Results tagged “tenure” from PEDABLOGUE

First up...

Neha Bawa, Seton Hill U class of 2006

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I am an eternal English major who keeps moving from one aspect of dissecting the language to another. I’ve completed my undergrad as an English Literature major, and currently, I am teaching English writing to college freshmen and I’m about to begin graduate classes in Communications.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

As a college freshman, my worldview was very convoluted, and I had no idea of how to picture myself in the future. When I first took Introduction to Literature in sophomore year, I knew I wanted to teach college students, so I’m exactly where I thought I would be.

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Eclectic. My college experiences have shaped my life and my thinking tremendously and have made a hard core liberal out of me. From the good to the bad and the ugly, the only year I would relive would be my Senior year, for both, academic and personal reasons.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

It was a class with you, in fact, that taught me a very valuable lesson in classroom management. I remember, I had started explaining something to a classmate about poetry, and you stopped teaching and asked me if I had started teaching the class at some point. It’s always stayed with me because I use it in my own classroom every time my students start talking in the middle of my sentences. Sometimes, respect has to be commanded.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

I have always wished that, beginning with freshman year, universities made it mandatory for students to learn about post-college savings and retirement options. Terms like “Tax Deferred Annuities” and “Individual Retirement Accounts” hold no meaning for college students and new college grads, which means that the time they spend with philandering away their earnings could have been spent building a nest egg. Also, I’ve always wanted universities to spend more time and resources on career advice and counseling, especially at Seton Hill, where the resources exist, but are not advertised well enough for the students to be completely aware of them.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

Reading responses based on emotions, instead of literary techniques used in a text. Being inundated with homework doesn’t necessarily mean that the class work is being understood. That just means that there’s more on the plate as “busy” work.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Writing research papers. I have never had the patience to sit in a library for hours and research a subject into the wee hours of the morning, but now that I’m teaching, I realize the importance of understanding research methods, especially when time management is involved.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

Constant reading. Constant. Whether I read fiction or non-fiction, a newspaper article, or even the back of a tube of toothpaste, I make it a point to read something new every day.

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

The personal and social touches to teaching and learning.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Please don’t ever let yourselves forget, that at the end of the day, after the tenure has been earned, after the papers have been published, after the book deals have been signed, that our profession is about making a difference in our students’ lives and not always our own.

THANK YOU, Neha!

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Read more "Student Outcomes"!

I am going on sabbatical for the full 2006-7 academic year, in order to secure time to develop my next novel.

While I intend to keep researching and reflecting on teaching during that time, I've decided to put Pedablogue on hiatus until August 2007, when I return to full-time teaching. If I write about teaching before then, I will likely do it for traditional publication, and if anything appears in print I will alert you through a comment appended to this post.

If you're a regular viewer of this site, or if you want to be alerted when it relaunches (because, believe me, you will forget), please enter your e-mail address in the "subscribe" box on your right. This will add you to an announcement list, which will automatically send you a message whenever a new post is made to Pedablogue. Alternately, you could simply add the site as an RSS feed to your aggregrator, if you have one (if not, I recommend FeedDemon).

I want to thank everyone for visiting, reading, and referencing Pedablogue since 2003. I don't consider this page a dead site by any means -- I've simply "gone fishing" at the Isle of Sabbitcus for a year -- and I look forward to returning to this place to exchange ideas. Since I'll be focusing mostly on creative writing for the year to come, I will continue to post regularly to my other blog dedicated to horror writing, The Goreletter. If you like offbeat humor or bizarre horror, please subscribe!

It's been a great year for me: my second novel was published, tenure was approved, my classes were wonderful experiences, sabbatical was awarded, and I've got a poetry book presently on the final ballot for the the Bram Stoker Award (decided in June). I've also learned a LOT about teaching by maintaining this site and reading pedagogy and edublogs across the net. I will still be out there, reading along with you. As a final post, I will simply share some good links about sabbatical (which is often misconstrued as simply a "paid vacation")....

• "And on the Seventh Year..." by Mark Shainblum is an excellent explanation of what taking a sabbatical really means.
  
• My colleague at Seton Hill University, Lee Tobin-McClain, has written a fantastic series of "first person advice" columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the sabbatical experience.
  
• The Teaching and Learning Center at Truman State University offers a good compilation of Tips for Writing a Sabbatical Proposal
  
• Inside Higher Ed's running column on What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School by David E. Drew and Paul Gray is chock full of hard-knocks advice that you could probably use, generally; they offer a few tips on taking sabbatical, as well.
  
