GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

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What makes an academic leader?

In Anamaria's Posts on 2013/03/13 at 10:57
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 

In comparison with business and political leaders, leaders in academia appear different (and I use mostly the Swedish/European case as example for my ideas). At least in Swedish universities, academic leadership is collegial and limited in time.

Collegial leadership means that the administrative responsibilities are taken over by one member of the faculty at a time, who becomes a sort of “primus inter pares”. This has consequences for the job criteria: not only must the proposed leader demonstrate managerial capacities (flexible, adaptable, strategic and most of all effective), but she or he must also be a resourceful scholar with a good publication record and deserving academic performance. One obvious problem is that there is no transfer of merits between research and administration. A very good researcher does not automatically make a good academic leader. But since the principle of collegiality must be enforced, the academic performance criterion must be always included, despite its probable lack of relevance, for the sake of legitimacy in the eyes of the other members of the faculty.

The second feature that is particular to the academic leadership is its time-restricted mandate. None of the positions in the administrative hierarchy is permanent; after usually two mandates, the chair/dean/president returns to her/his original position as university teacher. This poses a challenge typical for all limited positions, namely the difficulty of formulating and implementing long-term goals and far reaching transformations.

Moreover, in combination with the collegial idea, the fact that the administrative mandate is time-limited makes highly unlikely the inclination for dealing with deep-seated problems within the institution as well as long-term change. No one would like to take some unpopular decisions during one’s administrative mandate knowing that someday, sooner or later, they will return and be depending on coworkers’ support and collegiality.

A final component of the academic leadership conundrum is the normative component of the academic culture. Traditionally, a “good academic” is a person whose merits fall primarily in the scientific/research areas. Innovative research resulting in new knowledge is the apogee of academic achievement. Taking on an administrative duty means reducing the time left for research; thus administration and leadership are valued not as high as scientific achievements. Because of the necessity of collegial leadership most Swedish academics accept the leadership role, but often their perception of it is that of a “necessary evil”. They see themselves primarily as scholars who temporarily fulfill an administrative role, as persons who have a leadership position, but who are not academic leaders (Rowley & Sherman, 2003).

So, what is your opinion? Who makes a good academic leader? Is it better to be led by “one of us”, who takes by rotation the steering wheel of the institution or better to have a professional manager? Does it make a difference if we think about the chair of a department or the dean of a faculty? And what are the reasons that motivate you to seek positions of academic leadership.

 

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Thinking about Academic Tribes

In Anamaria's Posts on 2013/01/20 at 04:36
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund in Sweden. 
I recently read for the first time a book that for many (most?) is a classic: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, in its revised edition (2001). I admit that the idea of an ethnography of academic disciplines and their internal codes is a bit narcissistic in the sense that it belongs to the genre of academics studying and writing about academia, but then so is this blog and all the writing about the theories of pedagogy and the analyses of higher education. We as academics have a duty to critically examine our own practices, so that is enough of an argument to read the book and take part in the discussions about the delimitations we tend to draw between our tribes and territories, the two key terms used by the authors  Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler.

“Academic tribes”, or “small worlds” or “microcultures” as they are variously called, are groupings that take place based on disciplinary boundaries. They are based on the subject and the method of academic investigation within that discipline. They are supposed to be more or less internally coherent and to be governed, however informally, by norms and values developed and internalized over time.

That these tribes exist is now commonplace. What I find interesting are two questions:

1. How widespread or broad are they?

2. How powerful are they to guard access to and the future development of any given discipline?

Academic Tribes: how broad?

The distinction between disciplines is as old as the attempt to study and think about the world. Becher and Trowler distinguish between several dichotomies based on epistemological dimensions: hard vs soft sciences, theoretical vs. applied knowledge. They also identify differences in the practice of the discipline, with variations in research styles, publishing traditions and career paths.

I find these distinctions applicable in my known universe, but also perhaps, too applicable. For example, the hard vs. soft approach to the nature of knowledge can describe the difference between natural sciences and social sciences, but also the one between ethnography and political science, both fields within the social science discipline. Moreover, political science is also divided between a more quantitative and a more qualitative methodological position. And to go to the microlevel, there are universities where political science departments are known to specialize in either the “harder” or the “softer” variant.

This has the consequence that we cannot generalize very much when we discuss “higher education” as a whole. The discussion on the future of the humanities, or their usefulness that has been quite present in the news on higher ed around the world is based on the assumption that there is a unit defined as the “humanities”. But according to the thinking behind the academic microcultures literature, the field is too fragmented to be described (and governed) as one.

