Hey, I wrote a post over on my other blog about finding a public history or museum studies graduate program that’s a good fit. Since I know many of my readers have been to grad school, and especially grad school in the humanities and social sciences, if you have a moment, I’d appreciate it if you’d click over there and leave a comment for students who are looking to make what is traditionally a historian’s Plan B into their Plan A.
Many thanks!
Historiann has thrown down the gauntlet in response to Tony Grafton’s round-up of a spate of recent books about higher ed.
Near the end of his review, Grafton muses,
Best of all would be for enterprising publishers to find curious writers and have them describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects. The polemical books, even those that have some substance, end up slinging mud—which, as Huckleberry Finn pointed out to Tom Sawyer, isn’t argument—more often than laying out the evidence. The empirical studies, with a very few exceptions, are deliberately cast in such general terms, and written in such a value- and metaphor-free style, that they won’t reach anyone without a professional interest. Neither sort would give an intelligent outsider—say, a parent or student, a regent or a trustee—a vivid picture of a year’s life and work at a college or university, as it is experienced by all parties; much less a lucid explanation of how finance and pedagogy, bad intentions and good execution shape one another in the academic world.
Historiann suggests that
The other bloggers and regular commenters here study and/or teach at a variety of institutions around the world–so let’s offer our own detailed descriptions of our universities and what the problems look like from our vantage.
. . .and she was kind enough to include me among the bloggers she tagged for this meme. So here goes.
(Check out the comments on Historiann’s post for links to others who have posted on this topic this week.)
I must admit I haven’t read any of the books Grafton reviews, though certainly I have heard of most of them. I don’t read them because too often I’m unduly angered by books in this genre. It’s akin to being a duck and reading books about duck hunting during duck season.
Another caveat: I’m still junior faculty at Boise State; this is my second year on the tenure track in the history department there. I’m getting a sense of the university and its issues, but my perspective is necessarily the narrow one of a newcomer to the scene. Plus, I can’t help but compare it to the institution where I spent 10 years, first as a graduate student, then briefly as an adjunct and then as professional staff, UC Davis.
Finally, I’m not known for having much of a filter; I tend to say what’s on my mind. I like to think that characteristic lends me the ability to “speak truth to power,” but more realistically, it’s just me being naïve and not knowing when I’m putting my foot in my mouth. Who knows, then, what kinds of–let’s be generous and call them fans–this blog post will win me locally?
In this post, I’m looking at students, my workload, and three big issues that concern me.
Here’s the difference between UC Davis students and Boise State students, in a nutshell:
UC Davis student, in my office, talking to me about her D paper. She’s 19 years old and taking my course to satisfy a general ed requirement. “But I’ve always been an ‘A’ student! Certainly there’s been some mistake. Can you look at my paper again to see if you missed something?”
Boise State student, in my office, talking to me about his D paper. He’s 28 years old and taking my course to satisfy a general ed requirement. “Well, I’ve fucked up again, haven’t I? How can I do better next time?” He listens to my suggestions. “That’s really helpful. I might not get to this until next week; I have sole responsibility for the kids right now because my wife has to spend several weekends in jail.”
My sense is that our students, and particularly our undergrads, are predominantly working class. Last I checked, our four-year graduation rate is 8 percent, and the six-year is 26 percent, but of course that doesn’t say much about reality, as many of our students are transfers from elsewhere, and they don’t figure into graduation rates.* Many of my students are my age (36) or older. This semester, I have students born between 1957 and 1993, which, as you can imagine, makes for interesting discussions. Many are veterans. Many have fought with addiction in various forms. About one-third are Mormon. The overwhelming majority are white. Many are single parents. At least three of my students have initiated divorces this semester; I can’t remember having any married undergrads at Davis.
I came in at a time when everyone in the department has a 2-2 course load, and we’re all nervous that we’ll have to go back to a 3-3 (without, of course, the institution changing its research and service expectations). This year and for the forseeable future, however, I’m on a 2-1, because I’m the internship coordinator for the department. This job is supposed to come with a course release each semester, but it would be foolish of me to accept a 1-1 load when I’m wanting to seem like A Team Player On The Tenure Track,** so I negotiated a 2-1 plus a stipend. When I first came on board, I also negotiated a couple of course releases in my first couple years, but I won’t be taking those, as a 1-0 load doesn’t look very good, either.
