GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

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Love the Teaching, Hate the Grading, and Other Institutional Paradoxes

In Melonie's Posts on 2012/05/26 at 02:31

Melonie Fullick, writing from Hamilton, Ontario in Canada

April is the cruellest month in (Anglo-North American) universities, given that the yearly academic cycle reaches its peak with final exams, which are in turn preceded by the crushing weight of major end-of-term assignments. Some students, worn out by the demands of the season, lapse into a state of caffeine-fuelled zombie-like vacancy. For those of us on the receiving end of their work, there is the prospect of a mountain of marking that forms the final obstacle to a brief breather before the summer term begins.

Based on the feelings expressed regularly by many professors and graduate students, I don’t think grading is something many people see as a form of genuine and enjoyable engagement with students–unless it is a case where the course director has been creative with the assignments and/or most of the students are motivated to work hard.

Instead, professors and teaching assistants tend to experience grading as a chore (or in some cases, an ordeal) that must be completed so that marks can be submitted–a technocratic necessity rather than a pedagogical one.

This makes sense for a few reasons. Grading is not an inherently meaningful activity, but more a function of a massified hierarchised institution. A letter or number grade assigns a relative value to a student’s performance, which is then used as a measure of his/her value within the educational system overall. Outside of this system, assigned marks have little relevance.

As such, in an increasingly competitive environment students may see grades more as tokens of exchange than signifiers of acquired skill or learning. That’s partly because it’s so hard to assess those things and link them to an objective “standard”. Students may (rightly) see grades as flexible, and act on this assumption, possibly encouraged by the consumerist tendency that comes with attaching a price tag to education–conflating payment for access with payment for an outcome.

Another issue is that we’ve institutionalised the way in which grading is un-enjoyable. The process and schedule of the academic year ensures this: grading tends to happen all at the same time, there’s usually quite a lot of it–and because students are fatigued and under pressure, what we see might not be representative of their potential.

In the past I’ve also felt as if I have little influence over the outcomes I see when I’m grading assignments. I remember this was among the first issues that alerted me to “something rotten” in the state of academe, years ago when I started working as an undergraduate teaching assistant. It wasn’t that I didn’t care–I cared a lot; I wanted then, and still want now, to help students to learn and write well and earn the marks they desired. But I didn’t have the time and energy (and skill) to provide the level of help they seemed to require. Later, it was both relieving and distressing to realise I was working with all their past and present educational (and life) experiences, not just my own inadequacies.

Grading is just one of the experiences I’ve had, inside the classroom and out of it, that’s led me to look at the institutional frame in which university teaching takes place. To make the larger connections, why would excellent professors be limping along on contracts without job security? Why did undergraduate TAs make only half as much as the graduate students who did the same work–who, in turn, would later make less as contract workers than on the coveted tenure track? It was clear from early on that teaching in the university could be downloaded with impunity on to those with little or no experience or training (or control), and who were willing to work for lower wages.

Can these problems be addressed in a context where more and more people are being told to get a postsecondary education? Not only do we have more students now, but the students themselves must juggle their involvement with education with other demands on their time and energy. We must also find ways of engaging with, and helping, students from more varied educational backgrounds, without making unreasonable demands on those doing the teaching (and grading). And somehow, as teachers in this system we must become more “efficient” given the perpetual economic tightening in the context of managerialist governance of education.

This is where governance meets (and clashes with) pedagogy in the institutional context of the massified university; it is why the conditions of postsecondary teaching demand attention at the level of the egg timer often used to ration each minute of essay marking. Grading and the feelings and problems associated with it show us only a few of the ways in which the long-term devaluing of teaching in the academic economy is both experienced and perpetuated in our everyday lives.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Massive Open Online Courses: How “The Social” Alters the Relationship Between Learners and Facilitators

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/05/10 at 08:34

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

We’re getting close to the tail end of the 36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”

How can I tell?

First, I’m getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital Identities. I’m second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I’m on deck means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.

But it’s also clear we’re winding down because the #change11 conversation hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns.  Once there were lively debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.

Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week #35.

Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a stop over the last month or two.

I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I’ve been? Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m a teacher at heart. I’ll put the work into developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or 300. But as I’m preparing, I’m thinking about what it means to facilitate in a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.

Or the internet.

As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.

The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the facilitator.

On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of completed learning objectives.

Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is content-focused, not connection-focused.

If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I’d have a very different module ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.

I’ve been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course I’ve taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and grading backing me in the classroom.

In the connectivist MOOC model, I don’t.

There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They won’t get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they completed anything. There’s nothing specific for them to complete, unless I design an exit goal as part of the week’s activities. But that would be MY exit goal: not theirs. They don’t get to put the word MIT on their CV. And while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold, Pierre Levy – I’m among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in the year’s lineup. They won’t even get the relational perk of engaging with somebody famous.

Nope. But what they will get – in addition to what I hope will be a fascinating exploration of the idea of  Digital Identity – is hands-on practice in what it means to learn and connect and simply be in this networked, distributed age.

And I will get the opportunity to practice what it means to lead in the age of the internet: to share what one knows in a way that invites others to engage, to contribute, to participate.

Both models of the MOOC serve a purpose, but it is the connectivist one – for all it is less massive and far less a traditional course – that teaches both teachers and learners new ways of coming together to explore ideas.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Occasionally the Awkward Has its Perks

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2012/04/25 at 01:05

Deanna England, writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada

I have now completed the last actual class of my degree. I have one Special Studies course to complete this Spring (Jane Austen and Adaptation, woo!) and then I graduate. And while I’m not yet breathing a sigh of relief and soliciting congratulations, I feel that I’m now in a position to reflect back over the course of this program a little, particularly at how I’ve experienced the dual-role I currently straddle.

I’ve worked at the University for four years, and spent half of that time enrolled in this degree.  When I first began, I had oh-so-many pre-conceived notions of how my program would look and function based on the myriad of planning discussions I had previously participated in. A bit of a laughable expectation in retrospect really, as when does the theory ever truly represent the practice?  Like most of us, a large part of my job requires sitting in on meetings, and many of them focused around the construction of graduate programs: curriculum, policies, student issues, scholarships, promotion, recruitment…

One of the topics I always found the most interesting in those committee meetings were the discussions around the construction of courses.  I find it fascinating that at this level of study, a faculty member has the opportunity to take their area of research and construct an entire syllabus around it. Not only does it allow them the chance to share their passion, but it also grants them the occasion to explore the area further, and learn new perspectives on the topic as a result of student engagement.

On the other hand, wearing my student hat grants me the opportunity to experience those same courses from the other side. However, it’s an odd experience, and I find it impossible to simply flip a switch from one identity (Graduate Studies Officer) to the other (graduate student).  For example, I try to patiently listen when my fellow students informally complain (to me or around me) about the program, faculty, administrative details, fees and so many other frustrating facets of the student experience. Often I feel genuine sympathy and understanding of where they are coming from, but occasionally it’s challenging. I know just how much work goes into the running of these programs and how many hours of debate go into every decision. However, I have to admit: being a student has actually been quite beneficial to understanding just how it feels to be a recipient of those decisions. Because I know, if something doesn’t make sense to me, then there’s certainly no way that the average student will have much more clarity.

Now the two particular courses I’ve taken this year have been masters-honours splits. This is a phenomenon I’d been hearing about since I started at the University, but had yet to experience. And of course I was totally unprepared for what that would be like. I had  (arrogantly) assumed that the undergraduate students would be so much less knowledgeable and articulate than the graduate students in those courses that I was completely taken aback when I realized the exact opposite was true.

Cultural Studies is a multi-disciplinary program and these two courses were taught out of the Women and Gender Studies department.  Now, I have some background in feminist discourse, but it’s only one area of critical theory amongst many others I’ve been exposed to in this degree. But these honours students? It’s what they’ve been living for the past several years – their knowledge of the vocabulary and concepts around what we’re learning far surpasses that of the graduate students. I found myself so utterly humbled by those honours students for their patient guidance, particularly regarding how to handle some of the sensitive issues that the class was discussing. One student’s declaration that “this is a safe space,” reassuring us that we didn’t have to be so concerned about saying the “wrong” thing was absolutely invaluable.