The general and global trend has been towards fragmentation/interdisciplinarity and a flourishing of disciplines. There are now very specific fields of inquiry that did not exist 25 years ago, from my own area of specialization, “European Studies”, to “Queer Studies” or “Visual Cultures” or you name it – whichever specific domain that is entitled to define a territory of knowledge with its own boundaries. So, how can we have a discussion about the social sciences or the humanities or about engineering, when we see the growth of new disciplines that mix and match in a multi- or inter- or transdisciplinary fashion?

Academic Tribes: how powerful?

The other aspect I wanted to bring up here is the power of these academic tribes. Are the rules and values and practices valid within a given academic tribe so clearly implemented so that the boundaries of the tribal territory are safeguarded from “unfitting” guests?

If the ethnographic section of Becher and Trowler’s book is to be taken seriously (and I think that it should), then the answer is yes, academic tribes do guard their territories quite fiercely. The upside of this is that disciplines and various professional environments at a smaller scale are kept updated because of the constant knock at the door from new generations of scholars who want to join the tribe.

The downside of this may be the generation of very unitary departments, where hiring policies implicitly follow the principle of the goodness of fit between prospective candidates and the already existing academic culture. “If you are a qualitative political scientist do not even consider applying for a job at university X because they only do quantitative stuff” – this is the line of reasoning one can hear during a job search. Or even worse, if one’s ideological position does not fit with the tribe’s (if you are a feminist in a conservatives’ den or the other way around), the chances of getting a job there are minimal, despite one’s academic merits.

My final thought on this is that one should get to know (or define) one’s academic tribe quite early. It may help in the job search.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Evaluate the Evaluation: Course Evaluations and External Biases

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/12/02 at 00:08
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden.

Course evaluations: everyone knows them and uses them, but does everyone know what are they good for? Opinions are very much split on how to evaluate the evaluation. University teachers differ from university administrators, for example, when they assign importance to the results of course evaluations. Whereas faculty are more skeptical, administrators rather confidently believe that the responses to end-of-course assessments represent an accurate description of teacher effectiveness (Morgan, Sneed and Swinney 2003).

The truth of the matter is that we do not know for sure what the impact of these evaluations is. Do they really help improve teaching? Do they help improve learning? And perhaps most interestingly, are course evaluations true? I would like to discuss here this last point, and to rephrase it in a milder form: Do course evaluations deliver the answers expected by teachers and administrators? Or do students respond based on assumptions outside the scope of the course?

Research done in several academic environments points out that the students’ answers cannot be taken as facts, but are raw data in need of interpretation and contextualization. In a study performed at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kwan (1999) reaches the conclusion that students base their answers on factors external to the course. This is reflected in the following four observations:

1. Humanities courses tend to get better evaluations than science courses, regardless of the variation within the respective curricula;

2. Courses  with fewer students (the borderline is at around 20) get much more positive evaluations than large courses;

3. Courses at the advanced level get slightly better evals than those at the basic level;

4. Optional courses are better appreciated than obligatory ones.

I do not wish to engage here with the possible explanations of these results, even though, of course, it is very interesting to investigate why these phenomena happen,  I concern myself here with the accuracy of course evaluations. If a teacher is assigned a mandatory first-year course with one hundred students, she is very likely to get poorer results on the course evaluations than a colleague teaching a smaller, optional course for the third-year students. And this is regardless of the actual pedagogical skills and competence of the persons in question!

In another very recent study, this time on Swedish students active on a site equivalent to the US “Rate My Professor”, Karlsson and Lundberg (2012) analyze 98 assessments of faculty from across the universities in Sweden. They come to the conclusion that there is a clear gender and age bias in the ratings provided on the site. Younger teachers tend to obtain lower marks in comparison with more senior faculty. Women teachers also consistently receive poorer ratings in comparison with their male counterparts. The effects are worse if the two negative factors are combined: if you are a young female teacher your evaluations are likely to be significantly below those of a senior male teacher at the same institution.

The Swedish study corroborates with the earlier investigation on students at US universities by Sprague and Massoni (2005). They asked almost 300 students the decievingly simple question “who was the best respectively the worst teacher you have ever had?”.  The answers reveal, among other things, the “Ginger Rogers effect”: in order for a women teacher to obtain the same level of recognition they need to invest more energy and emotional commitment in their students in comparison with a male teacher. Or, as one of my colleagues put it, as a women faculty member “one has to do the same dance steps, but in high heels”.