It looks as if my pattern of courses will become one survey and one upper-division course in the fall, totaling about 80-90 students, and then either one upper-division undergraduate course (possibly cross-listed for grad students) or a graduate course in the spring (40 students if undergrad, 15 students if grad). I can make those upper-division courses pretty much anything I want. Thus far that’s meant a public history and a women’s history course; I’ve proposed a digital history course for next fall.
All in all, it’s a fine teaching load. I have no complaints, except maybe when I’m grading papers.
The scholarship requirements for tenure are modest, with three decent journal articles and around five lesser pieces (e.g. book reviews).***
As a public historian and women’s historian, I’m finding service is taking care of itself both on and off campus. Most of us in history carry a pretty significant service commitment.
Let’s lay it all out on the table, shall we? Aside from my small stipend for internship coordination, I’m paid $49,000 a year, and yes, I negotiated up to that amount. It’s a significant decrease from my staff salary at UC Davis, and I don’t have much hope of it increasing until tenure, when it should rise to just about what I was making in Davis. (And no, we’re not finding it cheaper to live in Idaho than California, aside from the cost of our rent.)
Boise State is definitely feeling its growing pains, so it’s facing plenty of challenges, not the least of which is that it still receives less funding from the state than does the University of Idaho–last year it was widely advertised around here that BSU receives 2/3 per student what UI does–even though Boise State is now the most selective public institution in Idaho. Educational institutions in Idaho aren’t really rolling in money to begin with. That said, here are three big issues that I think will impact my time here at Boise State:
The university is jonesing for STEM money and STEM graduates. I mean, all the big universities are doing it, right? I understand the appeal of STEM–there’s a good deal of satisfaction and positive public relations to be had in announcing your science professor has just secured a grant worth $250,000 or more. It’s also nice to bring the university royalties from intellectual property that’s been commercialized through technology transfer. That said, science researchers at most American universities rarely recoup their start-up costs through grants, so the costs of scientific research tend to be added to undergraduate tuition–and they definitely don’t recoup those costs if faculty leave for elsewhere within a decade. Despite these figures, during my time at UC Davis I heard more than one professor opine the indirect costs paid to the university from science grants are life support for the humanities.
The misguided self-importance of a few scientists aside, administrators also are misinterpreting the relative economic value to the university of the sciences and the humanities. At least one person interviewing for a high-profile position here has announced that all departments should pay for themselves–by which the prospective bigwig meant with income from more than tuition. I know he isn’t alone in this belief (universities should be run like businesses!), and the implication always seems to be that arts and humanities programs should be the first to fall under the budget ax because we’re not producing patents and drawing mega-grants. Yet the humanities, with our growing class sizes, our many general education courses, and our lower faculty salaries, are incredibly cost-efficient–especially when we consider that we’re educating a lot of the K-12 teachers who accept ridiculously low salaries. (How low? Last year, the salary for a new teacher in Idaho dropped below $28,000, and the average salary remains $41,000.)
Of course, my colleagues and I have a nefarious (and apparently quite workable) plan to snag an NSF grant or two, so that the indirect costs will help pay for some scientist’s lab equipment. (My start-up costs? $3,000 plus an iMac.)
There also hasn’t yet, as far as I can tell, been any kind of serious reflection here by people outside the humanities as to how the arts and humanities complement STEM education and research.
This drive toward “distinction” is marked by greater investment in STEM, but also more Ph.D. programs and a greater rate of faculty publication. I’m all for publishing, but it’s difficult in light of the next issue I’ll discuss. (And can I just say it’s hard for us long-form historians to compete on publication quantity with criminal justice or political science types who apparently publish many, many short pieces?)