• Sabbitcal Overview Basics at Hays Recruitment
  

Keep teaching well. No matter how hard it might seem, or how little you feel you're accomplishing, remember that it always matters. -- Mike Arnzen

On cable news this morning, I caught a special report from CNN/Money Magazine on the "Best Jobs in America." And while I expected to see something like "software engineer" come in first place, I was very surprised to find "college professor" ranked 2nd in the nation, for "best job"!

What's interesting about the report is that they don't just look at salary. In terms of rating our job elements, college profs get "A's" for flexibility and creativity, but lower grades for stress-level and ease-of-entry.

What's cool: Professors have near-total flexibility in their schedules. Creative thinking is the coin of the realm. No dress code!

What's not: The tick-tick-tick of the tenure clock; grading papers; salaries at the low end are indeed low.

Obviousness. But look at the stats and see if they match your own experience. In their report, Money gives the job an average salary of 81,500, and notes a 10-year growth in the occupation at 31%. They claim that there are 95,300 annual job openings for college profs.

While the retirement of some late baby boom faculty may account for some of the surges indicated here, there are radical differences in job availability based on field of specialization and salary variables based on the cost of living and the school finances in the campus where a faculty member works. When they talked about this on-air, the commentators lauded the job, but were also full of the usual wise cracks, jealous snarkiness, and ungrounded assumptions about college teaching. "Summer's off!" and "Students at your beck and call...Get a TA to grade all your papers and you're set!" and all the usual presumptions about the real work we perform both on campus and off as academics. The correspondent from Money magazine noted that there is a low-entry level for profs, but if they stay in for the long haul -- tenure, promotion, advancement to dean or president, work in consulting -- they get solid benefits (and this is true, but he lost me when he mentioned that "some professors get up to half-a-million dollars a year!" Yeah, some.)

Seeing a report like this makes me appreciate my job and happy that there are some positive messages out there that might make education more attractive to those who are on the market. But I also have become jaded regarding hyperbolic claims about how easy professors have it, and to see some of the myths broadcast and reinforced by the mass media once again only makes me wish someone would do a special report on the reality of the profession. (I suppose the edublogosphere is a potential counter-voice to all this, but I'm not sure it has the same cultural power.)

See also: The Truth About Tenure from the NEA and the Chronicle's searchable AAUP Faculty Salary Survey for a reality check.

Happy news. I received tenure in my position as Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University this week.

I'm grateful. To mark the occasion, soon I'll be writing letters to the important teachers I've had in my life, just to share the good news and to let them know how much they really made a difference. I'm joyful, but also almost too busy to celebrate. I have to finish up a conference paper I'll be delivering next week at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, in addition to grading papers so I can submit midterm grades to the registrar before I leave. Oh, and there's the search committee dossiers I have to read before I can go to that conference. And the campus litzine editorial meetings I need to attend, as well, so the magazine will be out on time. And then more papers to collect. And then....

Ah, tenure.

I'm no less busy than I've always been. But it's an exciting achievement. There are a lot of myths attached to tenure -- mostly that it provides "lifetime job guarantee" (which it doesn't -- nationally, 2% of all tenured faculty are dismissed each year) -- or that it means a faculty member can kick back and rest on his laurels (which they don't, and can't since there are future reviews, evaluations for promotion to "full" professor, and more ... stats say that tenured faculty work an average of 52 hours a week!). But one thing that it signifies, which I hope is not a myth, is the security of academic freedom. As a creative writer, one who works in the taboo-breaking realms of horror fiction, that means a lot to me. (Not that I intend to suddenly start writing satanic bible study manuals featuring nude torture illustrations or anything like that -- I realize, naturally, that with tenure comes the responsibility for representing my college, my field, my colleagues, my home, my students, my future... -- but when I see articles reporting how professors are being fired for inane things like using the "f-word" in class, I cherish the academic freedom of tenure all the more.)

I don't have a lot to say here about achieving tenure (other than "whew!" and "now what?" and "hey, is there any more champagne in the fridge?"). But I am trying to take the time to think deeply about what tenure really means, to both myself and to others, because I have never really thought of tenure as the "brass ring" of my academic life (and, frankly, I rarely trust anyone who does... the autonomy granted by tenure is simply a tool enabling one to achieve higher aims). So I'm reading a lot. Here are some excellent sources I've come across.