As we have seen, factors extrinsic to the course affect the evaluation results and do not provide an accurate description of the teacher’s effectiveness. Moreover, evaluations need to be properly situated in their cultural and social context, as students who respond to them often share the general prejudices and stereotypes that are the norm in a given society. Before judging teacher performance, tenure assessment committees should certainly evaluate the course evaluation.

References
Karlsson, Martin och Erik Lundberg. 2012. “I betraktarens ögon – Betydelsen av kön och ålder för studenters läraromdömen.”  Högre utbildning 2:1, 19-32.

Kwan, Kam‐por. 1999. ” How Fair are Student Ratings in Assessing the Teaching Performance of University Teachers?”. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 24:2

Morgan, Donald A., John Sneed and Laura Swinney. 2003. “Are student evaluations a valid measure of teaching effectiveness: perceptions of accounting faculty members and administrators”, Management Research News, 26 (7): 17-32.

Sprague, Joey and Kelley Massoni. 2005. “Student Evaluations And Gendered Expectations: What We Can’t Count Can Hurt Us.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 53, 11‐12: 779‐793.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The More Education, The Better

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/10/20 at 00:29

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 

The more education the better for each and all. So why are there not enough resources?

Just this past week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released its annual report, Education at a Glance. In a comparative fashion the study provides the most recent statistical data, country by country for all the 34 members of the organization, about the number of students, the type of education they follow and what they do after they graduate. Other measurements included in the report are education spending (public and private), teachers’ workload, teachers’ tasks and teachers’ salaries, as well as the gender gap, the social mobility and the accessibility of education to different groups in the society. A special section is dedicated to the analysis of economic and social benefits of education, measuring the extent to which having an education translates into economic gains for individuals, as well as the social impact of having a population with a large percentage of educated people.

This report is very timely, since only at the beginning of September 2012 the European Commission (EC) and its special expert group published a report on literacy in Europe, showing some alarming numbers. Even if the EC has a special campaign on improving literacy (“Europe Loves Reading”), the numbers do not show this love being spread in the general public. In concordance with earlier published numbers, 20% of the adults in Europe lack the necessary literacy skills to propel them on the job market, and 20% of the European 15-year olds did not possess sufficient reading skills in 2009, a number that stagnated until today.

Both the OECD and the High-level expert group of the European Commission concur. Poor literacy and from there insufficient education has a negative social impact on pretty much all accounts as it is connected to unemployment, social exclusion, criminality, political absenteeism. Low literacy and low education levels are also connected to widening the gender gap as well as the gap between migrants and the local population.

The numbers are clear. In the OECD population, those with a university degree tended to earn more than those without it, up to 55% more. On the contrary, those at the lowest end of the education echelon, who lacked a high school degree, were likely to earn up to 23% less than their co-generationals who graduated from secondary education. Getting a university degree makes one more likely not only to earn more but to secure a job more easily. Among those with higher education diplomas, only 17% are unemployed, in comparison with 44% of those without high school education. Finally, having a university degree improves the overall quality of life: university graduates tend to live longer, to express a higher satisfaction with life in general, and to participate more actively in politics and civil society activities.

This information is not new. The most recent reports confirm earlier trends. So the only wonder I am left to have is: how come we do not do more for education, for literacy? For governments it would be an investment in the future of their country. What can be wrong with a well-educated population that is prosperous, healthy, and takes part in politics and civic life? What can be wrong with a population that is able to read and write in a time where literacy (and especially computer literacy) is the key to having a job? This would decrease the costs of unemployment and the associated social unrest and would raise the amount of money circulating in the economy, thus making the economy grow and generating a virtuous circle (provided that some of the surplus is reinvested in education). Even for the private education providers, making education more accessible and of better quality would increase the total amount of money going back into teaching and research, as it is also demonstrated that educated people tend to invest in the education of their children or support research through donations and funds.

How come we do not do more for education? Yes, in order to answer this question one almost feels prone to believe in conspiracy theories. Or in politicians working from the assumption that voters do not care about education and can be fooled with cheap tricks like talking to empty chairs.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The Perils and Temptations of Plagiarism

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/09/22 at 05:15
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden.  

