GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

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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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The Death of the Lecture

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 Of the many things we discussed during that lunch, the idea of the outdated lecture stayed with me, I decided to dedicate this post to a critique of this method of teaching.

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

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

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

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

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

Further readings:

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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The R1 Bias*

In Afshan's Posts on 2012/04/03 at 00:14

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

Having been out of graduate school for several years now, it’s easy to forget sometimes that the advice we received in graduate school often did not match our reality or our preferences. I’ve written about the “publish or perish” emphasis and the lack of emphasis on teaching in most graduate programs.  There are other manifestations of this lopsided emphasis on research.

Recently, I was reminded of the lopsidedness, when I volunteered to do a “Critique Me!” session at the winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) this year. At this session, faculty from all kinds of institutions and backgrounds volunteer to offer advice to current graduate students regarding the job market. They specifically offer advice on each person’s CV, personal statement and whatever other materials they may have brought with them. The organizer of the session very accurately described the format as similar to “speed dating”. The “experts” sat at different tables and every twenty minutes students moved around from one table to another.  We briefly explained our background/expertise (such as working at a small liberal arts college, part of an academic couple) so that students could identify who matched their interests the most. More organizations need to do sessions like these, and in a moment you’ll see why.

Even though I had volunteered to serve as an “expert”, I was unsure. How much advice could I have to offer? I’m only in my fourth-year as a tenure-track faculty after all. I thought so many things I have to say would be . . . obvious. Turns out, I’ve forgotten what it was like to be a graduate student at a research university. My most interesting exchange was with a graduate student who sat down at my table and started her introduction with something along the lines of “I know you’re at a small liberal arts college, and I don’t want to teach at one, but I still wanted to talk to you . . .” She went on to tell me how much she absolutely loves teaching (which is the reason she decided to get a PhD) but also wants to do research, so the only option for her would be an R1 institution.

Whoa. Here was a passionate and enthusiastic student, one who considers teaching to be close to her heart and she will only consider an R1? What made her think that an R1 was her only option? Now, don’t get me wrong. Of course there are amazing teachers at R1s (I had some of them!), but they don’t normally go there because they love to teach and feel like it is their calling in life.  So I asked her: If you love teaching so much, how come you don’t want to consider a small college?  Turns out that somewhere along the way, she had picked up the idea that small liberal arts colleges, for instance, just make you teach and teach and never leave any time for research. Not only that, she was led to believe that research isn’t rewarded or expected at small liberal arts colleges.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Why have I been working so hard at my scholarship then?

Once I cleared up these misconceptions and told her about what life is like at a small liberal arts college like mine, she seemed thrilled. Maybe even relieved. She then told me how a liberal arts option is never really discussed and how people treat her love of teaching as a naïve preoccupation, one that she’ll outgrow once she’s in the real world.

The devaluing of a small liberal arts career is connected to the devaluing of teaching, of course, but it’s also connected to the exaltation of research institutions over any other kind of institution. Why are we trained in graduate school to think of R1s as our top choice? Why do we want our “brightest” students to land at R1s? Having been to a small liberal arts college for my undergraduate degree, then to an R1 for my graduate degree, and now back to a small liberal arts college as faculty, I can tell you that I wouldn’t trade my experience at a liberal arts college for anything, not even for an R1 job.

This is not a denigration of R1 institutions by any means. It is simply a plea to graduate programs to acknowledge that not every one of their students will be happy in a large research institution. If we want graduate students to succeed (that is, be happy in their choices and careers), we need to consider their interests, passions and strengths and advise them accordingly.  But before we can do that, we have to let go of the idea of the research university as the best job in academia.

* I realize that Carnegie has officially dropped this classification. But I use this term in this post, because 1) it is still commonly used, and 2) because it does symbolize the high ranking we give to research universities.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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What If You Could Do Anything?

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/03/16 at 04:23

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

I ask students this all the time. If money and geography were no object, where would you go and what would you do? My job is to help their wildest dreams become reality. This week someone asked me what I would teach, if I could teach anything. I panicked.

First, just as students doubt my veracity, I doubted my questioner. He didn’t really mean anything. He meant within the bounds of the curriculum. To be fair, I don’t mean queen of the fairies or king of the world when I pose the question. I mean architect in Amsterdam, soprano at La Scala, zoologist in Zambia, etc.  Even so, freedom is terrifying.

