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 .

This semester I signed up for the University of Venus Networking Challenge. The challenge asked readers to reach outside of their departments and meet people in other disciplines, in other institutions, and/or in other countries. Because of my current employment position, I find myself getting in touch with a lot of people from other departments. Thus, I thought it would be unfair to count that as part of the challenge. However, the U Venus challenge prompted me to think about my interactions with faculty and staff from other schools and offices differently.

As a teaching assistant and a graduate student, I met people mostly through classes or meetings. If we were taking a class together or worked for the same professor, chances are that we would eventually get to know each other. However, unless your department is an interdisciplinary one, or unless you work outside of the department or have connections with people outside of campus, it is possible that your experience as a graduate student is limited to the footprint of the school—and perhaps only to your department floor. In my case, I knew few people outside of campus until I met my significant other.

Once I was done with coursework, my interactions with my peers were even more limited. Field exams required me to immerse myself in reading, and the dissertation research was no different. Every new semester brought new students while old friends moved away. If I went to a department function I knew few of the students, and without the commonalities of sharing an office or taking classes together, we had little to go by—it got to the point where I had trouble remembering classes when new students would ask me about a professor. Hence, I retreated into my academic shell.

Adjunct teaching was no different; we all taught at different times and had different obligations that kept us away from the office. During that year I was an adjunct, I got to know well two other adjuncts in addition to two faculty members, and the only reason this happened was because we all spent so much time in the office. I would prep for my classes, then I would work on my dissertation, then I would pick up my daughter and drive home. However, this was not the case for most adjuncts.
These stories are not uncommon. We have been warned that our disciplines have become silos, and even with Twitter we might run the risk of listening only to the voices that sound like us or that think like us. It’s easy to follow someone on twitter, but how often do we follow someone from a different discipline or from a different career path?

In my new home town I have felt the urge to reach out and meet other fellow academics in part because I needed the scholarly interaction; the dissertation can become a black hole where you hear only yourself and forget what other voices sound like. In reaching out I have met some wonderful people from different universities (fortunately I live in a city that contains over a dozen universities and colleges within an hour of the city center), and this even helped me find my current job.

As part of the UVenus Challenge, I resolved not just to reach out to other academics but to keep alive the connections I already had. I made lunch appointments, I attended the TEDXWomen live streaming event in Kansas City, heard Gloria Steinem speak at UMKC—a highlight of my semester—and handed out my business card. (To think, I had to remind myself to hand out business cards! Something I had never done before.) But in the spirit of the challenge I pulled my gutsiest move yet: I contacted a Latino/Latina studies scholar whose work I admired and and who teaches where I work. We met for coffee in her office and talked about graduate school, my work, and academic writing. As I sat there, talking about my research and about the process of academic writing in general, I felt like I was shedding my graduate student shell.

As graduate students we immerse ourselves in our departments, and the deeper we go into our research, the less likely we are to connect with others. Making friends as an adult is hard enough without adding the layer of academia. It was not until I moved away from my school to a big city where I knew no one that I really reached out to people across departments and outside of my university. It gave me a real appreciation for the work others do at the same time that I developed new friendships and connections.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

In the days preceding my wedding in a Cambridge College chapel,  my brother would perform a spot-on imitation of George Costanza from Seinfeld and shriek, “Worlds Collide!” each time the English and American in-laws to be or my husband’s Oxonian undergrad buddies and our shared Cantabrigian graduate cohort threatened to run amok.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

In response to my last post, I received a thoughtful email from a colleague (an administrator) reflecting on the difference between managing and leading. This has been a theme for a lot of our on-campus professional development directed at faculty moving into administrative roles.

Managing is keeping things moving smoothly: scheduling meetings, making sure everyone has the agenda, generating reports that accurately reflect in a timely fashion the work of the unit.  These are tasks that help people feel like their ship has a rudder.  Managers structure people’s work lives by maintaining systems and rules.  Leading demands a more dynamic approach. Leading requires a vision that can be clearly and meaningfully articulated–a vision that other people can get behind because it is inspiring, forward-thinking, and in some way resonates with what they themselves have defined as their purpose or passion.  (You can read more about how this breaks down in business-speak/management theory here and here, and here as the distinction is applied to the work of chairs in community colleges from my trusty Women in Higher Ed.)

Of course I have some ambivalence about this. (I always have some ambivalence about this. I should have a T-shirt made.)  I’m an English professor and an advocate for the humanities: the corporatization of the university and the wholesale importation of managerial models and audit culture into higher education is, from my perspective, one of the most potent threats to what I do.   But as I’m thinking about the tasks confronting my department–a new assessment plan, a curricular review, a general sustaining of intellectual and professional well-being–I can see the need for balancing a get-it-done approach with a vision for why it should matter, even as the corporate-speak goes against my sense of professional identity and purpose and chafes my sensibilities.  It’s not enough to be able to schedule meetings and keep us all organized: a shared vision that makes sense and might possibly be inspiring–even on a day to day basis–is also necessary.

