With this conversation, our goal is to create an open and inclusive forum for:

• networking,
• sharing experiences and resources, and
• addressing the challenges and opportunities facing women in higher education who seek to lead with vision.

The numbers of women filling leadership positions on campuses around the world are growing; they are staff, faculty, and administrators.  The growing numbers are cause for celebration as more women take on exciting and transformative roles.  But we feel this also creates a need for a supportive space for women–and men–to talk about what these new roles mean and how best to fill them in order to pursue personal, professional, and institutional goals with integrity.

You might be interested in work-life balance, and wishing for a leadership role that made a better match with your personal commitments.  You might be thinking about taking the next step in your career…but not completely sure what that looks like.  You might be seeking a network of mentors–or mentees–from other disciplines or sectors of academic life.  We’re hoping #femlead will prove a resource for all the possibilities and questions we have on a day-to-day basis as female leaders in higher ed.

While we seek to provide a female-centered perspective, we don’t necessarily define our work or our positions as feminist.  #femlead will be a welcoming space for multiple points of view from women and men all around the globe.

We hope you will join us for our first chat:  Tuesday, February 28 from 2:00-2:30 EST.

Janine Utell will lead our first chat and we will focus on service v. leadership:  what’s the difference?  Is service work invisible?  How can we facilitate women thinking of themselves as leaders as they confront their various service obligations?

Chats will be held biweekly, Tuesdays at 2 EST, and will be archived (details to be announced).

We look forward to chatting with you on Tuesday and would love to have you host forthcoming chats or suggest hosts you would like to bring into the conversation.

Future topics will include:

• the division between the Global North and the Global South
• the relationship between female leadership in higher education and female leadership in other sectors (politics and business)
• common goals for the GenX female leaders for the midterm and long-term perspectives: what (and where) do we want to change?

#femlead mission statement
We believe in the value of connecting, networking, and sharing resources and experiences.  Our mission at #femlead is to promote these values and to create an inclusive forum for open discussion of the issues confronting leaders in higher education.  #femlead is for those who lead, those with vision, those who seek to support one another in the challenges and opportunities facing us in all areas of academic life (faculty, staff, administrators).  #femlead is female-centered but you don’t have to be a woman to participate in this conversation – all civil and constructive voices are welcome!

I’ve written before about conversations that count — those written artifacts that will count toward tenure or promotion — and I’ve complained that non-traditional writing (e.g. blog posts) doesn’t count for much (or for anything, according to the latest TRIP report on the state of my field). But of course, I still have to play by the rules, such as they are, and I continue to work toward submitting articles to journals and hope for publication.

And then I prepare to wait. And to wait a painfully long time as my work gets stale.

For a journal article to “count,” it must be peer-reviewed. Our academic standards hold that an academic work should and must be subject to scrutiny by our peers, improved by their input and ultimately add to the academic conversation. I agree with that whole-heartedly. The pursuit of knowledge is a social affair and should be respected as such.

But what happens in practice leads to quite different results. The bulk of what we read in journals was written long ago. I am a political scientist (and a news junkie), so I am interested in theory, history and current applications. I want to understand my “now” world within the vast context of the literature. I want to write that way, as well, and have my work be applicable to others’ “now” worlds. Most of all, academics want to be relevant. But that is impossible in the current structure of academic journals.

Let’s talk about the mechanisms of journal publication.

You work on an article for a few months (and if your work is dependent upon field work, as mine is, one article might be the result of several months of work in the field before writing even begins). You send it to a few friends or colleagues, you present it at a conference and perhaps you sit on it for a week or two. So you’re already a year into the initial problem/issue you hoped to address.

You send it to a journal. The journal’s editorial board may take a few weeks to decide whether or not to send it to the reviewers. If they do, that may take another three months. Then, if your article hasn’t been roundly rejected—but needs work—you might get a “revise and resubmit” based on the reviewers’ comments. (I personally enjoy that part, because it’s a refreshing way to look at your work, once you get past your ego.) You have other work to do, so perhaps you don’t return revisions for another 3-4 weeks. The editorial board then sends it out again for the reviewers’ comments. You wait another three months.

During this entire process, you must agree that you will not send the article anywhere else. You are trapped by one journal’s editorial process, without the benefit of “shopping it around,” thus, they have no incentive to move more quickly on reviewing your work. “Under Review” remains on your CV for months.