Second, my mind raced. Here was my chance “to dream the impossible dream.” Don’t blow it! Say something unbelievably creative and compelling, right now!  I recited courses I’d taught before and the standard array of material I’d proven myself qualified to teach in graduate school and more recent scholarship. Woo hoo! Who is this boring woman? I posed a slight stretch comparative course that would necessitate a colleague’s participation. I’ll give myself half a point for that. I dared to share my fairy queen fantasy – a course on Bollywood, which we agreed belongs in another school altogether. My La Scala moment eluded me, and I’m still mad.

I embarked upon this blog in hope that I would arrive at a delayed answer via my virtual re-visitation of the conversation and my inadequate reply. I want students to step into the past with me and embrace its unexpected lessons. I don’t care who begat whom among the high or low born. I like to pass among the ghosts and see the world through their eyes to the extent I can. When that happens as I read a poignant diary entry or detailed newspaper description, the veil of eternity lifts. I want to share that. Guess what? It’s hard.

I want to take my students through the portal to the past so they will not stand on a Florida stage at some future date and proclaim opponents’ staffers “bad historians,” because they disagree over chronology while utterly incapable of making the empathetic leap into others’ lives themselves. I want my students to enter other real (not fictional) people’s lives and ensure that they look at rioters and riot police as beings with mothers, lovers, dreams, and despairs similar to their own.

To achieve this goal with greatest efficacy, I would need a time machine. Although my sons are at work on a device to break “the space time continuum,” I can’t build it into the curriculum just yet. Instead, I must rely on an assortment of old documents, contemporary discussions, and pedagogical alchemy to transport students through time by different means.

Wither? When I’ve taught before, we’ve galloped across sixteenth-century Europe and crisscrossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as I’ve attempted to guide my charges through the world that was and in many ways still is.

Certain episodes make my task easier. Three Sovereigns for Sarah allows them to experience the Salem witchcraft trials acted expertly by Vanessa Redgrave with the actual documents for her script as opposed to the exponential fiction of Daniel Day-Lewis ulcerating in The Crucible. Few historical moments demonstrate social-political self-destruction with such visceral impact, but it feeds the fantasy that all the world was New England until 1776. It wasn’t. Puritans just produced more words per person than most.

I want the rising generation to meet Conrad Weiser as he moves across an ocean, up the Hudson and down the Schuylkill in conversation with Natives and Europeans of multiple tongues but few printed words. I want students to enter the lives that desperate widows and runaway wives patched together in the colonial countryside.

So many men, women, and children flit though my mental landscape from Portland to Pune all while I realize that I’ve missed millions more who could shed light on the delights and dilemmas of the human condition. If I could do anything and teach anything, I would visit them all with students in tow.  I just need that machine….
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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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.

 

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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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What Are You Teaching Next Semester?

In Uncategorized on 2011/05/16 at 07:23

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Missouri in the USA 

I have been an adjunct for almost a year now. Last January, amid a flurry of stress, and uncertainty about my future, I decided I would not adjunct after this spring semester. Actually, I thought about it long and hard, but it didn’t feel official until the division chair asked me how many sections I was interested in signing up for; I made an appointment with the chair, and explained that I would not be coming back.

My decision, ultimately, was a financial one. When I needed a job in Kansas City and didn’t find one right away I applied for an adjunct position. I didn’t feel comfortable with adjuncting because I knew what the working conditions would be like, but I figured an adjunct job was better than nothing. Why not continue doing the thing I love instead of waiting for a callback? But I quickly found out I couldn’t live on an adjunct’s pay.

(I know I could have pieced together several courses from several schools, like so many adjuncts do. But it would have been at the expense of my dissertation–which already takes up a lot of my time outside of class–and my home life. I am aware many adjuncts do just that, and they balance things just fine. However, I decided not to so.)

My feelings wavered between excitement (what does my future hold? It could hold anything!) and fear (what does my future hold? It could hold nothing at all!) Plus, I have financial obligations; what would happen with that? And what about teaching?

As I labored away at my dissertation and prepped lesson plans, I wondered. Would I be happy if I didn’t teach for a while? Should I find a full-time job outside of academia? Maybe higher ed administration is a better fit for me? Would anyone even consider me, without my diploma in hand? Life after May seemed like one big question mark built with questions in a tiny font.

