College Ready Writing

College Ready Writing Has Moved

2011-10-30T09:16:00.004-04:00

Welcome to College Ready Writing, Version 1.0. I am no longer updating this space regularly, but please head over to Inside Higher Ed for Version 2.0 of my blog.

Please feel free to continue to browse these old posts and comment on them. I'll be linking to posts here from time to time; the wonderful thing about the web is that the conversation can continue dynamically over time.

Thanks for clicking, reading, responding.

Big News! CRW is Moving Up!

2011-10-25T16:27:00.003-04:00

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (or who troll Inside Higher Ed carefully) already know that I am now an official part of their Blog U! College Ready Writing is the newest member. I've already (technically) been blogging for Inside Higher Ed as a contributor to the University of Venus, but now my blogging will be over at Inside Higher Ed full-time. I'll still be writing for UVenus once a month, as well as contributing longer Views pieces (which I've recently started doing).

I'd really, really, really like to thank all of you, my loyal readers for all of your support (and traffic!) over the past two years. It is because of you that I am able to take advantage of this opportunity to grow my audience, extend the conversation, and really participate more fully in the conversations taking place about higher education. The words won't change (much), but the visibility will be more significant.

I'm still not sure about what I am going to do with this space. Obviously, I'll keep the archives here, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do simultaneous updates. If you do "follow" this blog, please adjust your Reader/RSS feed/whatever system you use to keep track of all of the various blogs you follow. I hope that you'll follow me over there and tell all of your friends. When I get back from my conference on Monday, I imagine I'll do one last post with the link to IHE, front and center.

Here is the text from my first post over at Inside Higher Ed, which I will link to the moment it goes live:

To my regular readers, welcome to my new home here at InsideHigher Ed. I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of the blogging communityhere. I appreciate that Inside Higher Ed has been at the forefront ofsupporting academic bloggers and encouraging academics to write in ways thataren’t typically supported by traditional higher education. Blogging has been aliberating experience, and I’m curious to see what direction this new venuetakes my writing. I doubt I’ll change much in terms of style or content, butone never knows.

(I’ve already edited this piece way more than any piece that’sgone up at the “old” site, so there you go.)

For those of you who are new to my regular blog (you mayknow me from here as one of the University of Venuswriters), I invite you to click over to the “old” (virtual) placeto check out some of the archives. I write about teaching, I write aboutwriting, I write about balancing work/life, I write generally about highereducation. I teach writing off the tenure-track at a rural state university. Istudy literature, translation, and a whole bunch of stuff in between. I am amother of two and a wife of an academic (not in my discipline) who is on thetenure-track. I was born in Montreal, Canada, and I’ve lived and taught in twoprovinces and three states.

Being invited to blog here at Inside Higher Ed feels likeapprobation for a lot of work and writing. Almost two years ago, I wasunemployed and miserable, and I took a chance and started to blog. Because Iwasn’t in an academic position (and my family situation kept me from reallylooking for another), I was free to take chances with my writing and reach outand make connections that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. An answer to a CFPfrom the University of Venus put me in contact with Mary Churchill, to whom Iowe a great deal, particularly in giving me to confidence to seek out thisopportunity. I’ve connected to a community of academics (and former academics),none of whom I would have met had I not started blogging.

I kept blogging when I got my current teaching position.I’ve created, through my blog and Twitter,a Personal Learning Network (or PLN) that rivals any face-to-face professionaldevelopment opportunity I’ve participated in. I find support and community, andI’ve been touched by the number of people who have reached out to thank me fora post on one topic or another, from practical classroom issues to personaladmissions to irreverent observations. I’m looking forward to extending thatreach and that community here at Inside Higher Ed.

So, welcome to this new space. I usually update three timesa week, but this week is a bit of an exception as I am going to a conference and thus won’tbe able to blog until I get back on Sunday (and if you’re in Toronto, tweet me or head over to Ryersonfor the conference).

Bad Student: I Was an Undergrad Snowflake

2011-10-23T21:57:00.002-04:00

(We're finally watching Bad Teacher because it's now available on PPV; it seems fitting that I write this particular post while Cameron Diaz plays a deplorable human being, let alone teacher, in the background.)

There was an interesting discussion over at Prof Hacker about venting about students using social media. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I, from time to time, make negative observations about my students. They are general and they never discuss grades. What I often am looking for are some words of encouragement and support, as well as a place to sort through my often conflicted feelings about how things are going in my class. And, more often than not, these tweets (and the responses to them) turn into blog posts (like the most recent one on plagiarism). I don't tweet anything that I wouldn't tell my students in class.

But, as I wrote in the comments of the Prof Hacker post,

I think that when we express some of our frustration about our students online, for me on Twitter, I think it shows us as human, who get frustrated and discouraged, just like our students. I also think that an angry tweet about, say, catching a plagiarizer serves as an immediate reminder that a) yes we will catch you and b) it will not be good.

Our classes don't always go as planned. Sometimes it can open up a conversation about what went wrong and why from both our perspective as well as the students. Also, I think some students need to know that certain behaviors are unacceptable from them, and that that is a "universal" sentiment, expressed through tweets and RT from lots and lots of professors on Twitter.

I know that if I had seen behavior that I recognized as my own tweeted out by one of my profs, I'd have actually reconsidered my own attitude and actions. See, I was an undergraduate snowflake. In fact, I was probably the worst kind; the kind that still got really good grades, despite a) rarely attending class and b) putting little effort into the assignments. I left just about every single paper until the last minute, handing work in late, and just generally not caring about my classes very much.

(There were a few exceptions, of course.)

I kept behaving badly because I got away with it. No one called me out on my crap, at all. I know now that I must have driven my professors absolutely crazy. Either that, or they didn't care (and really, maybe they didn't). If there was a way that I could have known that they did, indeed, care and that my behavior (and, to be fair, the behavior of many of my classmates) was unacceptable, I probably would have changed it. It wasn't until I realized myself, through a mixture of professional quasi-failures and hitting an academic wall during my MA, that really, being a snowflake may have been fun for me, but it was totally unfair to my professors.

(In writing this, I am beginning to totally understand Worst Professor Ever's attitude towards teaching.)

My professors were human and professionals. They deserved better treatment than what I gave to them.

Peer-Driven Learning: I'll Need to Drive a Little More

2011-10-21T12:22:00.003-04:00

We're at the half-way point of the semester. Mid-term grades are in. One of my classes handed in their "required" paper, while the other class has begun their presentations. I have some thoughts about how each class is going and how I will be doing this class next semester.

In my "stronger" class, the presentations have been excellent. The discussions have been interesting and the the students are clearly interacting with the material in ways I could never have hoped they would had I assigned them the same thing. Class participating seems a little better, though dominated by a handful of students. I'll have to "encourage" the students to find a way to include more of their peers in the discussions. No one has dropped the class. There have been no complaints about attendance or students not doing their "fair share." It's amazing.

My other class, we started with the required essay. This was a MISTAKE. Yes, it was a mistake that the students directed, but it's a mistake that I won't allow happen in the future. Here's why it was a mistake. Students wanted to get the required paper out of the way first, and as a result, the class turned into a traditional course, mostly directed by me. The students weren't engaging with the subject. Students stopped coming. Some students didn't even hand in an essay. The course became too much like a normal class, so they treated it as such.

Now, we're on to projects of their choosing. The difference is incredible. Students who never said a word are engaged and excited. Attendance isn't a problem anymore (except for a few who I think are going to withdraw). The lesson is, do the unconventional first, because then they'll be hooked and more likely to produce good work, even on their "traditional assignment." I will still given students the choice of what they work on, how the project is formatted, how they are ultimately graded/evaluated, but I think I will set the schedule for them from now on.

I'm fascinated by this video on motivation. What worked with my students was to let the students do exactly what Dan Pink recommends (Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose), the results were impressive. In my "stronger" class, we never talked about grades. Not once. In my other class, grades became their incentive/reward/profit. And it didn't work. There was little autonomy (at least, they didn't perceive that there was; they saw that they were required to write a traditional essay and thus lost their autonomy), little desire for mastery (meh, writing, rather than mastery or attempting mastery of a topic that they are interested in), and their purpose was simply to get a paper out of the way and get the grades.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how to provide this same kind of environment in my other classes.

Work-Life Balance: When Life Get in the Way

2011-10-18T20:42:00.000-04:00

If you've been reading, I was actively working on achieving some sort of work-life balance in my family. This past weekend was our "fall break" and thus my husband and I had Thursday and Friday off of work. Because much of the support staff at our kids' preschool are students, the preschool was closed as well. This was a perfect opportunity to reconnect as a family and spend some time together.

And it largely worked. It was a beautiful fall weekend where we could enjoy our back yard, head out of "Court Days" in a neighboring county, and just spend time all together as a family. The kids became noticeably more agreeable, calmer, and got along better with each other. My husband and I even got to go on a date where we ate antelope for dinner and got to see the Boston Pops play here in Kentucky. I'll forever be able to say that I saw "America's Symphony" play Bohemian Rhapsody, accompanied by a 350+ member choir. Who head-banged.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, my family, and thought that I was setting myself up well for the rest of the semester. My grading was done, my classes planned, my family happy; it felt good. Of course, it lasted about three hours. First, my 2-year-old son got sick. Then, my 4-year-old got sick. And the, I got sick. And not just a little sick. Washing machine continuously running sick.

I'll leave it at that.

I had to cancel classes on Monday because I physically couldn't make it. I was particularly troubled because it was supposed to be the first of the peer-driven class' presentations. The high-school/dual credit teachers I am mentoring had to also enter in mid-term grades, and of course there were any number of technical problems that prevented them for doing in on time. I was in no condition to be able to help them. My house is a disaster again. My husband, who was sparred the virus, is a wreck because has had to take care of everyone, leading to severe sleep deprivation.

So, we're right back where we started, through no fault of our own. My teaching is in disarray (or at least it feels that way). My kids are out of sorts. My husband and I get to see each other fleetingly between clean-ups and running to class/work. I still have a conference presentation to write and an essay, and because I am still recovering, I barely have enough energy to teach let alone write academic prose (I said academic prose; there's always energy for blogging).

But there are bright sides. My 2yo son now asks all the time if he can help me. My daughter, even when she was sick, didn't get nearly as worked up as she has in the past. So I have to take a deep breath and accept the good with the bad. It's not the end of the world that my peer-driven class will be starting a class late; I had an extra class at the end worked in there just in case. And, my under-preparedness lead to a pretty fruitful discussion about grading and motivation in my classes today.

I just wish I could go back to Saturday night, when all was well with the world and I felt like I finally had a handle on things.

I Write. A lot.

2011-10-16T22:15:00.004-04:00

I blog here three times a week. I write about a paper a month for my academic career (either conference presentation or an article to be submitted to a journal/collection). I write the odd guest post or Views piece for Inside Higher Ed. I write a monthly piece for the University of Venus. I write emails. I comment on blogs, opinion pieces, and news stories. I write on Facebook and I Tweet.

I write. A lot.

I got an email from a colleague, asking me how I manage to write so much. To me, it's easy. I just do it.

I've always been a prolific communicator. I can talk up a storm (my husband, after more than ten years together, still marvels at my ability to just keep talking). My years spent swimming was essentially one long opportunity for an internal narrative; I was writing in my head, constantly. I have boxes and boxes of writing from high school and college, mostly informal. I chose writing as my first profession because I love it. I think one of the reasons I became an academic was because being a professional writer (in my mind) wouldn't let me write enough. The thought of writing a 200-300 page dissertation didn't scare me; in fact, it was the most exciting part of my PhD.

I used to keep an extensive diary. I used to have terrible insomnia, my mind continually racing, unable to relax. This was even after being up since 5 AM, swimming for a total of 5-6 hours, a full day of school, and some after-school activity, before swimming. Writing was one of the ways I could organize my thoughts, get them out of my head and on to paper. I would do it usually late at night when I should have been sleeping. Of course, that got difficult when I started sharing my life with someone. And, the insomnia went away after I had kids. I still have some nights where I can't sleep, but not with the frequency or intensity as before. But, there was something missing. And what was missing was the writing.

I still write to organize my thoughts, to get them out of my system. As much as my posts are often reflection, writing for an audience forces me to at least make some coherent sense of the multiple strains of thought running through my head. Take, for example, writing about teaching. I just really write what I am thinking about my class. It forces me to actually reflect on what's going on, rather than spinning it endlessly in my head (or pretending that it never happened). While I don't have to worry so much about it being "polished" I do at least want to make sure there is some cohesion to it. I'm a little ADD to be honest, which means I can get particularly obsessed with things (ironic, I know). Writing is a way for me to actually think it through (rather than simply obsess over it) and then once I hit publish, to let it go. It's actually quite cathartic.

Friday's post, for example, on my supposed failures in one of my peer-driven classes. As soon as I posted it (in fact, by the time I had finished writing it), I knew that I was being too hard on myself, as many of the comments points out. But, if I hadn't written the post, put what I was feeling down "on paper" I would have probably carried around the guilt and frustration. Now, I'm fine (a really great long weekend with my family really helped with that). Writing, for me, is about finding balance in my life. If I don't write, I'm missing an important part of who I am and how I stay sane. It's always been this way.

I really hope it always will be.

Peer-Driven Learning: Plagiarism, Motivation, and Acceptance

2011-10-13T21:04:00.001-04:00

I've written already that I need to work on accepting the strengths and limitations of each of my peer-driven learning classes. But this week has really tested my patience, my resolve, and my faith that this change in approach is really a good thing.

My...less-enthusiastic class has been struggling. Their first paper was due on Monday. I realized during the drafting process that one of the reasons this class hasn't embraced the peer-driven concept is because they are insecure/unsure writers. The first day that they were supposed to have brought drafts to class for peer-review, only three did. And this was after I forced them to go to the library to do research for their paper. Instead of sending them away, I was able to quickly find an available computer lab and take them their to actually write their draft (those three who brought a draft did the peer-review work by themselves). Turns out, the majority of the students did in fact have a draft but were too afraid to let anyone read it. I was able to work with each of them through their various issues and they came away from the class with a bit more confidence and a workable draft (or at least a better sense of how to get there).

I am a little ashamed to admit that I was feeling pretty proud of myself after that class. I was able to help the students rather give the knee-jerk reaction of simply dismissing them and their apparent lack of motivation. Sometimes, a good teacher needs to discern what the students want or need, even in a peer-driven setting. And I also knew that the direction we had initially set in the class probably needed to change. On Monday, when the entire class was there to hand in their essays, I announced that on Wednesday we would re-evaluate how we approach the rest of the semester. Did we still want to all work on the same topic, or would individual groups like to work individual topics of their choice? Did we still want to do group work? Did we still want to do projects? Be here on Wednesday if you want a say in the direction of the second-half of the semester.

A little less than half the class bothered to show up. Now, I will give the less-than-half of the class that did show up credit. They came full of ideas and prepared to defend them. We sat down in a small circle and came up with a second-half plan (which closely resembles what the other class is doing right now). But, we are going to waste Monday's class forming groups for the other students who weren't there.

And then, today, when I was grading their papers, I came across one of the most blatant case of plagiarism of my career. The student found a conference presentation on poverty and education online. It was even a Word document, so all the student did was take the first few pages of the presentation, double-space it, and stick her name on the top. The language was so obviously beyond the student's level, that it was the giveaway I needed. A simple Google search turned up the paper immediately.

I don't know what to do. I make the course peer-driven, empower the students to make their own decisions about the direction of the education, and I still can't get better than 45% attendance. I told the students that if they didn't show up that others would make the decision for them. This saddens me, not just for the success of the class, but for the future of democracy; the students don't seem to care if someone else decides their future for them. And, I know all of the reasons why students plagiarize, but thought that I had managed to remove all of them.

I don't know what else to do but accept that some students aren't motivated. Or that there are many, many factors that I can't control. Then, why continue with peer-driven learning? Why put up with the stress and the added work if more than half the students don't even care one way or the other what they learn or how?

Even writing that, I know why.

It's just this week has been really, really hard. I'm still working on acceptance.

Work-Life Balance: Some New Rules

2011-10-11T20:41:00.003-04:00

In case it wasn't clear from my last post, our family has been having some work-life balance issues. I was incredible moved by how the post seemed to resonate with many other academic couples/parents. It's a constant process of negotiation, re-evaluation, and compromise for many of us. I'm not sure if it reassures me to know that our family is not alone in our struggles or saddens and angers me to know that there so many of us sacrificing so much for an academic job.

The point of this post is to outline some of the ways I am trying to achieve some sort of a balance in my professional life and family. It's especially challenging because I am not on the tenure-track while my husband is. His conference trips are fully funded, mine are not. He has a list a mile long of administrative responsibilities, I don't. How can you achieve balance, when one member of the academic couple clearly has a number of advantages (funding) and disadvantages (administrative responsibilities)?

The first thing I did was to jump on the first chance I had to increase my amount of travel/professional development funds. I agreed to mentor high school English teachers who are teaching in our dual-credit program in exchange for a generous amount of money for professional development. There is obviously a trade-off - the increased responsibilities add to my workload, but now I can go to a conference and not worry about if we can afford it or now. Last year, I had to cancel going to a THATcamp that I was really looking forward to because we couldn't afford it. This year, I have my own funds to tap into.

And, I am not rushing home anymore if I don't have to. I'm not showing up the day of my presentation and leaving as soon as I can after it's over. I'm staying until the bitter end. I'm reconnecting with old colleagues and classmates, and hopefully meeting and creating new connections with people I only know virtually (or not at all). My kids are old enough (and my husband more than capable) of running this household for five days while I'm gone. If we are serious about one day finding a tenure-track job for me, then I have to do these things.

But that's my professional life. At home, I am almost forcibly scheduling time for all of us to spend together. We have a four-day weekend this weekend (Fall Break!) and while both my husband and I have a pile of grading to do in order to get our mid-term grades in on time, I'm making sure we take a day-trip together, without work intruding on us. Plus, more date nights for me and my husband.

I'm trying to focus on the things I can change, including my own behavior and reactions. I know this sounds all very zen (and painfully obvious), but I have to give myself a break and give my husband a break. I have to remember to make the most of the time we do all have together, and the time we have apart. I'm going to keep blogging, because it's something I do for me. I guess I'm frustrated because I began this semester hoping we'd do better this time achieving a sort of a balance.

It's always a work in progress.

Our Two-Headed Problem: A Letter to my Daughter

2011-10-09T18:34:00.002-04:00

"Mommy, why does Daddy always have to go back to work after dinner and miss my bedtime? I want him to have a different job so he can be home."

