I am writing to share that in response to an important vacancy in assessment, Dr. Liz Chase has accepted the position of Senior Associate Director, Academic Assessment, at Emerson College. She will begin her role on Monday, February 1, 2021.
Liz joins us from Stonehill College, where she has served as Assistant Dean of General Education since 2018, leading the College's reimagining of its Cornerstone Program of General Education. Throughout her work with the General Education program, Liz has maintained a focus on transparency and collaboration. Her office launched a public website to document each step in the reimagining project, and made additional data available to faculty on a private site. As part of this work, Liz was responsible for assessing the current General Education offerings at Stonehill and building a new program with a clear eye towards and plan for ongoing student outcomes assessment. Additionally, Liz lead campus conversations around revised learning outcomes and inclusive excellence bor both the core curriculum as a whole and its discrete requirements. That included serving on the Institutional Assessment Committee to ensure a coherent, documented assessment program and compiling accurate data for organizations such as NECHE. She was part of the Academic Affairs staff tasked with compiling data for NECHE Standard Eight and meeting with Stonehill's visiting team during the reaccreditation process. NECHE cited her collaborative approach in their 2019 site visit report as "a model for engagement, inclusivity, transparency, communication, and intentionality."
Liz originally joined Stonehill in April 2013 as the Head of Collections, Assessment, and User Engagement for the MacPhaidin Library. There, she provided strategic direction for her team as they launched support for online courses, a new assessment plan, and enhanced collection development practices. During her tenure, the library launched a new Information Skills Curriculum and began a long-term study of student interactions with Research, Teaching, and Learning resources in the library. Throughout her time at Stonehill, she has also contributed to many faculty and staff professional development opportunities, taught classes within the former Irish Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Studies, and English, and most recently assumed responsibility for the Writing Program.
As an instructor, Liz's online course, "Memory & Violence in Modern Ireland" won a 2017 Blackboard Exemplary Course Award, and she has worked closely with faculty and staff to enhance equity and inclusion in her own classes and those of her colleagues. She is deeply engaged in researching and sharing strategies for improving course and program delivery. In her cover letter, Liz noted that "What sustains [her] interest in working with faculty, students, and staff is our shared focus on supporting students as they grapple with complicated questions of identity, engagement, history, and power in our classrooms and in their co- and extra-curricular experiences."
We look forward to welcoming Liz in February!