I’m thinking about what this means for me as a teacher, too.  And while I believe the humanities classroom should be a place where we focus on the big questions, the life-changing, mind-bending questions that matter, I also think part of my job is helping students get things done. I’d like them to see how they owe it to the amazing insights they’re having every day to figure out how to manage projects and time and energy, so those ideas can emerge and be shared. I think part of my work is to facilitate and model such a process.

So this past semester I thought a lot about how to translate some of what I’ve been learning as an “administrator” to my practice as a teacher, particularly in my work with two groups of students. One was a first-year writing course populated by humanities majors (English, fine arts, modern languages, history); the second was our senior seminar for English majors in their last year of coursework. (Pretty neat to work with students on both ends of the spectrum at the same time!) Both courses culminate in a major research project, so they require a continuously fine-tuned balance of independent work on the part of the student and intense hands-on guidance on the part of me, all designed around each individual writer in conjunction with the needs and direction of the group. (Heather Alderfer has a good U of Venus post here on how student research is being redefined.)

After the first set of conferences around midterm, several rounds of feedback on early drafts, and my request to the students for a mid-semester evaluation of my teaching, I was trying to figure out how to pull it all together. I knew from my evals that the students were happy with the feedback they were getting as they moved through the research and writing process, but I also knew that as we went on it would be difficult to synthesize all the comments, all the drafts, and really shape the work into a finished project. I started creating individual project reports for each writer, and then delivered the reports in class with a discussion of what we all thought the vision for the course as a whole might be in tandem with their specific work. With each round of comments, and each outbreak of writer’s block or performance anxiety or uncertainty about the direction of the project, I gave the detailed and concrete feedback that would move the project forward and address mental and logistical issues, but I also had numerous conversations individually and in groups about the purpose, the bigger picture of the work:  what does it mean to do research in the humanities?  what does it mean to ask big questions?  what place do these big questions have in our lives? what does it mean for you to imagine yourself as a thinker, a writer, a member of an intellectual community? (Another U of Venus writer, Juliann Emmons Allison, has a lovely post here on intense mentoring.)

I realized that if I think of myself as a project manager, or a team leader, then the students in the course become contributors to getting the work done, as well as to the overall vision of what we’re trying to do. It’s something we share, but it means we’re all responsible for fulfilling that vision, with all its manifold moving parts. My role is to manage, but it’s also to lead. Management theory types seem to suggest that managing vs. leading is a binary, with one a more desirable trait than the other.  In most areas of my work life, however, I’m finding a blend to be pretty productive.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed .

I have something to admit: I know that I eventually want to go into administration. Please continue reading! I realize that within higher education there is often this us vs them mentality. It is us (instructors, graduate students, support staff and more) vs. the at times faceless, nameless enemy, the administrators. We are the 99% on campus and they constitute the 1%. But, I have to admit that during the last few years, I have had lots of conversations with colleagues and family about what I would do if I had an administrative role on campus. We academics talk lots, and part of this talk includes constructive comments and perhaps even some criticism. I partake in these conversations, but I always get to the part of “what would I do to fix this.” And, my sense of justice and desire to mentor students has meant that I want to go into administration in a role where I will help students or oversee student issues.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

The advent season invariably leads me to engage in a self-reflection on whether (and to what degree) I have been naughty or nice. Oftentimes, I am very confident I have done more good deeds than bad, mainly because I have little occasion to potentially do ill to somebody. As long as I did things on my own (as a professor, researcher and writer), my actions bear little direct consequence to others. I would like to think I have a modest amount of social capital after being in the academic profession for 20 odd years, which I could bank on in case I veer towards the naughty territory.

But my social capital account has seen some tectonic movements in the past year. On the credit side, I would like to think of points gained from the many social events I pursued in line with my being Division chair: arranging a memorial for a retired faculty member who passed on; celebrating the Deanship and the Scientist award given to colleagues; welcoming a colleague who returned from a leave of absence; attending a funeral for a parent of a faculty member; hosting student events such as the Best Undergraduate Research award and a graduation reception; and throwing several parties at our house marking the start and end of the school year. A big plus also came from my unerring attendance to University events: graduation, opening ceremonies, alumni homecoming, foundation day celebrations, lantern parade, etc. Where I use to “disappear” from the University social scene to do research field work, or attend a conference or meeting, I now find my schedule sufficiently “freed” to make room for exponentially-expanding social obligations attached to the chairmanship.

On the debit side of my social capital ledger are losses due to the bitter struggle against a faculty member who wanted concessions pertaining to faculty loading (she eventually resigned); junior faculty members who now feel “small” because I made public their student evaluation ratings; a falling out with a colleague from a collaborative project whose leadership style and decisions I strongly contested (she no longer talks to me); and a foreign colleague whose proposals for a co-authored journal article piece I turned down without saying so (he was very upset because I didn’t answer his emails).