I’m not sure why our administration wants to bring in more students, as we’re having a hard enough time graduating the students we already have. Perhaps it’s because if we’re investing heavily in the sciences, we’re going to need to recoup the costs somewhere–and where better than by making arts and humanities faculty teach more classes, each with a significantly greater number of students?
Because so many of our students are working part- or full-time, many of us would like to provide them with as flexible a schedule as possible. Unfortunately, for administrators, this flexibility too often means offering classes online. I say “unfortunately” because, although I am often an advocate for the thoughtful use of technology in teaching and learning, the university has made a couple of decisions that make it clear
This blog post is already too long, so I’m going to just touch briefly on each of these points.
First, a colleague of mine has been teaching a section of one of her courses online for some time. When she first signed on teach online, she was told any course content she created would be her intellectual property. However, the university’s latest version of its statement on online instruction intellectual property rights (PDF) indicates quite the opposite:
A course (as a designed collection of assembled and authored material) produced under University sponsorship, where the University provides the specific authorization or supervision for the preparation of the course, is a work made for hire (as defined by law and BSU policy). A course specially ordered or commissioned by the University and for which the University has agreed to specially compensate or provide other support (such as release time) to the creator(s) is a commissioned work, (as defined by BSU policy). In either case, the copyright to the course will be held and exercised by the university.
I suppose that means my colleague’s course, which includes videos of her lectures, can now be handed over to an adjunct to teach, yes? Who cares, as my colleague pointed out, that according to the AAUP’s counsel, it’s unlikely that classes crafted by professors can be considered works for hire?
Second, in that same IP statement, the university makes clear what, in its eyes, constitutes an online course: “An online course implemented in the Blackboard course-management system at Boise State University, or similar educational technologies, is an organized collection of articles, notes, media, assignments, online communications, tests, and similar materials.” Basically, then, an online course is a bunch of stuff that can be collected and passed on to someone else. It is not, you will note, collaborative or individual student work that showcases critical and creative thinking. It is something to be packaged and delivered–likely, as I noted above, not by the professor who created it.
Third, the platform the university provides and assumes faculty will use, Blackboard, does not provide adequate tools or configuration options to allow for best practices in student learning in the humanities. If I’m going to teach online, you can bet it will be more ds106, less enterprise learning management (ick!) system.
That was quite the monologue, and yet it barely scratches the surface of my last 16 months or so of experience at Boise State.
Anyone who wants to participate in this meme is welcome to do so–either leave a trackback at Historiann’s, or a link in the comments to her post.
I especially invite Colleague Who Sometimes Reads This Blog (and signs hir comments thus) to add hir perspective, either here in the comments or in a pseudonymous! guest! post! Alternatively: Get. a. blog. 
* For a nice rant about graduation rates and how they (don’t) work, see Dr. Crazy’s post for this meme; simply search her long post for the phrase “motherfucking graduation rates.”
* Hey, that’s A TPOTTT–a teapot! Sing it with me, tenure-track folks: I’m a little teapot. . .
*** I’m totally falling down on pursuing book reviews and encyclopedia articles. If you’re a journal or encyclopedia editor who needs reviews/entries in public history, women in U.S. science, women in California history, museum studies, or digital humanities, please do be in touch.
Havi Brooks has a really useful practice she calls The Book of Me; basically it’s a notebook where she jots down things she notices about herself–her feelings, body, attitudes, productivity, and more–so that she can revisit her observations and improve her future experiences with a place, event, person, etc. You can read more about it in her post The Book of You, although if you search her blog for the phrase “book of me,” you’ll find quite a bit of elaboration on, and examples of, the practice.
I’ve been taking mental notes for The Book of Me for quite some time, but I admit I’ve been pretty lazy about writing them down.
That ends today.
One of my recurring frustrations is–surprise!–grading my students’ essays. You’d think that after 12 years of being in the college classroom, including three years as a faculty consultant where I helped professors improve their own grading practices, that I’d have a better sense of what works for me.
Nope!
Every time I have to comment on undergraduate student work, I end up with a giant stack of essays the night before I wish to return them to students. (Note: Despite the practices I’m about to describe, I am pretty successful at returning essays within one week if the class has fewer than 40 students; more than that and I tend to need nine days.)