I remember that, as a child, I loved to copy in a notebook the best parts of the literature I was reading.  I would taste the words in my mouth as I was transferring them from the page of the book and jotting them on my little pad, thus enjoying them even more. I must admit that secretly, I wished it were I who authored those pretty phrases, I who had found those brilliant and unexpected pairings between adjectives and nouns. But even if I was just the scribe taking down the notes of the divine inspiration of others, the activity of repeating the path of their pen was pleasurable and, later on, inspirational.

In some non-Western traditions, to reproduce faithfully the words of canonical authors is considered not a crime, but an  homage. It is as if these great writers have succeeded in putting into words the essence of an idea. To try to change anything in their expressions, in the turn of their phrases, would be to insult their craftsmanship, to put into question their talent. The pupil can only hope to copy the words of the master, in the hope that they will serve as medium for inspiration.

I have noted this trend when grading the papers of those of my students coming from outside the Western world. More than once I was met in the pages of the exams by words that sounded very familiar, too familiar: my own words that the students carefully took down during the lectures and that now returned to me as the embodiment of the best, or at least most correct, of the answers to the exam questions. When I confronted them with the accusation of plagiarism, they did not understand. Was it not the purpose of the exam to answer the question correctly? They thought that those words, my words, carried the seal of legitimacy, sanctioned as they were by me, the teacher.

In order to explain that what they have done was wrong, I had to go back and clarify that the point of the exam was not just to answer the questions correctly, but to do so with their own words, in their own way, bringing up their own examples. Only this would be proof that they understood the lectures, the course literature and the theories presented therein and that they could independently apply the abstract notions introduced earlier in the course to specific situations that they themselves chose as appropriate.

Plagiarism is not a crime unless originality, individuality and authorship have the weight of legal and social norms. Our love of the “original” as in the primary/unique version of a work of creation is not necessarily shared by other cultures. In other parts of the world, the social norm says that the value of something is not diminished by its reproduction in millions of copies. On the contrary, it increases: the more copied, thus the more famous, and ultimately the better the product.

Ideas, like products, are likely to spread widely if they are deemed to be good. The key here is acknowledging the sources. Quoting and making explicit one’s sources is to admit their importance – if not more, at least for provoking a reaction. Not referencing is a mark of dishonesty, and implies that one doing so lacks the capacity to reformulate or critically assess previous works.

For the sake of the argument though, let us also admit that sometimes our greatest inspirational sources remain unknown even to ourselves.  Perhaps those notebooks of quotes that I put together as a child are still somewhere in the cellars of my literary memory and that they emerge from there unacknowledged. If all creativity is combinatorial, then the plagiarism of ideas (omitting the parenthood of an idea) is more of a crime of inspiration and a fault of the imagination.  To use an oft cited quip, “all ideas are second-hand”, but some of their combinations may be entirely novel.

Additional references:

Harvard Guide to Using Sources: A Publication of the Harvard College Writing Program. What Constitutes Plagiarism?

Maria Popova (2011). “Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity”. Brain Pickings.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

How to remain productive over the summer

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/08/28 at 04:49
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 

Summer is here, and for most of us it is also spelled as v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n: sunny days, ice cream, mint juleps, children at play, and long family evenings. But this is not all there is to it…

In a recent post, I was writing about the constraints that internationalization imposes on the academic schedule even during the summer. This year, I am concerned with how I can remain productive while enjoying some relaxed days away from office.

The first dilemma I face is whether or not I should have my computer with me during the vacation weeks. Most of the time I hesitate to carry it around.  It is heavy and when computing in the weight of my carry-on luggage, I do not feel that its added value really amounts to that much. On the other hand, can I be entirely disconnected from the world? Do I want to be out of reach? And how about the key word here, productivity?
I argue that there are ways to be productive without a computer on board. In terms of communication and email, a smart phone is enough to keep in touch with what is going on with one’s students or with other relevant news and activities from the academic world. Checking the Internet once a day or every other day should satisfy most needs and, with WiFi increasingly available in hotels and restaurants, this process is convenient in almost every country.

Productivity is not measured in the number of pages written. So one can travel without a computer and focus not on writing but on reading and/or sorting out gathered research material. I see the summer vacation as a great opportunity to read, and after the first (or second) novel, I feel ready to dive into the academic book pile I gather during the semester. I find reading academic books and articles to be quite relaxing; reading them gives me inspiration and excitement, it stimulates my imagination and gives me new ideas for my courses or for my research. Even if I do take notes when I read these books, I prefer more often than not to keep their main ideas in my memory, sort of “baking” slowly at the back of my mind.