This week, my husband, who is also an academic but who, unlike me, is on the tenure-track, was besieged by professional responsibilities: candidate dinners, night grad classes, faculty senate meetings, social gatherings that represent important opportunities to network and appear like a good member of the "community." To make up for the lost time, he woke up earlier than usual to go into work and prepare for class. Many weekends every semester, he is also away at conferences.

My daughter, who is four, was getting fed up, which lead to the quote above.

I want to tell her how lucky she is that her daddy has the job that he has, given the academic job market, heck the general job market. That not being an academic does not guarantee better hours; one of her classmate's dad is always on the road for his non-academic job. Another one of our friends is overseas in Afghanistan, leaving behind a wife and son only a little younger that she is. That daddy is home more nights than he is away is a gift we can give to her.

I want to tell her that all of the extra work that he does is, in part, because he has won external funding, increasing his work-load, but also increasing our take-home pay. That mommy and daddy are up to our eyeballs in debt because of all of the extra schooling we did to get where we are, and those bills have come due. All of our small luxuries (like going to McDonald's) come from mommy and daddy working hard to make sure he gets tenure and I get renewed year after year.

I also want to tell her that her father and I have made every decision we could to try and maximize the amount of time we can spend together. I gave up a tenure-track job so our family could stay together. We live a block from campus so we don't waste time in the car driving to and from work. We could move to a bigger city, but we would sacrifice at least two hours a day in drive time. I know many, many other academics (and non-academics) who sacrifice even more than that.

But I also want to tell her that, in that moment, I wished we both had different jobs. Jobs that didn't pay my husband twice as much as I am making, even though we have the same qualifications and essentially the same job. I wished we didn't have a job that requires us to work 60-80 hours a week just to fulfill the minimum requirements. I wish that my work wasn't what is pushed aside in the name of the quest for tenure. I wish I wasn't stuck with the entirety of the "second shift" of cooking and cleaning. I wish I wasn't also left all alone all those nights (and mornings) that my husband has to go back to work. I wish weekends could be weekends rather than a negotiation of who gets to go to their office to catch up and which four hours we'll get to spend all together as a family.

But I also want to be a good role model for her, show that I don't resent my situation, or that I am settling. I don't want to raise the proverbial "snowflake" and shelter her from the harsh realities (which really aren't that harsh). But, I also need her, at that moment, to go to bed and get some much-needed sleep. I am overwhelmed in that moment by anger, shame, and fear, none of it directed at her, but all of it so powerful that I almost start to cry in front of her.

"I know you miss your Daddy. I miss him, too. And every night isn't like this, you know that. And, you know that Mommy and Daddy work hard to make sure you and your brother have everything that you need. We both love you very much. Daddy will come up and give you a kiss goodnight when he comes home."

I come up later to find her curled up with a picture of her and her father, asleep. I go back downstairs to try and work on my own teaching prep, my own grading, my own research, alone. I am grateful for everything we have: our health, our house, our jobs, our family and friends. I just wish I had a little more time to enjoy it, together.

Addendum: After I finished writing this, I was completely emotionally drained. My two-year-old son woke up early from his nap and we were able to spend an hour together, snuggling in his bed, reading together. Sometimes all it takes is just an hour. I still stand by this post, but today I feel a lot better than yesterday.

To Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T20:43:00.001-04:00

I have to admit that I was really choked up by the news of Steve Jobs' death last night when I got on twitter just as the news was breaking. Which I was reading on my iPhone. And then I got on my MacBook (the last old-school white one I'll ever own) to read tributes, reactions, and watch the Fail Whale tell me that Twitter was over-capacity as we all took to social media to collectively mourn Jobs.

I was just old enough in 1984 to remember the first big Apple commercial that ran during the SuperBowl (although I think I probably saw it the next night during the evening news). It scared the crap out of me, but there you go. I had never seen a commercial like it. We didn't own an Apple (we had a Vic 20 and a Commodore 64), but in what would be junior high, one of my best friends and I would stay up until 3 AM writing our own scripts for our favorite TV shows on her Apple computer (I have no idea which one it would have been. It was around 1990-91).

I was late coming to Mac computers myself. I owned PCs, unfortunately, but when Blue Screen of Death started appearing far too regularly, I got my first MacBook. I've been hooked ever since. I spent entirely too much money on a second generation iPod (the one that still had four buttons on top). When I opened the box, all I could think of was that it was the prettiest thing I had ever owned. Two things that Apple, under Jobs direction, did best: design and usability. I loved my iPod, and I loved having all of my 8000 songs all in one place.

But it was perhaps one of George Lucas' cast-offs that, for me, is one of Jobs' greatest achievements: Pixar. If it wasn't for Jobs' belief in the little computer animation company that went on to create the Toy Story movies, The Incredibles, and other classics. My daughter was never into princess movies when she was really little, but she adored the Pixar movies. We all loved the Pixar movies. Her first full movie in the theaters was Toy Story 3, and we were able to have our first full family movie, little brother included, when we went to see Cars 2 (which, regrettably, wasn't Pixar's finest moment, but whatever).

It is really my kids lives that will be and currently are being shaped by what Steve Jobs shepherded into the world. My daughter knew how to work my iPhone before she was 18 months old. She could find videos, her puzzle app, her number match app, Tap Tap Revenge...Neither of my kids understand why they can't just swipe their fingers across my computer screen to make it work. Their world, they ability to connect, to collaborate, and to learn really have the potential to be greatly changed by the inventions Apple brought to us. But, as Seth Godin said in his brief tribute, A Eulogy of Action:

I can't compose a proper eulogy for Steve Jobs. There's too much to say, too many capable of saying it better than I ever could.
It's one thing to miss someone, to feel a void when they're gone. It's another to do something with their legacy, to honor them through your actions.
Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you're reading this on.
What are we going to do with it?

I think that's the real question now. What are we going to do with it? Steve Jobs did, in fact, change the world by putting tools in our hands that we never had access to before. Now, it's up to us to make this world a better place using them. I hope for my kids' sake that we do. Personally, I keep asking myself, how am I going to use these tools to help my students learn? I started this process through my peer-driven learning experiment, but I need to integrate this thinking into all of my courses.

I honored Steve Jobs in my own way today, but reading my students the riot act, for not performing to my expectations, for not even attempting to achieve their best. I doubt it was anything close to his infamous tirades, but while I hate being negative and berating my students, it was nice to know that Steve would probably have approved.

Peer-Driven or Paternalism? It's all about the Process

2011-10-04T21:33:00.000-04:00

My Basic Writers have turned in their narrative essays. And I am so thrilled with the results. While not perfect (and, really, what writing ever is?), the improvement was significant enough that they even noticed it when they compared their first draft(s) with their last draft. And, there were eight of them.

Yes, that's right, we did eight drafts of this essay. Eight steps, to be precise. I won't go into all the gory details because inevitably I'll make someone mad because I either skipped an essential step or had a step that is contrary to an essential pedagogical approach. Regardless (see how I just skated over that?), the students who took the process seriously wrote stellar essays.

This is the sort of "disruption" I enjoy, showing students that they can, indeed, write an excellent essay if they just give themselves the chance and take advantage of the resources that are available to them. And this is where the idea of peer-driven learning butts up against my good, old-fashioned maternalistic (or paternalistic) teaching style. Would these students have done the drafts if I hadn't essentially forced them to? They receive "homework" credit for doing the various drafts and taking the process seriously (not sure what the students who printed six copies of their essay and just labeled them the various draft names were thinking).

But, they saw the results. They saw that they were able to write better essays, better than perhaps they thought they could. So, do I regret "forcing" them into the process? No. Do I wish there was a way where I didn't have to coerce them into it? Yup. And I'm sure there is a way, but it's hard, particularly with basic writers who often resent having to take a non-credit course to begin with. A non-credit course becomes the lowest priority on many of my students' list, making it an upward battle for me as an instructor.

So, I use force, because, damn it, I do know better. I know what they need to do to become better writers. I'm not sure what I can do with this disconnect, between peer-driven learning facilitator and paternalistic teacher. Other than maybe admit it and keep trying to be better. Or, throw it out to you.

What do I do?

Now You See It: Backward Thinking on Where Education Innovation Should Take Place

2011-10-02T22:11:00.000-04:00

I'm in the process of re-reading Cathy Davidson's excellent book, Now You See It (here's my initial review). My Freshman Writing classes are done with Fahrenheit 451, and we're moving on to a more optimistic view of the future. This is (obviously) the first time I'm teaching this book, and it's going to be a challenge to come up with assignments both large and small to engage the students with the work. Not because it's a difficult book to engage with, but because it's new, and as Cathy Davidson points out, the new is hard.

So much of the book resonates with me because I've actively sought jarring and unfamiliar experiences: I decided to not to attend an English university in my hometown on Montreal, instead choosing attend a smaller French university; I headed North and West to do my PhD; my first tenure-track job was at an HBCU (and as to why that's "strange," take a look at my picture). Even now, this Canadian city girl is in the middle of Appalachia. Every single one of these choices has forced me to confront my preconceptions and, as Cathy Davidson (and obviously others) points out, this disruption is essential to learning: "Learning is the constant disruption of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old. And then the process starts again" (5).

(This, by the way, is going to be the "free write" discussion question I post to my students before we start any class discussion; how many of them have experienced that as a part of their education?)

I've always been restless. I need to feel like I'm moving forward, challenging myself, really learning. As much as I enjoyed my undergraduate experience, I knew that any job I took, any job that I was trained for, would bore me to tears, and that I hadn't really been challenged intellectually. Grad school, it seemed, held the promise of greater intellectual stimulation. But I am forever grateful for the Université de Sherbrooke for providing me with such a wonderful environment in which to learn.

Sherbrooke started as a service city for a large and fertile farming area in south-eastern Quebec. The university itself, founded in 1954, in still one of the youngest free-standing universities in the province. All things considered, there was no reason why the university could or should evolve into one of the most innovative and dynamic universities in Canada. But it did. It's medical school, in 1987, moved to Problem-Based Learning, and now is cited as an example for other schools to follow. It's engineering school also works largely on a problem-based program. It always seemed strange to me that Sherbrooke was ranked in the "Medical-Doctoral" category (medical school notwithstanding) because the focus was so squarely on the undergraduate experience.

My program was no exception. I was studying "professional writing" in English (yes, I went to a French university to study English). Our program was small, professionally oriented, but also one that responded not only to the needs of the job market, but also the needs of the students. We learned HTML and web design back in the mid-1990s. In an English program! I edited our small student newspaper, oversaw the birth of the online version (no longer available), and had lots of informal opportunities for translation. When a large group of students (from my year and others who were ahead of us) were voicing their displeasure about the program, I organized a meeting between the faculty and students to discuss the direction of the program. We were writing publicly in many of our classes before we even knew that's what we were doing.

I was lucky. While I was being "trained" so to speak for a profession (to be fair, multiple professions: journalist-editor-translator-web writer-technical writer), it was in an environment where we were free, in fact, encouraged to create our own jobs, our own profession. It was never hidden from us that, while jobs were almost a guarantee (this was during the tech boom), self-employment and being a freelancer was an attractive option. We were connected with alumni who had successfully gone off on their own. We were, as a small English program in a large French university, a community who worked together, took care of one another, and helped each other succeed. I loved that.

I compare my undergraduate institution with the one that I am currently teaching at. The experience for my students couldn't be more different. And yet, this is a place where education should be on the cutting edge of innovation. The programs that most of our students major in (education, nursing, vet tech, engineering tech) are perfect for Problem-Based Learning and a more collaborative style. But, in a cruel irony, these are the programs that are most rigidly standardized and controlled by external (and internal) accrediting bodies. And in most of our other programs, we prepare students for urban, white collar jobs that just don't exist in our region.

One expects cities to be the centers of innovation, but I think we need to look to rural colleges and schools for new ways to teach and learn. Scratch that, we need to liberate rural colleges and schools in order for them to better serve their students, providing for them an education that they can use in their communities, to improve their communities. But, we don't, in part because we assume that rural students are "less than" their urban (and urbane) counterparts. Those who can, leave. Those who stay...

This is, Cathy Davidson would say, an assumption that needs disrupting. Innovative, relevant, and enriching education can happen anywhere. Sherbrooke proves that. I want my students to prove that, too.

Perils of Going Paperless

2011-09-29T20:20:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to go paperless this semester. Homework is done in the form of "blog posts" on Blackboard (I know, I know, lay off. Baby steps). Papers are submitted electronically. Free writes have been replaced with discussion board questions. I've embraced (or at least I've tried to embrace) electronic interaction.

But (and, from the title, you knew there'd be a but), it has had it's problems. The first one is that we're almost halfway through the semester and I know only a few of my students' names. I've admitted to this shortcoming before, but now that I don't hand back work to them on a daily basis, I've lost one of the only ways I had to really put names to faces. Now, this is a terrible thing to admit (sorry any of my students who might happen to be reading this). But I wasn't prepared for this consequence of going paperless. Now, I'm struggling with my picture roster, and frantically searching for Prof Hacker posts on the subject. It's not too late, right?

Another unexpected side-effect of going paperless has been how my lectures have been effected. I teach one-hour periods. In the past, the students typically wrote 10 minute free-writes at the beginning of class, to get us all focused on the task at hand. Now, I've moved the question I would normally ask in the free write as either an online discussion question or a blog post question. This has been advantageous because I am able to read what the students are thinking and where they are in their understanding of the readings before I go into class. But, now my classes seem to finish 10 minutes early, after 50 minutes. Like, when it ended all the other times when I would do the 10-minute free write. My internal teaching clock is still set to 50 minutes.

Other problems have no been totally unforeseen. Many of my students comes from economically precarious situations, so their access to a reliable computer and internet connection can be... inconsistent. So students, at least for the first few weeks while they learned the lay of the land (where the computers are on campus and when they can access them), were often late getting work in, and I was spending a lot of time explaining (and re-explaining) how to access blackboard, and where tech support was on campus.

But even when I tried to help my students by bringing them to the computer lab, I hit snags. Can you imagine computers that a) don't have Flash installed and b) won't let you install it? Yeah, neither could I. Until it happened and half my students couldn't complete what I had planned to do in class. Or how the computer in my classroom died and it wasn't fixed for two weeks, severely impacting my ability to put handouts up rather than printing and distributing them. While I appreciate that many of my students have limited access to technology, I get frustrated when we can't help them prepare for the late 20th century, let alone the 21st century.

So, I'm still figuring this out. And, let me tell you, it's the unreliable technology (don't even get me started on Blackboard) that's really making it hard to keep doing it. And, yes, I know that using Wordpress, Google Docs, Twitter, are easier, more reliable, and more user friendly. Next semester. There's always next semester.

And, unless the students choose pictures of themselves as avatars, I still won't know their names. Wait, on second thought...

Motivating Students

2011-09-27T20:26:00.001-04:00

I've had motivation on my mind, in part because of Wednesday's #FYCchat. But a chance conversation on Twitter really started the wheels in my head turning.

Everyone is motivated by different forces. My daughter was potty trained with the reward of M&Ms. My son absolutely refuses to go potty for any other reason than he wants to; no reward we have offered him can motivate him to go potty. Even in my peer-driven classes, I'm having two completely opposite experiences: one class has embraced the opportunity to learn what they wanted while the other hasn't seen it as an opportunity as much as a chore (or so it seems).

We want to master certain skills, like guitar (which, by the way, I never was able to. At all). And, one way or another, we award ourselves unofficial badges, based on which songs we can play. Anyone who plays an instrument knows which songs they aspire to play, and once they play those songs (and often for an audience) they move on to harder songs. I used to swim. I loved swimming for so many reasons, but I also aspired to achieve certain standards set by a external body. In any sport we practice, the idea is to improve, and we know much of the time who is better than we are and aspire to approach or surpass them.

As kids, we always knew who was good, better, and best at anything and everything, from spelling to handwriting to video games to running to everything. Kids know, as Cathy Davidson points out. Taking grades, or badges, or ranking, or anything else isn't going to change. The trick is to then offer kids recognition for what they can do. As much as the people who put together Wikipedia did so for free they also knew that people would read their work, use their work, recognize their work. Super-contributers receive recognition for their contribution, even in a minor way. We might be self-motivated, but it always feels good to receive recognition.

Take my blogging. I started blogging because I love to write and talking about teaching, writing, and higher education. But I'll tell you, I always had an audience in mind, and it feels good that I'm receiving recognition for what I already love to do. Maybe this is because I've been "trained" to want rewards. I don't know, but I spent 13 years swimming competitively even though for the last half, I knew there wasn't any chance of making the Olympics. So, where was my motivation? My rewards were smaller, but no less significant to me. Each of use has looks to be rewarded in different ways.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's #FYCchat because these questions don't have any easy answers.

Peer-Driven Learning: The Power of Play and Wasting Time

2011-09-25T20:53:00.004-04:00

As a follow up to my last post on encouraging play, and the subsequent #FYCchat, I'm thinking about the groups in my peer-driven learning class that have been the most "creative" in their project ideas. One of the worries that was expressed during the chat on Wednesday was that when we encourage creativity and play, it looks too much to the outside observer that we're not "doing" or accomplishing anything. Or, that we're wasting time.

I've written about this issue before, what my "job" as a teacher actually looks like in practice: Coach? Editor? Maternal Figure? All of the above? None of the above? And when I started this peer-driven learning project, I had to once again radically reconfigure what a teacher does. And, a lot of the time, to an outside observer, it looks like nothing much. In fact, if one was to walk into my classroom, they might assume that none of us, myself or the students, are doing much of anything at all.

One particular group of students, a really good group, was killing time the other day during class time. They had their direction, decided on individual assignments for the rest of the week, and were just hanging out together. They weren't being disruptive, as the whole class is typically a fairly noisy affair, with groups working out their projects. But I knew they weren't "working." One of the students had his iPad out, and the others were looking at it, asking what certain apps do, how he liked using it, etc. Another group member saw the DC app, as in DC Comics. Thus began a discussion about how DC was rebooting their entire line of comics, with each super-hero starting all over again at Issue 1. And then, magic happened. This particular group is working on the broad subject of human nature, specifically examining the question of why people commit crimes/transgress laws. Could we, one offered, make a comic book? Within five minutes, they had found an affordable ($2) app allows you to modify photos to looks like a comic book. The group decided, they were going to make a comic book.

I was thrilled. Thinking about it, though, this idea might never have occurred if the students hadn't been given the time and the freedom to simply sit around and talk. I know that it helped that I encouraged them to think of different ways they could present their materials, but the idea of the comic book might never have come about had the students not had the time and space to just relax and talk things out. I know that I'm being redundant in this paragraph, but to most, what I let them do is tantamount to misconduct or negligence in my role as their teacher. Instead, they're creating something really interesting.

