FCAT Academic and Strategic Plans

From April 2023 to January 2024, FCAT engaged in a strategic planning process to understand the needs of its faculty, staff, post-doctoral fellows, students, and external partners, and create a set of priorities to focus on.

The strategic planning process began with conversations amongst the Dean’s Advisory Council, made up of the FCAT Dean, Associate Deans, School and Program Directors, and the Faculty Advisor on Equity, Community, and Care.  These conversations explored the reasons for creating a strategic plan and helped define a strategic planning process. This process was further refined through conversations amongst staff within the FCAT Dean’s Office.

Next, a series of online surveys were created and shared with FCAT faculty, post-doctoral fellows, staff, students, and alumni in June 2023 to collect information on the strengths and weaknesses of FCAT and how they felt their work and experience in and with FCAT could be improved. Questions focused on teaching and learning, research, faculty work, staff and administration, communications, advancement, alumni engagement, and external relations.

Survey data was analyzed by staff and the Dean during the summer of 2023 using thematic analysis and data coding techniques.  Following this, FCAT faculty, staff, and post-doctoral fellows engaged in two sets of open forums where they were presented with the results of the surveys, reflected on the survey responses, and provided more thoughts on what they felt FCAT’s strategic priorities should be moving forward.  Virtual forums in Fall 2023 were more general in scope, while in-person visits to Schools and Programs in Spring 2024 focused on research.

The strategic planning process also involved the Dean and staff from the Dean’s Office working with the FCAT Dean’s External Advisory Board, which is made up of highly esteemed community members in FCAT’s various disciplines, to understand their external perspectives on FCAT and their ideas for priorities.   The FCAT Dean worked with the FCAT Dean’s Student Advisory Council, made up of students from each of FCAT’s schools and programs, to further explore the needs of students from across FCAT.

We analyzed the data, thoughts, and ideas from across all of the aforementioned community engagement activities. This analysis revealed six strategic priorities:

1. Transforming the Faculty Member Experience: Support, connect, and uplift the work of faculty members across research, teaching, and service.
2. Empowering Research Excellence: Recognize and support diverse forms of research.
3. Elevating and Supporting Staff Members: Create a fulfilling work environment for staff members through additional support mechanisms and knowledge sharing.
4. Creating the Future of Teaching and Learning: Plan, support, and enact new ways of teaching and learning, while strengthening existing programs.
5. Connecting and Sharing Knowledge: Create, support, and broaden the ways that faculty, staff, post-doctoral fellows and students can connect within and across units to share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, and build relationships.
6. Engaging with the Community and World Around Us: Tell the stories of the schools and programs and foster long-term connections with external communities.

Across all of the strategic priority areas, the FCAT community expressed a clear desire to strengthen each unit within FCAT.  The units were seen as the core of FCAT and strengthening them means strengthening FCAT as a whole.  The FCAT community also told us that it was important to bring people together across our units to create opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

FCAT’s academic plan builds on and aligns with the SFU strategic plan, SFU: What’s Next?, where we are committed to Uphold Truth and Reconciliation, Engage in Global Challenges, Make a Difference for B.C., and Transform the SFU Experience.