• "The Truth about Tenure in Higher Education" from the NEA
  
• The Tenure Trek from Continuum Magazine
  
• The AAUP on Academic Freedom and Tenure
  
• The Economics of the Tenure System by Jeffrey A. Miron
  
• Michael Berube's analysis of the politics behind attacks on academic freedom
  
• Wikipedia entry on "Academic Freedom"
  
• The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship
  
• Protecting College Freedom
  
• Humbly, older pedablogue entries on tenure
  

Whew. Now what? Ah yes, to the fridge!

I was interviewed by Kendra Hamilton for the just-published article, "Getting Off the Burn-Out Track" -- part of a series about important faculty career trends in the latest issue of Diverse magazine. In the article, Hamilton sheds light on the ramifications of the waning of the tenure-track for academics seeking work. She raises the central question: "How do they strike the balance between the job they need right now and the job that will fulfill the aspirations they came into the field with?" Talking about everything from "freeway faculty" to professors-of-practice in the new academic landscape, the essay gives a sobering snapshot of the realities most grad students will have to face and a realistic reminder of how privileged those of us with tenured positions really are.

See Erin O'Connor's blog entry on "Phasing Out The Tenure System" for more context on this issue in relation to Academic Freedom.

I've been meaning to plug a really great e-mail listserv on Pedablogue for quite some time: Tomorrow's Professor, led by Richard M. Reis (author of a book by the same title). I subscribe to this newsletter, which disseminates wonderfully thoughful essays about college teaching (usually excerpts from current books by diverse authors) about 100 times a year.

The archives of Tomorrow's Professor are an enormous buffet. One of my favorite finds from past issues is "Why Professors Have Tenure and Business People Don't" by Richard B. McKenzie. It explains why tenure exists economically (as a "benefit" in exchange for lower salary) and politically (to protect professors from internal forces -- like the odd whims of committee votes). But interesting pedagogical theory entries make up the bulk of the listserv. For example, Robert K. Noyd's "Balancing Overteaching and Underteaching" interestingly applies Aristotelean methods to achieving balance in one's teaching decisions.

You can't read all that the listserv offers in one sitting, but you can start keeping current with it now. The next issue promises to be on "The Perils of Powerpoint" so subscribe today!

Today I submitted my tenure package: a three binder set of documents about my teaching, scholarship, and service over the past seven years at Seton Hill University. Though the process is difficult, it feels liberating to have it out of my hands...and the process of assembling the portfolios and reflecting on my work was much more rewarding than I thought it would be.

A lot of advice about getting ready for tenure is aimed at keeping good records and developing your career early in the game, so that you'll "survive the tenure track" and have excellent material ready for the tenure package when the time comes around to submit it. But little help is available out there on preparing the package itself. Obviously, one should turn to colleagues and administrators on campus for assistance and mentoring every step of the way. But I did find a very good article to recommend. In "Making Your Case: Strategies for an Effective Tenure Package," Kirk Martini compares a professor's career to "building a city" and the tenure package as a series of "maps and guidebooks" that escort the evaluator through it. That's a great analogy. Organization is everything. I spent a lot of time not only composing a narrative overview of my work, but also added brief narrative cover pages to function as introductions to each section of the portfolio (for example, I included a brief bio for the section where the letter from my "external reviewer" will go; for the "course materials" section (aka teaching portfolio), I described why I chose the classes I chose to represent). These mini-intros also cross-reference different parts of the portfolio if I felt it prudent, so that the committee will be invited to draw connections. I also used construction paper with labels to subdivide different sections to make the organization of material clearer (e.g., for the "scholarship" binder, I tab-divided the material by genre (articles, presentations, fiction, poetry, and new media) and then subdivided those with black separator pages (e.g., "articles" is subdivided with pages labeled "instructional essays" and "book reviews").

There's a lot of curiosity about how weblogs relate to tenure; since blogs aren't "peer reviewed," many scholars are skittish about incorporating blogs into their package. At the same time, faculty who blog claim that it's a form of "open effort academics" where the formative process of scholarship is shared among a discourse community. I tend to agree with the latter, obviously (otherwise Pedablogue wouldn't exist!). And since I am loosely attached to our New Media Journalism program at Seton Hill, it's part of my work and I didn't bat an eye about including websites in my binder. I included a section of "new media" under scholarship, and included screen captures of Pedablogue and other websites I've designed; otherwise, a few selected entries from Pedablogue went under a subdivision called "Scholarship of Teaching," alongside some articles I've published about pedagogy.

