GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’

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How Journals Put Us Behind the Times

In Liminal Thinking on 2012/02/16 at 01:44

Denise Horn, writing from Boston, Massachusetts in the US.

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.

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Dreaming of the Ideal Student

In Conversations on 2012/02/09 at 02:17

Each month, the writers at University of Venus share their answers to a question we pose for the higher education sector.

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

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Globalisation of Digital Humanities: An Uneven Promise

In Ernesto's Posts on 2012/02/07 at 01:54

Ernesto Priego, writing from London, England in the UK.

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”.

My lecture (the slides are available here) explored how blogging fits within different models of academic knowledge production and research cycles. Using examples from music and popular culture as guiding examples, I discussed the importance of innovation and the positive power of disruptive change, explored blogging initiatives I personally admire and engage in, and suggested good practices and paths for future action.

Meeting with colleagues and students from my home university was a very fruitful and thought-provoking experience. They  were eager to learn and debate the ways in which blogging can be adopted as a method to increase teaching and research outputs and, perhaps more importantly, to increase the international visibility of the academic work which is already being done.  There was a special interest in discussing ways in which intellectual property can be protected and shared online, and in the technical requirements of setting an academic blog with its own domain.

One of the ideas I took with me was how important it is to realise the significant infrastructural differences between academic institutions around the world. This means going beyond the usual common-sense educated awareness that not all countries, and therefore not all academic institutions enjoy, or suffer, the same structural conditions (funding, human resources, access to technology, salaries, academic work and “impact” cultures).

In this case, it means understanding that in a globalised higher education market, some simple measures, involving digital literacy strategies, can be, for the time being, an initial step towards preventing a normalization which often leaves many scholars out of the competition. It is no secret that “the promise of the digital humanities” is being pushed upwards and forward to the academic mainstream in the form of significant funding granted to projects involving digital technologies for teaching and research in the humanities, like the one provided by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States or JISC in the United Kingdom. In the specific case of Mexico, though the National University and the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) fund projects that would fit within a digital humanities category, the sums granted and the global impact of the initiatives pale in comparison, not least because of very different cultural and disciplinary attitudes to the perceived relationships between computer technologies and the humanities. (I must add that had it not been for CONACYT, I would have never been able to start and finish a PhD!).

The feedback I received from the audience was that following best practices (including reliable multilingual metadata) for personal academic blogging holds a lot of potential for educational environments where it is harder to achieve quick and significant institutional change. Projects such as the Biblioteca de Pensamiento Novohispano, Estrategias de Lectura and Reflexiones marginales have recently received funding to continue their work of digital scholarship, and the Mexican Digital Humanities Network blog (Red the Humanistas Digitales) is gradually improving their output and playing a role in forming a new generation of digital scholars.

It seems to me that “the promise of the digital humanities” is not only where the big money is; it is also where innovation using readily-available and inexpensive technologies is at work. The recognition of digital scholarship in the form of institutional funding is an essential step in the advancement of the digital humanities, but we should also be aware of the increasing digital divide between institutions and scholars. This year, international collaboration with a focus on open access, interoperability when possible/desirable, affordable technologies and sustainability might be one of the essential steps towards the fulfillment of that promise.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Get Smarter

In Anamaria's Posts on 2012/02/04 at 07:48

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund, Sweden.

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.

 


Going “Home”

In Lee's Posts on 2012/02/02 at 02:36

Lee Skallerup Bessette, writing from Morehead, Kentucky in the US. 

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.

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The Missing Link in Teaching

In Afshan's Posts on 2012/01/26 at 08:18

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US.

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 .

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Networking aka Getting Outside the Comfort Zone

In Liana's Posts on 2012/01/25 at 01:15

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

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.

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When Worlds Collide

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/01/24 at 09:40

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

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.

Academics seem particularly prone to such celestial crises.  University towns the world over make neighbors of colleagues in a manner my husband has never experienced in his post-modern/post company town, private sector career.  When you see your supervisors at the block party you experience both your relationship with them and with the rest of your neighbors differently.  Warmer more personable connections not only fuel workplace camaraderie, but also mean you are never entirely unguarded.  Friends and neighbors who work in far-flung professional roles can gripe over a beer about their annoying colleagues.  No such indiscretion can creep into the fully integrated work-life community.

The flip-side of integration besets those like the University of Iowa professor who besmirched his non-academic neighbors in print and may find himself pilloried at his neighborhood park.  Valparaiso University Professor Mark Schwehn described the dislocation from elite and urbane graduate institutions to colleges surrounded by cornfields year ago in his Exiles from Eden.  Such exiles also dance among the dangers of collided worlds, but they are profoundly different.  Everyone can easily spot those who despise their surroundings.  They need not unveil themselves publicly in the pages of The Atlantic.  Their disdain seeps from their pores, poisons any positive aspects of their experience, and deepens the gulf between them and their enforced community.

This contempt is a tragic by-product of the need to take a tenure-line job – any tenure-line job – no-matter how miserable it makes you.   A lucky few land upon the tenure track at their dream institution whether ethereal coastline colleges or research universities with convenient commutes to city centers.  Schwehn found his perfectly integrated calling at his Lutheran university.  Others, like me, opt for life off-the tenure track but within worlds we encourage to collide.  It is a huge and scary leap (and one I continue to question) to opt for my culture of choice over tenure’s “brass ring.”  I don’t know if anyone has studied how many of us make this active choice.  I suspect more women are willing to sacrifice prestige on paper in order to balance to dual-careers and child-rearing in a metropolitan area over the sparse professional options of rural college towns.

I have been both a culturally dislocated faculty member and observed those relocated to my beloved alma mater against their will.  Disaffection fails to serve anyone well.  It’s one thing to be a swinging single scholar on the move.  Singletons dig in and either grow roots or sow scholarly oats (aka articles and books) that allow them to move to their definition of a more desirable location.  Those of us who enter the job market with partners and progeny in tow experience any culture shock in exponential form.  The weeping wife, the harried husband, the crying child simultaneously detracts from our own integration into the new institution and limits our access to any means of escape.  Suppressed, silent misery causes less offense than forthright rants, but just as surely sucks the pleasure from life and power from pedagogy.

All this returns me to my marvelously collided worlds.  I’ll gladly stick to one margarita at the block party and bite my tongue about university politics on play-dates in order to live where my entire family feels at home.  When I self-edit, I do so to maintain the intermingled communities I love, not to hide my misery and protect a paycheck.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Teacher as Team Leader? Maybe

In Janine's Posts on 2012/01/23 at 08:28

Janine Utell, writing from Chester, Pennsylvania in the US.

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 .

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Administration Ambitions

In Janni's Posts on 2012/01/21 at 02:06

Janni Aragon, writing from Victoria, Britsh Columbia in Canada.

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.

My first paid job was as a tutor. I continued tutoring throughout my undergraduate days and as a Graduate Student, I found the Teaching Assistantships rewarding. It is no exaggeration to say that I probably love teaching more than I did in 1998, when I taught my first class, but I also have come to realize that there is work to be done in administration. We also need more women administrators and I know that the only way to change this is to actually take the leap and go into administration. I have no desire to stop teaching, though. I also know that there are certain units in campus that I have a natural inclination toward.
One of the best parts of my job is the repeated opportunity to mentor students. I find that I can mentor in the classroom, but the really priceless moments take place during my office hours. My office hours as an Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Political Science offer those teachable moments for me and my students. When I saw the posting for the Associate Dean of Academic Advising, it looked like a perfect fit for my skill set and desire to help students on campus. I am not going to lie; right before I clicked send my heart was fluttering. I sent my dossier and hoped for the phone call—the one that informs me that I made the shortlist. I got the phone call and my interview is next month.

The reaction by some co-workers has been surprising. A few were surprised that I would entertain having an administrative role and leave the classroom. One remarked that it is unfortunate that good instructors (reference to reputation and university evaluations) go into administration. I understand the unease, but think that a university needs people who want to go into administration and these people should enjoy teaching, mentoring, research, and service.

The interview is in early January and my fingers are crossed. But the reality is that if I do not get the position, as an Undergraduate Advisor, I will work closely with the new Associate Dean to support projects to improve advising on campus. Either way, the good news is that the committee perused my dossier and shortlisted me. The next time there is another administrative job that is in my area of interest, I’ll apply for it.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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