SLHS Strategic Plan, 2023-2027

UNIVERSITY GOAL 1: Establish UMass Amherst as a destination of choice where academically accomplished, socially responsible seekers of a world-class education succeed in a research-rich, inclusive learning community. 

SLHS Strategic Focus Area 1: Increase the variety of students enrolled in our bachelor’s degree program and/or courses and work to ensure that both retention and success rates in this program are equitable

  • Increase the number and variety of SLHS majors through on-campus recruitment efforts, leveraging the resource of our current students who are excellent ambassadors, and open pathways into the professions of speech-language pathology and audiology to all students by offering a new SLHS minor. 
  • Increase outreach to high school students and college preparatory programs such as Upward Bound and the United States Attorney’s Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be”. 
  • Establish connections with local community colleges for both recruitment and development of a support plan for four semesters of success. 
  • Improve peer support networks and mentorship opportunities for our undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds by strengthening opportunities to build connections with each other, graduate students within our courses (e.g., speech-language pathology assistants and multiculturalism in SLHS courses) and lab communities, and with our network of alumni. 
  • Provide sufficient staff support for faculty to be able to successfully develop, market, track, implement, and assess the success of these initiatives. 

Strategic Focus Area 2: Enhance student career planning and support opportunities for all SLHS undergraduate students 

  • Increase career advising capacity of faculty and staff through a variety of initiatives including training about appropriate student support referrals as well as development of up-to-date career counseling materials, a career exploration tool for students that contains reflective questions they can ask themselves, educational materials about finances and being able to afford graduate school, and resources that can be shared with parents who may be putting extreme pressure on students. 
  • Provide increasing access to multiple post-graduate career pathways for students through expansion of our SLP-A offerings, assessment of the possible growth options for our ASL program (e.g., new courses in Deaf culture, Deaf studies, additional ASL courses), and creation of a new revenue-generating SLHS MPH program (with a 4+1 option) focused on disability policy and advocacy. 
  • Review our undergraduate curriculum to assess the adequacy of existing career development content and opportunities for further expansion. Examples of target courses include Introduction to SLHS and Junior Year Writing. 
  • Ensure sufficient faculty capacity for programmatic growth and staff support for these new and expanded initiatives. 

Strategic Focus Area 3: Enhance student success by increasing access to high impact educational practices (HIPs) for all students, striving to ensure participation rates are equitable across students of various racial and ethnic groups  

  • Increase undergraduate research experiences through participation in honors theses and credited undergraduate research assistant independent studies. Encourage summer undergraduate research experience by offering paid undergraduate research internships. 
  • Conduct a review of our bachelor’s curriculum to identify opportunities for and feasibility of increasing high-impact practice offerings such as collaborative assignments and projects, service-learning, one or more additional writing intensive courses, and a capstone experience. 
  • Establish a monitoring program to assess equitable access to HIPs with the development of corrective actions plans should inequities be revealed. 
  • Ensure sufficient faculty capacity for programmatic growth and staff support for these new and expanded initiatives. 

Strategic Focus Area 4: Our bachelor’s curriculum  

  • Conduct a review of our bachelor’s curriculum through an equity and inclusion lens with a particular focus on linguistic and cultural diversity in SLHS, neurodiversity and anti-ableism, and evidenced-based practice with a focus on quantitative skills such as calculating and interpreting data. Identify areas where improvement and curricular revision are needed. 
  • Provide faculty with a framework and support for evaluating ways in which flexible learning approaches may strengthen our undergraduate program. 

UNIVERSITY GOAL 2: Establish UMass Amherst as a partner of choice in advancing and applying knowledge and innovation to the betterment of society. 

GOAL 2A: RESEARCH AND OUTREACH 

Strategic Focus Area 1: Increase the public profile of our research program and ensure continued growth and longevity of our research programs 

  • Work to ensure that our research accomplishments are recognized within our local (campus, greater pioneer valley, and state) and professional communities. Strategies include increasing participation in activities such as grant review panels and journal editing, institution of a new colloquium series, and consistent internal and external communications through improved self-marketing. 
  • Develop a succession plan that supports continuation of audiology research excellence in light of the expectation we will experience multiple and close to simultaneous upcoming retirements. 
  • Provide training, support, and a professional learning community for faculty interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. 
  • Ensure faculty capacity allows for continued growth of research programs and that with additional hires the diversity of our faculty increases. 