I think the best part of the process was sorting through my old teaching files and realizing how much some of my routine courses (like composition and literary criticism) have evolved over the years. It's hard to communicate that evolution in the tenure package, but I've come to realize that a lot of these "hoops" that academics are asked to jump through are really opportunities for reflection and self-discovery that prompt renewal. As far as the outcome of what lies on the other side of the proverbial hoop, wish me luck -- decisions won't be final until the Winter.

A recent entry about the problems with student evaluations over at the anonymous weblog for "Bitch Ph.D." is garnering a lot of heated comments (as noted by my colleague, Dennis Jerz). Essentially, she's concerned that "our primary feedback on our work comes from children...18 year olds who don't understand what your job really is" and that "a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis."

Having just reviewed a number of part-time faculty evaluations in my job as interim division chair this term, I can see what she means. While I don't think 18 year olds are "children," it's true that the evaluations are often emotionally-driven rants or raves, whether pro or con, and often don't focus on the teaching itself -- or, when they do, they're filled out like customer service surveys rather than critical feedback on pedagogy. While I typically garner very strong recommendations, the ones with thoughtful written comments that mention specific examples are the only ones that really help me. I'm way beyond doing this for my own ego -- so while it feels good for a moment when I read the evals that say "You're the best teacher in the world!" they are sometimes only as helpful as a blank form.

But student evaluations are only part of a larger process of self-reflection and administrative evaluation. What "Bitch, Ph.D." neglects to say is that we already are (or should be) the "authorities" on our own course teaching and that the best people to teach the teacher is the students because they are the living embodiments of our course objectives. Our peers also function as our continued mentors, but they can't sit in on the day-to-day experience of our classes. Though nothing's stopping a professor from inviting colleagues to sit in on her classes, and most colleges have a system of peer review. We also get our feedback in teacher development sessions and tenure review letters -- help that comes in an academic and collegial manner, not from some outsider boss up on high. Teachers need to take advantage of all the forums for the scholarship of teaching if they really want to improve.

Besides, she kind of misses the point of the evaluation process, too: the students really are the ONLY ONES "who count on any kind of regular basis." Not because they're the customers, but because they're the learners.

Of course, I do understand her point. If a class were a book, the sort of feedback we get from editors is what we'd like to get on our teaching. Students (esp Freshman) aren't really skilled in evaluating teachers -- and yet, perhaps they are to some degree because they've been studying teaching as much as course content their whole lives. The problem is that they haven't thought of what they're doing as students in a critical manner. But evaluation skills, too, could be taught in some classes and the teacher can "prep" the evaluation at the end of term. I often directly solicit comments on specific events, telling them outright how much I depend on their feedback to improve the class -- "last year's students who took this class influenced what I taught you this year," I'll say, and so I urge them to be specific about course activities. And before the class fills out their evaluations, I'll have them brainstorm orally while I transcribe on the board all the different sorts of class activities performed across the term. This works to get concrete feedback far better than just tossing the evaluation instrument at them blindly with a fistful of pencils. I also always seem to get better evaluations (meaning thorough and critical, with cited examples and thoughtful reasoning, not just "way to go" responses) in my courses that have writing workshops, because they train students to evaluate in thoughtful ways. Any class that has students engaging in "evaluation" as part of the course content can tie those same skills into the end of term course evaluation as well.

Anyway, I think the system is indeed a "weird gig" but I'd much rather have students evaluate me at the end of the term than some sort of outside inspector watching over my shoulder the whole time. A string of bad evaluations may not be a sign of badly taught classes at all, per se -- they may instead be a sign that the teacher isn't engaging in their own development as an educator (whether by attending pedagogical conferences, soliciting peer class sit-ins, or simply talking about teaching and genuinely revising their syllabi) in the scholarly and self-reflective ways that they probably ought to be. Students tend to write positive evaluations about those who genuinely care about teaching more than they do about their own needs and are flexible in adopting the course to the students learning...even students who aren't getting good grades respond positively to teachers who care about their jobs.