Another group, on their own, decided that they were going to use Facebook to communicate and collaborate with each other. As one of the students put it, I'm on it almost all the time playing. Not any more, I exclaimed! Once again, the line between working and playing is blurred; the students are now working in a virtual space that many see as a waste of students' time and a massive distraction, a place where they go to socialize (at best) or gossip (at worst). It made me realize that perhaps I should start using Facebook to better communicate with my students.

Time. If we want our students to be more creative and playful, we need to give them more time. The pressure of deadlines, the limited resources, the overwhelming amount of work students often are faced with, all of that acts to create students who actively work to avoid thinking about their school work. My students are actually pretty relaxed, loose, and dare I say it, enjoying their experience in class. All because I give them time.

Even it looks, from the outside, like we're wasting it.

Peer-Driven Learning: Forcing Students to Visit the Library

2011-09-21T13:23:00.000-04:00

Today, with my Peer-Driven Learning class that is less self-motivated than the other, we went to the library. The class decided that we were going to get our "required essay" out of the way first. The required essay needs to be "an analytical essay that connects multiple texts across disciplines" (to quote our Gen. Ed. Student Learning Outcomes requirement). We are still working on the broad topic of "Wealth, Poverty, and Social Class" and we've been brainstorming ideas as to what to write about. But, the essay requires multiple sources from across disciplines, and I knew that this wasn't going to happen without some help.

So I assigned a short annotated bibliography. I know, this is old-school me assign/they do format that we are trying to avoid, but I am so glad that I am requiring this particular mini-assignment. The annotated bibliography is due Friday, and we met today in the library to do research. Keep in mind that this is a 200-level course and most of the students are Sophomores. About halfway through the class, one of the students came up to me and asked if she was able to check out a book and if so, how to go about doing it.

Oh dear. This lead to some very interesting conversations on Twitter about how my experience is not unique.

In each of my classes I stress how important it is to physically go to the library to do their research. I also mention that their tuition pays the salary of the reference librarians who are there to help them do their research more efficiently and effectively. In the same way that I am a "trained" expert and thus hired to be their teacher, the reference librarians all have Master's degrees in Library Science; they are also "trained" experts hired to help us do research. Their jobs, their raison d'etre is to help you do research. Why else do you a) get a Master's in Library Science and b) go work at a primarily undergraduate university library?

But it also brings up a larger issue that I have been struggling with all semester with my peer-driven classes: how much can I "force" or require them to do? How do I find a balance between what they want to do versus what I know they need to (or at the very least should) do? The annotated bibliography was not their idea, but when I introduced the requirements for the essay, they were dumbfounded. Multiple sources? Across disciplines? Research? The library?

When I typically assign annotated bibliographies, I ask for one book, two peer-reviewed articles, and then two other sources of any type. I expect a very brief (1-3 sentence) summary of their source and then a brief description of how they will use the source in their paper. I think in a class of less-than-motivated students, this can be an effective tool to help them refine their topic and start to move in the right direction. And I'm curious to see how much guidance my other peer-driven class is going to need when we get to that stage later in the semester (they wanted to save theirs for last).

Needless to say, it was an eye-opening experience today, having students unable to find books on the shelves or know that the books could be checked out. But, like I expect my students to do, I learn and I adapt. And I readjust my expectations.

Peer-Driven Learning: Encouraging Creativity and Play

2011-09-18T14:28:00.000-04:00

This week, one of my peer-driven classes was finishing up their project proposals. They will be responsible for teaching two classes, which includes presenting a project that they will then hand in (this is a writing class, so they have to hand in something that is written). As I was going around the class, listening as their brainstorms were beginning to coalesce into a more solid proposal, I kept hearing something that troubled me: powerpoint. Four our of the five groups were planning to use powerpoint in their lessons.

A shook my head. Do you like, I ask, when your professor uses powerpoint? Most of them shook their head. What happens when a powerpoint presentation starts? They answered that they tuned out, only focused on what was on the slide and only planned to learn what was on the slide. Then WHY would you want to recreate that in your own lessons? Blank stares. It's what we're used to, some answered. Because it's easy, others added.

The students in this class have four weeks to prepare for their presentations. I sincerely hope that they didn't think that they would be spending four weeks on a powerpoint. But it shows how set in our ways we all are when it comes to just about everything. Students want to learn differently, but when presented with the opportunity to create a different learning experience, they chose the same old, ineffective tools. In my other class, when invited to explore options for their class assignment, most students didn't even look at the options I provided for them.

This inspired me to tweet out to a peer of mine, Kathi Inman (check out her blog/site for her class at USC; this is thinking differently about education). Below is our conversation on Twitter:

Ok, it's a little truncated, but it really did make me think. How do I encourage students to play and explore, and thus find the space to be creative in my class? Should I have perhaps required them to find an example of innovative pedagogy/project themselves, rather than provide it for them? There's still time to do that in my other class, where we are doing projects at the end of the semester. But it also makes me think about whether or not I'm doing enough in my own practice, in my own classroom to facilitate play.

In other words, should I require play in a peer-driven classroom? It becomes difficult for me to think about what I should or should not require of students. I have said over and over again that they are allowed to do just about anything they want to, but it seems like they either don't believe me or have no idea just how creative and free they can be. It feels like I'm splitting hairs, but this is what it takes to make a class like this really work.

I'm not the only one asking these questions, obviously. Kathi is experimenting with this (see the coding project her students are doing). Dr. Davis is using art and design as a basis for getting her students to think differently about what skills they will need in the future. The 2010 HASTAC Digital Media and Learning competition was based around games (scroll to the bottom). Over at DML Central, they are looking at making education more like Kindergarten for life; more making, tinkering, and remixing. Also, projects are a more creative way to learn, as well as more relevant to what future employers want.

I'm still working through these issues. How do I introduce these concepts and options to my students without taking the classroom back over from them? There are so many rich and varied examples out there. Here are just a few:

The Johnny Cash Project, recently featured in a Google Chrome commercial, but originating from SXSW.
NFB Interactive, from the National Film Board of Canada. Innovative and interactive visual projects. Welcome to Pine Point, about a Canadian mining town that no longer exists is stunning and moving.
Kyra D. Gaunt is a TED Fellow and in one of her classes, the students put together a book on race and race relations. She has written extensively about how higher education needs to change and that students need to take ownership of their educations.
Here is a completely mind-blowing model for how to teach college writing by David Perry.

Even just going through this list of fantastic and innovative projects, put together by a group of inspiring education and artists, I feel overwhelmed. And then I remind myself: think about how your students must feel.

The list goes on.

Efficiency =/= Innovation =/= Quality

2011-09-15T12:31:00.002-04:00

I'm going off my blogging schedule. This might turn into a longer, more developed post for uvenus or elsewhere, but I need to write this and put this out there right now. While I'm angry. And reeling.

Today on Inside Higher Ed, there was yet another post about disrupting higher education. Earlier today, I ran into a colleague who had spent the morning in another department, collaborating. "It's the theme of my semester" she exclaimed excitedly. I sighed. I would love to be more collaborative, more innovative in my teaching. But, I don't have the time.

Professors are currently being (excuse my language) shit on for being luddites, inefficient, and unwilling to change. I represent the most "efficient" part of higher education; the non-TT instructor who teaches a lot of sections of a large course (not as large as some, but still pretty big considering I'm supposed to be teaching writing). I have limited professional development opportunities/funding (which is better than none at all, which is what many people in my position have access to). I teach five classes.

I'm efficient. I've figured out how to efficiently grade 100-150 papers, multiple times a semester. That also means that I have to sacrifice quality. This is, obviously, a dangerous thing to admit. We're told we need to be more collaborative. But, when? All the free time that I have when I'm not teaching, preparing to teach, or grading? I've innovated one of my classes this semester, and I have to admit, my other classes have suffered as a result; they are more standard, more "canned" than I would like. Why? Because I don't have as much time to devote to them. But I'm efficient (even if the technology isn't). I'm just not very innovative and I know the quality isn't what it could be.

I want to use technology, but when I do, I find that it fails because the institution doesn't invest in the support needed to help me and my students. Pens and paper never fail. Last week, I couldn't do an activity with the students because the computers in the lab didn't have FlashPlayer (seriously) and wouldn't let anyone install it. "Innovation" is thrown about as a buzz word, and there are software packages being purchased and then "introduced" to us every day. But when do we have the time to learn about them and integrate them into our classes? For example, we upgraded to a new Blackboard version this year. When was it available? A week before the semester started.

This semester, I haven't had time to breathe. If this semester has taught me anything, it's don't try to change what works because it's exhausting, thankless, and ultimately difficult to measure (which is of course what everyone wants). The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But, what if you decide to change what works? I was a good teacher before, why am I reinventing the wheel? There are few incentives, but also few rewards for changing how we teach. There's no time to slow down and think.

I want to cry. I'm the model that apparently everyone in higher education wants to recreated: large classes, lots of section, canned delivery. Why? Why do we want to do that? I don't even want to do that. I don't want to be the model that higher education re-creates en masse, like McDonald's. Trillions served the same unhealthy meal, the same way. Sure, we all get to eat for cheap, but at what cost?

What the hell are education reformers thinking? Innovation is expensive and time consuming. You fail more often than you succeed. But in this world, there is no room for failure. Efficiency is only good if quality doesn't decline. But what if the quality isn't where it could be? We're stuck in a death spiral when it comes to talking about education reform. I'm sick of it. So should you.

Bad Female Academic: Admitting I'm Wrong

2011-09-14T14:47:00.002-04:00

As someone who writes about literature (and pop-culture!), I know the value of re-reading (and re-reading and re-reading again). I've always been this way; any book or tv episode or movie that I love are often revisited time and time again. Sometimes it's because they provide comfort or familiarity during a time of crisis or volatility (hello, Muppet Movie, Star Wars, or Almost Famous!) or because they are so rich that they demand more than one kick at the can. But even now, I can still be surprised by what I have missed in works that I thought I was thoroughly familiar with.

I was re-reading (and re-reading) Nalo Hopkinson's short story collection Skin Folk for an essay I'm writing (the postcolonial body, in case anyone was interested). Anyway, in one story, "A Habit of Waste," the protagonist (a young woman of Afro-Caribbean descent living in Toronto) is revealed to have bought a new body, a thin white one. I highly recommend this story for anyone interested in the intersection of race, gender, and postcoloniality, and the story became the central part of my analysis for the whole collection.

As I was writing the essay (after having read the story at least fifty times), I noticed something I hadn't picked up before in all my other readings: the body that the protagonist buys is called a "Diana" type. Why had I not ever seen this before? Diana? Princess Diana? The remnants of the monarchy? The fairy-tale princess? In a story involving not one, but two Commonwealth countries in a postcolonial setting? Really? How did I not see this before? Suddenly, I was researching the image of Princess Di, how she is interpreted, etc (there was a Journal of British Studies issue devoted to her, among the hundreds of other peer-reviewed articles dealing with her image, legacy, etc). And now I had a whole new avenue to write about in this essay (which meant I had to sacrifice some of the other things I had planned to write about).

This week, in my FYC class, we are talking about the great dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. I wrote my MA thesis on dystopias, so I've been reading (and rereading) this book for over ten years. I've taught it in various classes at least ten times. And this week, during our discussion about the book and why the world Bradbury creates I realized something I never had before; Bradbury wasn't just making a point about books and education (the three things we need are things that have depth, time to think about them, and the right to act on what we've learned), but it is also about how society has fragmented, with people cut off from each other. Montag finds the strength to act when he connects first with Clarisse, then with Faber, and finally with Granger and the band of nomads. How had I not seen this before?

Of course, I didn't call attention to my revelation, simply including it as part of the discussion. Maybe I should have. Anyone who teaches knows that it's almost impossible to get students to read, let alone re-read anything we assign. The worst is when students ask me if they have to read something because they read it in high school already. I think I was afraid to say, hey, I just noticed this, because it might appear like I wasn't prepared or I didn't know what I was talking about. I could have let me students see my own learning process, a process that didn't end...ever. So many students, heck, people now decide on something (for whatever reason) and desperately cling to those conclusions. I need to remember to show my students that I am open to noticing and learning new things, that I am often wrong and that's ok.

As a young, non-tenure-track female faculty member, I often feel the pressure to make sure that my authority and expertise are unquestionable. But, they aren't. I'm often wrong, and I am open to learning from my mistakes, open to sudden epiphanies, open to changing my mind. That I was afraid to share those moments with my students when they happen isn't something I am proud of. This is one area where I need to work on being the baddest Bed Female Academic I can be.

Peer-Driven Learning: I'm No Cathy Davidson

2011-09-11T19:31:00.000-04:00

I received an interesting set of questions in the comments on my last peer-learning post:

I've read Cathy's piece in the Chronicle of HE. I hate to be a bit of a wet blanket but having had some experience of designing, leading and being part of peer driven teaching and having been an early member of the so-called 'anti-university' set up in London in the late '60s-- I have a few questions that I'd need to know in order to determine if this is an idea that can be realistically applied and allow students to graduate with some kind of marketable qualification (however and whoever determines the 'market').The type of class isn't clear. Are they postgrads/post-experience/mature/straight from secondary school? Are they doing an elective or is it a compulsory class?Will their grade make a difference to their degree and does the degree have to meet any institutional or external (eg professional/regulatory body accreditation criteria)?In fact, what does the grade signify? Is it simply a metaphorical 'fig leaf' to cover your back or is it a rigorous measure of the learning and self-instruction?

I've been wanting to do a post since the beginning outlining all of the ways my peer-driven class is different from Cathy Davidson's classes. I could point "anonymous" to my previous posts on my peer-driven classes that outline more carefully what the purpose of the class is, etc. But, just to reiterate, the class that I am reformulating as being peer-driven in ENG 200 or Writing II. This is a required course for all students, regardless of major. They have already taken ENG 100 or traditional freshman composition. Our student learning outcomes are essentially to have students read primary sources from across disciplines, discuss, and write about them. We have a choice of two almost identical textbooks to assign to them, and a list of required assignments, both large and small. At the end of the day, if the students are using the textbook as a guide, they will be fulfilling the requirements of the course. Most of my colleagues that I've told that I am letting the students decide what they want to read from the textbook have shrugged their shoulders; any readings from the book will be challenging and stimulating.

There are some very important differences, of course, between my course and Cathy Davidson's course. While Cathy Davidson seems to have had a weekly schedule that students followed (more or less), my class has been shaped exclusively by my textbook, which we would never be able to get all the way through. Both my classes are completely different in terms of our assignments and week-to-week layout. One class is much more "traditional"; the students have picked the readings, but we are working on them together, as a class. The other class has broken off into groups and will be teaching their own two-class unit, complete with a project based on their readings/lesson. It's early, but each class is having some good results.

My students didn't "chose" to take me, specifically, for this course. Sure, there are a handful who had me last year, but most of the students selected my sections of ENG 200 because it fit their schedule. They certainly had no idea that I was going to turn the tables on them. I have a higher cap in my class (18 students sounds like a dream) and no TA. I don't have tenure, and I am teaching three other classes on top of the two peer-driven courses. Our college has a high number of first-generation college students, as well as a poor graduation rate and low ACT scores for incoming freshmen. The majority come from our service area, which is largely poor and rural. If one of my classes is less ready to embrace peer-driven learning, I can't say I'm terribly surprised. Actually, that one of the classes so readily embraced the format is perhaps more surprising.

I don't have a ton of experience being an "innovative educator" nor does what I write about or do in my classroom cause our PR office to have palpitations. Thanks to Cathy Davidson, turning your class over to your students isn't met with hang-wringing and fainting (seriously, read the first chapter of Now You See It to see how much negative national press Cathy Davidson has inspired). Or, thanks to the fact that I toil away at an out-of-the-way university insulates me from any notice. I'd say it's a bit of both. I help create one of the most exciting and innovative (to me at least) academic programs/organizations (HASTAC), so I'm starting from behind, so to speak, compared to Cathy Davidson. I'm still learning to let go and embrace all of this.

My job, as I understand it, is to help students become better writers but also more independent learners. I want them to becomes 4-year-olds again, where the world was exciting and new and they wanted to learn about everything. I want them to learn how to create a community, to support one another in their education, and just think differently about anything I can. I want to help them think more critically about their world and how they fit into it. These are my goals regardless of how I teach, but I think teaching this way will be more successful. Even if the rest of their educations are "by the book" both literally and figuratively, I hope they will take what they have learning in my class beyond university.

Is it sustainable for every single program on campus? I don't know. I'm not as optimistic as Cathy Davidson, although I'm getting there. I've said time and time again that it's my own failure of imagination that I cannot think about how to do my class or university differently. But I know I am doing something right as my class buzzes with excitement and begin to come up with their own innovative and creative ways of looking at their readings and the issues they bring up. I can't measure that.

I'm not sure if I want to.

Retention, or When a Student Disappears

2011-09-07T20:41:00.001-04:00

As any reader of this blog knows, I teach Developmental Writing (some excellent posts from my archives linked right there, folks). These are, studies have shown, some of the most vulnerable students in higher education; the statistics show that these students typically drop out and never finish a degree of any kind. I work at an institution that has dismal completion rates. With public pressure mounting, we are becoming more and more aware of the issue of retention. More and more, the pressure to "retain" students is trickling down to the individual instructors.

Anyone who has been following me knows that I care about my students, perhaps too much. Does this mean that I am perfect when it comes to doing everything and anything I can to "retain" students? Not in the least, but I'd like to think that I am there for students who are ready and willing to help themselves. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. But for all of our efforts, additional services, councilors, tutors, advisors, and financial aid options, students, good students, still disappear.

Last semester, I had a pretty good student in my 200-level writing class. Not the best student, but a solid student who was willing to do the work, ask questions, think, and improve. She also happened to live just in behind our house. We would often see each other on weekends or in the evenings when I would be playing outside with my kids. I got to know her a little bit. She was from out of state, wanted to be a nurse, spent her summers on Christian missions, had a job working back home as a waitress, and was generally a good person. She was planning on living in the same place this year. I even contacted her over the summer to let her know that the windows of her back door had been broken. She got back to me to thank me and told me she was looking forward to seeing me in the fall.

Fall has come, and we're three weeks into the semester. I have not seen her. I have no idea why she's not back. Did she run out of money? Did something happen to her, or her family? Did she transfer? None of these things matter in the grand scheme of things, at least to those who do the counting; she has dropped out, thus hurting our "completion rates." But how do we plan for students like this, students who seem to be most prepared to succeed in college? Our university has a high rate of first-generation and poor students and most of our resources are focused on their success. We, on the ground, know how hard it is to get students to understand the importance of attending class, of making university their top priority, when their families are pressuring them to work or take time off to support those back home. When a student who seems well-equipped to succeed and then doesn't, what could we have done differently?

