, as a first-year faculty member, I organized a First-Year Faculty Working Group, that existed before the TLC was officially launched. Our self-organized group was funded by the Provost and generated a report with 15 recommendations for how to make Bucknell better for new faculty. 14 of these recommendations have become integrated into the current work of the TCL. I went on to become a regular attendee at TLC events, presented nine times at the Friday Learning Series, and then served as the TLC Faculty Fellow for two years. In 2018 I was appointed as the TLC director, a University-wide position reporting to the Provost’s Office.

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 Position duties include:

  • Oversight and execution of Faculty Development Programs that include including New Faculty Pedagogy Series, Friday Learning Series (FLS), Teaching Learning Communities, Teaching Circles, 2-4 Year Faculty Learning Group, Course Design and Pedagogy Workshops, Reboot Camp, Integrated Perspective Workshops, and Foundation Seminar Workshops. Each year these programs reach approximately 80% of all Bucknell faculty

  • Oversight over all Student Learning Support, including academic success skills workshops (targeted to first-year students), peer-facilitated study groups, a robust peer tutoring program, individual consultations and online resources Each year these programs reach approximately 1/3 of all Bucknell students (50% of all first-year students)

  • Convene the TLC Advisory Board once per semester and as needed

  • Oversight of 4 full-time staff members as well as ~200 student workers

  • Oversight of Center Operating Budget of ~$170,000

  • Oversee all Center assessment and reporting

  • Recruit and coordinate Faculty Fellows and TLC Assistants

  • Serve as the primary liaison to faculty and departments regarding pedagogy

  • Direct and coordinate the faculty consultation programs, and new faculty mentoring

  • Lead all strategic planning and strategic partnerships with other groups on campus, including but not limited to the Academic Deans, the Faculty Development Committee, the CCC Director, the Office of the Provost, L&IT, and the Division of Student Affairs.

 

Key accomplishments include:

  • Hired a new Assistant Director of Student Learning Support
    Drafted a proposal for an Academic Coach to be shared between TLC and Office of Accessibility

  • Added Reflection as a TLC value. Initiated a two-year long Learning Community on Reflection, culminating in a May Plan report and two Friday Learning Series workshops

  • Made revision of the TLC SWOT analysis a biannual activity

  • Operationalized how tactics and actions are generated from the SWOT analysis

  • Operationalized all communication within the TLC using Trello and Google Filestream. This has nearly eliminated email as our internal means of communication

  • Designed a comprehensive year-long Mentorship Ecosystem Model for new faculty. Included Associate Deans, Deans, and members of the Provost’s office in the design of the model

  • Re-envisioned new faculty orientation to coordinate the efforts of Human Resources, Library & IT and the Provost’s Office with the aim of providing a more coherent and holistic experience

  • Co-chaired the ad hoc ePortfolio Working Group, appointed by the Provost’s Office. This group grew from a previous TLC Learning Community

  • Developed a Faculty Development Canvas that was tested with 2-4 year faculty, then the new faculty, then the faculty as a whole at an FLS. The Canvas is used by 14 other institutions

  • Enhanced Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the work of the TLC by ensuring that all staff are trained as diversity advocates, including more on DEI in the Course Design and Pedagogy Workshop and New Faculty Pedagogy Series, as well as several Spring 2020 FLS focused on DEI. For our work, the TLC was nominated for Bucknell’s 2020 Diversity Award

  • Designed and executed Bucknell’s First Regional Faculty Development Workshop that drew participants from 13 regional schools

  • Enabled both associate directors to become POSSE mentors. This was a long-standing desire of these staff and will bring in additional best practices and insights into the TLC.

Institute for Leadership in Technology and Management Co-Director (2014-2018)

ILTM is an intensive six-week summer program for students from Management, Arts & Sciences and Engineering Colleges. During the day they learn about leadership, a variety of societal and technological perspectives and interact with real-world leaders. At night and on weekends, interdisciplinary teams of work on a project from a real-world client. At the end of the program, they present their client with a 100+ page consulting report with recommendations and defend them in a three-hour live presentation. Throughout the program, they are guided in developing their own leadership and professional development plan. I served for two years as one of the four core faculty members prior to becoming co-director.

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Director duties include:

  • Recruit projects from multiple companies. Companies included General Electric, Save the Children, United Way, Nielsen, Comcast, Oracle, The Children’s Place, Omnicom, Rich Foods, Primus Technologies and TastyKake as well as the start-ups CollectiveI, Stantt, MyNetwork and Novipod.

  • Iterate upon the project scope with clients

  • Plan and oversee ~$200,000 budget

  • Negotiate all seminar rooms as well as summer housing for ILTM students

  • Negotiate financial aid for students in need

  • Create and distribute promotional material and conduct recruitment sessions

  • Organize application process, reviews and notification of decisions

  • Plan and execute all day-long project site visits with all 24 students and core faculty

  • Plan travel and accommodations of approximately 20 C-level leaders to Bucknell’s campus

  • Coordinate final project report-outs, including travel of clients to Bucknell

  • Recruitment of core faculty, faculty speakers and off-campus speakers

  • Write end-of-year report for the Provost’s Office, accompanied by strategic aims for the future

  • Faculty advisor for seven, six-member interdisciplinary teams.