This was something that never came up in committee meetings – the actual dynamic between the two levels of students. I had heard many discussions around the necessity for an increased number of pure master’s classes, countered with the practical use of resources in the split classes. Once again, the theory did not adequately describe the practice. I cannot explain just how valuable both perspectives have been to me in both roles. I think the only thing left for me to do now is to get my PhD and start teaching in these programs – the University really doesn’t have enough classes on porn!

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Do You Manage Technology or Does Technology Manage You?

In Janni's Posts on 2012/04/04 at 00:12

Janni Aragon, writing from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada

I have prided myself on the early adoption of new technologies in my work and personal life. A good majority of my research has examined women and technology. From a practical point of view technology allows me to connect almost immediately with friends, colleagues, family, and students. This is a mixed blessing.  I know that we all lament how, thanks to email, we have expanded this notion of work and working hours. I thought about managing technology when I read Liana Silva’s blog post about work and guilt. I looked in the mirror and thought that her thoughtful commentary was about me, too. Managing time and technology surely adds to the guilt discussion. Is technology making me a workaholic? I managing technology or is it managing me? Am I saving time by my use of my smart phone and my tablet?

I certainly use my host of technology in the classroom, for office hours, and beyond. But, the weight of this electronic umbilicus is at times more of an electronic manacle. I have taken to scheduling writing or grading time in my Outlook calendar, as this allows me work time, and I manage getting scheduled into meetings. The good news is that I love my job and my career, but I know that it is not everything. I’ve been thinking a lot about Heather Menzies and Janice Newson’s article “No Time to Think” and No Time by Heather Menzies. I know that we have all heard about how academics’ work practices have changed a lot, thanks to technology. The Menzies and Newson article speaks to this and made me uncomfortable as I read it. They were definitely talking about my work life. I have also heard  a colleague or two refer to smart phones as the tool of neoliberalism rebranding the university landscape. Academics are prone to wax poetic, no?

I read work-related emails during the evenings and weekends. I do not want to walk into work to a hundred or more emails. This might surprise many, but I do think it works for me. One issue though, in this smart phone world is that students have gotten to expect this. It is not uncommon for me to get emails an hour or two apart with a student inquiring if I got the previous email. They might know my schedule and assume that since I’m not teaching I can effortlessly reply to their important query immediately. This last holiday I noted that I was getting more advising emails from students on Christmas Eve. I made a point of not responding for a few days—as it was a statutory holiday that I was celebrating.

And, yes, I am known for often responding to emails within minutes or hours. But, it does not always happen. Have I unleashed a beast? Perhaps this explains why my partner is asking me to unplug more. One thing that I started last Fall was not working late on campus 2-3 days, instead I do this 1-2 days a week. The upshot is that I’m home more this school year. This means more family dinners together, which is a great end to the day with my family. The cost is that I often work for a few hours in the evening and like most academics, I still work for a few hours during the weekend.

Gen X scholars remember the good old days of doing research in the library and scouring for books in the stacks, and feeling a sense of discovery when you found a really good book next to the book that you were really looking for initially. What were the good old days of technology? Have we increased the work day with our efficient smart phones? I ask this as my smart phone plays music and my tablet is open with Twitter streaming. I rely too much on either to get rid of them, but maybe I need to willingly unplug more.

Menzies, Heather and Janice Newson. “No Time to Think.” Our Schools, Our Selves, v16, n3 Spring 2007: 99-104.

Menzies, Heather. 2005. No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life. Toronto, Douglas & McIntyre.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Living in Liminal Space

In Melonie's Posts on 2012/03/29 at 00:06

Melonie Fullick, writing from Hamilton, Ontario in Canada.