In the meantime, I re-discovered my love for writing. I struggled with the revisions for my first chapter, and tried to deal with that by free writing and developing a writing routine. Now, I make sure to write every day, and I’m writing about much more than just my dissertation. I am writing like I used to when I was an undergrad. Writing and literature were the things that propelled me to become an English major a long time ago. Teaching was an extension of that: I wanted to share the pleasure of reading with others and help them read texts with a critical eye.

Even though my holy grail was to teach literature, along the way I also became a writing instructor. I learned more about the craft of writing than I ever did as a student. I don’t know if my students believe me, but the things I teach in my writing classes are the things I practice in my own writing. I have learned that writing is not a matter of memorizing rules and style guides.

I have discovered that these things, writing and reading, still move me.

As I reflected upon these things this semester, I wondered if I’d ever go back to teaching. I could stay in touch outside of the classroom with the things I love. My degrees and skills are valid outside of the academy, even if in a different capacity. And I had fallen in love with my research again—it was a matter of recognizing that it should not be the only thing that defines me. It’s okay to have other interests as well.

I have applied for academic and non-academic jobs, and so far I think I’ll be okay outside of the classroom for now. But it wasn’t until I read this blog post at Red Lips and Academics that I really thought about my relationship to teaching. As I commented there, I am still mourning the fact that I will not teach in the fall. I hope to come back to the classroom. Maybe it won’t be a traditional classroom. Maybe it won’t be in a tenure-track position. One thing is certain: I will always be engaged with writing, literature, and teaching.

Goodnight, College Classroom, and good luck.

Liana Silva is a PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University in New York, and a writing instructor at a community college in Kansas City, MO. She is currently working on her dissertation, an interdisciplinary study on the concept of home and urban space in African American and Puerto Rican cultural productions. On top of that she is busy raising a daughter and settling into their new home in Kansas City. You can follow her short bursts of thought on twitter.com/literarychica or her longer, better organized ideas at soundingoutblog.com

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Teaching or Service?

In Uncategorized on 2011/04/13 at 21:30

Lee Skallerup Bessette, writing from Kentucky in the USA.

I am a full-time instructor. At my institution, this means that I have a heavier teaching load, but it also means that I have no service responsibilities whatsoever; no committees, no advising, no curriculum reform, no administrative duties, nothing. My department allows for me to participate in departmental committees and tries to ensure that we, the instructors, are properly represented, but at the end of the day, we are not required, nor do we receive any credit. In fact, our yearly evaluations are restricted to speaking about our teaching. In other words, even if we have served on committees or performed other “service” duties, it will not be mentioned.

The problem becomes when the lines are less clear. Where does teaching start and service begin? If I am working to, say, help revamp how developmental writing is taught, am I in fact acting as a teacher or an administrator? If I am doing it for myself, then we expect individual teachers to revise their courses, thus making it a part of my responsibilities as a teacher. But, when it crosses over to program-wide changes…

Here is a rock and a hard place where I currently find myself: change is coming, and as an instructor, I can either have the change done to me by those who clearly have the responsibility of service, but often don’t actually teach the courses in question, or I can participate and potentially get sucked into a service role that I will not be rewarded for in any way. Neither option, to me, is particularly appealing.

When we talk about research not being a requirement, there is a clear benefit to both the institution and the individual if the instructor chooses to continue doing research. My institution would seem to understand that link by making available funding to go to conferences, do research over the summer, and other activities. For me, it helps my C.V. and, depending on my research, makes me a better teacher, not to mention a more satisfied employee. For the institution, they receive the prestige of their name appearing in conference programs or publications and happy, “cutting edge” instructors.

Service becomes a much more problematic proposition. Who really benefits from the service the faculty (tenure and non-tenure track) provide? What is the benefit of excluding instructors from the service requirement, and thus the administrative process? For me, the only real benefit is cost; an instructor is paid less than a tenure-track faculty. In some ways, not being required to perform service duties is a gift; more time for teaching, less time in endless meetings. And it is the benefit the university supplies me; we’ll pay you less, but we’ll also expect less from you.

But.

With the ever-increasing number of faculty who are off the tenure-track, the people who are running the university are becoming more and more disconnected from the people actually doing the teaching. As an instructor, I go to departmental meetings if only to have my face seen by the tenure-track and tenured faculty: I am here, I exist. It is all too easy to “forget” that instructors (and adjuncts) make up a large piece of the teaching puzzle when they are never at the meetings or events. We never learn the inner-workings, nor do we have any say. I want to help rework the way we teach developmental writing because I don’t want it done to me; I don’t want to be implicitly told, you’re good enough to teach the classes, but not good enough to have any say on how they are taught.

We are hired by the university because we have the proper credentials and experience. We are approved by our (strict) accrediting board. But because of a decision to save money (among others), we are excluded from the larger process that takes place within the university. There is extra money to be had for those who look to do research, why isn’t there a similar pool of funds to support instructors who are or want to perform more service or administrative duties? What is so sacred about the tenure-track that says those of us who aren’t on it can’t take on official leadership roles?

This is another reason why I am so discouraged about the direction and future of higher education. For an institution that claims to value inclusiveness, it sure goes out of its way to make sure a majority of us receive the message that we aren’t welcome at the grown-up table where the decisions are made, at least not if we want to eat.

 

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Drill, Baby, Drill?

In Uncategorized on 2011/03/21 at 21:47

Afshan Jafar, writing from Connecticut in the USA

I like tigers. The animal, that is, not the human variety that has cropped up lately. Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom” has gotten a lot of attention in the press for the shocking admissions of her parenting style. I won’t discuss her parenting here. But since she is a professor at Yale Law School, her book made me wonder: what is she like in the classroom? As a mother who demanded nothing less than A’s from her children and did not balk at calling them “garbage”, or “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic”, who barred them from being in school plays and insisted on them learning to play the piano and violin (no other instruments were allowed), how does she approach her students? Is there such a creature as a “tiger professor”?

I know the tiger professor exists. I’ve had some of them. They believe in “drilling”, and rote learning (as does Chua), and not tolerating any deviance from their idea of perfection. I don’t want to dismiss the value of repetition in learning to do a task well. I still remember my multiplication tables from second grade and it’s a skill that comes in handy. And I am appalled when my students misspell common words that I learnt in first grade. But I also know that some of my most satisfying moments in my educational career have been when I’ve been able to figure out (or been given the liberty to pursue) the whys, when I was allowed to bend the rules of drawing and painting, when I wrote a paper that I really enjoyed, and not the one that would necessarily get me an “A”.

I have to admit, as a young student I was that person who didn’t really “get” Mathematics. Yet I was able to get good grades not because I understood it necessarily, but because I was able to follow the specific steps required to get to the correct answers as I was expected to. But I have a sister whose Math abilities amaze me. She “gets it”. She can see the logic and the process behind the calculations, while I never could. She spent many hours trying to get me to see the connections between the various steps involved in a formula. Yet, I was the one who got better grades – I was good at producing the desired answers in the limited time frame allotted for tests and exams.

So I must ask: what kinds of tasks can be accomplished by repetition and drilling? What kind of learning takes place? And what kind of appreciation for the subject does it inculcate in the person performing the task?

There is a lot of national unrest and concern about our test-scores, and our failing education system, as there should be. But before we get completely swept up in the discussion of tiger moms (I’m sure tiger teachers and professors are next) as the saviors of nations from mediocrity and self-indulgence, perhaps it makes sense to think about the whys along with the whats of our pedagogical techniques. It is no surprise that Chua’s younger daughter gave up the violin (one of their constant battles). You can teach a person to do certain things by “drilling” them but can you teach them to love it? Can you inspire students to create, to innovate by rote learning?

What if Van Gogh had a tiger mom or a tiger teacher? What about Einstein? Do we inspire people by demanding conventional perfection? Should we drill our children and our students into coloring inside the lines, using “proper” colors, traditional techniques, or let them create something? Do we not turn the piano, violin, math, dance, or any kind of learning, into a mechanical activity when it becomes a task to be accomplished, instead of something we love, understand, and appreciate?

I said earlier that I like tigers. And I do. I would have no objection to espousing a tiger parenting or teaching style, if the label accurately resembled the methods of real tigers. Tigers may be fierce animals, but when it comes to caring for their young, they are also gentle, and nurture them for a long time. They are in no hurry to demand perfection or “appropriate” behavior from them. Have you ever seen how much fun tiger cubs have with each other and their mother as they pounce, flop, and chase their tails around? But don’t let that fool you; amidst all that “unbecoming” and often clumsy behavior, they are actually honing their hunting skills.

 

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