I'm not saying Bitch, PhD. doesn't care about her job...if she didn't she wouldn't host such a GREAT blog about education and she wouldn't have let those evaluations get to her. When bad evals sting us, they hurt because we do care. But we can't blame the students for it. The instititution might be partly to blame, but that's only because, perhaps, the system (at some research colleges anyway) is designed in a way that is more interested in what is taught than how it is delivered. That's one reason why "teaching certification" isn't required of professors. But when the scholarship of teaching is valued by a school, then the purpose of student evaluation becomes more meaningful.

I read a news article at Inside Higher Ed today, called "Holding Out for Tenure," which talks about how some schools are dealing with instructors who are employed full-time or nearly so, but not given the opportunity for tenure. Roughly 34% of all full-time faculty are not tenured or tenure-track. There's a new trend afoot in terming the more highly valued professionals off the tenure track "Professors of Practice" -- a model which gives long-term, talented teachers more benefits than they'd get for part-time adjunct pay, but without the other benefits of tenure. The AAUP has issued a statement against this model, arguing that such a practice "endangers the academic freedom" of these teachers, erodes their power in faculty governance, and "demeans instruction." It also calls tenure itself into question, since the differences between a tenured prof and a "prof of practice" are hazy.

I know of a number of adjunct teachers who are good instructors and "regulars" in the faculty pool and while they do get raises based on their education and seniority, I like the idea of giving them something a little better that recognizes their value. Adjuncts and part-timers don't get enough credit for what they contribute to a college and anything that can help them achieve more status (or more equity, in comparison to their colleagues) is meaningful and appropriate. But I have to say I agree with the AAUP's response: this model probably isn't the best way to do it.

"Professors of Practice" is a fancy way of saying "teacher whose research isn't important to us." This does demean teaching, because it turns a blind eye to the scholarship of teaching. Moreover, "Professors of Practice" is really just another way of saying "scholar-practitioner" and I see no reason why "scholar-practitioners" can't be afforded tenure for all the work they do. In fact, I'd call myself a scholar-practitioner, since I not only teach creative writing, I write and publish my work professionally in the fiction/poetry marketplace. All professors should be professors of practice to some degree, anyway. They don't just profess; they publish and present and more. Would research scholars be offended if they were given the rank of "Researcher of Practice" or "Scholar of Practice" instead of, "Tenured Professor"?

I'm actually up for tenure this semester, and reading articles like this one make me appreciate my opportunity and status all the more.

In "Simplifying the Academic Hierarchy," John Jeffries Martin argues that the "associate professor" title should be abolished. Building on Max Weber's Marxist thinking about the bureaucracy in the American university system, Martin proposes that the best way to reform the rank system of the professoriate is to hold a probationary "assistant professor" rank for a short period of time before an institution promotes and tenures faculty into "full professor" rank. The publish or perish "bean counting" mindset of the rank system, he asserts, alienates teachers from their relationship to their own scholarship, burns them out and distracts them from thriving as educators, because there are so many "hoops" to jump through on the way toward full professor. The emphasis on "specialization" impedes the response to one's "calling" because the focus on proving one's self to administrators disallows the freedom to muse reflectively and be inspired by chance, among other things. He writes: "Simply by removing the second 'hoop' — that is, the goal of promotion to full professor — many universities and colleges would become more capacious workplaces, accommodating the diverse strengths, talents, and goals of their faculties with greater ease."

Such reform won't likely happen in my lifetime, if ever, but it's an interesting notion to think of alternatives and it's liberating to recognize how the system is historically contingent. Since I'm an associate prof going up for tenure next year -- and with full professor many years away -- I'm glad I read this piece. It reminded me of my own situatedness in the academic hierarchy -- and to think about the tenure process and the rungs I'm climbing a little more objectively.

For my presentations over the past few weeks, I've been researching the role of blogging in faculty development. One issue that comes up repeatedly is whether or not a blog should "count" as professional scholarship. Obviously, this weblog is self-consciously focused on the scholarship of teaching; other blogs are teaching tools or forums for teachers to gather. While they aren't "peer reviewed" like traditional journals, blogs are reviewed by peers (who often post comments or blog about other scholar's blogs) and the blogosphere has its niche communities that engage in specialized discourses.

I think of blogging as "scholarship-in-process" -- that is, in motion, live, and in-progress, whether it leads to publication, presentation, or edification. I've accumulated a number of bookmarks on this subject and thought I'd share a shortlist of them for anyone reading this who is interested. There are probably LOTS more...surf (or comment) away!