At that point I’m usually worn down, both by my actual work and the thought of having to do all that grading. Then I read the first really awful essay and start to spiral into a depression. This feeling is made worse when I’ve taken the time (as I do 95% of the time) to coach students on how to construct an argument and support it with evidence from primary and secondary sources–because hey, then I’ve failed, too.
I took some notes for the Book of (Grading) Me when I was 35 essays into my most recent 45-paper stack, in the hopes they help me avoid some discomfort at semester’s end, when the next big batch comes in. Here they are:
Even though the end is in sight, I’m teetering on that brink of depression thanks to all the frustration and anger I let myself feel.
My Facebook status currently expresses my desire to scrawl “WTF?!?” across several pages of students’ papers. (It also reads “GRADING HULK SMASH BULLSHITTING ABOUT PURITANS.”)
I’d like to remind myself, then, of a few things that ease the process. Some of these I discovered on my own; some were tips from wiser faculty than myself; and others I learned from Havi (can you tell I’m a big fan of hers?):
Things that help:
Things that don’t help:
What about you? What works for you when you’re facing a stiff sentence in grading jail?
I’m working pretty closely with a few of my public history grad students this semester, and in so doing, I’ve been reflecting on my earlier experiences with grad students in museum studies. Advising grad students who are focused on vocations outside academia has been a joy to me, but it’s meant I’ve had to shift my paradigm considerably from my own graduate school experience.
While I did, over the course of grad school and during breaks from it, take on a number of jobs outside the classroom, my focus while I was in school was almost always on landing a tenure-track job. My adviser gave me very practical advice in the job search–her best career advice was for me to accept an alt-ac job as soon as I graduated rather than adjuncting while I remained on the market–but most of our time together was spent discussing my intellectual interests, not my vocational aspirations.
These days, however, I advise several students in our Master of Applied Historical Research program. The M.A.H.R. students are every bit as intellectually engaged and bright as the M.A. students, but as with the museum studies students I taught a couple years back, their immediate needs are different. Our M.A. students tend to be focused on teaching (high school, community college, and/or adjuncting) or a Ph.D. program; the M.A.H.R. students are interested in pretty much anything but teaching, and they want to develop hands-on skills.
Here are some things I’ve observed over the past several years of teaching or advising students who anticipate working in jobs outside the academy:
Here is my description of the stereotypical graduate of a museum studies program in the western part of the country: A smart young woman, armed with lots of generalized knowledge about museums and how they should be, taught by university professors, some of whom have never worked in a museum in the real world. As a member of the emerging generation, she wants to be in charge right away, figuring that her studies were enough dues to pay and that traditional starting roles would be both boring and low paying. She is fortunate enough, through connections, to find a job as director of the local historical society in East Jesus, Texas. She has a 1,000 sf museum complete with a two-headed calf and the baptismal clothing of the first white child born there. She has a volunteer secretary and no other help, while the board of 25 people is made up of 70+ year olds, all of them very conservative. Besides the challenges of improving the museum, she finds that there are very few people of either sex her age with whom to be friends or even acquaintances. She starts looking at the AAM job site after her first month on the job, hoping to spin herself up to the next higher circle of hell in a larger city. She might also consider going back for another advanced degree in social sciences.
I always keep East Jesus in mind when advising grad students and helping them network. (In Idaho, East Jesus institutions are also identifiable by their collection of likely inauthentic Nazi knives. Idahoans for some reason love them some Nazi memorabilia.) I’m discovering Idaho is packed with East Jesuses. I’m also finding that, in my Boise students’ minds, the opposite of East Jesus is Portland, Oregon–which totally makes sense to me, although I’m guessing there are more opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. (If you’re in Portland or its environs are are looking for engaged grad students, either as interns or recent graduates, let me know.)
If you’ve worked with Master’s-level students who are not seeking academic jobs, and especially students who are seeking jobs in the nonprofit sector, I’d love to hear about your experiences. If you have been (or are currently) such a student, what needs of yours have been met well, and what needs might be better fulfilled (and how)?