Depending on the type of work that one is involved with, one can also use the holiday weeks as a time to go through their research material. I am currently working on a project that uses photographs of Eurosymbols as one type of empirical material. I find the sorting of pictures, their categorization and mapping, a pleasant activity that is not categorized as “work”. Once this groundwork is completed I can proceed to the write-up of my findings in the shape of articles and conference papers, which I save for my active work days. Summer, however, gives me that time to put order to the data and into my own thoughts.

Finally, since the word “conference” has slipped into my post, one can consider combining business and pleasure and use the destination of a conference as a starting point of holiday travel. Most of the time, the cities hosting conferences are interesting to explore in themselves. If this is not the case, or if they are already well-known destinations, one can use them as departures for a larger exploration of a region or a country. For example last year, several colleagues enjoyed the amazing landscape of Iceland after having participated at a conference in that country’s capital, Reykjavik.

I wish you all a pleasant and productive summer

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Life After Ph.D.: How to retain capacity in academia

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/07/04 at 07:58

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden.

We have recently learned that many women choose to leave academia after getting their doctoral degree, and women are not the only ones deciding against a career in higher education. Especially in the hard sciences, many researchers prefer to work in their respective industries or in special research institutes. More money, a shorter path between the project stage and the practical implementation, and more effective administration are some of the reasons why this is the case.

Universities are concerned with this flight of research and teaching capacity, and rightfully so. If the most talented and driven scholars choose to move outside the academia, then the universities will no longer fulfill their goal to be at the forefront of the production of new knowledge. Besides the loss of prestige and regress in scientific results, universities would then be at risk of losing important financial support both from companies and donors.

In order to increase the capacity to retain scholars with a record of excellence in academia, and in particular those that have benefited from the support of the universities during their Ph.D., universities need to develop special programs aimed at junior scholars. Lund University (LU), the place where I work, is one of the schools where such a program has been developed.

Under the name luPOD (abbreviation for Lund University Post-Doctoral course), the university designed a one year program destined to increase the marketable skills of the junior scholars working at LU. (It is interesting that luPOD is born out of another, earlier, initiative targeting the group of junior women scholars. Since then LU decided that not only women but all researchers at the beginning of their careers are in need of support and expanded the program to include both genders).

  • Mentorship
  • Some of the strategies used during luPOD are familiar matter to University of Venus readers . One of them is mentorship (discussed also here), where junior and senior scholars are paired with the help of a database constructed on the basis of recommendations and of previous experience. One can choose a mentor from one’s own discipline if one judges that it is the academic research that needs more support. Or one could choose a mentor from the administrative side of university life, or from one with high pedagogical skills or another with a good record of attracting external funding. No matter what, the mentors are there to help, guide, and inspire the more junior scholars.
  • Networking
  • Another strategy is to create networks both horizontally and vertically (and here the University of Venus Networking Challenge comes easily to mind as a similar attempt). Vertically, through the mentorship initiative, younger and more senior higher education professionals get in touch and learn to know each other. The more experienced scholars roll the ball further by inviting their mentees to relevant reunions and conferences where they are likely to meet like-minded people. Horizontally, each luPOD group has one year of joint work and meetings at least once a month (including two overnight stays) to build connections with each other. In the future, when these young scholars will step up in the hierarchy, they will have each other’s support and perhaps would continue to “give forward”.
  • Improved skills
  • Thirdly, the luPOD participants will be improving their pedagogical skills through special workshops. They will also benefit from career advice on how to present themselves and their research in a more convincing fashion, how to write better grant applications, and how to start their own businesses. Not everyone will be interested in all of the things above, but the hope is that everyone will find at least something of relevance to their own career.

Since I myself have started luPOD this year (the first get-to-know-each-other meeting took place in May) I will have the chance to report from the field, so to speak, about the transposition of these goals into practice. For now, the least that can be said is that I am very glad this initiative exists and that, on paper, it bids well for the future.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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A Hall of Femmes for Women in Academia

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/05/30 at 00:19

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 

Not long ago, the Swedish design duo Hjärta Smärta, composed of Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio, initiated a project aimed at recognizing the talent of women designers. They noticed that most of the books in their field showcased the work and the biographies of male creators, and wanted to fill the gap by including all those major female figures in the world of design. They admired their older counterparts’ artistic muse but were looking for also for some inspiration in the biographies of these highly successful but less known female personalities in the world of design.