• Working With Technology and Winning Tenure (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
  
• Academic Credit for Blogging (Prof Bainbridge)
  
• Teaching, Technology and Tenure: How are they Valued (Educause -- .pdf file)
  
• The Impact of Electronic Publications on Promotion and Tenure Decisions (Association of Research Libraries)
  
• Web Contributions and Tenure Decisions (Ex-Libris)
  
• Scholarly Communication and Electronic Publication (UCSB Library)
  
• Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)
  
• Tenure for Bloggers (matthew yglesias)
  
• Report of the Committee on Electronic Publication and Tenure (Rutgers U)
  

This afternoon, I gave a little talk to first year faculty about how to prepare the tenure portfolio and how to perform the annual self-evaluation report that all faculty are asked to do at SHU. In my planning for this, I came across several sources, which I thought I'd note them here in case others are interested in how to compile a good teaching portfolio (or "dossier") and how to survive the tenure track:

• Evaluating Teaching by EKU's Teaching & Learning Center
  
• Step-by-Step Guide to Preparing a Teaching Dossier and Online Resources for Writing a Teaching Dossier by Dalhousie U's Center for Learning and Teaching
  
• Teaching Portfolios web by U Texas El Paso
  
• Preparing a Teaching Dossier by James McNitch
  
• How to Survive the Tenure Track by Diana Hume George
  
• Survival Skills for Teachers Book Series at Sage Publications
  
• Junior Faculty Development by Donald Jarvis (book)
  

"Forging that new ground requires extra protection, an assurance that pushing the envelope will not be punished. “The great thinkers are also the ones who come up with lots of ideas, many of which fail,” says Coles. “They have earned the right to fail, to have a multitude of ideas.”-- Theresa Desmond, The Tenure Trek, Continuum Magazine, Sp 2003.

Although I hadn't thought of "academic freedom" in this way -- as earning, after all those years in school, "the right to fail" -- I liked the clarity with which this article not only explained the tenure track system, but also discussed the rationale behind it. There's also a great little chart that shows the way that academic titles are put together.

Found via an article on Akma's Random Thoughts on how teachers self-evaluate...which I discovered via Adjunct Nation's blog entry on the subject...which I was reading because of a great article I read about the increased reliance on adjunct faculty (up to 50% nationwide) "Fewer professors spend a full day on campus" by Kimberly Chase)...which, I'm ashamed to say, I found by clicking through a banner ad of all things...while reading an article about getting kids to paint cars creatively in art class, featured in the latest issue of Teacher Magazine

Demonstrating Good Teaching by David G. Brown -- recently published in Syllabus magazine -- is a good reminder that teachers who integrate lots of technology in their courses may have to take special steps to show its value to their administrators and colleagues. Especially those who are up for tenure and promotion. Brown briefly lists ten strategies for helping others to see that computer mediated instruction can be good instruction.

Brown's tips range from utilizing a website or Powerpoint presentation in a final exam (and archiving that to disk or publishing it online in an electronic teaching portfolio) to publicly soliciting and archiving comments about course materials (as a blog like this one might do). It's all good advice. Brown emphasizes generating empiric evidence to make your teaching process self-evident so that the strengths of your use of technology will be obvious. It can sometimes be difficult for those who don't use technology to understand it's use if you only talk about it or describe it from afar...it's far better to have it speak for itself. That is, if you can get folks to look at the web site or CD in the first place...sometimes that's the hurdle. Brown recommends having colleagues visit classes or soliciting their opinions about specific course strategies you're employing.

One tip that Brown mentions gives me pause. He suggests that technology savvy teachers "Ask students, about every three weeks, to e-mail you comments about how the course is going, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it can be improved." He's probably advocating this because you're likely to get good supportive letters from students who sing your praises that you can put in your promotion file. But even better, you can adjust your approach to a specific class along the way, "tuning in" to the students needs along the way as the course progresses. Of course, this can also lead to troubles: students might see your inbox as a complaint box. And if what research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project suggests is correct, students already e-mail professors so often that such course corrections already occur. In fact, 82-90% of students are already contacted by their profs via e-mail and around half of those students report that e-mail has enhanced their relationship with their professors. (That research also suggests that students only complain 4% of the time, by the way...which, as is often the case in course evaluations, too, is probably a case of one bad apple spoiling the bunch.)