Strategic Focus Area 2: Expanding research collaborations and impact 

  • Support faculty development in the areas of implementation science, community-based participatory research, and mixed-method designs, among others. 
  • Encourage an increase in collaborative, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary research projects by establishing a new departmental-supported seed grant program, providing staff support for interdisciplinary working groups meetings, and expanding community and statewide partnerships. 

 

GOAL 2B: GRADUATE EDUCATION 

Strategic Focus Area 3: Strengthening and growth of our PhD program  

  • Complete our PhD program curricular review and the development of an associated PhD student handbook. 
  • Support faculty development in the area of PhD student mentorship by drawing upon the excellent resources of the Graduate School (e.g., Mentor Training, Mentoring Handbook) as well as ensuring they have the appropriate departments resources (e.g., evaluation tools, tracking systems) to guide students through their PhD program and support creation of Individual Development Plans. 
  • Building on the recent success of the holistic admissions process we have employed with our professional graduate programs, develop an analogous process for PhD student admissions. 
  • Create a holistic recruitment process taking advantage of resources such as the National Name Exchange and the McNair Scholars list. 
  • Create and continually foster a sense of community for our PhD students both within and outside of our department and school. 
  • Ensure sufficient staff support for holistic admissions and recruitment efforts. 
  • Ensure we have the teaching capacity to right-size our doctoral curricular offerings. 

Strategic Focus Area 4: Strengthen our professional degree programs and increase the public profile of our clinic 

  • Conduct a standards-based comprehensive curricular reviews of our MA and AuD program. Within this review identify contemporary curricular areas that would be beneficial to expand and consider the feasibility of specialty tracks within each of our programs. 
  • Continue to improve clinical education by increasing the diversity of clientele served by our student clinicians.  
  • Work to enhance the public profile of our clinic. Example strategies include self-marketing both on- and off-campus, increasing collaborations with community partners, and targeted interprofessional practice and education initiatives. 
  • Provide faculty with a framework and support for evaluating ways in which flexible learning approaches may strengthen our professional degree programs. 
  • Ensure we have the teaching capacity to optimize our curricular offerings in our professional degree programs. 

UNIVERSITY GOAL 3: Establish UMass Amherst as a community of choice for students, staff, and faculty that exemplifies the power of diverse perspectives and mutual respect. 

Strategic Focus Area 1: Building a more inclusive departmental community 

  • Continually commit to actions that will result in increased inclusion in our student body, faculty, and staff. Develop a tracking and evaluation system for these efforts. 
  • Continue to build community among faculty by providing increased opportunities for interaction and engagement (e.g., regular retreats, some ASL learning, social events and celebrations). 
  • Strengthen relationships between students and faculty through relationship-focused efforts, including departmental community events (e.g., coffee hours, new colloquium series, social events and celebrations) and a culture of showing up for each other. Seek places for faculty and studentto exist together outside of the classroom. 
  • Foster and work to continually provide an inclusive, accessible, and anti-racist learning community in which all students feel represented and experience a sense of belonging. 

Strategic Focus Area 2: Ensure workload equity and workload support 

  • Develop and implement a new departmental workload equity plan, employing the resources, training opportunities, and support of the Zuckerberg Faculty Workload Equity Project and the UMass ADVANCE Program. 
  • Examine ways in which we might decrease overall departmental workload when possible (e.g., committees of one, consciously deciding what to give up in order to take on new initiatives/approaches). 
  • Provide professional development supports to faculty to realize the goals of this strategic plan as well as their own professional goals, examples areas include improving accessibility through universal design and intentional design of classroom activities that improve equity.  

Strategic Focus Area 3: Diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in the curriculum 

  • Successfully implement the offering of our newly-approved Multiculturalism in SLHS Graduate Certificate Program. Collect data on the program’s effectiveness and revise as appropriate. 
  • Engage in regular curricular review to ensure currency with best-practices approaches that foster a sense of belonging and inclusion for all students. Pull resources and lessons learned from the SPHHS anti-racism pedagogy mutual mentoring group. 
  • Assess our curriculum and classrooms through an accessibility lens, identifying areas for action as appropriate. 

(revised, March 2026)