Structuring Faculty Workshops

A prawf writes:

We (i.e. “I”) are (am) thinking about starting a workshop here at ___ (not to bring in speakers, but for internal presentation).  What ground rules do you set for participation in your workshop? Do you require any kind of commitment from faculty, or is it open to whoever wants to come that week? Any ideas on “best practices” would be helpful, especially since we're concerned about cultivating a committed group of regulars while minimizing free-riding.

Some thoughts and an invitation for you all to hop in, after the jump.

 

    I can't say what best practices are, but here are some options. At FSU, our internal workshop series usually occurs in the summer b/c during the school year we have about 20-30 speakers from enrichment and app-comm per semester. That said, we do have some very informal internal workshops during the school year too, but they're usually for untenureds and they  get to decide who to invite. At least that's my recollection. 

    Most of internal presentations have operated under a pretty conventional structure, one that's similar to our job talk structure: the school provides lunch and circulates the paper a few days to a week in advance. The person would then present for 20 minutes and there'd be roughly 40 minutes for Q/a. Many folks would have read the paper but probably not all (if my own behavior is any guide).

For my own internal presentation last summer, I didn't want to have any presentation at all except 3 minutes to describe the basic claim and what my anxieties about the paper are. I told people in advance that there would be no "formal" presentation, with the hope that this would spur more people to read the paper even if the audience were smaller.  I think this worked well. My hope is that those who read will ask more questions especially if the paper is somewhat developed, and that those folks who hadn't read would not take precious time away from those who had read the paper.

    That latter structure is closer to what happens at Prawfsfest! and the crim law theory colloquium up at NYU/BLS that I'm involved with. In both those venues, only people who have read are welcome to the room to participate.

    From what I can tell, I think NYU's faculty workshop has a rule /norm that the "presenter" has to circulate a paper no longer than 30 pages and there is no presentation at all so the expectation is that everyone will have read the paper and there will be questions for an hour or so. (Rick/Rob, correct me if I'm wrong). I've heard other schools do an incubator workshop model: 10 pages of draft or 10 minutes of talking by the presenter (or both?), and the rest of the hour is brainstorming/challenges, ideas for development and further reading. 

    So, capping presentation time or paper length might be helpful in terms of facilitating scholarship growth. Part of the decision-making will turn on whether the idea behind the presentation is to render vulnerable a piece that's developed already (in which case, don't cap the paper length but do cap the presentation time) or instead to generate ideas and resources for growing the piece from an acorn into an oak tree (in which case, capping both presentation time and paper length could be helpful). So perhaps there should be two workshop formulae: 1/4 baked and 3/4 baked. Maybe the best thing to do is allow the presenter  to decide which format she would prefer, and hopefully that will shape the nature of the feedback. 

    Here are some other posts we've had on the subject of faculty workshops. You can probably find some more in our archives.

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2009/05/workshops-as-they-could-be.html

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2006/08/creative_facult.html

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/08/is-a-workshop-a-performance-or-are-you-not-entertained.html

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/05/d%C3%A9j%C3%A0-vu-the-ethics-of-workshops-presenting-.html

 

What do you all think about the best way to structure workshops?