 

Key accomplishments as director include:

  • Led two-year strategic planning (the first in the history of the program) to develop Program Values, Vision and Mission Statement

  • Spoke at University Campaign Events in New York, Naples Florida and Chicago about ILTM

  • Included the first start-up and non-profit companies as clients

  • Included the first non-corporate/non-academic speakers into the program

  • Balanced participating from Arts and Science students and faculty. By the end of my term the participating was 1/3 from each college

  • Revision of all website text, images, videos and format

  • Created and hired a faculty fellow position as a way to recruit core faculty

  • Updated the application and interview questions to align with the Values, Vision and Mission

  • Worked with Bucknell IT to move to a custom-written online application process

  • Operationalized the budget such that yearly updates would not be negotiated line-by-line

  • Increased diversity of underrepresented students and guest speakers

  • Increased international student participation from ~3 per year to ~6 per year

  • Introduced a leadership plan that each student would explore throughout the program. This included a variety of developmental exercises, feedback from peers and visiting leaders, and a final individual leadership statement (Hoshin Plan) with goals at 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years.

Strategic Planning (2006-2018)

I am no stranger to strategic planning. I was the untenured representative to the 2006 Academic Planning Group, was one of four faculty to draft the WE DO Creative Campus strategic initiative, and led a two-year effort within ILTM to develop the first formal program values, vision and mission. I led the TLC in redrafting of our vision, mission, SWOT analysis, five-year strategic plan and operationalized how we generate projects and actions from the plan. Within the College of Engineering I served on the Engineering Long Range Planning Committee (2006-2007), the Engineering Strategic Planning Committee (2011-2012), and co-chaired the Strategic Planning Committee (2017-2018). Off campus, I served on the ASEE Strategic Doing Taskforce and have engaged in strategic planning for the Kern Family Foundation as a member of their faculty board. Through these experiences I have found that a strategic plan is only as good as the actions that follow. I am excited to help put our current strategic plan into action.

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My most significant strategic planning experience was serving as the co-chair of the Engineering College Strategic Planning Committee (SPC). I was elected to be a member of the Engineering Strategic Planning Committee and then the committee elected me as a co-chair.

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My work on the committee as co-chair included:

  • Led the writing of a formal charge for the SPC as well as clarifying the relationship between the Dean’s Advisory Team and three working groups

  • Formed three working groups to collect vital information and provide recommendations to the SPC

  • Coordinated communication between working groups and the SPC, including regular meetings with the working group chairs

  • Coordinated SPC processes with the Dean’s Advisory Team and an external consultant

  • Established a timeline and expectations and regularly communicated progress to the College

  • Created and executed multiple surveys, focus groups and brainstorming sessions that engaged students, faculty, staff, alumni and employers

  • Led a comprehensive search and analysis of the strategic plans at other Engineering Colleges

  • Created a website where all minutes, reports, data and analysis from SPC and working groups was posted to enhance transparency

  • Created multiple Slack channels to move communications out of email and provide a transparent record of decision making

  • Led SPC meetings where data were analyzed and transformed into values and vision statement

  • Led multiple iterations on the college values (with descriptions) and a vision statement through SPC meetings and College-wide townhall events

  • Led SPC in drafting goals and measurable objectives that would achieve the vision while living by the college values. College-wide townhalls were used to refine these goals and objectives

  • Coordinated drafting of the final deliverable from the group, incorporating the final deliverables and timeline and rationale. Served as one of two main editors.

KEEN Winter Interdiscipinary Design Exerience Co-Director and Founder (2010-2015)

K-WIDE was a 10-day immersive (~130 hours), no-credit, no-pay, January term experience for first- and second-year engineers. Multidisciplinary teams were given two words (e.g. “Decent Work”) based upon the UN Sustainable Development Goals (previously the Millennium Goals). Through a series of experiential assignments, they were guided through a problem identification phase (generally the first five days) during which they proposed the design of a physical artifact that would intersect the two-word prompt. The remaining days were used to build, iterate and test prototypes. If students needed to know something along the way, they need to learn it. The culmination was an exposition and two-minute pitch.

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In addition to the student experience, K-WIDE was a laboratory to experiment with radical emergent pedagogy – much of the guidance and assignments were created on-the-fly in response to student needs in near real-time. Many of the pedagogy ideas generated (e.g. short reflective exercises, mindset exercises) have been refined and integrated into other learning experiences. 