If you are unlucky, the extra work and time you put into a piece will still not merit its publication. You’ve just lost a year trying to get the piece out. However, if you responded well to the reviewers’ comments and made the required revisions, the editors may decide to publish your piece. Great news! It will come out in the fall edition! The fall of next year.

By this point, the information in the article is well over a year old, perhaps two. The article itself was written a year ago. By the time it will be published, it may be two or three years old.

The “top journals” are the worst in this regard. They tend to be quite conservative when it comes to new literature, and, in the case of my field (International Relations), very little outside the mainstream is considered or published. Many of the articles in these journals are rehashed debates of articles originally written ten years ago. If you were to peruse only those journals, you’d think my field was quite narrow, when, in fact, there is a wide variety of interesting, lively, engaging work being done. But it’s not being published in the places that have the high “impact factors” (which is based on how often a journal or article is cited—of course, if those are the only journals we turn to, there’s a bit of a selection bias, but no matter…)

I rarely look at the top journals these days. I canceled my subscriptions to all but the most relevant—Foreign Policy, for example, is one I will continue to read. Why? I read it because it comes out every month, and it’s timely and interesting. When I want to read what my esteemed colleagues have to say about theory or current events, I turn to the Foreign Policy website, which includes some of the best blogs by the top names in my field. They are talking to each other, and others are leaving important and interesting comments—in effect, “peer reviewing” is happening in real time, and in a transparent way. Intellectual discourse is moving forward at a rapid pace, not in the glacial quarterly publishing of journals.

I still read books when I want deep, thoughtful engagement with a topic. But the process of publishing journal articles is archaic, and provides a false sense of “weightiness” to our work. As long as publishing in the “top journals” is a requirement for tenure or promotion, we will be trapped in this cycle. Our approach to our work will be vastly improved when we can share the immediacy and the excitement of fresh thinking—and recognize that this is a legitimate way of sharing knowledge.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

For more than one year, almost every two months, I enjoy writing a book review. Most of the books I am interested in cover the main issues I am focused on in my daily lectures; there are books on political science, history of Central and Eastern Europe, foreign affairs and identity, ethnic minorities and tolerance.

It usually takes me a maximum of two weeks to read a book, during which I take my notes, and look eventually for further documentation and build my critical background. Unless it is a very difficult book, in a maximum of three or four hours I am done with the final writing: the presentation of the subject, the introduction of the details about the author(s) and the quality of the writing, the main thesis and the critical considerations. Also, at the end of my contribution, I should not forget to mention my personal recommendation about the opportunity to read or not read that particular book.

From the point of view of academic relevance, I am convinced that articles may be more important for my CV than my short notes about the books I enjoy reading. Not too many people read what other people think about books, preferring instead to read them themselves and make their own opinions. The recommendations may work but, with some particular exceptions outlined in dedicated publications, such as the New York Review of Books, who really remembers the author of a book review? Even the name is usually written in small letters.

An article will be preferred because it may introduce original ideas that can induce change in the way we look at things. And, from this point of view, some may ask: What can you change, for instance, with a book review? Unless the book is very badly written or plants the seeds of a revolution in the domain, you cannot change too much with a story about other people’s words. You had better start writing your own book. Well, from this point of view, writing book reviews may be a very helpful exercise in practicing your book writing skills.

But, despite all these logical considerations, I should reinforce my initial statement: I fully enjoy writing book reviews. It might be a sign of mental laziness, as obviously it is easier to read and write about what you are reading than to build an argument for a fully original article and carefully document a certain issue. To write an article, I need a longer amount of time for the documentation and actual writing. After the submission, I also must wait for the decision of the peer review process and sometimes, I need to make new and radical changes before the final publication is approved.

What I really enjoy when I am writing a book review is the independence of my words: I am alone with my point of view and able to freely express my opinions.

The peer review approach is equally critical in the final decision regarding the publication opportunity of a book review, but until now, the feed-back I have received addressed mostly some considerations of style instead of requests for radical reevaluations of my article. Openly speaking, at least once I considered that the opinions expressed at the end of the peer-review process disregarded my basic right of articulating my point of view. Right or good, as long as it is exposed in a coherent and logical way, the opinion is yours and you should be free to assume the full risk of expressing it.

I do not want to insist too much, but this may be one of the reasons I love writing book reviews. What are we, as academics and humans in general, without the freedom to express our points of view? Maybe I will focus the next months on writing a new book as well. My words need to find their way somehow.

This month’s question comes to us from Denise Horn. Denise has asked us to describe our ideal student and in so doing, we reveal our dreams for the future of education.