The result is now known as the Hall of Femme, a nice pun on the Hall of Fame that does not include as many women as the team at Hjärta Smärta thought it should. Besides having a blog (in Swedish) which gathers their design-related posts from around the web, Bouabana and Tillman Sperandio authored also several books based on extensive interviews with the grand dames of design such as Lillian Bassman or Carin Goldberg.

After I had read about the Hall of Femmes I thought immediately that this is exactly what I would love to do: collect the life stories of the big names among female academics. It is true that we here at UVenus are representing the younger, Gen X, women, but, as the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. The life narratives of these first ladies of academia are documents about the history of the process of bringing in and recognizing women’s merits as researchers and professors at the university level. They are also potential models and terms of comparison for our own lives and struggles today. After a long and successful career, perhaps one looks with different eyes at one’s working life, and at one’s priorities. This could be an inspiration for us younger women in the academia, and perhaps also a comfort, to know that these women we admire have shared our own passions and our own occasional desolation.

I always wondered about such things as:

How did the women professors in any given country active in the 1960s or 70s cope with the patriarchal biases so much more present and visible at that time?

How did they solve the “life puzzle”, combining academia with families?

Did they feel recognized for their work and how (and when) did that recognition come?

As for my imaginary interlocutors, there are many, some dead, some still with us. I would have loved to talk to Marie Curie or Rachel Carson, for example, but that chance is gone… I would love to talk to Nobel Prize winners such as Elinor Ostrom (Economics), Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (Medicine). Or with some of the women authors in my field of study, social sciences, professors like Katherine Verdery,Wend yBracewell, or Helen Wallace. Of course, I would also like to go outside the English-speaking world and get the opinions of women, both young and old, such as Leyla Neyzi, Daniela Koleva, or Barbara Törnquist-Plewa.

We all need role models, and have such people as references in our everyday professional and private lives. Let us recognize their impact and acknowledge their contribution.

Who would you like to include in the Hall of Femmes of Women in the Academia and why? Which questions would you like to ask these prominent female figures in the world of higher education and research?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

 

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The Death of the Lecture

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/04/27 at 04:50
 Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden. 
Recently, I had a conversation around the lunch table with several of my colleagues. The discussion turned to the requirement to take pedagogical courses, now part of the criteria for getting an academic job at my university. Were these courses useful or just necessary? Do they teach something relevant for improving one’s teaching? As good scientists, we stopped discussing the courses and focused thereon on the definition of “teaching” or, more specifically, on what “good teaching” should stand for. Of the many things we discussed during that lunch, the idea of the outdated lecture stayed with me, I decided to dedicate this post to a critique of this method of teaching.

Lectures are a very common (I could safely generalize and say even the most common) method of teaching at the university level. This does not mean that there are no labs, seminars, discussion sessions, group projects etc. It only means that if we look at the academic schedule of most disciplines, the majority of the booked times are under the heading “lecture”. During these lectures, the teacher imparts information on a specific topic to a group of students. What  happens is known as “information transfer”: the teacher shares her knowledge with the students, who take notes and can ask questions whenever something is not clear. At the end of the session, the teacher and the students are in possession of the same amount and quality of information about the specific topic – the transfer of information has been completed.

But is the transfer of information mediated by a teacher the same thing as learning? Learning is about the long-lasting acquisition of information, it is about remembering the information and being able to retrieve it and apply it at the appropriate time in the appropriate circumstances. Lectures can ensure the short-term memorization of information, as teachers who give quizzes at the end of their presentations have certainly proven. However, it is highly questionable if lectures can deliver this kind of long-lasting knowledge. Others have demonstrated the need to complement lectures with other didactic exercises. This is where terms such as peer instruction, or (inter)active learning come from: from the need to make students engage with the information received from the teacher, to make it their own, and to apply it.

In this kind of learning, the teacher spends much less time talking to a quiet classroom (sometimes the lecture is entirely virtual, like in audio or video broadcasts that are available before the physical meeting in the classroom). Instead, the teacher’s task is to provide personalized and qualified feedback for the learning activities of the students. The students, armed with the lecture and the associated readings, discuss and respond to various hands-on exercises. The teacher assists the discussions, monitors them, and gives responses to the quality of the debates and of the results of the exercises.