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In building K-WIDE I:

  • Co-created the curriculum and all instructional materials

  • Co-mentored 18 projects

  • Led efforts to recruit students and design an application process

  • Hired a faculty fellow

  • Secured access to instructional and fabrication space as well as streamlined student training

  • Created and operationalized the program budget

  • Engaged in fundraising for the program

  • Later versions included college students from other universities as well as high school students from a Science and Math Magnet school in Georgia

  • Securing insurance for off campus participants

  • Dissemination K-WIDE out to other schools, through grants, publications, and university site visits

  • Delivered a live-streamed Keynote for the KEEN National Conference while K-WIDE was occurring. Featured me interviewing students multiple times as they were engaged in their projects.

Bucknell Innovation Group Founder (2010) and Fellow (2014-2016)

The Bucknell Innovation Group (BIG) was created to encourage students to transcend existing institutional frameworks and think flexibly and creatively about problem solving. BIG aimed to create an environment that would support those for whom innovation is a primary focus and to help others discover their innovative impulses. Its members were a very diverse group of faculty, students, alumni, and community members interested in nurturing and celebrating innovative endeavors that take place on and off campus. In the context of this collective, the term “innovation” was construed broadly: the development of novel ideas that provide some type of added value (social, economic, aesthetic, intellectual, etc.) to the classroom, campus and world.

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The objectives of BIG were to:

  • Enhance Bucknell’s reputation for offering an inviting environment for innovative students

  • Help other Bucknell students discover their latent innovative impulses

  • Spur interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship related to creativity and innovation

  • Create co-curricular and extra-curricular programming related to innovation

  • Integrate Bucknell alumni with the teaching and learning related to innovation

  • Support partnerships with the local communities related to innovation.

 

 As a founder of BIG I:

  • Co-wrote the mission and gave feedback on the website

  • Helped obtained funding from a Presidential Initiative

  • Co-drafted the grant submission form to focus on how proposals would enhance BIG’s four core principles of being innovative, interdisciplinary, inclusive and impactful

  • Participated in five BIG-funded grants.

 

As a BIG Fellow I:

  • Worked with the Markets Innovation and Design Program on logos/branding for BIG

  • Organized several mixer events, with a format that encouraged sharing and mixing

  • Operationalized the grant application process by refining the questions and moving online

  • Reviewed proposals to give out one-time grants for under $1000 to kickstart new ideas.

Instructional Facilities Committee (2008-2012), Chair (2010-2012)

The Engineering Instructional Facilities Committee makes recommendations to the Dean on appropriate usage of College spaces in service of the College’s educational and scholarly mission. Spaces which the College administers that are not offices or departmental laboratories or other departmental spaces are under its purview. The IFC takes a leading role in recommending renovations for College spaces, allocates project spaces, reviews capital budget requests for laboratory equipment, and assists the University Space Committee. I served as the Chair of IFC from 2010-2012.

 

Projects I completed as chair include:

  • Worked with Facilities and a contractor to design and construct the Mooney Innovation Lab

  • Created of the Product Development Laboratory Steering Committee that provides oversight of the Product Development Lab and operation of the Mooney Innovation Lab

  • Designed and oversaw construction of an engineering storage space that opened up more space for educational and research projects.

Engineering Curriculum Committee (2005-2018), Chair (2016-2018)

I served on the Engineering Curriculum Committee (2005-2007, 2011-2017), including a significant time as Chair. The Committee reviews, advises, and coordinates discussions around topics that focus on interdepartmental courses and/or curricula. At the course-level, this includes any and all courses that are required by more than one degree program in the College, including ENGR 100. At the curricular-level this includes any and all changes to a program’s curriculum that impacts another curriculum in the College. Another primary function is to establish the General Education Requirements that are shared by the curricula in the College of Engineering. The Committee may be charged by the Dean or departments to pursue other requests that relate to interdepartmental curricula or courses.

Brain Mind and Culture Founder and Organizer (2009-2013)

The Brain, Mind and Culture group started in the Summer of 2009 as an informal reading and discussion group with a theme of exploring how modern neuroscience was reshaping our view of ourselves and the world around us. The original group was four faculty but over the years grew to 34 faculty, staff and administrators. We met weekly, including during the summers, taking turns choosing articles. BMC provided an informal source of mixing of ideas and people, resulting in Integrated Perspective and other team-taught courses as well as some scholarly projects. One of those courses was the proto-Integrated Perspectives course taught by myself and John Hunter called Brain, Mind and Culture.

 

As the founder and organizer I:

  • Created a website and email list-serve to aid in communication

  • Posted the schedule and readings to the website

  • Created venues to interact with off-campus authors of articles, typically through online sources

  • Organized and ran a University-wide Focus Year (2010-2011) called Emerging Minds that sponsored talks and workshops with five internationally known speakers. Planning included writing the proposal for $10,000 of University funding, gaining additional funding from 15 departments and offices, creating all promotional materials, booking all spaces and food, and hosting the events

© 2020 Joe Tranquillo

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