Bonnie Stewart (Canada) My ideal student seems to change every few years, as my teaching does. I am slowly learning that the students I appreciate and remember most – even years later – are often the ones who’ve pushed me in directions I didn’t find easy at the time. So while my instinctive response to this is to say that my ideal student is engaged and able to approach complex ideas with enthusiasm – because those are the students who perhaps learn most like me, and whom I find easiest – in hindsight, my ideal student is the one propelling me through my discomfort to a new perspective.

Ana Dinescu (Germany) The ideal student is the one that not only learns from you, but the one with whom you also learn together every day.

Afshan Jafar (US) My ideal student, besides being an engaged and enthusiastic learner, is usually one who is a bit spunky and has a sense of humor.  What’s the point of having a class full of students who just want to sit around and take notes? My best classes have been with students who can banter, who are out-spoken, yet aren’t so fixed in their opinions that they feel like they have nothing to learn.

Itir Toksoz (Turkey) My ideal student is one who has a curious and open mind, a hunger for knowledge in several fields, not just her/his own , good communication and self-expression skills, respect for divergent ideas and a sense of social -  political and environmental responsibility towards the world in general and the society in particular she/he lives in.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe (US) My ideal student is an interested, independent, intellectual risk-taker.  Point her towards new terrain, and she sets off to explore.  She doesn’t seek answers to my questions but searches for new discoveries to share with me.

Anamaria Dutceac (Sweden) She/he is curious, intelligent, engaged, independent, cooperative. She/he has personal initiative but follows instructions. Can communicate her/his ideas orally, visually, and in writing. She/he aims to become a better researcher than the professor. As we all know, the ideal student does not exist.

Meg Palladino (US) Of course my ideal student is bright and curious.  But I also like other things in a student:  I like them to be unique and a little bit rebellious.  Often when I am teaching and there is a student in the back of the room drumming on the desk rather than focusing on the lesson, I would rather be taking that student aside and working with him or her instead of teaching the students in the front who have done their homework and are hanging on my every word.  I like a challenge.

Melonie Fullick (Canada) I hate to think of an “ideal” with students because I feel I’m really just projecting an idealised image of myself onto them. With that in mind I think if there were a few things that really help both the student and myself, they would include a strong interest in something (anything!), willingness to do the (sometimes apparently tangential) work to pursue that interest, and openness to new ideas and approaches.

Ernesto Priego (UK) The ideal student is engaged. S/he is open to “the shock of the new”. Will carry out independent research; it’s her/his passion for the subject matter that drives her/him. Will be critical but respectful, curious and aware that education is an ongoing, endless process, that nobody knows everything at all times. It sounds obvious but the ideal student likes learning; she/he gets bored of conformity.

The ideal students are, if I may say it with the multi-quoted words of Jack Kerouac, “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!””….

Mary Churchill (US) My favorite students inevitably end up being the difficult students, the relentless naysayers who can always find the opposite point of view in any discussion. These students push me to be a better teacher and add an energy to the class that helps me to keep the rest of the students engaged. I consider them to be my unofficial assistants.

Janni Aragon (Canada) My ideal student is a student who shows up to class ready to participate and comes to office hours. This student has questions and wants to learn and has a sense of owning her/his education. This student is engaged and wants to be in university. This student does not have to be an A or B student–s/he just has to care.

Liana Silva (US) If I had an ideal student it would be a student for whom the grade isn’t the ultimate goal. In other words, my ideal student is someone who is interested in learning, in reading, in asking (and answering) questions; someone who  wants to go beyond what they know today.

What about you? What qualities does your ideal student possess?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

• Afshan Jafar for University of Venus at The Guardian UK with Consumerism in higher education: the rise of the helicopter parents.

What’s New With Our Writers:

• On January 19 Anamaria Dutceac Segesten participated in a public debate on the place of Europe in Copenhagen and on the nature of the relationship between Denmark and Europe. On the same panel participated Ian Manners, professor at Roskilde University, Eva Kjer Hansen, chair of the Danish parliamentary committee on EU-DK relations, and Uffe Andreasen, former ambassador and member of the UNESCO Board. Anamaria launched during the debate her new website collecting images of Eurosymbols from all over the world. Check it out: EUROSYMBOLS.
• Janni Aragon was interviewed: Saanich News Jan 20, 2012 Spectrum Living Library and CFAX 1070 Jan 19, 2012 Women and Politics and Social Media
• Bonnie Stewart joined the dialogue about proposed theoretical models for the Bachelor of Education program at the University of Prince Edward, as part of UPEI’s Faculty Education Committee.