In teaching and in research I’ve been taught to pay close attention to the assumptions I bring to the contexts in which we create and re-create knowledge, and one aspect of my own perspective that I often take for granted is the fact that I’m more often present and comfortable in spaces that lie between one particular “position” and another. The term that comes to mind is liminality, a word associated with limits and “intermediate stages” and deriving from the Latin limen for  “threshold”.

The sense of being somehow outside and inside simultaneously has been with me for much of my life. I’m a blend of, and in a zone between, cultures and continents. Born in New Zealand to English parents and having now lived in Canada for over half my life, I’ve often had the sense that no matter where I am, I’m peering in at something (a social world) that isn’t “me” but is something I’ve adopted and adapted to through exposure over time.

The geo-cultural ambivalence extends to language, too, since my accent has morphed into an odd amalgam recognizable as multiple things and no-thing; Kiwis and Brits wonder if I’m from Anglo-America, and Canadians guess at Australia, England and South Africa, or occasionally even Boston or New York (covering almost all bases but the right one!). I still sometimes joke that I did a linguistics degree so I could understand why people perceive my accent the way they do.

I feel like I was born at a liminal historical moment, as well—at the tail end of “Generation X”, which is itself a kind of transitional generation coming as it does after the Baby Boomers and before the (supposedly radically different) “Millennials”. Our group seems sandwiched in between great demographic revolutions, a transition point, when the global economy tipped from post-war Keynesianism into neo-liberalism even as it became more tightly connected by new information technologies.

Aside from time, and physical and cultural space, I’m also living between socioeconomic classes. This is technically acceptable in a culture that encourages (and expects) us to be engaged in the long-term process of “climbing” to a better point in the economic hierarchy. But the actual process of the climb is not seen in its messy detail. For those of us outside the bubble of academic and/or economic privilege, education comes well before economic success, not alongside it; often we’re in the position of having multiple degrees, yet struggling to pay the costs of day-to-day living.

In the academic sphere, I’ve found that my interests lie at the crossroads of a number of different disciplines, including education, sociology, economics, communication studies, linguistics, and political science. I try not to be a dilettante dipping my toes into the various disciplinary deeps to add a splash of this or that to my work, but it’s hard not to create that impression when I haven’t formed the kind of strong connection to one definable area of study above all others that is considered desirable in academe.

Lastly, I know the “space” I take up at the moment is one between the position of an academic and that of student, one that PhD candidates know well, wherein we are expected to assume a high degree of professional autonomy even as we’re still considered incomplete as scholars and “knowledge workers”. As for what follows the PhD, it’s becoming more and more difficult to predict what we’ll “become” —or what will become of us—if and when we embark upon academic careers. More and more of us from all academic backgrounds may be finding ourselves between jobs or professions, trying to make sense of the shifting ground beneath us.

One of the positive effects of this bias of mine is that I’m usually not content to understand something from one angle only. I feel a need to inform myself about the “other side” of every argument. Thus being in “no place” has its strategic advantages, and I find I often act as a connector, a curator, and a translator between and among multiple groups or domains.

For most of the examples I’ve provided, I don’t know if I’ll ever find a “place” for myself that’s already named and recognizable. After all, these locations are in some ways just imagined—they are expectations we hold, but perhaps states that we never really reach—because there’s “no there, there”. All of this is about perpetual learning, and it’s usually when we don’t fit the categories provided to us that their limited nature becomes clear.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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Learning in – and from – the Great Disruption

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/03/27 at 23:40

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada

Ever since MITx got announced last December, the voices of the futurists have been out in grand numbers, predicting what it all might mean for higher education. They’re calling it “The Great Disruption,” a brand name worthy of Nostradamus.

The Globe and Mail says it‘s about time.

The Atlantic is envisioning a post-campus America.

For those of us actually enrolled in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), though – or those like me who’ve enlisted both to teach and learn within these experimental course environments – this “great disruption” feels more like an augmentation than anything else.