I accomplished an amazing number and quantity of things today, but of course it wasn’t enough. And now I’m supposed to be grading, so instead I’m blogging, random-bullets style.
What’s up with you? Feel free to leave your own random bullets in the comments.
Pop quiz!
Where, even though both the primary- and secondary-source readings for my U.S. history survey repeatedly used the word “Virginia,” did my students today think the Chesapeake is located? (And no, I don’t have any international students in this class.)
Leave your answers, as well as your favorite student geography blunders, in the comments.
(I’m going to have to start every class meeting this year with a geography lesson, yes? I feel really bad for my colleagues who teach non-U.S. history.)
Let me throw out a (ahem) hypothetical situation. . .
Say (again, just for the sake of this entirely hypothetical situation) that this week I took over the department’s internship program. Pretend I have the power to approve or reject any internship that would earn a student academic credit from the history department.
Say a Master’s student contacts me and says she wants to “do an internship in” a colleague’s large-enrollment class. By which she means basically be a TA, do grading, etc. (We don’t have Ph.D. students, nor do we have standard TAships; grad students pretty much just work as readers/graders in my department, and we only have a handful of those positions each year.)
The student would not, I imagine, be paid for this “internship.” In fact, she’d be paying for the internship credits.
My questions:
Your (hypothetical) thoughts?
*I think you know my answer to this question. After all, I received medical and dental insurance, tuition/fee remission, and a salary as a TA at both institutions where I was a graduate student. Still, I’d like to hear your opinion.
This past week I received an e-mail alerting me that, because I teach in a particular classroom, I can have access to lecture capture this fall. The e-mail, from the campus’s tech folks, reported that of students with access to this technology, 70 percent watched at least one capture per week, and 78 percent of students said they would like more classes to use lecture capture. The lectures get posted to iTunesU and also to Blackboard.
Those of you who know me well know that I have been an evangelist for the use of certain kinds of technology in higher ed–particularly blogs, wikis, c0llaborative mapping, and certain uses of mobile devices–but I’m deeply uneasy with lecture capture technology because I think it’s a step backward from the best uses of technology for instruction.*
Lecturing and lecture capture are by their nature unidirectional. Yes, both lecturing and lecture capture could be made interactive–lecturing by peppering the class period with questions and activities, and lecture capture by adding some kind of commenting or discussion function wherever the audio and video are posted. I have yet to see anyone use institutionally sponsored lecture capture in this way.
The lectures can be shared most easily within corporate repositories–Blackboard and iTunesU–rather than to open-source, not-for-profit educational repositories. Yes, iTunesU has some fabulous stuff on it, but I’m not ready to share there.
It’s also too easy for the university to repurpose content in online courses that could be adjunctified. I’m not sure what the policy is at my current institution, but I signed away a lot of intellectual property rights at my last one. In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of “delivering content” that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.
There also may be a misunderstanding or miscommunication on the part of tech folks and their student workers that faculty should be driving this bus. A colleague was teaching in a classroom where a student was in charge of running the technology. She was going to review answers to a quiz they had taken in class, and she asked the student worker to turn off the lecture capture for that time period. The student refused, saying she’d need to check with her boss. Because the lectures can be posted automatically, the instructor wasn’t certain she’d have the opportunity to edit out that portion of the class (nor should she have to, I might add–the lecture capture should be at the instructor’s request).
There definitely was a gap in understanding between me and the technologist with whom I communicated about lecture capture. I asked if the system could capture students’ portions of class discussion, and I was told that the system captures only the instructor’s audio, and thus–and I’m quoting here–“we train faculty to REPEAT all questions before answering them, so that they are on the capture.”
This assumes, of course, that students–and not instructors–are asking the majority of the questions. (It also assumes instructors can be “trained,” which made me LOL, since one of my previous job titles–one I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to–was actually “faculty technology trainer” and even then I knew going in that faculty are not easily housebroken. This faculty member, I assure you, does not sit. lie down. roll over.)