Our Writers At Other Blogs:

• Melonie Fullick discussed the possible implications of SOPA/PIPA for higher education in the United States and for researchers internationally.
• Janni Aragon commented on Grad School application process and her Fri Fun Facts discussed Reading and she responded toLiana Silva as part of their Academics on Academia Series on how Pedagogy can make the grad school experience better for grad students.
• Bonnie Stewart explored how personal, institutional, and peer-networked branding operate in open online courses; and wrote about the gifts of turning, erm, forty.

Coming Up:

• In April 2012, Rosalie Hall will present her paper on the Philippine experience of military integration for the Military Mergers panel at the International Studies Association conference in San Diego, California. In March, she will be speaker at her high school’s (Zambales Central Institute) commencement program. She will join her fellow silver (25th) high school jubilarians in an alumni homecoming lunch and ceremonial turnover of donated school chairs.
• On 1 June Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe will join Yoni Applebaum from The Atlantic, Chris Cantwell from The Newberry Library, and John Fea from Patheos for a roundtable on “The Perils and Promise of Popular History in a Digital Age” at The Historical Society’s 2012 Conference on “Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils”in Columbia, South Carolina.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Last October, I gave a lecture at the Lifelong Learning Division of the School of Humanities at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This was one of the ways I participated in the University of Venus Networking Challenge, where I was aiming to “go interdisciplinary” and “go international”.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

New Year’s resolution: get smarter.

I do not like this quasi-obsession with making promises for new beginnings whenever January 1 shows its face on the first page of a new calendar. I do not think they last, these attempts to become a new person in a new year. Most of the classical New Year resolutions die out about the time we do not have to think twice before dating correctly our correspondence.

At the same time, as humans we are blessed with the capacity to learn throughout our lives, to train our minds and bodies to achieve new feats. This is exciting, and a motivation into itself to do that which is the most typical for the first days of the New Year: to appraise the past and think about the future.

I want therefore to ask: how has 2011 been for you? For me, to quote Umair Haque’s blog entry at HBR, it’s been the best and worst of times. I got my first monograph published, started a new and very exciting research project and became assistant professor at the university I liked best in my region. At the same time, my health reminded me that without paying attention and care to my body it will decay much faster than it should. On top of this, my personal life has been going through some most unpleasant downs.

How could this be? Leaving luck to the side, how could I manage some things so well and some others so poorly? An answer came to me during the winter break when I got my hands on the best book I read last year, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The Nobel Prize winning author writes in a language meant for the non-specialist reader about how our minds work when we make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. I will not spoil you the pleasure of reading the book for yourselves, but to summarize the main point, it appears that more often than not we reach systematically wrong decisions because we rely too much on our intuitive, unconscious, low-energy cost thinking and we do not activate our statistical, conscious and highly demanding mode of thinking.

Our brain tricks us in relying too much on autopilot driving, even when we do not have enough information about the road conditions and the destination point. It does that in order to save energy, according to a law of least effort. Most of the time this works out fine, but when too many things are unknown, we are bound to default on routines, and thus not evaluate a new situation appropriately.

Kahneman gives a personal example to which I, and many of us teachers, immediately could relate to. When grading student exams consisting of two essay questions, he normally would read through and give points to the first question in one student booklet and then move on to the second question. This had been his grading style for a long time. At some point though he realized that the grade he put on student’s first question almost always influenced the grade he was likely to give for the second question, regardless of the actual quality of the essay. The grader’s brain was “primed” to judge the second text in light of the first one. In order to improve exam grading, Kahneman forced himself to read the first question from all students, grade it, and only afterwards take up question number 2. As he writes in the book, this was done at great expense of energy on his part, as the brain constantly wanted to revert to the first, less costly, method.

The second way to grade exams is the smarter one, the more just one, but also the more laborious. This is where the word “resolution” comes into play. As I warned the reader at the very beginning, I do not want to make false promises to myself in this new year. But I do want to be more resolute in using my conscious, analytical thinking. There are some tricks to get us going along this path, some easier to adopt than others: eat turmeric and chocolate, sleep more, learn a new language. Get smarter, as they say. And not just about grading.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

I spent part of my Christmas holidays in the house that I grew up in, located in the suburbs of Montreal. I haven’t lived in Montreal full-time since I left to go to university, more than (shudder) 15 years ago. And even then, I didn’t really live in Montreal growing up. And yet, in my mind, I’ve built up my home city to the point where there could be nowhere better to live.