In any case, I agree that professors need to be receptive to student e-mail, but the degree to which it is solicited is up to the teacher. Many of my colleagues report being flooded with e-mail correspondence to answer, from not only students but administrators, publishers, communications officers, and even e-mail worms. E-mail can become a workload problem if it isn't managed well. I personally ask students to contact me via e-mail if there are problems they're having in the course, but more often than not my replies ask the student to come by my office hours for a conversation. At the beginning of the semester, I tell students that I'm addicted to e-mail and love to get it from them -- and I am very receptive to their messages. But sometimes e-mail is a false solution to problems. I've had students e-mail me about problems finding materials on reserve, for example, when the obvious solution to that problem is to first ask the librarian for assistance (in my Literary Criticism class recently, I learned that an article was placed in the reserve file folder for a different class -- there's no way I could have solved that problem by e-mail...it took someone asking the librarian about it for them to dig around and discover the error). There's a tendency for people, not just students, to defer work by sending off e-mails to others and hoping they'll do the work for them. Like when students conduct e-mail interviews, whipping out five questions and sending them off without really inter-viewing at all. I've also had students write e-mail to me to "defend" their writing from editorial feedback I'd written to help them revise...which means my inbox became a place for them to vent rather than to critically rethink their writing (of course, again, I invited them to come see me with the subtle reminder that writing must always speak for itself).

But I'm beginning to digress. Like I said above, e-mail is a boon for teaching but it needs to be managed effectively. The same is true of all classroom activities, especially technology, which is usually intended to help organize material. I recommend you read Brown's article and see which tips are applicable to your courses. If you're coming up for promotion or tenure review, you need to start thinking in the ways that Brown advises. Regardless, you might even e-mail David Brown to let him know how you feel about it; his article practices what he preaches and solicits tips. You also might want to review the long list of practical and useful articles he's written for Syllabus magazine. I'm going to let him know about this entry.

Dennis Jerz, my colleague right down the hall at SHU, posts an interesting deconstruction of press "spin" regarding Elizabeth Ito, a teacher who was terminated for promoting her views against the Iraq War in the classroom.

Ito is predominantly seen as a victim in most media treatments of this event. But Ito has also become a politcal poster child regarding political speech in the classroom given the current war climate. The anti-war group, Not in Our Name highlights Ito as a sort of poster child of the Bush administration "coming after the teachers" in the wake of the Patriot Act and you can read the Ito Defense Coalition's website if you're interested in Ito's response to her termination.

Although he treats Ito as a stereotypically "out-of-touch campus radical consumed by an irrational passion for one ideological issue," Jerz sets his sights on the press release itself, unveiling how the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education bias their audience through writing. Although I think any superficial look at the FIRE's website will reveal their political leanings, Jerz' analysis is a pretty good lesson in journalism, and Jerz offers this as an example of how he teaches politically-ripe issues in the classroom. He prefers to analyze the representation of the truth, rather than scrutinizing the truth value of the event itself. This, at least, tries to approach objectivity by taking the attention away from the teacher's politics in order to examine the politics of the texts themselves. In a journalism course, this allows the teacher to show how press releases can -- and ought to -- be read critically by reporters and not just reprinted verbetim, because, "language has the power to heal and the power to destroy." I've done similar analyses in my own journalism classes. And I concur with Dr. Jerz.

But the more I scrutinize the Ito story itself, the more I think of the academic freedom issues that Ito's tale raises -- and that's what FIRE is really after. In many ways, all curriculum is political, all teachers are products of their ideology, and no content is free of bias. This is why academic freedom needs to be protected by structures like tenure. If a course is going to discuss political issues, I see nothing wrong with a teacher acknowledging his or her biases and leanings -- in fact, it seems more honest to me than a pretense toward pure objectivity. Naturally, a teacher can go too far in promoting their own views -- and Ito probably did -- and as a fan of the student-centered learning environment, I don't think the teacher should play a dominant role that would allow them to proselytize in the first place. But if we expect our students to have viewpoints and to support them in arguments we shouldn't pretend that we don't have viewpoints ourselves (note: I'm not saying my colleague, Jerz, doesn't already do this). The trick is to try to remain balanced and to be very conscious of the amount of power that a teacher wields in shaping the worldviews of his or her students. Teachers need to respect contesting opinions and alternative belief systems, whether political or religious. Such matters also depend on the class, of course -- my thoughts on this are more applicable to humanities courses, where politics become a matter of open discussion, rather than, say, to chemistry. But even in Chemistry, their might be debates about certain theories. In fact, every discourse community is a contested space where differences emerge. In some classes, particularly freshman composition, I try to make these differences more visible, so that we can dialogue about them and learn from one another.