Nothing of what I write here is revolutionary. Almost all of this has been common knowledge for many decades. Lectures are not the most effective way of learning. Instead more participatory forms of pedagogy give better results both in national tests and in professional life after studies. So why do we still have the lecture as the number one teaching tool?

I single out here two reasons: inertia and money. Academia is an environment well-known for its slowness in embracing change. The lecture has been around practically since the Middle Ages. It is the way to teach, and both students and teachers expect it. In order to change the teaching format from lecture-based to more hands-on student-focused learning, one needs to change the infrastructure of the university (everything, from the way to count worked hours to the classroom design). This change is met with resistance because of inertia but also because of the high material costs. And it is not just the costs of change that deter the dethroning of the lecture. One should count here also the higher amount of contact hours, since the student discussions/labs/seminars can only be carried out by few students at a time. The teacher would have to work more hours to attend these meetings and to give specific, customized feedback to every group, instead of delivering a finished product to many students at the same time.

Further readings:

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Why go for a Ph.D.? Advice for those in doubt

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/03/31 at 21:37

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden

It is very fashionable these days in the world of arts and entertainment to create prequels. As opposed to sequels, telling readers/viewers what happened next to their favorite characters or plots, prequels go back in time. I find myself following this trend and writing a prequel to my post on how to avoid Ph.D. drop-out.

One of the comments to the above-mentioned post made me think that one of the best ways to minimize Ph.D. drop-out rates is to select the best candidates for the job. The next logical question is: Why follow a Ph.D.?

Why go for a Ph.D.? There are as many reasons as people, you may say, but perhaps these motivations can be systematized in some general categories. The disinterested reason most often given is that people go for a Ph.D. because of their thirst for knowledge. Simply put, Ph.D. students are those with high degree of internal motivation that stems from their inborn curiosity and love of intellectual pursuits. They are expected that after they obtain their degree they will metamorphose into scholars for whom also the temptation of researching new and exciting subjects is irresistible, or at least preferable to all other choices.

But is it so that one can satisfy this desire for deeper understanding only by enrolling in a Ph.D. program? Are there no other avenues for the interested mind than university-based research programs? Certainly we all know the answer: there are other opportunities to drive research projects outside the academia. Sometimes access to these opportunities is conditioned by having received a Ph.D. from a university, but I would not claim this to be the absolute rule. Think-tanks and research institutes do hire capable minds with or without the diploma.

There are other reasons for pursuing a Ph.D. though, let them be called more pragmatic. In this sense, the doctoral degree is not just a passport to a world of research and new knowledge. The degree is a valuable asset that increases one’s chances for obtaining higher paid, more satisfying jobs. It is seen as an investment, a certificate of one’s special abilities that gives advantages on the job market.

While it is true that Ph.D. holders do get higher salaries, the higher education market is not one of the most rewarding in terms of financial stability. There are few available jobs, there is a lot of tough competition and the salary of a professional is lower here than in the industry. So the Ph.D. diploma is valuable if its possessor is interested in the non-academic job market. However, how many of the Fortune 100 people hold a doctorate? Not many. On the contrary, there are numerous among these who are drop-outs (even before finishing a Bachelor). So if you want to be really financially prosperous, then Ph.D. degrees are not for you.

There are other pragmatic reasons that motivate students to continue their education to the Ph.D. level. Coming from the times when these diplomas were reserved for a minuscule segment of the population, the doctoral degree is a seen as a prestige marker, the recognition of one’s exceptional talents and the certificate of belonging to the intellectual elite. The non-material rewards that a Ph.D. is supposed to bring, at least theoretically, are connected to social standing; Ph.D.’s can be used as a vehicle for upwards social mobility, and for the fulfillment of personal and family ambitions.

The prestige power of the Ph.D. is however on the wane. With mass education, the number of doctorate holders increased exponentially, so that the elite membership and the high social status coupled with it weakened. Especially in connection with a decrease in salary size for university professionals, doctorate holders may be seen as exceptional but quirky: why choose to specializes narrowly, work so many hours, and for so little pay when one could get a more lucrative employment elsewhere?

Some people are driven to pursue a Ph.D. because of pragmatic reasons that are not of their own making. The Ph.D. is not the first-hand choice, but the one imposed by necessities. If the job market does not offer attractive alternatives, or if entry to the job market is prohibited because of immigration status, then pursuing the highest academic degree is the choice for students who under other circumstances would have opted for a position in the industry and not in the research field.

Why did you choose to pursue a Ph.D.? Or why did you decide against a Ph.D.?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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