I would like to think I have also added on to my social capital after having introduced some worthy managerial innovations. The Division yahoo group is buzzing with exchanges of information, queries, responses, well-wishes and even debates. I have collected each of my faculty members’ mobile phone numbers for collective text message sending. Weekdays, weekends, nights and early morning (I am up at 5am doing “office” stuff on my computer); I engage my faculty and staff. I am told when any of them is sick, on errand somewhere, traveling or in some kind of trouble. I doggedly tracked down and followed personnel, mundane (e.g. updating the faculty contact list) or quixotic (seeking “corrective” promotion, something NOT previously done in the University’s history) concerns. I introduced transparency in ALL of the Division’s transactions from conference attendance grant applications to faculty loading. I feel I have established sufficient trust that I can confidently expect timely and substantive output from faculty members when I ask them to. Alas, the yahoo group medium also sank some of my social capital. A yahoo group for a regional project I was involved in yielded less than satisfactory outcome: my natural inquisitiveness and demands for transparency were seen as un-collegial and high-handed. Several members simply tuned out.  I don’t expect them to come rallying in support of future proposals from me here on.  My virtual musings at University of Venus, which keyed in academic issues to on-the-ground realities of my factual University, equally earned me admiration and admonition. Two former bosses told me my writing was too spicy and bear little circumspection but the current one says he enjoys reading them. At least I can expect some accountability from here on (lest they want to get written about!).

Political Scientists have argued that social interconnectedness and its premise of generalized reciprocity are linked to positive collective human endeavors. Whether addressing poverty or reducing crime, things get done better where social capital is present. In the academe, one must be ready to earn or burn it accordingly. There is always the next year to start all over again.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

• University of Venus at Times Higher Ed’s THE Scholarly Web featuring Deanna England on the positive qualities of professors.
• University of Venus was mentioned as a group working towards “creating new futures in education” in “Forays into the Future of Work” by Lex Schroeder in Boston.com.

What’s New With Our Writers:

• Janni Aragon  was interviewed by the Saanich News about women in politics  and by CFAX 1070 Radio about the Iowa Caucus Results.
• Lee Skallerup Bessette published a book review in the most recent CEA Forum and her blog College Ready Writing was named on of the best Non-Academic Blogs to read for 2012 by SellOutYourSoul.com (a site for recovering humanities graduates).
• Lee Skallerup Bessette and Mary Churchill were prominently mentioned in Andrea Doucet’s piece in The Chronicle, Scholarly Reflections on Blogging: Once a Tortoise, Never a Hare.
• Mary Churchill’s photo, “Eminent Domain,” was included in the group photography show, Space, at UForge Gallery in Boston. The show opened Thursday, January 5 and will be up through January 29. Eminent Domain is part of Picturing Roxbury, a photography project  focused on capturing the rapidly changing urban landscape of her Roxbury neighborhood in Boston.
• Ana Dinescu published a book review in the CEU Political Science Journal, the December 2011 issue. She also signed a contract to publish a book covering her PhD topic, on the interethnic relations and intellectual representations in post-communist Romania. The book will be published in Romanian. An English version will be announced in the next six months.
• Melonie Fullick’s posts on depression in Ph.D. students and Lee Skallerup Bessette’s posts on taking action for adjunct faculty were mentioned in McMaster University’s Public Intellectual Project’s 2011 Retrospective on Higher Education and new Ph.D.s.
• Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe’s review of Snow Hill: In the Shadows of the Ephrata Cloister appears in this month’s edition of The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
• Liana Silva found out she will be presenting at this year’s EMP (Experience Music Project) Conference, which will take place in New York City.

Our Writers At Other Blogs:

• Janni Aragon  made some suggestions for people on the academic job market and wrote about Rehashing Reverb: Habits.
• Melonie Fullick wrote a follow-up post to her piece about Ph.D. students and mental health, at Speculative Diction blog.
• Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe invited everyone to share in holiday Fe(a)stivities then contemplated the Not-For-Profit Mamas pervasive in her family’s holiday viewing.
• Liana Silva reflects upon finishing the first full draft of her dissertation.
• Ernesto Priego unearths an old Mexican comic bookf or The Gothic Imagination, a project at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
• Bonnie Stewart explored class, education reform, and the myths that drive education; then ruefully reflected on her own Christmas privilege.

Coming Up:

• Janni Aragon  is participating in the Human Library at Spectrum High School. She will give a presentation about Young Adult Literature and Politics.
• Bonnie Stewart will be featured on the CBC’s The Sunday Edition across Canada on January 8th, discussing the phenomenon of monetization in momblogging and social media.

