GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

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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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Communication, not Edutainment

In Uncategorized on 2011/03/06 at 12:48

Guest blogger,  Melonie Fullick, writing from Toronto, Canada

How do we, as tutorial leaders or professors, deal with the revelation that students find classes or entire subject areas “boring?” And to what extent is it our responsibility to get them “interested?” These were questions that came to mind as I read Itir Toksöz’s recent UVenus post about “academic boredom”. While she was discussing the boredom she experiences in conversation with colleagues, my first thought was that boredom is not just (potentially) a problem for and with academics, but also for students.

I see boredom as something other than a mere lack of interest. I think of it as a stand-in for frustration, which can, in turn, stem from a sense of exclusion from the material, from the discussion, from the class, from understanding the point of it all; ultimately an exclusion from the enjoyment of learning. This can happen when the material is too challenging, or when the student doesn’t really want to be in the class for some reason.

Boredom is sometimes about fear, the fear of failing and looking “stupid” in front of the instructor and one’s peers. In other cases it can also be a symptom that someone is far beyond the discussion and in need of a deeper or a more challenging conversation. All these things can be called “boredom” but often they are more like communicative gaps in need of bridging.

In other words, boredom is often a mask for something else. We need to remove this mask, because of the negative effects of boredom on the learning environment and process. It causes people to “tune out” from what’s happening, and in almost every case it creates or is accompanied by resentment for the teacher/professor and/or for the other students. As a psychological problem, this makes boredom one of the greatest puzzles of teaching, and one of those problems that most demands attention.

It’s even more important to uncover the causes of boredom now that many students have access to wireless Internet and to Blackberries and iPhones, in the classroom. Professors and TAs complain that students are less attentive than ever while in class, because of this attachment to their devices—something I’ve encountered first-hand with my current tutorial group.

I think the attachment to gadgetry comes not from the technology itself, but from the students. In my blog I’ve written about the issue with students using technology to “tune out” during lectures, and they do it in tutorial as well; they’re “present, yet absent”. To understand this behaviour we need to keep in mind that the lure of the online (social) world is reasonable from the students’ perspective. Popular media and established social networks are accessible and entertaining, and provide positive feedback as well as a sense of comfortable familiarity. Learning is hard work, and the academic world is often alienating, difficult, and demanding. It’s all-too-easy to crumple under the feeling of failure or exclusion. Facebook is welcoming and easy to use, while critical theory is not.

The other side of this equation is that in the process of negotiating and overcoming “boredom” there’s a certain point at which I can meet students halfway, as it were—but I can’t go beyond that point. Like everything else in teaching and learning, boredom is a two-way street, and the instructor is the one who needs to maintain the boundary of responsibility. I’m not there merely to provide an appealing performance, which leads to superficial “engagement.” I’m not “edutainment”.

However, I think it’s part of my job when teaching to “open a door” to a topic or theory or set of ideas. I can’t make you walk through that door (horse to water, etc.) but I can surely do my best to make sure you have the right address and a key that fits the lock. And that means using different strategies if the ones I choose don’t seem to be working.

Holding this view about boredom certainly doesn’t mean I’ve solved the problems with student attention in class; I’m reminded of that frequently. It just means I have an approach to dealing with the problem that treats their boredom as something for which there’s mutual responsibility. In an ideal learning environment there must also be mutual respect—but unfortunately mutual “boredom” is easier and often wins the day. My hope is to help cultivate the former by finding ways of unraveling the latter.

Toronto, Ontario in Canada.

Melonie Fullick is currently a Ph.D student working on research in post-secondary education, policy and governance. She previously earned a BA in Communication Studies (2006) and an MA in Linguistics (2007). She can be found in virtual space on Twitter [@qui_oui] and in the blogosphere [http://speculative-diction.blogspot.com/ and http://panoptikal.blogspot.com/].

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Are Students Intentionally Plagiarising?

In Guest Blogger on 2011/02/15 at 12:19

Janni Aragon, writing from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada

Like most instructors, I have graded more papers than I care to count. Add to this the drafts and proposals that I have reviewed and the number gets all together more daunting. Something was a bit different this term, though. I saw more issues with plagiarism or “almost” plagiarism. I was reminded about how it is easy to do the research, but writing is a special craft that the students have to learn. I tell students each term their writing will improve.

I am part of a team-taught course with some 225 students in the class. This class gets 6 Teaching Assistants (TA) assigned and one part of my role is managing the TAs. This includes marking papers and providing the TAs with sample marked papers and grading rubrics, so that they are prepared to do their own marking. Maybe I had better TAs this term, but something was amiss. Anecdotally compared to last year, I re-read more papers that had citation issues. The majority of these instances were cases where students do not attribute the original source.

Now, in many cases sources were never incorporated into the paper. None—not a direct quote or a paraphrase. Yet, a works cited was attached. My point here is that the majority of these instances did not look like the student was intentionally plagiarizing; however, the student had not cited. And, when I met individually with the student, it became obvious that the student did not know how to cite or when to paraphrase. I had an off the record chat with some other faculty and heard that they had also seen more “almost” plagiarism cases in their classes.

There are many things that I would like to say about this. Am I seeing a new phenomena related to students not doing well in their English classes in high school? Is this more commonplace? I am not sure, but my concern is more focused on what to do. I am going to continue my dedicated lecture to the paper assignment; however, I am going to need to speak to writing more. I already have a lecture dedicated to the proposal and I mark all of the proposals. I am also going to have a meeting with a colleague in the English department who teaches their survey writing course and get ideas from him.

Hopefully, my colleague in English will also have some hints to teach more critical thinking and analysis! Wait, that is another post!

Janni Aragon is a Senior Instructor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Her areas of interest are varied: Gender and Politics, Women and Technology, American Politics, Feminist Theories, Youth Politics, and Popular Culture. Most of her work attempts to connect these interests. Currently she is working on a co-edited Introduction to Women’s Studies textbook. When she has time, she blogs at http://janniaragon.wordpress.com/.

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The Importance of Classes

In Ponderings of a Peregrine Pinoy Professor on 2011/02/10 at 04:46

Rosalie Arcala Hall, writing from the Philippines.

On the 3rd of January, I showed up bright and early for my Comparative Politics class and was peeved that only 1/3 of my students showed up. One student who was due to deliver an oral report said she wasn’t ready because “she didn’t think I would hold classes that day.” I was similarly aghast that many of the faculty members from my Division were also absent that day. The Arts and Sciences building felt like a ghost town–the habitués having decided they needed an extra day to recuperate from their holiday hangover.

This is, sadly, part of a larger cultural malaise besetting my home institution– the tendency NOT to take classes seriously. This is indicative in the way administrators set meetings, consultations and celebratory occasions within class hours (7am to 5pm, Mondays through Fridays) and suspending classes to give way to them. Apart from early January, faculty members routinely do not hold classes on the first week of the semester (arguing for attendance in “opening exercises/programs”) and a day before and during the Christmas Lantern Parade. Many also routinely miss classes on account of moonlighting activities (our professors are poorly paid). While it is standard to require the holding of make-up classes for these absences, many times faculty members are not as judicious given difficulties of scheduling. And so they just send the students away with loads of additional assignments and film showings. Predictably, students also imbibe this lackadaisical attitude; they anticipate these “informal” class holidays and go on long vacations, show up late in classes and max out their quota of 7 unexcused absences.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

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“We Need to Talk”

In Uncategorized on 2011/01/29 at 03:52

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

One of my students plagiarized this semester. Not once, but twice. I graded both papers in a week’s time, so the severity of the offense seemed even worse. Instructors who have encountered plagiarism will remember that brief moment of hesitation, the slow passing of time as you wait for Google (or Turnitin) to bring up the results, the quick beating of your heart as you see the lifted passages appear on your screen, the determined swish of the cursor to “Print.” Now imagine that twice in one week. It was unnerving but also sad.

We’ve read the numerous articles on plagiarism (like David Callahan’s article in Huffington Post or Carson Jerema’s post in Macleans.ca). However, as a new, female, adjunct instructor, other concerns about my identity as an instructor come into my head.

From that first semester as a teaching assistant, I have been trying hard to convey my authority to my students. I was aware of my position as a young, new, female graduate student of color; I had also seen how some students treated other female teaching assistants who seemed less authoritative, less “professorial.” I wanted my students’ respect, maybe even more so than their admiration. Through my dress manner, tone, and the way I addressed them inside and outside of the classroom, I tried to show them I was in control of the classroom. During the semester I opened up and relaxed a little; I became friendly, chatty, sarcastic, and witty. But I always made sure I held command of the classroom. Some thought I was too stern or too serious, but honestly I always worry about being too “nice.”

Over the years, I’ve seen students do respect me. I also feel more confident about my position as their instructor. However, I’ve also noticed a difference in their interactions with me: they open up about their personal lives more often than they do with my male colleagues (whereas they usually have students come to them to talk about books, readings, ideas discussed in class). They question my decisions more than my male colleagues. Conversely, it seems to me male instructors I have worked with seem more confident in their standards than the female instructors. Even with my years of experience I still wonder if I’m too “nice” or too harsh. Is being “nice” wrong? Not really. However, it is when other instructors equate being “too nice” with not being strict enough with your students or with being easily swayed by their appeals. As I confronted the student who plagiarized, the same concerns popped into my head.

I slowly pulled out the plagiarized essays with the internet articles as evidence, and went over my talking points in my head. As I explained what I had found, I repeated to myself “don’t let X try to sway you; this student failed the assignment.” But I also wondered “does this student understand the gravity of the situation? Did the student understand what they did? Am I being too mean? Maybe the student deserves another shot.” The right and left sides of my brain battled it out. On one hand, I wanted to make it clear this was unacceptable, and there would be consequences to this unethical behavior. On the other hand, I wanted to give this student the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, I worry that showing sympathy or emotions of any kind will undermine my authority as a female instructor. This situation probably did not warrant sympathy (after all, this student plagiarized two WHOLE papers), but if I did not wonder so much about my tenuous position as a female adjunct instructor of color at a new school I would probably feel more comfortable talking with the student about their actions.How many of my male counterparts have the same dilemma between being too strict and too lenient?

I asked the student what happened that they felt they had to plagiarize. The student said nothing. I asked if they had plagiarized other papers in the class. Response? No. The student said they only did it one paper. I showed the student both essays, with my evidence. No response. I didn’t know what else to say, so I mentioned how plagiarism was unacceptable in a college writing course. No response. As the student walked out, they asked, “is there anything I can do?” “No.” I went to my office, drank some water to calm down my nerves, then walked to my next class. I was a minute early.

This post was also published at Inside Higher Ed.

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