I teach five section of writing-intensive courses. I have trouble learning my students' names, but I do try to get to know each of them as well as I can, but often its the ones who are having the most difficulty that I get to know the best. When a student who was doing well disappears, it's difficult for me because I wonder if we were set up to help her succeed. I despair: if we can't even hold on to the solid student, what hope do the rest have? I know that people look at a school like ours and point to it saying that we are wasting taxpayer money, that we're failing at our jobs, and that we need to be held "accountable."

I'm not really sure how much more I can do.

Peer-Driven Learning: Accepting Where We Are

2011-09-04T12:52:00.001-04:00

This week in my peer-driven classes was amazing. We finally put in concrete terms what was going to be expected of them during the semester. We decided what our major and minor assignments would be and how much of their final grade each part would be worth (yes, we decided to go with good, old-fashioned grades, awarded by me. One class pointed out that they didn't want the responsibility and the other saw it as too time consuming).

Each class is going to be completely different. The first class (the class that is less self-motivated and less vocal) will run in a much more conventional way. We decided to get our "required" paper (the essay that all students must write) out of the way first. In preparation, we will read the section of our textbook on "Wealth, Poverty, and Social Class." We will decide collectively which readings we will do for homework and what sort of discussion questions we should address. Homework in this class will be worth 50% of their final grade, as an incentive to stay on task. Once we have completed this section and the required paper, we will move towards being a little more non-traditional in preparation for a final "project," which can be done in groups.

The other class more closely to what Cathy Davidson imagines for her next peer-driven class. The students are already in groups (with one exception; the class decided that they wouldn't force anyone to be in a group, so there is one student working solo), working on different sections of the textbook that they found the most interesting. Each group will come up with a proposal for a two-class lesson plan and project on their section. Once the proposals are approved, they will work on their lesson plan and project. Each group gets two classes to teach/present, with the rest of the class expected to read and participate. Once that is done, we will move on to working on our "required" paper, our final task. This class also decided to put together a rather draconian attendance policy because, as one student put it, how can this class be peer-driven if you're not here?

I was so proud of my students. They recognized their strengths and their weaknesses, developing a class that met their needs. One class wanted more from me as their instructor, the other class, not so much. While they were intrigued by the idea of contract grading, at the end of the day, this class as a concept was radical enough; it seemed they wanted the familiar comfort of grades, as something to hold on to. I can't say that I minded; it gives me something to hold on to as well, some remnants of "control."

I realized that we hadn't discussed a rubric or "scoring" guide in my second class. This worked out well, as we were going to be discussing rubrics during our weekly #FYCchat. As the chat progressed (check out the archive here), it became clear that we were of two very different minds about rubrics; some of us swore by them, while others shunned them as one more way we limit students' creativity. I panicked; what had I done? I communicated with the students that we might want to develop a rubric. But clearly this wasn't a concern of theirs. What if they were going to do one just because I had suggested it? Was I in the process of messing with a good thing?

And then the concept of badges (again from Cathy Davidson) did the rounds on Twitter. Why wasn't my class using badges? Why were we using grades at all? My panic increased. The students decided, I said, but what if the students really didn't decide, and they were just doing what was comfortable, or worse, what they thought I wanted them to do. Did I not present the concept well enough for them to feel comfortable with it? Am I still being too traditional, conventional? Was I failing my students? I'm not requiring them to put together a digital project or use social media. Should I? Am I doing enough to push my students outside of their comfort zones?

I could no longer see the success of my class, only all of the ways it could (already) be interpreted as a failure.

My students were able to accept where they were in terms of their comfort level with a peer-driven learning environment. One class needs more guidance than the other. I need to accept that my own level with peer-driven learning as their teacher is also evolving. I need to accept where I am just as much as they have accepted where they are. This is a learning process for all of us. In the same way that I try to provide positive support, encouragement, and patience to my students, I need to do the same for myself.

This will not be perfect. There will always be thing that get left out, left behind, and things that could be done differently. In a peer-driven learning environment, I have to trust that the direction my students have chosen to take is the right one. I also have to trust that I am doing my best as well.

Another way that this class is the most challenging thing I have ever done.

Teaching Ain't Easy (or, Duh)

2011-09-01T21:18:00.002-04:00

I think I've finally over-done it. I've bitten off more than I can chew. After a summer of fabulous productivity in the writing department, I'm spent. I know I wrote basically the same thing exactly a week ago, but it seems that Thursdays, I hit a wall. Or, more accurately, Wednesday I hit a wall, but habit dictates that I face this reality on Thursdays when I try to write my Thursday night post for Friday.

Teaching, it seems, it taking everything out of me. I'm completely redoing all three of my classes (for a total of five sections) to various degrees. My peer-driven classroom is mentally draining; the uncertainty of what is going to happen in every class is unnerving and stressful, I'm not going to lie. My other classes are using texts and techniques that are more traditional but unfamiliar to me. I'm re-learning how to teach.

But I also think that I have never had a clear picture about just how physically and mentally taxing teaching really is. When I was a PhD student, I was young, unattached, and only had one class to teach (at noon, no less). I started my first adjunct position (four sections) when I was pregnant, so if I was tired, I "blamed" it on the pregnancy. When I went back to the adjunct position after having the baby, I just assumed I was tired because I had a small baby who was still nursing and not sleeping through the night. And then, my tenure track job was an even split between being pregnant and having a newborn.

And then last year, when I started teaching full time after a year off, I was also taking care of my son part-time, trading off with my husband. In other words, I've never been in a situation where teaching can and is the only source of my complete and utter exhaustion at the end of the day. But now, I think that I've been getting it all wrong; motherhood is easy, teaching is the hard part.

This semester, I have no excuse for not being able to find some balance in my life. I know that one of the reasons my energy levels are down is because I'm not taking care of myself. Because the kids are back in school, I just assumed I'd be able to maintain my manic writing pace I set for myself over the summer. But, I apparently can't replace one set of kids with another with no impact.

So, here's what I've decided: I'm reducing the number of weekly posts here from three to two. One on Sunday night for Monday, another on Wednesday night for Thursday. Mondays will still be about my peer-driven classroom, while Thursdays will be whatever catches my fancy. I'll still be doing my monthly posts for UVenus, as well as looking for other opportunities to guest-post (or even make some money!). And unless a call-for-submissions really catches my eye, I'm taking a break from academic writing, too. I mean, as soon as I get all of these essays I have left to write out of the way (seriously, there are two more).

So thank you, loyal readers. My peer-driven class would not be nearly as successful as it has been if you had not been here for me, supporting me, offering advice, and just a sympathetic ear. I tell my students that this can have a ripple effect; I already know that I have inspired some of you to try this, and my students are also reaching out to their professors, introducing them to the idea that maybe they can handle having a voice their own educations.

But, for tonight, I'm done. I'm going to bed.

Turning Group Work into Collaboration

2011-08-30T20:51:00.000-04:00

I was desperate to find a way *not* to blog about some very real drama that is hitting one of my Peer-Driven Learning classes. It's amazing how one bad, poorly-prepared, attention-starved apple can spoil the whole bunch. And now the class has decided to break out into working groups, with the Bad Apple's group suffering from a horrible case of regression. Unlike the other groups, where learning and discussion is taking place at a fast and furious pace, this group's other members have regressed back into sullen, defensive silence, the kind that I'm met with in most ordinary classes when asked to participate or do anything at all.

(I'll be writing more about what each of the classes is doing on Monday, as well as how tomorrow goes, trying to mitigate the damage.)

No, this post is going to be about turning group work, something most of our students see as a burden or tedious, into a collaborative unit, which most see as a positive force for good in the world. It's timely, as last week the #FYCchat was on exactly that, and much of what we talked about was how to create an environment conducive to collaboration, creation, and collective wisdom, instead of competitive units of who-did-more-than-whom.

Coincidentally, last week's episode of Project Runway featured a perfect case study on how group work doesn't work and collaboration does. For those of you who don't know, Project Runway is the brainchild of former supermodel Heidi Klum. She pits a group of designers against each other in weekly clothes-making challenges, eliminating one a week until the next-big-thing in fashion is declared the winner. The challenges can be ridiculous (clothes made out of materials found at a pet store!), and the drama...Oh, the drama. Sleep deprivation and other physical hardships often push designers to the brink, and the contestants are fighting for their creative and professional life.

Last week's episode, Off the Track, is no exception. If you don't have an extra hour or so to spare to watch the episode (which is what I linked to above), you can read a pretty good recap here. Unlike most weeks, where the designers work as individuals, in Off the Track the designers are forced into teams of three and then expected to create a three-outfit cohesive line. Two groups in particular dissolve into complete and total chaos. One group gets completely wrapped up in drama, and while the team member (Bert) certainly deserved their ire, the other two forget to actually design clothes and the trouble-maker creates the "best" garment. The other group, equally drama-filled (Him: You're designs are dowdy. Her: TEARS), but the team leader sucked it up, said he was sorry, and she sucked it up and accepted it, they put their differences aside, ending up creating one of the winning dresses.

(Personally, that dress is a big "Meh" for me, but compared to a lot of the other designs, it was the least offensive. I honestly think Heidi was rewarding the group that was able to work through, or at least get past, their differences.)

I really invite you to watch the full episode to see how the "group work" mentality can deteriorate and destroy the final product while trying to really collaborate can produce good results, in spite of conflict. The team that found a way to work together was rewarded. Another important lesson is that you can only control the work that you do within the collaborative setting. While certainly a trouble-maker who doesn't play well with others, Bert still remembers that the purpose of the challenge is to create good clothes; the other two didn't even seem to bother, focusing instead on complaining about how useless and difficult to work with Bert is.

I don't know why this realization about Project Runway has eased my mind; I still have to teach tomorrow and I still have to deal with the Bad Apple group. But at least now I have an external example to think about and refer to in order to work through the issue. A few hours ago, I was despondent. Now, I'm hopeful. I need to get my students to become the successful collaborators, not the petty group workers.

Eat your heart out, Heidi!

Peer-Driven Learning: Readjusting Expectations

2011-08-28T21:33:00.001-04:00

Programming Note: I'll be taking a break from writing weekly Bad Female Academic posts, mostly because I don't have anything left to add. That's probably because I'm teaching again and am trying something completely new, trying to create a course based on peer-driven learning. So instead of Monday posts on gender in academia, you'll be treated to posts on my ongoing adventure in allowing my students to decide for themselves what we're going to learn and produce in our class.

Week one is over, and I'm staring down the reality of week two. Last week was hit and miss. The students seemed to really respond to Paulo Freire and the idea that there is, in fact, a different way to learn (well, lots of different ways to learn, but you get my drift). When I told them to pull out their cell phones and start texting their answers to question and that those answers would appear (anonymously) on the overhead, it was like I had just cured cancer. A teacher who was encouraging them to text, to use the technology that was most available to them and with which they were most familiar with? I blew their minds.

Their blog posts (sorry, not public) on their initial reactions to the class and the readings were positive. One of my favorite quotes from a student was that they'd been trained to sit and not talk in class the same way a dog is trained not to pee on the rug. Another student also astutely observed that learning technology is only useful if it allows us to learn in new and different ways, instead of recreating more efficient versions of the banking concept. There seemed to be a consensus that the class was different, exciting, terrifying, would be a lot of work, but it was work they were willing to undertake because they "knew" (or at least claimed to know) that it would mean that they would learn more. Students were emailing me to ask about contract grading or if we could use tumblr instead of blackboard. I was psyched.

Then came Friday. This, I said, is where the hard work begins. Now we have to start making some decisions and actually designing our course. What, I asked, do we need to decide? In my first class, there was silence. Absolute silence. I am proud to say that I waited it out, but it was painful. I have a number of students in the class whom I had last year, students who I know have something to say from reading their blogs, and yet, there was nothing. We finally got through a list, and their job over the weekend (I didn't want to call it homework) was to participate in a discussion (online) about each of the elements we need to decide on, offering ideas, brainstorming, and, you know, discussing. Communication, I reminded them, is a key element in making this class work.

My other class was better; I barely had time to get the question out of my mouth when a hand shot up and said: "Grading! How will we be graded?" We all laughed. This class had already proposed to break off into smaller groups, and each group would/should have a technologically savvy person in it to guide communication and innovation. They also want me to agree to learn something; one student offered to teach me how to weld. Another student asked if we were limited to our physical classroom in which to hold our meetings. We got threw the list and they, too, had the responsibility of discussing their preferences online so that next week, we can start narrowing our options and making choices.

The discussion, thus far, at 9:30 PM on Sunday night, has been a relative failure. Very few students have even post or participated. I created an internal wiki to share other innovative class and project ideas, so they could be inspired (I know, make it all public! I'm working on it; most of this is really, really new to me, too). I'm not even sure anyone has looked at it. Most of the suggestions that were made were vague and not well articulated (We should read about Class, Poverty, and Wealth because it looks interesting). I was ready to throw in the towel, declare this whole experiment a failure when I took a step back and remembered that this is really, really new for them, too. No one has ever asked them their opinion on what they should learn or why they should be learning it. While I might have been completely exhilarated by the opportunity as an undergrad, I was a massive dork (still am, obviously). My students will need a little more patience and guidance before they believe that this is for real and that this can and will work.

I also have to remember that I no longer run on a student's clock. Did I honestly expect an excited and intelligent exchange of ideas by 2 PM on Saturday afternoon, the first weekend of the school year? I did, and there is my problem. As the weekend has drawn on, the discussion has gotten more interesting, and more people have posted. I half-expect to wake up tomorrow morning and find that the whole class has been decided while I slept (not likely, but you get the idea). The whole idea of this class is to let the students run the show. Of course the students aren't going to work at the same times I would do my own work and preparation for the course. I need to readjust my expectations to meet their reality. My only fear is that they won't give themselves enough time to actually discuss; they will just post something and forget about it.

Communication, true honest communication that represents an exchange of ideas, is something that is completely foreign to these students, both outside, but especially inside, the classroom. When I told them that I had commented on each of their blog posts, they stared at me in disbelief. It never occurred to them that one of the great strengths of social media and other technologies is to truly level the playing field between professor and student. I am just one voice in a sea of voices all sounding off on the issues in this course. The work that they produce isn't simply to earn a check mark or credit towards a letter grade at the end of the semester. We're all readjusting our expectations, and these things take time.

Time, and patience. And, the strength not to lose faith at the first sign of trouble.

Fall Burn Out: Uninspired Writing

2011-08-25T18:30:00.002-04:00

I'm stuck. I don't have writer's block, but I am suffering from some pretty uninspiring writing. I volunteered to do a guest post on a pop-culture subject that I am (or at least I was) pretty excited about. And then, I sat down to write the thing. The words came, but once I got about three-quarters through, I stopped, re-read it, and hated it. It wasn't bad; it was coherent, followed the rules of standard written English, and communicated what I had intended it to say. But it was so...boring.

I don't know what to do. It's due tomorrow and I want to send them something. But I also would like them to accept guest posts from me again in the future. Will a boring (seriously, this thing is so dry) post be worse than no post at all? Or, should I just chuck it, start again, and send off whatever I come up with (which, I have to admit, will have to be better than what I've already written). But what if it isn't? What if it's worse?

The timing of this guest post couldn't be worse. After a summer of writing, I am a week into classes starting, meaning I am absolutely exhausted. I had forgotten just how physically and mentally demanding teaching five classes (three preps) can be. Add to that the fact that I am trying to completely and radically reimagine one of my courses, well, it's not the best time for inspiring prose, even about a subject that I am excited to be writing about on a platform I am thrilled to be (potentially) a part of.

This is rare for me, the inability to write and write halfway decently. This summer, starting in May, I've written 43 posts for this site, 11 posts for Chasing Laferrière, 5 University of Venus posts, 3 academic essays, 2 book proposals (one of them based off of my dissertation, one on my next project), and...I think that's it. This is the most writing I've done and longest sustained writing period I've had since I finished my dissertation days before my first-born showed up. So, maybe I should give myself a break if I'm a little burnt out.

I have one more day this week of my peer-driven classes, and perhaps after I get that done, I'll be able to take a deep breath and try to write this piece again. But, I don't think I'll be doing much writing this fall (save for here and for UVenus). And, you know what? I'm really, really ok with that. I think I've earned a little break.

Peer-Driven Learning: The Challenges of Letting Go of Control

2011-08-23T20:35:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow is my first day of crowdsourcing my course, or, perhaps more accurately, working with my students to create a peer-driven course. We had our first class(es) on Monday, where I introduced the concept and we went through the syllabus, such as it was. I assigned two posts from Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog, as well as the Paulo Freire essay on the banking concept of education included in their reader, in an attempt to inspire and challenge them, to help them see things a little differently.

First, the good news. One of my classes seemed really excited about the possibilities. I could see them smiling and nodding their heads and wheels starting to turn. One of the students (he took me for both of his English classes last year) has already emailed me about "contract grading" and if we could do something like that in the class (my response, after shrieks of joy, was to say that it was up to the class and if he thought it was something we should do, then make the argument). Tomorrow, I'm going to use a text messaging instant survey service to gage my students' attitudes and see where we stand on some general issues in the course. I am very excited about this. No one has seemed to have dropped my course (yet).

Now, the less good news. My other class showed little enthusiasm and looked more terrified than invigorated by the possibility of deciding the direction of the course. I feel unmoored by this experience; usually, I'd have my first two weeks of classes down cold and I could skate through the first few weeks on my charm and well-practiced lectures and exercises. Now, I'm completely without a rudder. And, apparently, relying on heavy-handed, cliched symbolism. I have a plan, but I don't want to have too much of a plan, in case I fall back on my well-trained habit of lecturing and steering the course where I think or would want it to go.

And I, too, am terrified. There are few places in my life where I feel completely and totally comfortable; one of those places is the pool, another is in front of the classroom. When I stepped in front of a class for the first time to really teach, it didn't take long for the nerves to disappear and for me to feel like I was right where I was supposed to be, right where I wanted to be. In the same way I had always felt "right" in the pool, I felt "right" while teaching in front of the class. This is a rare feeling for me. I've always felt slightly awkward, slightly out of place. Even in academia, I don't quite fit (that's one of the things that Bad Female Academic has been about). But put me in front of a group of students and tell me to teach them...

Maybe it's because I was in a position of authority and (relative) control; so much of my life growing up felt outside of my control that it was nice to finally be somewhere where people respected me, listened to me, and (dare I say it) had to do what I said. Don't get me wrong, I never took that for granted or took advantage of my position of authority, and I work hard to make sure that I deserve my students' respect. But that power, the feeling of being in control, it's something that I am already worried about missing.