Pop culture wasn’t helping either. Before I left for the trip, not one but two travel/eating shows featured Montreal. My husband and I watched, and I heard the French/Québécois accents, saw the old, narrow streets, the distinct architecture, and immediately couldn’t wait to get on a plane and get back “home.” I always relax a little when we land in Montreal and the announcement is first made in French, “Bienvenue à Montreal.”

Of course, it’s never that simple. The city may feel like home, but the house where I grew up most definitely does not. I am reminded of all of the reasons I left more than 15 years earlier for my undergraduate degree and never went back. It is home in all of the worst ways: oppressive, limiting, and confining. It was my home, but I am no longer that person and I no longer fit into the place where I used to, for better or for worse, belong. Couple that with the fact that I am traveling with my own very young kids, one who doesn’t travel well, and the trip was less of a vacation and more of an endurance test, made worse by my own unrealistic expectations.

Reading the now infamous piece in the Atlantic lamenting the life lived as a professor in Iowa, I am reminded of my own situation, a transplanted Montrealer and Canadian, living in the rural South. How much should we expect to adapt to our new surroundings in order to make them feel like home versus how much we try to reshape our surroundings for that same purpose? Bloom laments the expectations/biases of the people he met, their inflexibility, but how much of his unhappiness is a result of his own inability to adapt himself? And, if he were to move back to San Francisco, would he be any happier or feel more at home after 20 years?

As academics, we are told we need to be flexible or realistic when it comes to where we end up living for our academic careers. If we aren’t willing to be flexible and accept certain sacrifices for the tenure-track, then we need to be realistic about our chances of making a good living in academia. But there is always the danger of over-romanticizing either option, be it the tenure-track job in the middle of nowhere or adjunct teaching  in the big city (or getting out of academia all together). Montreal is a distant memory, largely divorced from reality at this point. And I am largely in control of my own happiness – I can either make the best of things here or keep pining for Montreal (or some other big city). Is that fair to my family to never feel like we’re home?

My experience and memories of Montreal are unique. Certainly, I have common cultural moments, shared by almost all Montrealers (cheering for the Canadiens, the now-defunct Expos, the Ice Storm of 1998, among others), but I grew up Anglophone in the West Island (aka the English suburb), which is different from being French from the East End, an immigrant living in an ethnic neighborhood, or a Jew from Westmount (my Montreal is not Mordecai Richler’s Montreal, Michel Tremblay’s Montreal, Dany Laferrière’s Montreal). It also has to do with the time I grew up in Montreal; as a young teen, I was largely insulated from the economic depression of the early 1990s. I lived in Montreal, with bagels and smoked meat and sugaring off and linguistic tensions, but I came of age elsewhere, looking back on where I grew up with eyes filled with nostalgia.

While in Montreal, I made the mistake of telling my son that we were going home when I meant we were going back to my parents’ house, my old home. He got excited, then completely despondent when he realized what I really meant. For him, home is where his things are, where his friends live, where we all live. As my daughter explained to the border agent, she was born in California, her brother in Florida, her Dad in Edmonton, and her mom in Montreal, but we live in Kentucky. Home for her and her brother is wherever we live, our family born at four corners of North America, living together in a space filled with love.

I’m not going to lie; I still miss the food and hearing French. But I wouldn’t trade my life for either of those things. I am, finally, home.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

• UVenus at The Guardian (UK) - Sarah Emily Duff with Visa Denied? Navigating the visa minefield for visiting academics.
• Erin Wunker at Hook and Eye gives UVenus a nice shout-out in her post, Two Words.

What’s New With Our Writers:

• Janni Aragon sat on a panel about international media speaking to Gender and News Coverage at NASH 74 the Canadian Student Journalists Annual Conference. Janni also attended Word Camp Victoria 2012 held at UVIC.
• Ana Dinescu published in latest edition of the Greek online publication re-public an article about the Hungarian far-right: How far is the Hungarian far-right from power?.
• Melonie Fullick wrote a Views piece at Inside Higher Ed about her top ten pet peeves in higher education journalism.
• Afshan Jafar started work on a new book: an edited volume titled, The Body in a Global World. The deadline for submission of proposals is March 10. For the full CFP, see http://www.cfplist.com/cfp.aspx?cid=219.
• Itır Toksöz will be attended the 3rd Annual Eurasian Peace Science Meeting at the Center for Conflict Studies, Koç University, Istanbul on January 13-14 2012.