I think higher ed has something to learn from the experiences that I – and learners like me, merging non-traditional avenues with formalized classroom experiences – are engaging in. Those of us who’ve chosen graduate studies in spite of the much-lamented death of the tenure-track professoriate have little reason to assume that we will have any sort of protected or privileged place in the academy’s next incarnation. Yet here we are. We are, at least for the moment, part of the system. But many of us are wary of being fully subsumed into it, because we’ve been cautioned against betting the farm on that tenure path. So we keep a foot outside the tower, seeking out alternative paths to augment our learning and research; we are keeping options open.

Yet neither do we necessarily reject the academy. For myself, I don’t belong to the Do It Yourself University camp that sometimes suggests that MOOCs and unstructured online network participation are The Solution to education in the 21st century. Our world relies too heavily on credentials for me to believe that the #change11 experience would remain as open as it is if it were suddenly forced to carry the burden of standards that falls, rightly or wrongly, on formalized higher education. The logic that drives open online credentialing experiments is, thus far, only experimental.

MOOCs do disrupt business as usual, yes. Those of us in the #change11 MOOC are engaged in the course at no cost, and nobody except us is holding our learning or performance to any particular external standards. Unlike MITx, the 36 week #change11 course offers no credential. These factors all make it a significantly different experience from studying at my bricks-and-mortar university.

What #change11 gives me, though, is access to a multitude of semi-organized ideas and expert facilitators, plus a semi-coherent network of peers to work through the weeks with. That network remains largely stable even as topics and facilitators rotate weekly.

It is this participatory element – the learning of being part of a large, distributed network of people from varied backgrounds, focusing on the same topic – that enables open online experiences to offer value, even to those of us already studying in conventional institutions. That, and the speed and flexibility inherent in networked learning.

In a Google-able culture replete with neo-liberal demands for reform, efficiency, and innovation, MOOCs help those of us interested in emergent ideas participate in a public learning experience that is otherwise not really available by conventional means.

As I forge ahead with my own research, the lack of fit between learning and success on academic terms and those that social media rewards and reinforces become increasingly apparent. Journal publications lag years behind blog posts in my area of specialization. The theory that guides my research seldom addresses the online contexts in which I’m trying to apply it. But my MOOC peers and facilitators do. And so I apply the ideas shaped by traditional academic environments to those shared in distributed digital environments.

The MOOC augments my Ph.D studies by making it possible for me to be a public thinker and learner; by giving me up-to-the-minute access to the conversations shaping and driving my field, and the opportunity to participate in these conversations. They are available on the wider internet, certainly. But MOOCs help curate and cohere them, and also overtly create them. MOOCs don’t just bring disparate networks and opportunities into focus; they carve out explicit teaching and learning spaces within the information overload of contemporary social media.

Will these type of practice ultimately have an impact of the teaching and learning spaces of traditional institutions? I hope so. But not necessarily in the ways heralded by media.

Too often, MOOCs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it – are written about primarily as dramatic new business models.

It’s true that there’s potential in that direction. And Sebastian Thrun et al seem intent on mining it, while all of watch breathlessly.

But that market lens on massive open coursework misses one of the central elements of the great disruption: education is not solely a business, or a credential-machine. It’s also about learning.

And with MOOCs, those of us acculturated to academia have the opportunity to learn new, responsive, participatory ways of fostering public knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional institutions. The disruption may be profound, certainly. But so may be the possibilities.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed 

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Scrabble, Tea, and Superheroes

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2012/03/15 at 03:43

Deanna England, writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada

I really like Facebook Scrabble – I spend far too much time on there, with only a vague justification that it “increases my vocabulary.” Over my Christmas holidays, I spent the vast majority of my 10 days off napping and finding new Scrabble opponents. All my grandiose plans of completing my Special Studies proposal (Sex and Jane Austen – woo!), preparing my section of the introduction for the book I’m working on, editing chapters for said book, submitting papers to journals and/or conferences – yeah, none of that happened. Well, the barest minimum of it happened anyhow.