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

• Athene Donald on The Gift of Pink.
• Whitney Johnson at HBR blogs with Are You Stuck in a Girl’s Club?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

Long ago, when I heard or read about the huge pressure continuously faced by serious and appreciated academics to publish as much as possible (following the overused and abused slogan “publish or perish“), I was extremely surprised – if not automatically cynical. How could an academic do anything else but write? Day and night, night and day, this was and continues to be, in my opinion, the main task of an academic. If you have something to say, you should say it through the power of your words. Such worries may be an expression of inadequacy to the noble mission of an academic and intellectual in general.

My optimistic opinion on the bright future of book writing was equally confirmed by the rapid multiplication of publishing possibilities over the last few years. The Internet opened the door to various alternatives to the usual long, pricey and painful traditional publication process. If you trust the message of your words, you can easily find a way to self-publish your books, including buying a proper ISBN. With the help of some easy tips – among other things, the tailored use of social media as Twitter or blogging – you can even obtain some financial advantages, beyond the much praised intense publishing activity. In this way you can successfully secure some funding to spend quality time writing your next book. Obviously, as your writing credential develops, so do the chances of being considered a serious, coherent, and truly interesting intellectual.

At the practical and marketing levels, most of the advice offered by publishing experts focuses on the same direction: publish as much as possible and make yourself a name in the world of words.

Overall, the many paths in life converge in the same direction. Writing becomes your second academic nature. Teaching, your family life, the time spent at the library (even the novel writers need serious documentation, as imagination is never enough),  maybe some social life and dedicated time for acquiring the proper media skills… there are lots of activities that we should take into account when planning our daily schedules.

But since entering the world of academia as humbly as possible, I have progressively started to change my mind about incessantly publishing. Even though I am convinced that writing is the only thing that I will always do as part of my job or whatever other professional and personal assignments I will have in the near future, I also face a certain fatigue of running on autopilot. From one Word document to another, my sense of wording diminishes and a couple of times I experienced a deeper feeling than the classic “writer’s block.” It was a rather certain despise of writing about everything and nothing. At the moment you understand with all your strength that you can’t continue throwing words on the page, because you aren’t sure about the meaning of your final work.

In such moments, I prefer to run away from the writing desk for a while. I read something completely different but that still shows good writing, watch a movie or go to an exhibition. I am permanently asking myself if what I do is worth the effort and if my narrative will make any sense outside my close area of interest. This reconsideration process may last for an hour, a day or a week, or even more. But I am sure that even if I am not publishing for a while, I will not perish as long as what I want to write about is something valuable.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

My first book was the result of years of graduate work and was born of my dissertation. It had gone through multiple iterations and critiques from my adviser and dissertation committee. In the end, I felt as though the whole project was out of my hands, and I was simply responding to the demands of others. Of course, that is the point — as a graduate student, you are being shaped to join the ranks of academics who speak the same (metaphoric) language and share similar expectations for academic work.

I am writing my second book now and feel the results of that training. It’s almost strangulating. I can’t help feeling that my old advisers are waiting in the wings and I’ll have to respond to their critiques, shape my writing to their style and demands. Coming up for tenure is the added pressure — in some sense this second book feels like a second dissertation being written for my senior colleagues. At forty, that’s a frustrating feeling, to be sure.

I ran into a fellow junior colleague today and shared some of this frustration. We both joked about the kind of book we want to write when we do get tenure — maybe not an academic book at all, maybe a travel book or a novel — anything to feel free of the academic “regulations” that have been imposed on us for so long.

Afterwards, I sat down in a cafe to work on a chapter and re-read the introduction. The language was replete with academese. So stultifying! So dull! So I decided to just write as though telling a story, in the clearest most direct way that I could. The words started to come, fast and easy. I thought, who told me I would have to write that way forever? If it isn’t interesting to me, why would it be to anyone else? Would I want to discuss this in class someday? Why am I not just writing for myself?

I thought then of the academics that I have truly enjoyed reading over the years. Cynthia Enloe, author of numerous books on women and International Relations (indeed, I consider her the Grandmother of Feminist IR), writes in an easy, snappy, funny style that is at once approachable and deep. James C. Scott, author of such classics as Weapons of the Weak and Seeing Like a State, is a joy to read, particularly when he isn’t afraid to add a bit of self-deprecation in his approach. These are authors I want to emulate, not the stilted jargon-laden stuff of “mainstream” political science or theory.

I wonder when this change happens — when do we gain the confidence of finding our own voices, or feel free to write this way? I think it must happen — it’s the only way we as academics can be relevant. We have to stop writing for our advisers and our colleagues. The opaque language and tortured rhetoric of the academy should no longer be the norm.

So I will begin consciously writing for myself. Maybe I’ll stop having those dreams where my adviser keeps sending back my dissertation for corrections. And maybe I’ll enjoy the work more. After all, if it’s not fun, why bother?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.