I do understand the utility of lecture capture. As faculty are asked to teach increasingly larger courses, lecturing seems more “natural”–because how could one have a live conversation with 200+ students? (Trust me–it can be done!) As more courses offer online sections, it’s efficient for faculty members to repurpose in-class lectures for their online students–and it ensures all students receive the same content.
But again, this entire form of course presentation is predicated on a belief that higher education is about acquiring content knowledge and not about encouraging critical or creative thinking. See, in my Women and the West course I could in a lecture repeat and reinforce what my students have already read in some textbook about 19th-century women’s contributions to, for example, early business development in California (they ran boardinghouses during the Gold Rush–surprise!)–and then test students on that knowledge. . .
What were the three most common forms of women’s entrepreneurship in mid-nineteenth-century California?
. . .Or I could provide them with primary-source materials by, say, Theodosia Burr Shepherd and her daughter Myrtle Shepherd Francis–pioneers of horticultural entrepreneurship in California and cultivators of plants that students likely have growing in their neighbors’ yards or have seen at Home Depot**–and ask them larger historiographical questions.
The answers to those kinds of questions are unlikely to be cleanly and clearly articulated, either by me or by my students. And lecture capture is, it seems, all about decisive articulation of disciplinary facts. (And I so do not do disciplinary facts.)
I do occasionally “lecture” in five- to seven-minute chunks that students might find useful to revisit. So. . . What would have to be in place for me to use lecture capture? (Maybe some of these options exist, but I’m sure others do not.)
1.) Ways to record multiple, simultaneous small-group discussion by students–and a simple way for me to provide some kind of feedback on those discussions, perhaps using video or audio. (The name of the lecture capture system–Echo360–would imply that technology exists to capture and play back all audio in the classroom, yes? Alas, not yet.)
2.) Ways to annotate the classroom-generated audio and video with text, so that if I wanted to share a link related to a certain moment in the video, I could.
3.) Fully accessible–the software should generate an automatic transcript that I can edit when I find transcription errors.
4.) Video and audio must be fully, and easily, editable by me.
5.) A setting that ensures only I, and no one else, can upload the videos.
6.) A choice of how open I’d like to make the videos–that is, I’d like to make them easy to upload to YouTube so that I can embed them on a (publicly accessible) class blog. Other instructors would likely prefer Blackboard, but since I only use Blackboard to calculate grades (and I hope to use Excel for that in the future, but I’m innumerate, so I rely on an LMS) and share an occasional document, I don’t want any of my content uploaded to Blackboard.
Have you found a satisfactory way to use lecture capture–one that is more about achieving your desired learning objectives rather than student convenience and efficiency of content delivery? I’d love to hear about it. . .
* Granted, my unease with lecture capture is rooted in a deep distrust of lecturing as a teaching tool. A select few do it well, and a select few students learn best from lectures–but after working as a teaching consultant for a few years, I observed that most people don’t lecture well, and most students retain next to nothing from the average lecture.
** Doubled, fluted, frilled, ruffled, and pinked petunias! Blue morning glory (Ipomoea ‘Heavenly Blue’)! Eschscholzia californica ‘Golden West’!
The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea.
He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me.
No you won’t catch me, old Slithergadee,
You may catch all the others, but you wo–Shel Silverstein
During my 2006-2010 stint on the staff side of academia, I became quite familiar with the bureaucratic beast. In fact, during my last couple years at in a teaching center, I felt its bite quite acutely; it’s kind of like the bite of a Komodo dragon–you die from the venomous saliva, not the ferocity of the bite.
I recall there has been some venom toward centers of teaching and learning from the academic blogosphere over the past couple of years, and I was kind of surprised to hear it, as it seemed the faculty at UC Davis who used the teaching center were quite fond of it.
One of the reasons for this affection, I think, was the fact that (aside from TA orientations), we didn’t mandate participation in any of our workshops or events. Nor did we allow ourselves to be used as a tool in others’ requirements of faculty. We insisted that our workshops be optional–that we were there to help, not to compel, for example, when a vice provost needed all 100+ departments to articulate undergraduate learning objectives for the reaccreditation process. And while we kept up with the research on teaching and learning, most of our advice came from our own time spent teaching students and from the ideas shared by other campus faculty.