In between naps I found time to email the ever-so-wonderful Mary Churchill, my editor here at the University of Venus to tell her that I was simply incapable of doing a post every month. I was beginning to have anxiety attacks over it. After sending that email, but before my tenth nap of the holidays I began to berate myself. Am I lazy? Unmotivated? Do I deserve to be here? I was convinced that I was about to get my first B+ in a course towards my degree, had no idea how to contribute to a book, and just generally felt like a pile of exhausted goo.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I found myself editing my share of the chapters for the book. As I wrote in my notes that this sentence was awkward, or she really should have considered that primary source, I was suddenly struck by the seeming absurdity of it all. I am a Master’s student. Who am *I* to be telling tenured faculty that they neglected to consider Freud when constructing their paper? Surely they had already thought of that themselves and had positively brilliant reasons for not including him.  I fell back into my gooey state of self-doubt.

I expressed my concerns about my seeming laziness to a trusted confidante and was greeted with (somewhat comforting) jaw-dropping shock. She first attempted to talk me down off the ledge over the B+ (Will it ultimately matter if I didn’t get straight A’s in this program? Will I still get the degree? Who is judging me other than myself?) and then started deconstructing this laziness fallacy.

Are you working full-time? Yes. Are you doing a graduate degree at the same time? Yes. Do you have extra-curricular activities? Yes. What? Well, there’s the book, and writing for the University of Venus and assisting with the coordination of the Winnipeg SlutWalk and my new involvement in a sexual empowerment and education group on events and writing and… OK, do you have a family? Yes. Friends? Yes. Romantic relationship? Yes. Laundry? Groceries? Housecleaning? Bills to pay? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Honestly? I had to go through the entire exercise before I got the point. I genuinely interpreted my sleep and lack of accomplishments over the holidays as a sign of failure. Confession: it’s sometimes a challenge to work for Senior Administration at a University. I see everything they do – committee work, supervising staff, teaching, publications, meetings upon meetings upon meetings, travel, research….How dare I aspire to anything less than that? Doesn’t it mean that I’m a lesser person? Weaker somehow? How do they accomplish such superhuman feats of productivity and still remain…pleasant?

I don’t actually know the answer to that question. But it does reinforce the importance of this mental health initiative that the University is constructing. And while the details of the large initiative are still being sorted out, I am on a sub-committee that is becoming increasingly important to me, as I wade through my own journey of exhaustion, potential over-achievement disguised as laziness, and self-doubt.

“Take 5” is the name of the event. It will be a week-long program of activities on campus that provides free yoga, dodge ball tournaments, massages, prizes, tea breaks and so much more. Last year when working on this, I viewed it as something “for the students.” This year it struck me that I am one of those students. And I could certainly benefit from taking a 5 minute break for some tea.  It’s a simple enough concept, take a breather, appreciate what’s going on around you, and take care of yourself without feeling guilty for doing so. It’s funny how much easier it is to give advice than to take it.

This year though, I think I really want to throw a dodge ball at someone – it sounds deliciously C-A-T-H-A-R-T-I-C.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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The Awkwardness of Multiple Roles in the Academy

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2010/06/02 at 09:00

Guest blogger, Deanna England, writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Last week marked the beginning of my Graduate Studies journey. And while I was thrilled beyond belief to have been accepted, I was concerned about the potential for awkwardness resulting from being both a Graduate Studies Officer and Student:

What if the students were uncomfortable as I switched from an advisor and administrator to a member of their cohort and peer? Could they strike the same balance as I must with these conflicting identities? What if the faculty had the same concerns? Could they grade and instruct me while acquiescing to my requests regarding their programs and committees? Could I remember to remain silent when the students were questioning something about which I had confidential information?

I gave myself a firm talking to and decided that I would own this program. I am doing this for myself, and no one else. I couldn’t let the potential for awkwardness bar my way to academic greatness. I was resolute.

Then 15 minutes before class a panic attack of comically epic proportions hit me. What if I failed? What if this was a huge mistake? What was I thinking? I couldn’t escape the idea that I had been accepted into the program because the committee couldn’t figure out how to say no. Did they feel pressure to accept me? How would it look if I quit now? Perhaps I could make up some “emergency”??

I called a friend and she talked me off the ledge. I saw students slowly trickling in, all of whom I knew by face and name. I edged my way into the room and spent an inordinate amount of time settling and choosing a desk. No one seemed to notice.

This gave me courage. My heart rate returned to normal, and I resumed my “resolute” frame of mind. This is my degree, and I can do this. Suddenly it all seemed rather funny. I remembered that I was not the first person to follow this journey, and that really, this is supposed to fun and interesting – not dramatic.

The instructor walked in and chose me to begin the “why am I here” and “who am I” introductions. I voiced my interest and apprehensions and found that I really wasn’t so different from any of them. The class moved predictably along, and I found that no one really cared who I was outside of the room. That was the best revelation of all. None of us were coping or performing – it was natural.

I breathed a sigh of relief and prepared for the next class. I wasn’t sure yet how comfortable I would be in speaking. The first class was primarily an introduction, so this second class would more clearly tell me whether I was cut out for this sort of thing. And of course, I was fine. I had done the readings and even had some insights to share. The professor is a delight, and I practically skipped out of the class with glee.

I’m aware that it’s only one course, and I have three more years to go. And I’m aware that there may yet be a time when I will have to recuse myself from a particular discussion. And I’m aware that awkwardness might yet sneak up on me from an unexpected source. But for now – I’m in love with graduate studies.

Deanna England is currently the Graduate Studies Officer at The University of Winnipeg. She graduated with an honours degree in Psychology in 1998 and worked in marketing and events for seven years before returning to Academia. This year she will begin her Master’s degree in English with a Focus in Cultural Studies exploring chosen cultures including women’s identification with the erotic community including blogs and fan fiction.

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My First Pesach: Diasporic Offerings of Sorrow and Hope

In Guest Blogger, That's So Next Generation on 2010/04/01 at 09:00

Guest blogger, Malissa Phung, writing from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

I would like to dedicate this piece to Max Haiven and Alyson McCready.

Surrounded by friends, friends and family of friends, I attended my first Passover this spring. On that first night of Passover, we sat in a circle and took turns reading sections of the Haggadah, the guide to the Seder ceremony that one of our hosts had rewritten years ago for a graduate course on diaspora. At any point during the ceremony, we were encouraged to interrupt the service with any questions, comments, debates, and especially jokes. We were also invited beforehand to share our own creative work or works of inspiration that related thematically to any of the sections of this unconventional Haggadah, unconventional for its radically politicized, anti-racist, anti-Zionist, and anti-every-other-oppression-ist bent.

For the section on remembering our losses, called the Zecher, I welled up with tears when I shared this poem that I had written last year about my late stepfather who had died in 1998:

Enlightenment

Everything I know
about Buddhism
I know
because of you.

I was only a child
then–I believed in you
I believed, I believed
in every word
you said.

One night I sat, cross-legged
and prayed, in front of
the altar because
you
told me to.

That night
instead of going to bed
that night because
you
told me to

I chanted
I chanted
a thousand
and one prayers:

Quan The Am Bo Tat…
Quan The Am Bo Tat…
Quan The Am Bo Tat…

I was too young
to understand
the journey.

I have lost my way since
the night you left me
the night
Quan Am passed me by.

What struck me about everything leading up to that moment was the generosity and creative impulse of my hosts to recreate and re-envision this Passover for themselves and their friends, most of whom were politicized non-Jewish folks affiliated with the English and Cultural Studies department, most of whom, like my hosts, had moved far away from home to go to grad school. Being around these folks on that first night of Passover and hearing about the pains and losses associated with migration and historical oppressions triggered an acute awareness of my own diasporic losses. In that one moment as I welled up with tears, I realized that I had been mourning.

For the longest time, I had been mourning the loss of my stepfather and all the good and bad memories of him. I realized in that melancholic moment that his death had closed a definite part of my life: a life of speaking primarily in Vietnamese, a life of daily prayers and the burning smell of joss sticks, a life of family meals and reliable intimacies, a life of ritual and satisfied bellies.

As a child, my stepfather had always spoken to me as though I were an adult. We would stay up late and talk for hours about things I could vaguely understand. In an ironic turn of events, I find myself today—as a Gen Y Chinese Canadian female literary scholar approaching thirty—only capable of speaking to my family with a child’s vocabulary. This language barrier entails more than just late-onset assimilation. It entails a loss of family connections and intimacies. It leaves me feeling lonely and isolated.

Overfilling with melancholic grief, I still managed to leave the Passover with an incredible feeling of hope. I left amazed at how my hosts have made this hybrid Jewish ceremony so meaningful for themselves and their friends for the past five years, and that it evolves and changes every spring. But after completing their dissertations this year, they will be moving back home to Halifax. Another hybrid ceremony will have to be created to help fill the palpable absence they will leave behind.

Malissa Phung

Growing up mostly in Edmonton, Alberta, Malissa Phung was born in Red Deer, Alberta to ethnically Vietnamese immigrants of Chinese descent.  She now lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she is completing a PhD in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.  Having completed her comprehensive exams in settler colony literatures, she is currently exploring Canadian literary representations of Chinese settlers in her dissertation project, which analyzes how settlers of colour are figured ambivalently as colonial settlers in Canada.  Every now and then, in stark moments of procrastination, she still manages to write creatively.  Her current literary project—Chinawoman—looks at the history of  Chinese sex workers smuggled into 19th Century Canada.

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Academia Dreams

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2010/03/30 at 09:00

Guest blogger – Deanna England writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Twelve years ago I graduated with an honours degree in Psychology, inordinately proud yet without any intention of doing anything about it. I walked across the stage feeling simultaneously thrilled and bereft. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself, I just knew that after five years, I was leaving an institution that I had come to love as a home.

While spending ten years working my way up the corporate ladder, the University never left my thoughts. My memories became saturated with rosy-coloured nostalgia and took on a kind of hazy glow. I began volunteering for the Alumni Association in an attempt to re-connect.

This wasn’t enough for me. Soon I applied to every job offered there, eventually getting the one I was convinced I was the least qualified for: working in Graduate Studies. All I had was an honours degree, so a part of me felt like a fraud – concerned that I would constantly be feeling subordinate to the very students I was endeavouring to help.

However, my boss knew something I didn’t – I absolutely love it. Working in education gives you the sense that you’re doing something that you can’t quite get in the corporate world. Yes, you can broker some impressive deals, and make a lot of money – but there’s an inherent emptiness there that’s simply not present in education.

Working in a school has given me the much-needed fulfillment that I was longing for. I have grandiose dreams of finding that little bit of funding for a student that will make all the difference in them: curing cancer, or finding that long-lost Shakespearean manuscript, or bringing all the cultures together in peace and harmony. I have visions of my students presenting papers at world summits, receiving Nobel prizes, having statues erected in their honour…

Ok, maybe not.

But at least I go home at the end of the day feeling happy and satisfied.

Last spring I had the opportunity to sit in on a department meeting for a Master’s program that was going to be launched the next year. Hearing the passion and enthusiasm of the faculty for courses that didn’t even exist yet was truly inspiring. In that meeting I discovered: Cultural Studies. Studying people and cultures and society without trudging knee-deep into someone’s psyche? That’s something I could get on board with. I walked out with a warm fuzzy glow of happiness that such a program existed in the world.

And it stayed with me. I found myself re-reading my meeting notes constantly. It struck me – why couldn’t I take this program? I could start learning again – a prospect both terrifying and exhilarating. The memories I had of the kind of abstract thinking you’re required to do in undergrad had faded from my mind. Twelve years of concrete thought and speech made me doubt myself. In fact, I had no idea how to even prepare the personal statement required with the application. The terror however, was no match for the sense of excitement and purpose that overshadowed this project. I was going to be a student again.

Deanna England is currently the Graduate Studies Officer at The University of Winnipeg. She graduated with an honours degree in Psychology in 1998 and worked in marketing and events for seven years before returning to Academia. This year she will begin her Master’s degree in English with a Focus in Cultural Studies exploring chosen cultures including women’s identification with the erotic community including blogs and fan fiction.

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