Ito was also a first year teacher from what I read, which is typically a position with the least amount of power and the most amount of scrutiny and judgment that a new professor has to endure. I personally feel her administration could have "taught her a lesson" without terminating her contract. In fact, I would argue that most good schools do treat events like these as teachable moments -- where senior faculty consult with junior faculty about teaching options and appropriateness of politics in the classroom. (Some schools clearly differ on the level of appropriateness -- when I taught at the University of Oregon -- which was listed as one of the most "activist" campuses in the country -- I regularly saw teachers promote their own views in the classroom, especially graduate student teachers who were so political they had their own labor union). It seems to me that firing Ito was actually more politically radical (or reactionary) than Ito's expression of her beliefs in the classroom. But maybe it wasn't political in the usual sense at all. Maybe it was purely economic.

In looking into this story, I noticed that President Bush actually guest lectured at the school which dismissed Ito just a few months after she was fired.

In my research of academic standards, I came across The Society for A Return to Academic Standards -- a fascinating collection of links and articles that seek to "peg the prof" and hold him/her accountable for the lowering standards of student performance among American undergrates.

I hope to return to this site often, because I have mixed emotions about all of this. On the one hand, I think it's a gross oversimplification to say that a professor is to blame for a student's academic failures. They might contribute to it, but they're probably not the direct cause. On the other hand, I recall my own days as a student, and there were times when I knew the teacher was just punching the clock or reading old notes or otherwise not wholly engaging in the act of teaching. It's one of the risks of liberal education, where the pursuit of knowledge is (or should be) free from the constraints of the workplace. Teaching is a job, and yet learning is not. And that's probably the crux of the problem.

One fallacy I see a lot of, however, is the assumption that if a teacher isn't standing at the front of the classroom, then they're not working. If you're not a teacher, you'd be surprised at how much writing, planning, reading, speaking, and administering we have to do. You'd have no clue about how accountable we really are, in terms of not only teaching our students well but also serving the campus and the community at large, in addition to engaging in scholarship and broadening the range of knowledge. And outsiders just don't realize how important course releases and sabbaticals are for faculty development and workload/life balance. People who don't understand the reality of academic work often cry for "accountability" without realizing what they're asking for.

In one outrageous essay I found at SFRTAS, called "Tenured Weasels" (from 2000), Patrick Moore claims that undergraduate educators "launder time" and thus do undergrads a disservice. "Professors don't steal money," he writes. "They steal time." In exemplum, he cites graduate programs at small institutions, which -- in his view -- teachers use to get time off to prepare new courses which aren't all that different than undergrad courses and often don't require much preparation. Or they often are cross-listed, as courses for BOTH undergrads and grads. Other "time laundering" operations include assigning class presentations where the students do all the lecturing, and so forth.

Moore contests the way profs seem to get time for their own pursuits, sacrificing the needs of their students for their own gains. But what Moore fails to understand is the notion of "faculty development" -- we must be students as well as teachers in this profession -- and every course benefits from time put into preparation in advance. Clearly, Moore's assumptions about graduate preparations are groundless: graduate-level courses require the professor to not only be as up-to-date on trends and new knowledge as their extra-brainy students, but also require reading longer researcher papers, leading more challenging discussions and seminars, proctoring dissertations (book length papers!), intensive mentoring and advising, and more.

Although I vehemently disagree with much of the logic of Moore's essay, it's still worth a read to understand the suspicion and skepticism folks have about the work that profs do and the case they might make against tenure. Also worth a read is a follow-up article at the Christian Science Monitor: "Pressuring professors to put in more face time" from 2001. [This article cites the book, Profscam, which I'm going to hunt down when I get the chance.]

Time isn't stolen; it's valued by professors because they don't have it and they clamor for "time releases" to do the work that they love to do. Time isn't "released" like a release from prison...it's simply shifted to something other than the standard contracted work. The fact is, most professors I know aren't "time laundering"...they barely have time to do their own laundry!

In this entry, I continue my reading log of Scholarship Reconsidered, by Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In Chapter 3, "The Faculty: A Mosaic of Talent" Boyer explores the diversity of faculty work and contemplates alternative methods for assessing a professor's scholarly performance. ....

I've decided to read Scholarship Reconsidered by Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from cover to cover. I'll post a summary and my unstructured gut-level responses as I go from chapter to chapter. I'm finding it a fascinating study....