I know this will make me a better teacher. But will that be as personally fulfilling to me? This is a selfish, selfish question to ask, but I think it's a question we need to ask ourselves as educators because this could be one of the reasons we are so resistant to radically changing how we teach. There is a sense of fulfillment and pride in seeing our students learn and succeed. But, if we're really honest with ourselves, there are other reasons why we teach, more personal, more selfish reasons. Those reasons often remain hidden, unexamined.

I am giving up a large portion of the control in my class. I am re-learning how to assert my authority in ways that don't involve dictating what my students need to do and when. And it's really, really hard and really, really scary.

I must be doing something right, then.

Bad Female Academic: My Bawdy Body

2011-08-21T16:57:00.001-04:00

I'm currently working on an essay about how Nalo Hopkinson uses the (postcolonial, black, queer) body in her short story collection, Skin Folk. The female bodies in particular in her works, both short stories and novels, are very physical; they are pregnant, nursing, menstruating, eating, going though menopause, coming, and they come in all shapes and sizes, lovingly described. This element of her work has always resonated with me. In my research for my current paper, I came across the book Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing from Rodopi. One of the essays deals with the difference between "female" and femininity:

If femininity represents the socially acceptable, aesthetic side of 'woman-ness', then femaleness exposes its socially unacceptable, abject underside, the undesirable leftovers of existence. Thus, while abjection deals in the undeniably physical - the messiness of the body's materiality - so aesthetics traditionally shuns the corporeal in favour of the polished, pretty veneer of femininity. (267)

The essay uses Kristeva and goes through the ways women's (particularly girls on the cusp of or going through puberty) are policed. Good girls are sugar, spice, and all things nice (but, not allowed to be seen eating those sweet things). We smell good, we look good, we are clean and fresh.

I've never had a problem with being "female" so to speak. As a tomboy or growing up as "one of the boys," I never felt ashamed of the messiness of being female; it was just something that happened, like the messiness of being a male. Growing up with the boys and their locker room talk just meant, to me, that bodies and bodily functions weren't anything to hide.

Of course, I quickly learned how wrong I was and what the double standard was for me and my female body versus males and their bodies. But being feminine just didn't fit with my personality or my body. I loved to eat, which I could do when I swam almost 30 hours a week. One might be tempted to discuss eating as a substitute for...something I was missing growing up, but for me eating was a simple pleasure that I would not give up simply because it was "un-lady-like" to stuff my face with the boys after a long practice.

Things got especially difficult once I hit puberty and it became clear that I was, despite my best efforts, not one of the boys. I didn't and don't possess a boyish, athletic body. My femaleness became obvious, in fact, it became hard to ignore. It is one thing to be pretty and feminine (think Betty Draper on Mad Men), it is another when your sexuality is on display (think Joan Holloway on Mad Men). I'm a Joan. As the show observes, it is difficult for "Joan" to be taken seriously, and I learned that many, many times over.

Joan Holloway

Betty Draper

I am and will be forever grateful for my best friend at university. She and I shared many similarities (tomboys, Joan-esque figures, former athletes, distaste/discomfort with being "feminine"). We spent five years together as friends and later roommates, figuring out the balance between our female bodies and the feminine expectations of the world around us. I can still remember the times we got "dressed up" when we went out, putting on skirts or dresses and make-up. We were lucky that we grew up in a time when the predominant style was grunge, and thus we could wear baggy cargo pants and oversized plaid shirts, hiding those parts of our messy female selves while still rejecting the feminine rules we didn't want any part of.

As we got older and moved on, we had to embrace at least some of the rules, particularly if we wanted to partially fit in at our chosen professions (she is a successful communications account manager). But we also figured out that we could be female and feminine, and largely true to ourselves. I miss her immensely because she was someone with whom I could be myself: messy, bawdy, crude, and honest. There was never any pressure to be anything other than who we were, no female pressure to conform, to be more feminine, less female.

I still love crude, raunchy humor. I have to remember to watch myself, that I don't say too much about bodily functions, because I know that it's not "proper." But I still eat ravenously and unapologetically. And I won't hide the fact that I'm a Joan. I'm still more female than feminine. I hadn't thought of that when choosing the title for this series, but I'm glad I did.

What am I still doing here? More Thoughts on Now I See It

2011-08-19T08:40:00.001-04:00

In the comments of my review of Higher Education?, capandgown notes:

well said, it's a completely pernicious system in which everyone higher up the pecking order is incentivised to exploit those below. at the end of your piece i was wondering though - why DO you do it? possibly you will say, because you love it. I'm wondering when the tipping point comes : when love of one's job becomes the privilege of those who can afford it?

These are two questions that I have addressed in the past (why I came back to teaching and who will be our future professors). I wrote the former post almost exactly a year ago, when I was about to start teaching again, full-time, after a year of under/unemployment. Many reasons I outlined there haven't changed; I still need the money and there are very few employment opportunities where I am currently living. Why not move? My husband and I decided, very early in our relationship, that if we were going to decide to be together "forever" that we were going to be together. So I am still place-bound and limited, therefore, in my employment opportunities.

But, and Worst Professor Ever is going to be mad at me for saying this, capandgown is right insofar as that I love what it is that I do. I am invigorated and excited to have the opportunity to completely reimagine and reformulate my classes. I have written elsewhere that it is liberating to "only" be an instructor, and I wonder if I would have had the courage or conviction to do what I am doing this semester if I was on the tenure-track. This job still has something to offer me (other than money), and me to it.

I can't imagine myself doing anything else. And, that might be the problem. I've spoken before about my failure of imagination when it comes to how I see and understand my classes. I have the same problem when it comes to my career trajectory. For so long I could only see myself in front of the class, in higher education, eventually moving up the administrative ladder. Of course, that vision has shifted somewhat, but not much. Maybe it's in part because of where I am living, with limited economic opportunities. Maybe it's because I've never been particularly entrepreneurial. Or, and I think Cathy Davidson would agree, the vision I've had for my life has never really been seriously disrupted enough for me to take a step back and really rethink things.

When I say that my job still has something to offer me, I mean that it allows me to go outside of my comfort zone, even if it's only in the relatively safe confines of the classroom, a place where I feel most at home. Maybe these small steps I am taking to change the way I look at the educational experience will help me build up the courage and the vision to look at my own career trajectory differently. Four short months ago, I was lamenting my inability to radically change the way I teach. Now, I'm making it happen.

Eight months from now, maybe I'll see more things just a little bit differently as well. Until then, I'll keep doing what I love and what challenges me. I'm pretty lucky that way.

Now You See It: Get This Book. Right Now.

2011-08-17T20:41:00.000-04:00

I finally finished Cathy Davidson's new book Now You See It. It comes out today (August 18th). I am so glad that I decided to adopt this book for my Freshman Writing class on "The Future." I am excited and invigorated by the hopeful and optimistic tone that the book takes. This is a book that everyone should read.

Everyone.

But, here's a list of the most important people who should read the book, and why.

1) Educators: This book outline where education reform needs to go, and for those educators who are already there (or desperately trying to get there) who face opposition or derision from administrators or parents, this book is your justification. We love "science" and Davidson makes sure that she has enough science to back up her claims about the benefits of things like social media, video games, and collaboration, to convince even the hardest skeptic. Teachers should assign it to students, it should be adopted as the campus-wide book assigned to students and faculty to read and discuss.

2) Parents: All of that hang-wringing about how we're raising our kids? It ends here. It might depress you to know that your child's school is nowhere near as relevant as it could or should be in order to prepare them for whatever the future economy is going to look like, but at the same time the message (or one of the messages) that I take away is that it's never too late. I'm making it sound like Davidson advocates a truly laissez-faire style of parenting, but what she explains is that those habits that we chide or don't understand in this technological age are not to be feared, but embraced. That, and that we should learn from our children about those things that we don't understand. Not what we want them to tell us, but what they are really saying.

This book is all about getting us to pay attention, to disrupt our perception of the world so we can learn something new and truly change and (to a certain extent) evolve. There was a passage towards the end of the book that brought tears to my eyes:

To believe that the new totally and positively puts an end to the old is a mistaken idea that gets us nowhere, neither out of old habits nor finding new ones better suited to the demands of that which has changed. John Seely Brown calls the apocalyptic view of change endism. Endism overstates what is gone...When I talk to my students about the way we select the worlds we see in our everyday life, they often ask how they can possibly possibly change the way they see. It's easy, I always answer. I'll assign you the task of seeing differently. And you will. That's what learning is.

I needed to read that tonight, staring down the reality of trying to teach my course differently, in order to get the students to see things differently. I'll be writing a more detailed review later, but I wanted a chance to be emotional, a little hyperbolic, and effusive in my praise for this book.

Buy this book. It will change your life because it does exactly what Davidson does with her students. She assigns you the task of seeing things differently in this book. It is a book that demands to be re-read, reflected on, and discussed. I hope you buy it, share it, talk about it, and have the courage to allow it to change you.

And remember, if you're on Twitter talking about it, use the tag #NowUCit.

It is (still) all about the Money: Another Review of Higher Education?

2011-08-16T13:28:00.003-04:00

I reviewed the book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus last year (see here for the final review and a list of the other reviews; it was a six-part series). I recently received the updated paperback version that has some additional material, including a new afterward. Much of my criticisms of the original book still stand, but it hard for me not to recommend a book that says the following:

What do we think should happen in college? We want people to use their minds as they never have before, thinking about the realities and issues that strain their mental powers. They should be urged to be imaginative and inquiring, to take risks without having to worry about their transcripts or alienating their teachers. To quote a friend, colleges should be making their undergraduates more interesting people. Higher education is an ongoing conversation, created for students poised at adulthood, which can and will continue throughout their lives. (6-7)

These are some of the things I aspire to do in my classes, and so I think that while their hearts are in the right place, I still have some issues with the authors' arguments. For one thing, everything that is wrong with higher education is a microcosm (or, if you'd like me to get all literary on you, a synecdoche) of what is wrong with society as a whole at the moment: greed, exponential growth, exploited underclass, bubbles about to burst, blind faith, etc. Our students (and their parents) come in not wanting an education but a job and the security that comes with it. So we provide it. The government keeps providing loans, so we take them, both students and institutions. There is a disconnect between those in administration, those who are professors, and those who are off the tenure-track. Perhaps disconnect is the wrong word: massive craters of empty space is a more apt metaphor.

But I want to get back to a question I asked the first time around: How Much is a Professor Worth? Comparing salaries of professors is really difficult to do; depending on where you live, what you study, and the nature of the institution, salaries will vary wildly. So to celebrate the professor living in rural Oregon and their (comparatively) paltry salaries is a bit unfair to those professors who have to try and make a living in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, or any other high-priced center. But it also doesn't take into consideration the economic realities of professors today.

The authors rightly call for the end of adjunct exploitation, as well as the end of student loans as we know them. But, unfortunately, an entire generation of PhDs (and, one would think, the next generation coming through the ranks) have been punished economically by this system. Not only are we facing our loans (and the accrued interest), but we are also facing years of private debt accumulated over the years of low-paying adjunct work. To tell a new professor, you aren't worth it, is a further insult, not to mention ignoring the very real fact that the (apparently) inflated salary is not enough to meet the student loan demands, career demands, and life demands.

We are not coming from schools where tuition could once be easily financed through summer jobs, nor from generous graduate programs that allowed you to live and work on your PhD. And most of us aren't coming from economic circumstances where we have been supported financially by family. We come drowning in debt. And, as inflated as the salaries seem to the outside world, I'd like to introduce them to how much red ink is also peeking from behind.

I write this piece from experience. We are (thankfully, gratefully) a two-income household, both in higher education. My husband has a tenure-track position, while I am an instructor. Our combined salaries are really great-looking on paper. And yet, monthly, we wonder how we are going to make our student loan payments, our credit card payments, pay for our kids' preschool, and have anything left over for savings. If something were to happen to one of us, like so many other families, we'd have nothing to fall back on, no cushion to catch us.

You might be tempted to throw an accusation at us that we lived beyond our means, and that this is all our own fault, but we believed in the myth of meritocracy and that all would be well once the Boomers retired. Student loans are the gateway drug to credit card debt as grad students: we take on these debt because we have been told over and over that it is "worth it" and will be rewarded with the job of our dreams at the end of it.

The authors call on all of us to see ourselves as public servants. And that's fine, but more and more of the best and the brightest are leaving higher education because they can't afford not to. Until the whole system is changed, this is a reality that just isn't going to go away; it's only going to get worse.

Bad Female Academic: Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-08-13T23:03:00.003-04:00

My blog recently hit 50,000 pageviews:

And, I accumulated over 2,000 followers on Twitter:

Some of my followers on Twitter asked me how I got to these benchmarks, and I have one answer: Shameless Self-Promotion. Good Female Academics are mild and quiet and work away at their jobs, hoping to get noticed, but well aware that any attempt at blowing their own horn will be met with derision and dismissal. Bad Female Academics put themselves out there. Repeatedly and persistently.

Don't believe me? Read the comments on this recent post on self-promotion for women in academia or this recent piece in the Times of Higher Education on self-promotion. It is unseemly and beneath academics to promote themselves in such a fashion, and even more so for a woman in academia. We might be mistaken as ambitious or loud. Or self-confident.

When I was about 12 or 13, I remember standing in the school's bathroom with my best friend as she ran through the list of things she wanted to change about herself. Then she asked me what I wanted to change about myself, the things I didn't like. I shrugged my shoulders and said that there wasn't anything I wanted to change. She looked at me and spat out, "Well, that's awfully arrogant, isn't it?"

This is the message we're sent as girls and as women. To believe in ourselves is arrogant, unfounded, untrue. It takes an immense amount of confidence to put yourself out there, to promote yourself, to tweet your writing, to submit your name and your work for judgement and recognition. I believe that my work and my writing is good enough, maybe even great. And if it's rejected, I take the critique, integrate it, and send it out again. I blog as myself because if I want the recognition and respect, it has to be as myself.

My advice for reaching these milestones is just simply to take chances, to put yourself out there. Follow those people who you admire, engage them in conversation, tweet and retweet your work and theirs. Bring it their attention. Post your work in the comments of relevant blogs or articles. Look for both traditional and non-traditional opportunities, from going to conference in your field to submitting more traditional op-eds to stuff that really out there (I'm applying to SXSW this year!).

To use an absolutely sexist and negative term, be willing to whore yourself. How is that for a loaded expression when it comes to self-promotion?

Above all, be patient and be persistent. Be relevant and be accessible. Be open and have thick skin. Don't give up. Find a supportive network of people who will push you and encourage you and be honest with you. But above all, don't let that voice inside of you win.

It's my birthday today (August 14th). In the spirit of honestly, I'm 34. My world in nowhere near where I thought it would be, but I wouldn't change it for anything. I took a lot of chances, none of them I regret. I put myself out there and I don't regret it at all. I want to thank all of your for helping me be the best Bad Female Academic I can be.

No, a better one. Because shameless self-promotion isn't about just you; it's about being better because of the people you've reached.

In-Class Distractions Are Nothing New

2011-08-12T09:02:00.000-04:00

Or, why you should allow your students to have their phones, laptops, and whatever else they want in class.

(This post originally appeared on So Educated.)

A student who is unengaged will find something better to do if they have technology in front of them or not. When I was in school, I wrote. I wrote notes to my friends, I wrote poetry, I wrote love letters to the object of my affection that I never gave them, I wrote short stories, I wrote anything and everything except what the teacher was saying. I had other friends who drew. Still others stared out the window and daydreamed.

We all clearly recognize that banning pens, pencils, and paper in the classroom isn't a good idea (or, maybe it is - what if the students couldn't do anything except sit and listen, or the teacher couldn't just rely on the students to "take notes" in order to learn). And yet, just because a student is writing (or looks like they are writing) doesn't mean they are paying attention. In the same way, just because the student doesn't look like they're taking notes doesn't mean they aren't paying attention.

Read this about Maria Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd College in California:

If one walked by an all-day meeting in progress and just spotted Klawe, it might appear to be a class in watercolor painting. Only a closer room scan would reveal that Klawe is the lone paintbrush-in-hand participant. Besides any meeting notes, surrounding her are some brushes, paint tubes, a small mixing tray, and a watercolor block.

"I'm a better participant when I'm painting," she contends. "I'm listening to everything but it keeps me quieter. Usually in a meeting I want to say something about everything. If I'm painting, it brings me down to a much more normal level." Those who have been in both types of meetings with her have agreed.

What if the student who doesn't appear to be paying attention is actually listening more effectively because they are also doing something with their hands?

There is something to be said about quiet, intense focus on one single task. But is sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture the best way to encourage this type of engagement in students? There has been a great deal of work done recently showing that cell phones can be a very effective tool in actively engaging students in the classroom, helping them stay focused. In the writing classes that I teach, it would be ideal (both financially and environmentally) for all of my students to have their laptops or netbooks in order to be able to immediately and actively edit their writing, share their work, and engage in research activities. And for me, the benefit of these devices in the classroom far outweigh the reality that the students will probably also be doing something else instead.

It's the same reason I don't ban pens and paper in my classroom, either.

Postscript: There are some legitimate arguments against laptops in the classroom (see here), but I think, especially as I read Cathy Davidson's new book, that the trick is to actively engage students using their laptops.

Time for a Change: Integrating Peer-Driven Learning

2011-08-09T11:55:00.001-04:00

After a summer of research (four articles submitted, two book proposals ready to go), I've turned my attention back to preparing to teach. And this year, I'm finally putting my money where my mouth is; I'm making my 200-level Writing II class entirely peer-driven, student-driven, and crowdsourced (and by crowd, I mean the class). I've taken my inspiration from the great Cathy Davidson and we will spend the first four week of the course shaping the final thirteen.

Why have I done this? I think my students are capable and should be encouraged to take ownership of their educations, as well as learn to work collectively. I also think that it's about time that I learn, I mean really learn, what it is that they know and react accordingly, rather than assuming up front and correcting my teaching.

Why I am only doing this in my 200-level class? Mostly because these are student who (in theory) have already learned the "basics" in their 100-level Freshman Writing class. I am hoping that the extra experience will help them feel more comfortable with the arrangement. I also hope that this means we can focus on what we are writing about versus how we are supposed to write about it.

If you would like to see my syllabus and offer comments, please do so below, rather than directly in the document. Please remember that this is a first draft of the document and I will be continually refining it and reworking it right up until the semester starts on the 19th. I hope to receive some good feedback here so that this class is as successful as possible.

I am also going to be using Cathy Davidson's new book Now You See It, which is excellent (more detailed review to come) in my 100-level class, where the theme will "The Future." After we read the book (which will take up about the first third to half of the semester), I will turn the class over to the students and we will read/watch/write works of their choosing based on the theme. At least, that's the plan.

I have to say, I am at once terrified and exhilarated. I am looking forward to the challenge and I am optimistic that this will work. But I am also terrified that it will fail horribly, either due to my inability to let go or my students' unwillingness to break free of the way they have been conditioned to learn throughout their educations. I guess I have a little less than two week to chicken out and revert back to my usual dictatorial style.

Please feel free to offer words of encouragement in either direction.

Bad Female Academic: Not Interested in Passing

2011-08-07T10:29:00.003-04:00

(See what I did there? That's the second post in a row where I've come up with a clever title with two possible meanings, both in the traditional academic sense and in the socio-economic sense. Anyone? Anyone? Alright, I'll get on with it.)

When Dr. Crazy was talking about gender and class, she brought up the concept of "passing", or being able to move up and fit into a different socio-economic class. Women, especially, have been practicing this since, well, since there were marked differences between different groups of people implying an hierarchy.* I think if this Bad Female Academic series has shown anything, it's that I am not very good at passing myself off as a "traditional" academic.

But writing this series has forced me to look back at my personal history both inside and outside academia, and I've come to the conclusion that I have never really been interested in passing, and in fact now seem to be actively seeking out situations where it would be impossible for me to pass.

Let me explain, and bear with me if we take a short voyage into my non-academic past.

In elementary school, I was the only girl in my class who didn't at least try to figure skate or do ballet. This was an offense punishable by being mean-girled for all of elementary school. I swam. I never hid the fact that I swam, nor was I interested in giving up swimming in order to "fit in." In high school, too, I wore my hideous swimming jacket as a badge of pride, marking my difference from the rest of the group. It was also in high school when my parents got divorced and I was suddenly thrust into a different economic reality, a reality that was much different from that of my friends. Swimming, while a welcome escape for me, was also a place where I didn't quite fit in, as I was one of the youngest and only girls.

After a particularly difficult two years at a private CEGEP, where I decided that I couldn't join the socio-economic elite I was going to school with, nor did I have any desire to beat them, so I wore sweatpants for two years, I left to go to a French university. I knew I wouldn't, couldn't pass as a French person, but I didn't care. The impossibility of passing was liberating.

After my PhD (where I probably tried too hard to pass, failed miserably, and was miserable), after getting married, after adjuncting while pregnant, I got my tenure-track job. At an HBCU. Once again, while pregnant. There was no hope of passing, in fact it would have been insulting and ignorant to even try. But I liked that. I had realized that letting go of the pressure, the desire, the desperation, to be something I wasn't, I learned more, was more open, and a better teacher. I wasn't wrapped up in whatever I needed or thought I needed to do, so I could focus on what my students needed me to be.

Think about that for a second. If we just stopped worrying so much about what our colleagues or administrators or "the elite" want us to be, maybe we can be better teachers and researcher, actually attuned to what they need from us, and what we need from ourselves.

Now, I am an instructor in the South. My accent marks me as different. And that's perfectly fine by me. Maybe by being myself, I can teach my students (and my children) that it's ok to be yourself and to be different.

*I don't use the term "passing" without realizing that it is a problematic term; I've worked at an HBCU and I study Black writers, so I am well aware of the history of "passing" for African-Americans in the US. And even the fact that I have the choice to be able to pass marks me as being a more privilege position. And my apparent rejection of that privilege is also not unproblematic. I don't see what I do as "slumming it" but instead a conscious effort to do things differently.

There are no words today, only action

2011-08-05T14:02:00.003-04:00

I was all set to write a post about how we remain obsessed with the Ivies and those top, elite colleges, to our own detriment. And I'm not just talking about how families will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get little Jimmy and Suzy into Yale or Duke, but how we, in academia and the media, keep pushing these colleges as the standard, for better or for worse. Three items:

In Forbes, Why Trying To Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar. College, of course, is limited to Brown, elite MBA programs, UCLA, and...that's it.
In the Chronicle, Academic English is Not a Club I Want to Join (sorry if the link doesn't work or is behind a paywall). A little more variety, but still, big, public, elite, R1 institutions.
In Slate, the response to William Pannaker's essay, a laundry list of self-important success stories from Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, and the Ohio State.

Nothing from a regional state school (or community college). Nothing from a PhD from a less than elite program. Nothing about the variety of experiences that are found in higher education, from how English is taught to the experience of the workforce therein.

And then, I read about an adjunct professor in community college who killed himself. 71 years old, history of depression, and all I can think is, did he not get help because he didn't have health insurance? And I remember reading about another adjunct who worked through his cancer treatments because he couldn't afford not to. He passed away from the cancer (sorry, no link; I saw it on facebook, in a private note, and I don't have permission to share). And how some are trying to create an Adjunct Emergency Fund. And. And. And. And.

So, I'm sorry if your experience at Brown and with elite MBA students isn't all that you imagined it would be; most of us are teaching our "mediocre" and "non-elite" students how to write quite well, thank you very much. And, I'm sorry I'm not the kind of role model you're looking for in English. Or, maybe I am, but you can't be bothered to meet me. Finally, I'm so, so happy that you're academic fairy tale has come true. Doesn't mean that it has for most people.

Ivory tower, indeed.

For the rest of us, it's real life, and it's about time others started realizing that. Although, most people reading this blog already do realize it. Preaching to the choir. Now, it's up to us to actually DO something about it. I wrote this. I'll keep writing this.

I need to figure out what else it is I can do. Because these words that I write, while reaching an audience, can only do so much.

The Academic Elite: Who Are These People, Really?

2011-08-02T17:15:00.001-04:00

So, class has been on everyone's brain lately. Not the kind of class that is about to start in less then three weeks (I really need to get on that), but the kind of class that involves money, social mobility, and how to properly "fit" into higher education. I want to start with a little bit of a roundup of recent posts that are either explicitly or implicitly about class issues. If I'm missing any, please let us all know in the comment.

I ask, in response to Pannapacker's original Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go post, Who Will be Our Future Professors? I explicitly address the issues of diversity in higher education given Pannapacker's advice.
Mary Churchill and Mike Brown debate How Our Educational Values Reveal Attitudes About Class and Social Class and Critical Education. So much of what Mary has written has helped refined my own understanding of race, class, and gender attitudes in higher education, as well as sharpening my resolve to stop being silent about it.
Over at Speculative Diction, Melonie Fullick writes about how important it is that graduate students (and aspiring faculty) know their value, pointing out how much money and sweat equity a student puts into building a career in academia, and how challenging that is for students coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
After Pannapacker hit the big-time in Slate, some hand-wringing about how successful and aware working-class PhDs are and how wrong Pannapacker is. And then, how those critics of Pannapacker don't take the issue of gender into consideration.
Worst Professor Ever shares her view on class issues in higher education, and then my own Bad Female Academic take on the whole thing (written before the whole Pannapacker in Slate thing blew up)
Over at ProfHacker, they're asking about "fit" within academia.
James B. Jones shared this book with me, Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks. Yet to read it, but I'm really interested.
Kathryn Allan, over at her blog, also comments on class issues, which don't seem to be all that dissimilar in Canada: Refusing Polite Conversation.
Finally, the essay that, for me, started it all. A professor at Dartmouth asks, At What Cost? Her story resonated with me because she's successful, but drowning in debt. Is this my future?

Obviously, this isn't all that has been written on class issues in higher education, but these seem to have all come to head, right now, online and in real life, at least for me. Thinking about my graduate and teaching career, I have one question that nags at me:

Who in the heck are these people who are forcing and enforcing a very clear and distinct set of class values on us? Seriously? Who are they?

Because it's not the majority of people that I've met on my path to where I am right now. Maybe it's because I've never attended an "elite" institution, either as a student or a professor. Maybe it's because I self-selected the people I hang around with, naturally drawn to those with similar backgrounds to my own (my husband, for example, who is also an academic, is from the same socio-economic background as I am). Or maybe, like so much of what we believe about higher education, it's all just a massive ruse that we've been blindly perpetuating.

I still remember being put in my place when I was an MA student by one of my professors. I was commenting on a novel we were reading, saying that it was written for "them" and not for ordinary people (or something like that). She took great offense to that, outlining all of the ways she was not one of them, in terms of her background. It was the first time I really took a step back and looked at the people in front of me and around me. Now, we did have a professor who was a stereotypical professor, in terms of both his class and attitude, but it was only one. And, I don't remember one of my peers in the program who came from anything higher than lower-middle-class.

It was the same for my PhD. There was, again, one professor who was clearly "one of those professors" (he came from a very wealthy and influential family, apparently, and my colleague of mine was horrified when I revealed, no, sorry, never heard of them), but the rest of the professors were largely from working-class and immigrant families, as were my colleagues in the program. I've taught at four different universities in two countries and three states, and I have to say that the majority of my colleagues come form backgrounds similar to my own.

So why then does this obsession with class markers persist? Did we all get into higher education so we could be snobs? Really? And why do we keep requiring that aspiring academics perform tasks that we know they can't afford? Go to conferences, work for peanuts, receive little institutional support both before and after the tenure-track job. Take on more and more debt, shop at the right stores, live in the right neighborhood, go to the right shows, the right conferences, etc.

We're suffering in semi-silence. I can't believe that, despite all of these voices speaking out, we can't change higher education, if not structurally, then at least culturally. I refuse to meet certain cultural markers. I'm not good at "passing" (as Dr. Crazy writes about) and, judging by the comments and traffic my blog post has received, I'm not the only one who is either incapable, unwilling, or just plain burnt out about the whole thing.

I am serious, though. Where is this pressure coming from? Because, from where I'm sitting, there are more of "us" than there are of "them."

Bad Female Academic: Am I In the Wrong Class?

2011-07-31T14:18:00.000-04:00

Throughout my examination of the pressuresfemale academics face to conform in order to “make it”, and how I (attemptto) resist or break, or simply just don’t fit those expectations, it’s becomeincreasingly clear that a lot of the issues surrounding being a Bad FemaleAcademic isn’t just about policing gender, but it is about class(socio-economic) expectations. When I admit that Iam loud or that Ilike to get dirty, I am essentially signaling a lower-class upbringing.

This is important when discussing the ever-nebulous issue of“fit” when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions. During one of my on-campusinterviews, one of the faculty who was taking me around campus revealed thatshe had attended school in Southern California near where I was currentlyliving. We got talking about living in SoCal; the traffic, the weather, ourfavorite beaches, local news, going to the Getty Museum, and the like. I madethe mistake, however, of revealing that I listened to KROQ, a rock-alternativestation. Their morning show, in particular, isn’t known to be very progressivewhen it comes to issues of sexism (they have an annual Miss Double-D-cembercontest), racism, and homophobia. But, to me, they are hysterical, don’t takethemselves too seriously, and often take-down the self-importance ofHollywood/L.A. And, I really like the music.

Obviously, the correct answer was that I listen to NPR or aclassical music station. Even if I had lied and said that, it would soon becomeclear that I didn’t, in fact, listen to these stations when I would be unableto offer comment on that morning’s feature story. Honestly, I hate talk radio.I appreciate classical music, but need something a little more…invigorating tostart my day. I grew up in a house filled with popular and rock music. Welistened to music in the mornings, peppered through with the news (sportsscores were essential) and funny bits done by the DJs. I’m not sure how much ofit has to do with class, but there are certainly assumptions to be made becauseof my favorite kind of music and what I like to listen to on the radio.

But it’s not just what kind of radio I enjoy listening to. Theseexpectations start to permeate every decision I make, especially as a mother. I let my kids watch TV,even indulging in my daughter’s love of Disney Princesses. I don’t have a nanny, but instead sendthem to preschool, and not one that is a Montessori. These are all revelationsthat slowly by surely leak out as I become more and more integrated in thecommunity. Where one shops, what kind of food or clothes one buys, it allreflects a certain class expectation.

For example, I shop at Wal-Mart. This, in many academiccircles, is a sin punishable by death, or at least a good shunning. But here’sthe problem. I can’t afford not to shop at Wal-Mart. For groceries and basicnecessities for the kids, it’s the most affordable option available. I wouldlove to be able to afford to drive an hour to shop at Whole Foods, or theorganic co-op, but I can’t. The student loan debts my husband and I have fromour educations are taking huge chunks from our income.

Here is where class really comes into play. Those of us whohad to go into a great deal of debt to get their PhDs often can’t afford toplay the game of being a good “fit” or embodying the non-academic values ofhigher education. I want to take my kids to the symphony or the ballet, I wantto sign them up for culturally enriching opportunities, and not just because ofthe societal pressure of my job, but I can’t afford to. And that inability topay can be interpreted as refusing to teach my own children the proper“values,” thus calling into question my “fit” in an academic setting. We are also often the same people whocame from a lower class to begin with, meaning that all of those “free” symbolsof class that come naturally to some aren’t obvious, comfortable, or authenticfor us.

When we talk about diversity in academia and what it meansto be a “good” academic, we can’t forget the economic privilege that exists forthose who have long set the rules as to what it means to be a Good Academic.

(Worst Professor Ever and I must share a brain, or at least be on the same wavelength; while I was writing this post, she published "You Stay Classy, Ivory Tower!" I encourage you to read her very similar reactions to the class expectations of higher education. I think the more voices we have talking about this very real issue, the better.)

City Living versus Country Livin'

2011-07-29T09:05:00.001-04:00

(I know, it's late, and a bit off topic compared to what I've been writing about lately. It's Friday, it's my anniversary, and this was lying around on my hard drive.)

I live in the country. Technically, I live “in town”, butwhen the town in question is only about 6000 people and in the middle of aNational Forrest, I think I can safely say that I live in a rural area. We arean hour from any real city, but even the cities we are close to aren’t largeurban areas. To say that living here has been an adjustment for me is anunderstatement.

I grew up in the suburbs of Montreal. Downtown was only abus and metro ride away. We had sports teams, museums, a symphony, concerts, shopping,restaurants, ethnic neighborhoods, everything. I’ve also recently lived inSouthern California, with everything that involves. I loved having relativelyeasy access to just about anything and everything I could ever want.

And by relatively easy, I mean, willing to put up with thetraffic to get there.

There are certainly advantages to living in a rural area.Real estate is much more affordable; the house and lot we just bought would beunattainable for us in any urban area. We live only a short walk from campus,meaning we only own one car and use it sparingly. Parenting isn’t afull-contact sport here. There is no competition as to who has the beststroller, whose child has the latest and greatest cognitive development toys,and who got into which (obscenely priced) preschool. I don’t have to worryabout over-scheduling my kids because there is only a limited amount of things Ican sign them up for.

Which is a disadvantage as well. My kids both love dancing,but there aren’t any classes offered for their age group, unless I am willingto drive an hour each way. Perhapsa parent more dedicated than myself would make that drive, but two hours (andthe gas) are a luxury we can’t really afford right now. I miss having optionsfor just about everything: food, shopping, entertainment. While at a recentconference in Toronto, my mouth watered as I walked passed restaurant afterrestaurant, offering cuisine I just don’t have access to anymore and seeingposters for events I know my family (or just me) would adore.

Finding things for us to do here is also a lot more work. Iam used to being able to just simply look online for schedules, directions,pricing, and other information. Here, most local businesses don’t have awebsite, and the city website is equally unhelpful and usually out-of-date.Here, if you want to know what’s going on, you have to buy the local paper andmake friends with the locals. Not that that’s a bad thing, just something thatI am still trying to adapt to.

We feel pretty fortunate, however, to be living (andworking!) where we are. There were no waiting lists or tests or sky-highregistration fees to get my kids into the best preschool here in town, whichthey both adore. The schools here are good, and, although not tremendouslydiverse ethnically (the entire state we live in isn’t very diverse), there is agreat deal of socio-economic diversity. It’s been hard to “break in” to the social circles here (we are cityfolk, after all), but we’re making inroads and starting to feel like a part ofthe community.

It hasn’t been an easy transition, but I can see the changesin myself when I do travel to the city for one reason or another (mostlyconferences). I feel more at home when able to ride on public transit, morecomfortable around people speaking different languages, more excited by all ofthe opportunities, cultural and otherwise, that the big city offers. But I alsorecoil at the site of the giant, impersonal high-rise condo that seem to bespringing up everywhere and disgusted at the price. I am more grateful for theslower pace here, grateful for the fact that my kids can be kids here, and Ican be myself as a mother. This place may not have been our first choice, butit’s now home and home for now.

Grad School for All?

2011-07-26T13:23:00.001-04:00

Worst Professor Ever alerted me to this New York Times article about how the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree. I posted my response on her facebook page:

I have to say I was more than a little flatter that William Pannapacker (aka Thomas H. Benton from the Chronicle) liked my response. And WorstProf wrote an absolutely hysterical Onion-esque response: "Education Secretary to Today's Youth: Stop Getting So Many Fucking Degrees." I do want to expand on my facebook comment, because it does reflect on how the economics of the universities are getting more and more screwed up.

I've written before about the economic realities of getting PhD, especially in the humanities. But what about from the other side, from the perspective of the universities that are increasingly offering MA programs. Faculty, particularly at public universities, are seeing their salaries if not get cut, then certainly decrease in purchasing power. One way to appease faculty is to create graduate programs; it's like a perk! Smaller classes! Better students! More prestige! Never mind that it's actually more work to recruit and retain these students, not to mention mentor and supervise them. From the university's perspective, they're getting the faculty to do more work for less money. And, the added prestige of graduate programs. Win-win.

Actually, it's a win-win-win. Grad students are cash-cows. You can charge more for grad programs (even though they aren't hiring any more faculty, or paying the current faculty more) and they'll pay. Plus, you can then use the grad students a cheap labor, working on campus, for professors, and maybe even teaching some of those pesky intro classes that no one else wants to. And did I mention the prestige? Rankings love grad programs.

But does the student really win? It keeps them out of the work force longer, usually will end up putting them further into debt, and makes them over-qualified for many of the jobs they may want. And, for the most part, this will benefit the same students who are benefitting from a BA anyway; the wealthy and upper-middle-class. Applying for graduate school is perhaps even more difficult and complex than applying for university. And even more expensive. To get into the best graduate programs, you have to not only be outstanding, but also know the right people. It's a big circle jerk, and those who benefit are those who have always been a part of it.

And do the professors really win? Soon, College Misery will be devoted not to the under-qualified and entitled undergrads, but to the under-qualified and entitled grad students that the college accepts because of the money and prestige. The MA will be the new BA, insofar as students will feel entitled to their degree on the basis of having a) been accepted and b) paid for it. The best and the brightest will continue to go to the "best" schools, while everyone else will move from one mediocre program to another. You'll be able to say that you supervise grad students, but at what cost?

To reiterate, I hate it. We're fooling ourselves within the academy into thinking that what we are doing is in the name of social justice and equality, when really we're just providing excuses to governments and corporations to compress salaries, benefits, and cheapen our students' educations, not to mention out own value as academics.

Bad Female Academic: Slightly Progressive Parenting

2011-07-24T16:13:00.001-04:00

My daughter was physically precocious when she was little; she was crawling before she was six months, walking by the time she was ten months old. She also loved to climb and would scale the jungle gyms at the park meant for children much, much older than she. It also meant that I had to be on the lookout for a tiny person who didn't understand that it wasn't a good idea to crawl right off the edge of the highest point of the structure. She dug for bugs, rolled in mud (well, sand, as she loves the beach), and generally challenged herself to any and all physical challenges.

Imagine my surprise the day we were in the store and she lost her mind over a princess shirt.

This wasn't a Disney Princess shirt; it was pink and sparkly and had a picture of a girl with a crown on it. I had no idea that she even knew what I princess was. She didn't go to school, and at this point didn't really have very many friends who could teach her about princesses. We were very careful about what she watched on TV, and while I own a lot of the Disney Princess movies, she had never shown any interest in them. But that day, something took over my daughter, and she became obsessed by all things princess. She was barely two years old.

My son, on the other hand, can't pick up a stick without turning it into a weapon. He hunts dragons, kills bad guys, and imagines he is a super-hero. He dreams of owning a dump truck and a motorcycle.

My last post about being myself, I mentioned that it was hard for me to allow my daughter, in fact, both my children, to be themselves. As a professor (ok, instructor) in the humanities, and a feminist, it grates on my nerves that my daughter is all about pink and sparkles and princesses. I worry about my son's "aggressive" behavior, but at the same time, try not to come down to hard on either of them. They are being themselves. It would be hypocritical of me to punish my daughter simply because she enjoys different things than I did, just like it would be to punish my son for liking (ironically) the same things I did when I was little (seriously, I dreamed of becoming a part of G.I. Joe).

Being an academic, I am supposed to know better. If it wasn't hard enough to be a mother in academia, it's hard to be a mother who isn't perfectly progressive in every way. A recent post, How to Remain Sane Among Alpha Moms, really struck a cord with me because it reminded me of so many academic women, both mothers and non-mothers, who judge the parenting of their colleagues, judgements that bleed over into decisions of whether or not to hire or award tenure. I let my daughter play princess and my son play superhero. I let them watch movies and TV shows...from Disney.

But my daughter also imagines herself as a superhero and wants her own motorcycle. She still loves to climb and is much more physically adventurous than my son. My son calls all of his stuffed animals his "babies" and is always taking really good care of them because they are "sick." I try to embrace all of the facets of their personality, the ones that are engendered and the ones that appear transgressive. I want them both to be whatever they want to be. If that's a "pilot and a mom" (as my daughter says), then so be it.

Where is the Intellectual and Creative Capital?

2011-07-21T20:03:00.002-04:00

I know I've had two reposts this week, but I'm up to my eyeballs in my more "academic" writing and research. Next week, I'll be back to my normal schedule. At least until school starts.

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

This TED video is powerful reminder of how one man with a vision can fundamentally change a school or school district. But it is also a sobering reminder of the importance intellectual and creative capital is in that change. How do we attract talented and motivated individuals to more rural and isolated areas? How can we improve rural education when there has been years of brain drain?

I think videos like the one I link to above are important to show otherwise urban (or suburban) bound professionals the potential of working in smaller, rural communities. There are opportunities for real, meaningful change. There is space to work, to create, to think. And there is untapped potential in the people who live there. And, cheaper real estate.

There is also the danger of being distrusted as an outside who will come in, try to change the world, get discouraged, then leave. The blogger, workprogesslife, writes about how she has been seen as an outsider in her small community as a urban transplant. Until my husband and I announced that we were buying a house nearby, we weren't readily embraced by our neighbors. There is an attitude that people from outside of the community either aren't in it for the long haul or are only there to impose their ideas and values.

But I also think there is more work to be done in teaching and training those people who do stay and who choose to get an education and go back to their small communities. I do not think that we, in higher education, do a good enough job preparing future teachers for the unique challenges that rural schools, communities, and students face. Why can't we awaken the potential in these local future (and current) teachers in order to develop and nurture the talent that is already present, but untapped?

We have to be willing and open to working together in order to improve and inspire these rural communities, respecting their local culture but helping them thrive in 21st Century.

The Mysteries of the Administrative Structure

2011-07-18T11:22:00.004-04:00

In light of the recent firestorm over the new book: The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, I'm posting this today. See the discussion going on at Inside Higher Ed.

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

"How will the Emperor maintain control without the beaurocracy?"

"The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line"

"What of the Rebellion?"

In higher education, we are currently in the midst of an elaborate game of whose-to-blame. When the economy was booming, faculty didn't seem to care what the administration was doing, even as the number of contingent faculty rose while the amount of tenure-track lines decreased. Grad students were funded, technology was being put in place, and shiny new buildings were attracting the best and brightest students and faculty. But now that the economy has tanked and cuts are being handed out left, right, and center, the faculty are rising up with fingers pointing at the administrators for all that ills higher education. Administrators (and some members of the public) are quick to lay blame on "lazy" and over-indulged faculty for their high salaries and low productive output.

Let's be honest; we're all to blame. Administrators and faculty. We, as faculty, have remained purposefully ignorant of the inner-workings of our institutions. We stare in the face of the bureaucracy and shrug our shoulders in a collective act of defeat. What can we do, we ask? It's too big, it's too powerful, and we're just a lowly professor. And professors show little to no interest in becoming a part of the administrative structure in order to change it. Administrators are increasingly professional bureaucrats, not academics. The two worlds are existing simultaneously within the same institution with seemingly very different missions and priorities.

But when we say we blame administrators, do we really know who we are blaming? Our chairs? Our deans? Our president? What about the mountains of layers of administrative structure in between? Do we know how budget decisions are made within the institution? Do we understand the process, or just the results? We grumble at the shrinking budget numbers and lines, but do know how to change them?

Professors are increasingly losing their voice in how their institutions are run. Faculty members who have unionized are finding that their institution punishes them by removing them further from the administrative table. And while the few professors who are left rightly complain about the amount of administrative tasks/committee meetings they are expected to participate in, I wonder if it isn't just busy work that has little to no impact on the big picture and just gives the illusion of participatory governance, hence my example above from Star Wars. What if some overly-ambitious university president or board decides that it is cheaper and more expedient to eliminate much of the bureaucracy, meaning meetings and committees? Fear would, in fact, keep the professors in line, much like it already does, fear and ignorance.

But what of the Rebellion, that tiny band of idealists who manage to take down the all-powerful Empire? So far, there doesn't seem to be any real effort or ability for faculty (all faculty, on and off the tenure-track) to come together and form some sort of concerted effort to rebel against what we perceive as the dismantling of higher education. We cannot organize ourselves to counter from without, and we steadfastly refuse to change it from within. So we remain fragmented, hopeless, and ignorant.

Ironic, isn't it.

Bad Female Academic: Being Myself

2011-07-17T15:22:00.000-04:00

Ben Folds, who is probably my all-time favorite musician, has a song from his first album (with Ben Folds Five), "Best Imitation of Myself." The song opens with the following verse:

I feel like a quote out of context
Withholding the rest
So I can be for you what you want to see
I got the gesture and sound
Got the timing down
It's uncanny, yeah, you think it was me
Do you think I should take a class
To lose my southern accent
Did I make me up, or make the face till it stuck
I do the best imitation of myself

That seems like a pretty good description of how we try to be as academics, especially women. We mould our research interests into a project that pleases our supervisor. We then contort ourselves in cover letter after cover letter in an attempt to fit what we divine a department is looking for from a brief job description. If we're lucky, we dress in identical power suits (and, apparently, we'd best make sure they're suits that match), and we try to fit ourselves, our research, our goals, and our values, to a hotel room of people in 30 minutes or less. Or we try to read the myriad of faceless voices at the other end of the phone in order to convince them to fly us out for a campus interview. Then, if we do get a campus interview, we spend up to three days, from the moment we get on the plane to the moment we're finally safely back home, playing the role of ideal future colleague. If, by some miracle, we get hired, it dawns on us that we have to at least try to keep being that person who was interviewed. We also have to bend ourselves according to the wind and will of the department, faculty, and institution in the quest for tenure.

I'm exhausted just writing about it. But if you're not convinced, here is a little Twitter conversation that took place in regards to a piece in the Chronicle on how inter-faculty conflict is your fault:

I think that sums it up quite nicely, don't you think?

The most liberating thing that has ever happened to me was giving up my tenure-track job and ending up as "just" an instructor. I am now free to do whatever research interests me, rather than what I think will lead to tenure. As I am now place-bound, I'm not stressed about the job market or trying to be what I think people want to see. Even living in a small town has its advantages; there's no hiding here (there's also little competition for my job). For the first time in a long time, I'm truly free to be myself.

But this quasi-rebellious streak isn't new. I've always made contrary choices (I prefer thinking of them as the road less traveled) when it comes to my education, in large part because I was searching for a place where I could be myself. I chose my dissertation supervisor because she allowed me to do the research and work that I wanted to do. Career-wise, that may not have been the wisest choice in the short-term, but what it did do was allow me to develop confidence in my ideas and my abilities. Miraculously, my first experiences teaching were ones that freed and empowered me to develop my courses myself; they trusted me, and I was able to be myself and discover my strengths in the classroom.

But my dirtiest secret is how I "won" my tenure-track job. I figured that the hiring cycle had finished. I had dozens of phone interviews, three on-campus interviews, and no job offer. We had just moved to larger place, my husband had just started receiving benefits from his job, and I found out I was expecting again. Because I had been working at my current teaching position for three years, I was eligible for a small, paid, maternity leave. When I got the call for a telephone interview, I just figured it would turn out like all the other phone interviews I had done. But it didn't matter because I had the next academic year figured out. So I didn't sweat the phone interview, and I answered every question as myself instead of trying to give them the answer they wanted. Imagine my surprise when I got the job.

Writing this blog, writing for the University of Venus, doing these Bad Female Academic posts have brought me so much joy. If anything, it's really reinforced the idea that who I am, who I really am, is okay. In fact, it's better than okay. It's fantastic. Even if we're living in a time of supposed extreme narcissism and unearned self-confidence, somewhere along the way, women (and especially women in academia) are told over and over again that being self-confident and self-assured in who we really are is unattractive, undesirable, and needs to be broken. To a large extent, writing these posts (and the response they've received) has helped "fix" me back into who I know I am.

One of the biggest challenges, however, is trying to pass that lesson along to my daughter. Especially when who she is is so different from who I am.

Urban Bias?

2011-07-14T21:38:00.000-04:00

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

What do you think of when I say that I am currently living in rural Kentucky, in the Appalachian mountains, not far from West Virginia? Do you hear banjos and think of Deliverance? So you hear a thick Southern drawl? Do you picture mega-Churches and born-again Christians? Be honest. And when you hear that I am teaching students from this area, do you applaud my efforts or feel sorry for me?

One of the biggest hurdles that we have to overcome in order to improve rural schools is people's attitude towards rural populations. Teaching underprivileged children in an urban environment is heroic, and you get to live in or near the big city. Moving out to the country, to the middle of nowhere, to teach a bunch of hicks? More of a punishment to most people.

Big cities offer a lot of advantages, I'm not going to lie. But one of the scariest things for parents and future parents who are thinking of moving to a rural area is that their kids will be going to the same school as everyone else. In urban areas, you usually don't live in the underprivileged area where you are working, and you certainly don't send your kids to school there. You live in the nicer neighborhood with the better schools. Out here, there's one school. There is no better school district or area to escape to. The kids you teach are the same kids your kids will be going to school with.

This, of course, is a major issue when it comes to convincing people to move out to rural areas to help failing schools. Another obstacle is the idea that the rural areas aren't worth the trouble. Making it in America used to mean conquering the frontier, but now it means conquering the big city. How many narratives do we read or see where the small-town, rural person moves to the big city in order to "make it." Or, to put it differently, we believe in the phenomenon that the best and the brightest leave their rural homes for the larger centers, leaving behind...the dumbest and least motivated?

There are so many stereotypes of rural people that essentially excuse not doing more to help them and their education system. Why bother, right? They don't value education, they're not interested in a "better life," and they are unwilling to learn what we want to teach them. You might try to say it in more politically correct terms, but think about your attitudes towards people who still live in small, rural towns and isolated farms, trailer parks and mobile homes.

I'm not saying it's perfect out here; far from it. There is drug addiction, racial tension, crippling poverty, and a lack of resources to provide effective services, including education. But before you dismiss rural education reform, ask yourself if you really think urban kids are more deserving of a quality education than their rural counterparts.

Getting Sucked In or Putting Myself Out There?

2011-07-12T16:39:00.001-04:00

I've written about this issue before; that I'm a Bad Female Academic for having administrative ambition, but also how it's a difficult position to put myself in because I am not on the tenure-track, thus it doesn't "count", nor am I afforded the same protections. Nonetheless, and despite being warned, I volunteered to be an "Early College Mentor." What does this mean? Well, our college offers early college credit courses in the high schools and I will be mentoring the teachers in the high schools who are teaching these classes.

The question is, why?

I have often written about the "exploitation" of contingent labor in academia. And I am acutely aware of my own position, trying to make sure I don't put myself in (or get sucked into) a position where I will either be taken advantage of or made a scapegoat out of (or both). But this mentorship role seems to me to be a relatively safe compromise.

For one thing, I'm doing it for the money. The mentors are getting a significant amount of professional development money for every teacher we mentor. I can use the money on conferences, books, research trips, whatever. This is not an insignificant reward for me because I am an instructor and therefore don't have the same level of support for these activities as those on the tenure-track or have tenure.

I'm also doing it because I like the idea of mentoring teachers and creating a community. It's one of the reasons I co-founded #FYCchat on Twitter. We should be more active in helping one another be better teachers, for ourselves and for our students. I really am hoping to facilitate a learning community for the teachers I will be mentoring using social media. I also hope to encourage (inspire?) these teachers to use social media in their teaching.

Our university's service area is largely (exclusively) rural and mostly poor. Many of these students come to our college underprepared and have a lot of difficulty completing a college degree. If I can help high school teachers better prepare students for college, then I think I am doing a great public service. These students are just as deserving of a good education as anyone else. This is a concrete way that I can help.

And I look like a good university citizen. Hopefully not too good, however. I am only supposed to be mentoring five teachers, but it looks like I'll have at least three times that many. I am also scheduled to teach five classes in the fall. Something has to give, so I am not afraid to stand my ground to make sure that my students don't get short-changed, either. Or my family, for that matter, and my research. I've been warned by those who have participated in this program in a similar capacity in the past that the university is all too willing to keep pushing the number of responsibilities. I'll push back.

Or, I'll just walk away. If I have to chose between a conference or my sanity and dignity, I know which one I will chose.

Bad Female Academic: Getting Dirty

2011-07-10T13:39:00.001-04:00

Last week, my kids and I were watching videos online of dinosaurs. After every 1-2 minute video, we would have to sit through an ad for "Camp Dirt." It's another example of grown-ups getting to relive their childhood, but this time it is targeted specifically for men. At the camp, you get to go off-roading, do mud-sliding, and other really, really cool stuff like that. Yeah, that's right, I like to get dirty, and all could think of while watching the commercial over and over again was, that looks like so much fun.

I was a tomboy growing up. I used to spend hours in the garden digging for worms. I was always the first person to touch the slimy, seemingly disgusting animals when we went to zoos. My mom would send me to school in tights, and I'd come home and they were ripped and dirty with blood and dirt from trying to climb the fence (and failing). When I started my undergrad degree, there was a...bonding event that involved, among other things, participating in an obstacle course which required us to roll in a pool of mud. I gladly volunteered to do it three times.*

As females, we are told over and over that we shouldn't want to get dirty, literally or figuratively. It might be one of the reasons why female academics are discouraged from displaying administrative ambition, or why we talk ourselves out of it; we don't want to get dirty, or appear like we are. We also are encouraged to avoid too much controversy when it comes to our research. Being clean is such a powerful metaphor for girls and women. We can only have a certain kind of fun, take certain kinds of risks, accept or excel at certain kinds of positions. Even for those of us who do take on the "dirty work," there exists a double-standard to how dirty a woman is allowed to appear; we have to make sure that we continue to uphold a certain standard of cleanliness.

I've never really bought into that. It is one of the great advantages of being really, really naive; I grew up being told I could do anything I wanted to, and I grew up as "one of the guys" on the swim team. It is one of the great advantages of an individual sport where you train collectively; it didn't matter if you were a guy or a girl, it only mattered how fast you could go. If you kept up with the guys, you trained with the guys. Also, at one point, there was something like 18 guys (all older) and only 3 girls in the elite training group. Even as I got older and was repeatedly told (explicitly and implicitly) that I shouldn't want to get dirty, I asked, why not? When no one could give me a good answer, I went ahead and did it anyway.

On a related aside, it may also be why motherhood, specifically, but not exclusively, birthing, is still a taboo topic; have you ever been to a live birth? Dirty work, I tell you. Sex, too, for that matter. Nikki Finke, founder of Deadline.com, and someone who isn't afraid of getting her hands dirty, lamented the popularity of the movie Bridesmaids because:

I couldn't believe that this is why generations of women fought the feminist revolution: to ensure we had the same opportunities to watch our sex make the same raunchy movie stuff as men.

Actually, this feminist is proud that there is an appetite out there for women getting down and dirty about sex, about bodily functions, all of it. Being a woman is not "clean" as everyone has been conditioned to think. If the message is out there that it's ok for us to be literally dirty, then maybe we can start seeing that it is ok to be figuratively dirty as well.

Good Female Academics stay clean. They do nice, clean, safe research, and know they place. But I'm a Bad Female Academic. I can't say that my research is particularly controversial, but I do what I want, how I want to. And, I'm not afraid, in fact I relish the opportunity to get my hands dirty.

And if you want to sling mud at me? Bring it.

*Once upon a time, this was called an initiation. But before everyone gets all up in arms about hazing, know that alcohol was involved (remember, drinking in Quebec is legal at 18), but in no way forced upon us. I didn't drink beer then, and I didn't have to. Just as there were a few girls who refused to get in the mud, so I volunteered to take their place. I still remember that day quite fondly. I won best frosh. Ah, memories...