Still, despite our attempts to hold our ground against bureaucratic intrusion, the teaching center’s corner of the university became increasingly bureaucratic, with administrators putting ridiculous new requirements in place. So, for example, they required that administrative staff members’ relatively new Macs be lobotomized so that they only functioned as Windows PCs. It doesn’t help when all the Ph.D.-holding employees and the non-degree-holding employees are divided into camps, especially when we’d worked very hard as a center to break down those silos. Yet the bureaucrats, barely feinting at consulting with front-line staff, decided that half the teaching center staff should report to an administrative middle manager and half to the center’s faculty director. That slowed some work and decreased our motivation significantly, as middle management is about efficiency, while center directors focus on vision and mission. There were other decisions, too, that were made without consulting those of us who actually worked with faculty and graduate students to improve teaching.
For teaching centers to do their work well, they need to be free of bureaucratic restraints, and their staff certainly can’t be see as enforcers of administrative dicta or as professionals offering one-size-fits-all (Blackboard!) “solutions” to teaching challenges.
I’ve been impressed by many of the offerings of the teaching center at my current university, and I’ve participated in several programs coordinated through that office, most notably a semester-long pilot on using mobile devices in the classroom.
The university is revising its core courses (which is très trendy, I know), and one of the requirements is that departments submitting courses–new or existing–to be included in the core send representatives to workshops on designing core courses. (Surprise! Many, if not most, of the reps sent to these workshops are adjuncts, though I will say the history department appears to be sending only tenure-line faculty.) I offered to attend as a representative of the relatively new History 100 course, Themes in World History. (N.B.: The last time I took a world history course was in the eighth grade. Wheeeeeeeee! Course design without content knowledge–playing to my strengths!)
The workshop basically exists to help me fill out a form that includes me to write the course title; a table listing learning objectives, assessment plans, and learning activities; a plug-in-your-course-name-and-description required syllabus statement; and a disabilities statement?
That kind of work should take me 60-90 minutes.
Have I mentioned that the workshop is scheduled to run from 8:30 to 4:30 for three days? (cue terrifying music)
After a full day of outcomes-ing, I’m tuckered out, but I’ll share more thoughts on this soon,* as there’s a lot of the usual error going on.
* Previews!
From a faculty member: “Blind students can’t do electrical engineering.”
Bureaucratic fiat: “Yes, all faculty teaching sections of the course must use the same assessment plan.”
Sisyphus at Academic Cog has thrown down the gauntlet, asking others to share that most dreaded of exercises–the statement of teaching philosophy.
When I worked in a teaching center, I had to read a lot of these by grad students and postdocs going on the job market, and by faculty who wanted to include one in their tenure and promotion packet. And hoo boy, did I read some bad ones. Because they’re so easy to write poorly. Plus, they tend to all sound alike because their writers imagine there’s something that reviewers expect to see in these statements. And maybe most reviewers do look for something specific. . . but at the point I last revised my statement I was more interested in remaining authentic to my experience in the classroom and less enamored with conscientiously using the “correct” rhetoric of teaching and learning.
So when I revised my statement for my last round on the job market, I decided I wanted to structure it differently. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but here’s where it stands now:
When I was a graduate student instructor, I found writing a statement of teaching philosophy to be a relatively easy task. I had only my experience to speak from, and I was fortunate to be teaching subjects students seemed naturally to enjoy—or that they could be persuaded to enjoy. I had complete freedom in selecting a curriculum, developing activities and assignments, and assessing student work, and my teaching evaluations were very strong.
After spending three years advising faculty, grad students, and postdocs about teaching, my perspective on teaching is considerably more nuanced. Thanks to the hundreds of faculty who have come to me for help, who have confided in me, and who have trusted me to interview their students, I have a much broader, and more seasoned, perspective on teaching, and the place of teaching, at the large research university.