Our Writers At Other Blogs:

• Janni Aragon blogged about Career Advice for Undergrads and chimed in about Difficult Students.
• Melonie Fullick takes apart the education-career equation at Speculative Diction blog and The Times Higher Ed Scholarly Web blog reported on Melonie’s post about PhD attrition and depression.
• Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe writes in praise of Northwestern University’s Purple Politics.
• Ernesto Priegotranslated Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s MLA 2012 Presidential Forum address, “Networking the Field”, into Spanish for the blog of the Mexican Digital Humanities Network; Ernesto interviewed Mathew Hack, co-author of The Opinions of Tobias Grubbe, a multimedia web strip published by The Daily Telegraph which comments contemporary British affairs by setting them in the 18th century, over at The Comics Grid; he also wrote an appraisal of the #tweetyourthesis hashtag on his HASTAC blog and was cited by The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog.
• In their “Academics on Academia” series, Liana Silva talks about the myth of the clear path to the professoriate and how that can affect graduate studentsand Janni Aragon discusses the importance of mentorship during her graduate school years.

If You’re Not on Twitter, You Might Have Missed This:

• #TweetYourThesis (Storify of tweets compiled by Ernesto Priego).

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

When I was a graduate student and was assigned to teach (and design) a course, the first thing I did was order the textbooks for that particular topic. It seemed to me then, that everything would fall into place once I had accomplished the major task of choosing a textbook and figuring out the readings. In contrast, now, when I am about to design a new course, the specific readings sometimes end up being one of the last things I choose.

I have sat through a few teaching seminars now (as a graduate student and as a young faculty) and I know that a lot of people attend these kinds of seminars to learn how to deal with the “nuts and bolts” of teaching: how many pages of reading to assign, what kind of a system/scale to use for grading, what to include in a syllabus, how much feedback to give on written assignments etc. These questions are, of course, not unimportant and should be addressed as part of teacher training seminars. But what I want to focus on here is one aspect of teacher training that is far less concrete and very often overlooked in teacher training programs: epistemology and how that relates to pedagogy. That is, how does and should your conception of knowledge (and more specifically our disciplinary knowledge) relate to your teaching style and methods.

How can your conception of your disciplinary knowledge (or knowledge more generally) impact how you design a course? Let’s start with knowledge. Is your view of knowledge that it is a concrete set of Truths that must be passed on? Or do you believe knowledge is shaped by perspective and location? Does it exist like “nuggets of gold” – solid, unchanging, and needing safe-guarding?  While most academics have answered these questions about their disciplines at some point, what is often missing is the linking of our abstract conception of knowledge to the very real practice of teaching.   That the two should be in harmony is often ignored by those teaching us how to teach!

Once you make this relationship between epistemology and pedagogy central to your teaching and course design, everything else—the kinds of assignments you use, whether you use a textbook or not, whether you allow revisions, whether you do in-class exams or take-home papers/essays—follows from this relationship. Let’s take assignments as an example. If I am a firm believer that knowledge is often malleable, changing and context dependent, then my methods of assessing my students should reflect that view. Does it seem fair or even logical to test my students with multiple-choice questions if I hold the view above? Does it not make more sense, to assess students’ knowledge in a way that is congruent with my beliefs regarding knowledge? In the case above, it means assigning papers, and written assignments, allowing for students to interpret the information I provide, instead of asking them to regurgitate dates, definitions, or names in the format of a multiple choice exam or True and False with only one correct answer.

Thinking about the relationship between teaching and my own conception of knowledge is what has led me to shun textbooks. The format of a textbook: the bold and italicized definitions, reliance on summaries of original research instead of the actual research, test-banks for teachers for instance, all reinforce a knowledge-as-nuggets-of-gold approach to teaching and learning. If I don’t hold that view as a researcher, why should I hold that view as a teacher?

So instead of turning to textbooks, here are the questions I ask myself before developing a course. For me, the fact that my answers to these questions have to be consistent with my conception of knowledge makes this part much easier than before:

• What do I want students to take away from this course? And I don’t mean regurgitating our jargon-filled “course objectives” here with all the buzz-words: I mean: What are the central ideas/themes that drive this course. What is the most important thing that I want students to learn from this course?
• How can I best get these central ideas across? Will it be a lecture? A seminar with student leaders for each section? A class discussion?
• Given my own conception of knowledge, and what I believe the central themes of this course are, how will I assess the students?

I realize that sometimes when faced with large enrollments, we may not have the luxury to stick to our ideals. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed .