assembling a graduate

I’m sure I’m not alone when I admit that I’m really tired. The last week of the semester always strikes me as the end of an endless spiral, faster and faster but without any clear sense of how it all will ever come to a calm completion. Lots of students, lots of grading, still lots of meetings … and it all seems to be stacked on top of the longterm fatigue of the last 15 weeks.

Still, when I have a moment of pause, the week of finals and commencement makes me think about what students have learned, and what they’re getting out of the degree they are seeking. A while ago Luke Fernandez forwarded me this evocative image portraying one interpretation of the creation of a graduate.

Entitled “Gods of the Modern World,” this is a mural painted by José Clement Orozco. (Here’s a link back to PBS, where this and other works of Orozco can be found.)

It’s a little haunting, isn’t it? The portrayal of the academy being a bunch of skeletal figures, watching over the birth of one of their own, assembled from books and incubated in glass jars, is much different from the traditional commencement ceremony. Certainly, it’s not what we put on billboards to advertise the meaning of our university degree. And yet, it doesn’t seem that it’s too much of a stretch to make the argument that we — the skeletons in the robes and funny hats — are probably best at creating people who are most like us. I don’t know that we have the training to do much anything else, unless we seek it out.

As we finish out the semester, the year, and even the entire incubation of a new graduate, it’s interesting to think about what it is we’re producing. At the very least, the moment’s contemplation is a break from grading finals. It might also be something to spur us on into next year in our courses, programs, and even considering the policies and mission of the University.

what’s our “job”?

In faculty senate this week, I’ve noted a couple of things on the agenda that generate lots of discussion in various circles. On one line there’s the latest proposal for overload compensation, and on another there’s dedication to a report on workload models. The former is presented by a task force that is considering faculty concerns about pay, and the latter is written by a committee which addresses issues regrading our appointment, rank, and tenure. Essentially, both of these address our “job,” what it is, its duties, and how we are compensated and promoted.

The question of what my job is is always difficult for me. Though I thought it would get easier to explain my job to my family and friends the longer I was employed, it’s actually quite the opposite. In graduate school I had two very clear, distinct tasks: studying and teaching. Today, I still do those two things, often at the same time and swirled together. And there are other things, including a long list that includes accounting, negotiating, meeting, and planning. I don’t even want to admit the amount of time I’m apologizing, correcting, and cleaning. What we do as faculty is varied and hard to describe.

Central to our job, I think, is the act and result of “engaged learning.” In fact, it’s within the mission and major themes that represent our university as we prepare for accreditation. In meetings and discussions about this term, there seems to be agreement that we, in fact, want our students to be so engaged, and that there’s an outcome inherent in this that represents an ideal of ours. That leads me to a set of questions: As we consider overload teaching models and workload proposals, what is it that matters the most for “engaged learning”? If we have smaller classes, will we have greater capacity for each student to be more engaged, and thus more in line with what we purport to be our mission? Or, if we teach larger sections, is total engagement proportional to the class size, even if there might be diminishing returns for each individual student? If a workload of an individual faculty member is comprised solely of teaching courses, will the outcome result in more engagement per student than if that same faculty member is able to engage in service with students in the community or research lab or advising? In short, if our goal is towards engaged learning, then can any other policy be determined independent of this consideration?

Honestly, I don’t know the answers to these questions.* I do know that we have an obligation to think about not only what’s good for us, our careers, and our incomes, but also what we profess to be our goals as an institution. Perhaps these discussions about compensation and workload should be in concert with discussions of quality programs, fostering faculty development, and engaged student learning.**

_____

*I also won’t pretend I have no bias. I think we should work harder to teach smaller classes, do more work with individual students, and increase scholarship and service that serves our communities, both geographical and academic.

**Sure, this could mean drawing the Teaching, Learning, and Assessment committee into this. I’m bracing myself.

crisis and avoidance

Today I met with my spring semester book group. John, Steve, and I read Crisis On Campus, a relatively short text by Mark Taylor about, well, a crisis on our campus. Of course, like any good book group leader, I’m going to post a quick report about our discussion on the TLF book group wiki later. In short, the text is a general critique similar to many others out there on the inadequacy of our university structure and faculty — yes, us — in preparing a new generation of citizens and professionals. Taylor and others contend that we are out of touch with the needs of the world, and our own disciplinary narrowness created via PhD programs and obscure research lines does us no favors. He contends that we need to work more in interdisciplinary pursuits, both in our scholarship and in our curricula. Not explicitly addressing the needs of the 21st century and instead burying our heads in the 16th century sand is the source of the crisis. What we provide for today’s students might be fundamentally different from what they actually need.

There are a host of other issues in the text — Taylor also suggests that we abolish tenure, for example. I think it’s worth a read. And yet, of the almost 200 books we gave out this semester, only three of us wanted to read about a “crisis.” Lots of people read Cleopatra and The Invisible Gorilla, both well regarded and, from what I’ve heard, providing interesting discussion from lots of corners of campus. At lunch today, Steve asked out loud what I’ve been wondering all semester: Do people not want to read about what might be wrong with the very system they’re entrenched in? Or, I’ll offer, maybe we just would rather read something that’s different? Or, maybe I just don’t really know what books people will most enjoy. It’s always interesting to see the book orders come in, because I know I could never predict the final assembly of selections. (Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods, for example, was a read I was sure would garner a lot of attention and attention, yet it didn’t even have enough requests to form a single group. Maybe the tepid draw was because of the author’s descriptions of lesbian primate sex — or maybe in spite of it.)

I see the book selection predictability as an issue that goes beyond books. It’s about what do faculty and staff need and want. Are our needs and wants different? Do we read compelling stories as an escape from the crises we may be facing? Or, if there were a crisis on our campus, would we decide to ignore it? I’m not sure. As for myself, I’m looking forward to reading about the bonobos (a whole other crisis, actually), but I’m still haunted by the image that maybe we aren’t doing all that we should be on our campus, and beyond.

lost on campus

Yesterday I got lost. It turns out, even after two years of working in this office in the library, I didn’t know where we got our mail. I’ve been enabled. Sheila or Victoria or someone in our adjoining offices (Undergraduate Research, Bachelor of Integrated Studies) always, consistently, pick up and deliver mail. To me, it’s just magic. Look, a letter, for me! Or, I create a newsletter, and magically it flies off throughout campus the next day. In short, I’ve become one of those people I despise, who doesn’t know how or even try to know how some very basic thing works.

So, when I decided to mail David Malone’s new book through campus mail yesterday afternoon, I admitted to Sheila my complete incompetence and desire to improve. She described where in the library to head, and fortunately ethe basic map was familiar to me. But imagine my surprise when I found that there were whole other offices, operations, and mail boxes tucked away in rooms I never even knew about. There were doors opening, quite literally, to new places on this campus.

In thinking about meetings and discussions and operations, I realize that the workings of our or any university are a Dr. Seuss-esque machinery of interconnected operations that most of us likely don’t completely understand. I say this because I only feel like I’ve really understood the structure of the University in the last couple of years, after a decade of teaching here and the experience of being in this “administrative” role. If it’s as complicated and foreign as I portray it, it must be a total black box to new faculty. I know it was to me — I just showed up, taught my classes, and kept my head down, and now I’m still finding out within which corner of a building the mailroom exists.

I wonder: What do we, faculty, really need to understand about the inner machine of the University? Are you missing something? Is something a complete mystery to you? Or, is it better to keep your head down, do your job, grade the papers, conduct the research, serve on a committee, and the like? What do you need to better understand? I can start by showing you where the mailroom of the library resides. Perhaps there’s even more I should be doing.

worth

Today I attended one of the campus meetings regarding a new proposed model for overload teaching compensation. These kinds of meetings are always interesting, even if the topic at hand doesn’t immediately appeal to me. Enter a room full of opinions backed by doctoral degrees and years in the academy, and you have a recipe for entertainment. In this case, the meeting is really about money, and so that extra ingredient makes the conversation that much more urgent, albeit bitter in flavor.

Money’s important. More would be nice. In this case, the discussion is about how to compensate faculty teaching extra courses. There’s a historical piece to all this and an interesting story in how online courses came to exist. I liken them a bit to a non-native, invasive species that we brought in, fertilized, and nurtured in order to beautify the landscape. Now they’re ubiquitous, and we’ve learned to rely upon them both from the perspectives of the institution and individual income. I have an apple tree in my backyard that likely has a similar story, and I admit that I quite like it.

The more I thought about the discussion, though, the more bothered I became. It wasn’t because people were looking for equitable models, or even more money for the job of teaching an extra course. No matter what model we eventually narrow in on, it’s likely that the number of students in a course will correlate to the instructor’s overload compensation. More students, more pay. And, to be fair, more students also means more grading, more interactions, more work. Yet, this still gave me a moment of pause about my “job”. What is it worth, and what exactly am I paid to do?

First, let’s acknowledge, if I may be so bold, that if a large number of faculty are teaching “extra,” it doesn’t seem “extra” after a while. If overload becomes the norm, and if we promote it more and more as such, then I wonder if we’re starting to shoot ourselves in the foot. Legislators, the general public, our students, and even peers may begin to see the extra course as not-so-extra. I have no issues with people working more to make more, but many of us are also complaining that we don’t have enough time to really do research, reach out to the community, or really innovate a curriculum for a general education course. Maybe we’re being forced into an impossible situation by low pay and high mortgages, but we need to be careful that we don’t paint our profession as one in which we can always do more. It’s not sustainable.

What really bothers me, though, is the fact that the model is based on number of students. Right, like I said, I acknowledge that more students can mean more work. But, does this mean that we should do less work when we have fewer students? If I have a class with only 15 students, should I sit back and relax? Should I look at whatever compensation model gets formed and use this to gauge the effort I exert in a given class with a given number of students? I don’t think so. Will I begin to look at my regular, “on load” courses in a new light after this model is implemented? Will each student in a seat be a dollar sign for overload courses and a rock-in-the-shoe for on load courses? I hope not. Seeing students, and even myself and my role, through the perspective of profits and workload changes the relationship between student and teacher. Perhaps this is why I’ve never bought into using business models in educational settings.

While I was sitting in today’s meeting, I wondered what it would look like if we turned everything inside-out. What if, instead of more compensation for faculty with higher student counts, we discounted tuition for students in larger classes? The logic goes like this: Assume for each course we put in a certain amount of effort, and as each student enrolls that effort gets divided proportionally. Thus, each course is paid in full by those in attendance, and they recognize that the quality of instruction may be proportional to the amount of money they are required to pay. Large lecture courses would provide the educational equivalent of cheap plasticware from Walmart; while small courses provide handcrafted, customized artistry. Yes, this sounds ridiculous; maybe it’s just as ridiculous as the per student compensation model we’re currently embracing.

What we do, I believe, is not a factory job in which we are compensated for the total number of units we ship out on a given day. Rather, we’re responsible to individual students and a society writ large. This means we are teachers of those individuals who shape that society, but also the scholars and activists who are privileged enough to be given the time (and even some compensation) to share ourselves with the community. Let’s be careful about asking for more compensation for more students. We may get exactly what we ask for, and in the process we may negate the value of work we do that does not scale with class sizes.

plagiarism? or, drowning in the new ocean of information?

Tomorrow, Dr. Rebecca Howard of Syracuse University is visiting campus, and I suspect that what she has to say will make us a little uncomfortable. At least I hope so.

Dr. Howard is at the helm of The Citation Project, a research endeavor that tests some of our most basic assumptions regarding plagiarism and pedagogy. I think it’s fair to say that most of us have encountered plagiarism in some form or another, and most of us have probably expressed frustration about it. But I doubt that many of us have spent much time thinking about ultimate sources of plagiarism. With written research papers, it’s easy to point fingers at students, their preparation, their misunderstanding of how to really compile and synthesize research, perhaps their laziness. But, then, we’re the instructors. Where do we really expect students to gain understanding of the research process? Perhaps, rather than in spite of, but because of the fact that our society is practically drowning in a sea of information, students should have a harder time than ever at synthesizing data from multiple sources.

Dr. Howard and colleagues summarize some of their work:

Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.*

A student today has so much material to work from, it’s easy to piece together full papers from multiple sources without ever understanding what any of them actually say, not to mention how they all work together. So, what do we do about this? I like to think that there are models of teaching and learning that are enduring through the ages; but, perhaps what we are facing is a new era. Students, perhaps, are the same as ever, but the world around them, the accessibility of information and sources, and the tools at hand are all new. If we stick to our old, 20th century modes of teaching, we’re letting our students drown in that sea of information. Rather than blame them for it, we should teach them how to swim.

_____

*Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tanya K. Rodrigue, and Tricia C. Serviss. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy 2.2 (Fall 2010): 177-192. Referenced from http://citationproject.net/CitationProject-findings.html

writing to learn and learning to write

I have three desks between home and two offices on campus, but at each of them you can find a stack of books, a keyboard, and an assortment of pens. This image recently struck me as an indicator of the power and necessity of words in our everyday work. Within the academy, writing is critical to everything I do during the day. Email, letters of recommendation, scholarly papers, more email, creating an exam, trying to draft course notes — all these things are the most solid artifacts of our existence. Using words like Lego bricks, we construct meanings and messages, questions and answers. In our daily classes and efforts, writing links things together. Maybe my perspective is narrowed by the act of writing right now, but I can’t think of anything that is more important to our curriculum and scholarship. There are many other skills we’ll emphasize, numeracy to critical thinking, but none of these has more impact on how we communicate with fellow humans than the act of putting words down on a piece of paper (remember those?) or screen.

If you’ve worked for any amount of time with students, you’ve entered into a conversation with other instructors about the lacking skills of student writers. I’ve heard and even contributed to the discussions of misspellings and miswordings — how many times have you grimaced at they’re/there/their? — as well as the bigger issues about how students construct arguments or how they can’t distinguish their own ideas from those of their sources. In class, I tell my students that writing is something they should engage in to stir ideas around and even make sense of what they are in the first place. It’s a tool for getting the notions and the thinking to start to make sense in some way, perhaps like tuning a bicycle to see if the gears all click right into place when the shifters move up the series of speeds. Writing is both therapeutic and generative for me, too, and I often find myself putting ideas down simply because that’s where I can first take a look at them. (That very idea was actually a good example.) I think, though, that this is something that’s only possible because of all the other things I use writing for. Because writing is endemic to everything else I do, I can use it as a tool rather than a burden.

Yet, I don’t think it’s this way for our students. Certainly, many of them journal, and once, when I asked a class if any of them had blogged, half of them raised their hands. (When I asked how many still blog, most of the hands went down.) Writing is a task. When I ask them to craft “response papers” to reading assignments in order to prepare for class, the very notion seems backwards to them. I’m fine with that — I’ll consider that it’s my duty to help them develop the skill of using writing to reflect upon what they’ve read and how they’re thinking about it. When the writing gets more serious and the stakes get higher, it’s a different story. We often ask students to assemble pieces of research and construct meaning in written form, and we expect them to get it right. It is, after all, a term paper, representing a synthesis of a semester’s worth of work, and they should be able to have something extraordinary and novel to show for it. Or, so we think.

Students know how to read and they know how to write, but they are still learning the process of constructing a thesis out of individual ideas. I suppose that this is something we all believe our students are going to implicitly learn in college, but few of us (including me) know where they will actually do this. I can’t expect that it’s the responsibility of the Composition program, but I also don’t see it as a capstone in our major programs. As with so many skills and competencies, there’s no way to learn it without doing it, but when we send them off to write a research paper, it seems analogous to asking an appreciator of music to go home and create an original composition on the piano. While we expect most students have heard music all their lives, and many have learned names of notes or even learned to play, asking for a composition is a whole other beast. But, with each major paper assignment, we may be asking them to do just this.

What to do? Perhaps there’s nothing that’s broken, nothing here really to report. Maybe that stack of books on my desk, my own need to write, and my ridiculous analogies to playing piano have all overstated a problem. Or, perhaps there’s some room to reconsider our own responsibilities and efforts in helping students learn this craft. I imagine that there’s more to be gained than just newfound writing skills, too. A student who can use language to help her shape thoughts has the power to consider new ideas, share them with others, and create unforeseen possibilities. That’s the ultimate gift I’d love to give to our students as they leave this institution. (And, maybe, they’ll get “their”, “there”, and “they’re” straight, too.)