In a typical teaching philosophy statement, I would (1) state my learning objectives for my students, (2) illustrate how I used assignments and activities to fulfill those learning objectives, (3), state how I evaluated student learning outcomes, and (4) make some grandiose statements about interactive, student-centered learning. However, in the past three years I’ve read more than a hundred of these, and I fear a certain tedium sets in after reading more than a few. Accordingly, I will address these teaching concepts, but less directly, through vignettes that I hope illustrate my commitment to teaching all students, my deep thinking about the relationship between theory and praxis, and my very practical approaches to common classroom challenges.
Dealing with that guy
When I encourage faculty to incorporate more interactive learning opportunities into their courses, they frequently express the fear that students won’t talk, and that they’ll find themselves stuck in an awkward silence in front of a hundred or more students. In my classroom, however, the challenge frequently is less getting students to speak than to encourage one student to talk less. Almost every undergraduate course I’ve taught has had “that guy,” a student—and 90 percent of the time it’s a young white man—who sits in the first or second row of the classroom, two or three seats to my left, and who must comment on everything, to the point that the students sitting behind him are rolling their eyes.
My approach to such a student is to take him aside after class and recruit him to my cause of reaching all learners, of ensuring all voices get heard. I thank him for the comments that have been spot on—and I cite those specifically—and then tell him that some students need more time to formulate their thoughts before speaking. Would he mind waiting a bit before speaking so that these students can get a chance to participate? I tell him to feel free to e-mail me with any thoughts he didn’t get a chance to share. So far, this tactic has worked every time, and it’s clear from their contributions to class that these students become better listeners and more critical thinkers as a result of that listening.
Learning with students with disabilities
Both because I’ve found most students respond well to images and video and because I’m a visual learner myself, my classes tend to be highly visual in nature. I may share a dozen or more images during a single class meeting. When I first had a blind student in my classroom, however, I realized this practice needed to be supplemented with better audio description and alternative ways of accessing the material. I was fortunate that the student was willing to work with me and was forgiving of my failure to plan for visually impaired students when I developed the course.
The experience of working with this student, and since then with other students with physical and learning disabilities, made me become interested in the universal design for learning, a set of principles that calls for giving learners multiple ways of acquiring information and knowledge, of engaging with material presented during class time, and of demonstrating what they have learned. I’m now chairing the teaching and learning subcommittee of the campus’s electronic accessibility steering committee, where I have the opportunity to ask hard questions about—and provide tentative answers to—campus policies. For example, UC Davis’s new general education requirements call for students to demonstrate visual and oral literacy. How does a blind student develop visual literacy, and how might we measure it? How does a student who does not speak demonstrate mastery of oral expression? I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with faculty and students in addressing these issues.
Helping the general education student research and write papers
The departments in which I have taught typically offer a large number of courses that help students fulfill the GE writing requirement. Accordingly, my classes tend to have a large number of non-majors who have not had sufficient opportunities to write argumentative papers or undertake research. One fifth-year managerial economics student confessed to me that she had not written a thesis statement since fall quarter of her first year, and I suspect she was not alone in this experience. Such students pose a special challenge, and I meet it by spending extra time helping students search the library’s databases, by offering multiple extra office hours (as many as 30 hours one week when I was a graduate student), and by partnering with reference and instructional librarians.
It also means I spend a portion of each course reviewing the principles of writing with my students. Some faculty have told me they don’t have time for such instruction as they have too much material to “cover.” My experience has been the opposite; by encouraging students to undertake research on topics related to the class (but not explicitly covered during it), and then asking students to share their research with the class, students are exposed to far more material, and have a more meaningful engagement with it, than they would if I had simply lectured or had them read about it. My classes are about discovering and uncovering, not “covering.”
My goal in every course is to make myself approachable to students and yet ultimately dispensable. I teach my students to ask thoughtful questions, conduct research, and express themselves through multiple media. I design my classes to help students learn to better engage with the world, with the hope that they will take steps toward effecting positive change in it.
After my experiences at the public history conference today, I’m thinking it’s time for me to write a teaching philosophy statement that’s specific to teaching public history.
What are your thoughts on teaching philosophy statements? Pointless exercises, valuable opportunities for reflection, or something in between?
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