More Thoughts on Coaching, the Humanities, and More Things We Can't Measure

2011-07-07T21:44:00.003-04:00

If you read this blog regularly, you know I used to swim and coach swimming. I received news the other day that one of the swimmers I coached in the past got a head coaching job. This past year, a girl I used to coach (when she was, like, 6) qualified for the the World Championships. I felt a tiny little bit a pride in seeing these two swimmers succeed in swimming. Here are two very, very successful swimmers in two different areas of the sport.

But, looking at it, that's two swimmers out of, how many? A couple of hundred? By that measure, I've been an absolutely horrid failure as a coach. I guess no less of a failure than I was as a swimmer; I've never came anywhere close to making Nationals, let alone a national team. My parent and I spent thousands of dollars on training, equipment, swim camps, and trips to swim meets. I don't even want to count the number of hours I spent in the pool, at the gym, in the weight room, training. For what? To what end? And all the time I spent on pool deck as a coach, breaking down video, planning workouts, organizing swim meets, and holding swimmers hands through nerves and disappointment.

These two swimmers are not the only swimmers I take pride; I am friends with many of my former swimmers on Facebook, and they are all successful people in their own right. They almost all do something other than swimming, although some have gone on to become lifeguards and coaches themselves before embarking on their chosen career. Many of them still swim, for fun, or run, or cycle, or play soccer, or some other form of physical activity. I'd like to think that their success is, in part, because of my influence as a coach.

I feel pretty confident in this assumption because despite my "failure" as a swimmer, I wouldn't trade my experience for anything. I learned so much more than just how to swim from one end to the pool to the other over and over as fast and efficiently as possible. I learned how to be a part of a team. How to deal with failure. How to persevere. How even the smallest success can be overwhelmingly satisfying. How important health and fitness are to my well-being. These are lesson that will stay with me the rest of my life, that I can call on when I need them.

While I teach writing, which is possibly the most practical and necessary of skills in this information age, my "training" (ugh, I hate that word) is in comparative literature, often seen as one of the most superfluous and decadent of majors. I don't miss the days of going to undergrad recruiting fairs and answering indignant parents when they ask, "What can you do with a degree in comparative literature?" While I never appreciated the question, "Are you going to the Olympics?" when I revealed I was a swimmer, I was never asked, what are you going to do with that? The (gag) return on investment on my years of swimming is negligible if you use any sort of objective metric (my best times, success of the swimmers I've coached). But no one expects those sorts of returns. So why are we so resistant to seeing the biggest picture of the value of the humanities?

The skills and experiences I had studying literature will also stay with me, regardless of my career. There are books that have literally changed my life, and books that have also literally saved it. In the same way that I can go to a pool, throw on a pair of goggles, dive in, and immediately feel better, I can pick up a book and have the same experience. My life is richer for having swam and for having studied the humanities. But only I have to explain and justify one of them.

Ed Tech Savvy?

2011-07-06T09:50:00.001-04:00

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

I have a confession to make. I don’t know how to use a smartboard. I’ve had one in my classroom for the entire fall semester, and I never used it beyond as an overhead to show students things on the computer. When it comes to class discussions and (yes) lectures, I use good, old-fashioned chalk and blackboard. Or whiteboard, depending on the classroom.

I have no idea how to fix the rss feed for my blog. In fact, I only have a vague notion as to what an rss feed even is. I don’t subscribe to any feed; I wouldn’t know how if I wanted to. I find out what’s going on or if there’s any new posts, once again, the old fashioned way: I visit their website.

These luddite-lite confessions may come as a surprise from someone who blogs, encourages her students blog, is actively engaged on Twitter, and is generally open to new forms of technology that can be used to teach, do research, learn, and share knowledge and information. But in the race to stay technologically relevant and on the forefront, I often feel overwhelmed and overmatched. Between teaching, my own (traditional) research and writing, my family, my blogging, and my hobbies (I swear, I’m going to start swimming and reading science fiction again this semester), and, you know, sleeping and eating, I can’t keep up, let alone catch up on all the things I missed while trying my best to be a “traditional” academic.

I often admit this to my students when talking about the magic bullet that some claim education technology to be. How do we help and encourage educators at any level to learn, use, and embrace education technology? I’ve heard some complain that this is yet another education fad that will pass, so why bother learning it? Others wonder why they should bother when the skills they acquire will probably be outdated in six months. And still others, like me, have enough trouble staying up-to-date in their field, let along the ever-expanding field of how to teach my subject matter.

Before we accuse teachers of willfully staying in the dark ages and thus robbing our students of valuable skills and opportunities, we need to make sure that we have provided an environment for them where they can learn and grow their knowledge about educational technology. We also need to understand that every teacher is different, and thus will see different types of educational technology as useful with regards to their styles, goals, and students.

I don’t have any easy answers. We have a whole office at our university devoted to helping faculty use the technology (albeit mostly hardware and proprietary software) available to us. But most faculty don’t use those services. How can we get teachers to a) take advantage of the professional development opportunities and b) integrate it into their courses?As one fellow higher ed blogger points out, one of the reasons faculty don't learn about the technology available to them is that the format and content of the training methods (the workshop) just don't work.

I think it comes down to really involving faculty and teachers in developing opportunities to learn about education technology and to be involved in the decision on what types of education technology the institution or school district purchases. If we can find a way to work together, faculty, staff, and administration, in order to make education technology meaningful and useful.

Bad Female Academic: I'm Loud (and not Funny)

2011-07-04T10:12:00.000-04:00

Have you seen or heard about one of the sitcoms on NBC, coming this fall? It's called Whitney, and while it's a show about "relationships" (shudder), the title character is described as "loud and/or obnoxious." The boyfriend, of course, endures and seems to love her in spite of, not because of, this particular character flaw.

Loud women are a difficult breed. As Rosanne Barr (probably the loudest of the pack) recently opined that for all of her attempts to receive proper recognition and respect on her show, she was labeled a bitch, a diva, and crazy. Loud women are either obnoxiously outrageous side-kick (think Karen, from Will and Grace) or promiscuous (think Samantha, from Sex and the City). When a woman speaks out, it is "obviously" a result of some other "character flaw." Could it be that the "character flaw" is a result of the message that it isn't ok for a woman to be loud?

Often women who are loud turn to comedy to use their voice, but in my mind also that comedy softens it. The message is softened to a certain extent when the loud woman becomes the butt of the joke. Rosanne avoided this; her humor was dark and so grounded in reality, she wasn't the joke, the rest of us were. But often being "the funny one" (and thus taken less seriously) is a way for women to deal with the label "loud."

(Note that this isn't a criticism against those women who do succeed in comedy, a notoriously male and chauvinistic profession. I'm just observing that being loud is softened by also being funny. Now satire, on the other hand...But note there are very few female satirists, too.)

I've always been loud. My voice carries, as they say. When I first started teaching, one of the criticisms I received was that I didn't need to yell (I wasn't yelling). You can hear my laugh from a mile away (almost literally, depending on the acoustics). But just because I'm loud, volume-wise, doesn't mean that I've always used my voice to speak up and speak out.

I do not get intimidated easily. I speak up for what I believe in, and while I am open, I have the courage of my convictions. I walk into my classroom like I own the room. My class is not a joke. I do believe that you have to earn your students' respect, but I carry myself like I deserve that respect from the first moment they meet me. I speak up in meetings, I speak out, and I make sure that I am not talked over or ignored.

This, of course, is problematic when you're a Female Academic; we're supposed to be seen and not heard, apparently. I have had numerous people passive-aggressively suggest that I am too loud when I teach. I can't imagine them saying something like that to a male professor. I've had others gently suggest that I keep quiet or keep my head down, for my own good, like I need to be protected from myself. I've stuck my foot in my mouth on more than one occasion, but I also know that it's a risk I'm willing to take in order to make sure that I'm heard.

And to show that I'm not a joke.

Accountable to Whom? The Un-measurable in Education

2011-06-30T14:54:00.001-04:00

I don't think I need to go back over for any readers of this blog the push in education, both K-12 and higher education, towards standardization, concrete learning outcomes, and return-on-investment. One has to look no further than what is currently going on in Texas to see that what we do as professors/instructors/educators is under some heavy fire. Increasingly, my job is about counting and measuring.

I am not saying that we shouldn't be held accountable, but I wonder to whom we should be accountable to? And if we change who we are accountable to, then we also need to change how we "measure" or evaluate the job we have done.

As public institutions, we are accountable to the public at large that supports our work. I have some trouble with that assertion if only because the "public" has largely abandoned public higher education. If we look at California, we can readily see the impact of severely reduced public monies going to the university; the list of universities that have had the highest net increase in tuition overwhelmingly come from California. I invite you to check out the work that Remaking the University has been doing to expose the erosion of public support for higher education in California.

But even if we still looked at the university as serving the public good, much of what the university does do (or, at least, could do) goes "un-measured" by the typical metrics. If all we measure are students taught, graduation rates, and post-graduation salaries, we are missing the rich and complex work that professors do in the university. In fact, I would argue, that it is not in the greater public's good to limit our judgement on a university's (or professor's) success based exclusively on raw numbers; it actively discourages academics from actually engaging the larger community that they are a part of. When the "public good" is defined as test scores, then you can be sure that that is the only good the public will receive.

But as the students' burden of paying for their education increases, so, too, then, should we see the individual student as the person we are ultimately accountable to. This, of course, is problematic. There are many ways we are, as educators, already at the mercy of our students', thus accountable to them. We are, if Academically Adrift is to be believed, simplifying the curriculum, at students' demand. We are entertaining them at best, enabling them at worst, rather than educating them in order to prop up our evaluations. But these sort of accountability measures don't actually serve the students, but the administrative (or governmental) dictates of retention and completion rates. In fact, the student is not the one who is holding us accountable.

When I look at the recent post from the educators at the University of Venus, commenting on the best part of their job, it universally comes down to the relationship we all have with individual students. In a moving defense of the humanities, a professor defends how a liberal arts education enriches the individual, making the world at large a better place. But I want to take his argument a step further and show how self-perpetuating arguments against "impractical" education have become.

Liberal arts degrees are seen as worthless because they don't provide students with any sort of "hard" skills. But they do provide students with the soft skills necessary to make good choices, both in their professional and personal life. But, why aren't they then? Why are more and more people acting badly (insert whatever definition of "bad" you'd like; the argument works no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on)?

Could it be because less and less students are, in fact, pursuing or even have access to this kind of enriching education?

I teach at a rural state institution, filled with non-traditional, first-generation college students. Our completion rates are, admittedly low. Not for-profit institution low, but low nonetheless. When I see my developmental students, I know the odds are stacked against them. In my mind, I am accountable to them by trying to teach them as much as I can in 15 weeks to attempt to make them not just a better college student, but a better person, period. I teach writing, critical thinking, and, even in this age of narcissism, confidence. Even if my students never complete their degree, or even their freshman year, I act as though my course will serve them outside of university.

They will come out of my class as better writers and more aware of the importance of literacy. Maybe they'll write a better cover letter, or earn a promotion because of their improved writing and literacy skills. Maybe they'll come back later to complete a degree because they demonstrated progress in my class. Maybe they will consume media a bit more wisely, carefully, and critically. Maybe they'll read to their kids, stock their dwellings with books, and take regular trips to the library, increasing the chances that their kids will succeed where they did not.

These are the un-measurable parts of my job. This is how I am accountable to my students. Are they better people having taken my class? That is one of my most important goals when teaching. No one measures that. I don't even know if we could. But I see it as my responsibility as a teacher, to my students and to the public, whoever they may be.

The D Word: Diversity in the Classroom

2011-06-28T16:10:00.001-04:00

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

I'll admit, it was a bit startling to me when I walked into my classroom on the first day of classes this semester and was greeted by a sea of white faces. I've never taught at a university where 99% of my students were white. I always took diversity for granted. And because I took it for granted, I wasn't a huge defender of it.

Now, with the majority of my students coming from similar backgrounds, mostly from the same small geographic area, I really understand the importance of diversity: diversity of ideas and opinions, diversity of experience, diversity of perspective according to race, class, sex, age, and gender identification. But, how does a rural school, or a rural institution, create a diverse experience?

When talking about education reform, one of my students spoke in defense of big schools because they were more likely to provide diversity. But, I countered, you could make a school as large as you wanted, but if the demographics aren't diverse to begin with, the school will continue to reflect the people it draws from. Kentucky is 90% white. The regions where most of our students come from (and which we are tasked to serve) is probably a higher percentage, as well as representing some of the poorest regions in the state, if not the country. How, then, are we supposed to provide students at any level with a "diverse" experience when the demographics tend towards a homogeneous population?

This is something that rural colleges, especially, deal with. One way to provide students with a diverse experience is to provide them and expose them to a diverse faculty. But recruiting and retaining a minority or "queer" faculty in an isolated community is challenging, to say the least. We are also typically responsible for educating the teachers who will go out into the more rural communities, making it doubly important to try to expose them to a more diverse education.

But what about the student body itself? How does a public university, tasked with primarily serving a specific region, build a more diverse "class"? Much like recruiting a diverse faculty, how do you attract minority students to an area that is typically seen as "redneck country" (admit it, you think that about Kentucky)? And in the age of dwindling resources, is spending money of recruiting trips far outside of our service area the best use of funds?

There are no easy answers to that question. One of the ways the institution has addressed the issues is to bring in a diverse array of guest speakers, artists, and intellectuals. Last year, for example, bell hooks came to speak on campus. I also think that exposing students to the wealth of materials that are available, for free, online can broaden their intellectual perspectives. Why aren't we using Skype more in our schools, K-12 and in higher education, to connect with people from all walks of life?

It's easy to talk about diversity, champion diversity, and even vilify the cult of diversity that some claim has been created. I don't take diversity for granted, but we all need to work, urban and rural, together if we want to ensure that students are exposed to diversity.

Bad Female Academic: Non-Academic Interests (or Having a Life)

2011-06-26T14:54:00.003-04:00

Before I begin this post, I want to draw your attention to what's happened to Rumana Monzur. She's my age. She's a wife, a mother, an academic, just like me. I feel incredibly privileged that I can sit here and blog about gender issues here and elsewhere, without fear of physical reprisal. It is for her and the women like her who are too afraid or too oppressed to even attempt to go to university that I write these Bad Female Academic posts for. At the end of the day, in our own ways, we are all Bad Female Academics. If we ever want equality, that has to change.

Tenured Radical recently commented that "The Only Good Professor is a Dead Professor" in response to a study that notes that academics are at particular risk for stress-related illness. We don't take good care of ourselves physically and are under a tremendous amount of stress mentally. In fact, as Eileen in the comments points out, we are socialized to neglect all other aspects of ourselves in the name of...Academics? Tenure? Teaching more and more classes as an adjunct to make ends meet?

I'm still in grad school, so I don't know about the job part of it, but part of the problem from where I am is that in addition to being socialized as scholars, graduate students are also socialized to standards of personal care. Don't look tired enough? Talk too much about going to they gym? You're probably not serious enough about the program. It's not overt, but at least at my uni there's a culture of "you have time for that later" but it may just be creating new faculty who believe they can't take care of themselves to get ahead.

I've heard and read advice that says that you shouldn't "Friend" your senior colleagues on Facebook lest they read your status updates and see that you aren't spending every moment of every day on academic matters, thus threatening your position. As a wife and mother, these two roles are seen as incompatible with being an academic because they are a "distraction" from the task at hand (which, again, is what?). While the rest of the world seems to have this image of us as being lazy, it's almost as if within the Ivory Tower, we want to prove the exact opposite by over-asserting our devotion and seriousness.

After four years of my PhD, my husband was accepted to do his own PhD in Southern California. My supervisor told me to get out and go with him. I luckily had a dissertation fellowship so the time off on my C.V. was justified, but truth be told, I was burnt out. I had been miserable in my program, a sentiment that I often read and hear online and in person from others in graduate school. My life got infinitely better when two things happened: I met my husband and I decided to join the Masters swim team on campus. I didn't care anymore if people thought I was unserious or unfocused or frivolous, I needed something outside of my studies to sustain me.

Our first year in SoCal, I took a much needed break from everything having to do with my academic work. And, I started to coach swimming again. No year off to find myself in some exotic location, no volunteering for a worthy cause, no, I coached swimming again. When I started teaching again, I still coached. After having my daughter, I still taught and coached (I would wear her while coaching). Swimming was the one thing that I had for myself (my husband can't even swim). I adored watching a swimmer's stroke on tape and breaking down what was wrong with it and working with them to try and improve it. I love to get in the water myself and just swim back and forth, back and forth. If you ever want to really see me geek out, ask me about swimming.

I will not apologize for this, nor do I hide that I love swimming. Or science fiction. Or Disney movies. Or any number of things that have absolutely nothing to do with my academic work, or have much culturally or socially redeeming qualities. When did we decide that academics (or mothers, for that matter) aren't allowed to have interests and a life outside of the institution? There are other jobs as stressful and demanding as academia, but I can think of no other job (again, other than motherhood) that demands complete and total subjugation of every other facet of your being.

You want proof that I am a dedicated academic? I could have become a coach, but I chose to become an academic. But, alas, I am a Bad Female Academic.

Academic Publishing, Money, and Legitimacy

2011-06-23T14:13:00.000-04:00

I attended World Views Conference on the Media and Higher Education in Toronto last week (#WV2011 on Twitter). I will leave it to my friend, @qui_oui (whom I finally met face to face, along with @Mary_Churchill) to comment about how higher education is portrayed in the media. What I want to talk about is the question of legitimacy in both the media and academic publishing. It's something else both fields have in common.

I was struck during the conference how many members of both the university and traditional media spoke about social media like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. One panelist spat the word Twitter like it was poison, while another dismissed social media as fleeting tools for the young, all while lamenting that no one reads/funds/pays for newspapers anymore. When one speaker commented that there may, indeed, perhaps, exist "legitimate bloggers" out there, I had had enough. What makes a blogger legitimate? Who decides? And why, if the model is failing, are we still holding on to it for dear life?

We see the same thing happening in the world of publishing in higher education. Traditional university/academic publishers are closing down and losing money, as are traditional journals. More and more paywalls are going up while library budgets are going down. Scholarship, however, is increasingly using multi-media techniques, as illustrated by the presentation at the 2011 Digital Humanities conference. The old systems are failing, and we are slow to embrace new means of sharing our research while still maintaining the "legitimacy" required for hiring, tenure, and promotions.

Why can't a cultural anthropologist receive credit for carefully making a documentary? Part of the reason, one can imagine, is because filmmaking is seen as a commercial enterprise. Making money is a definite no-no in academia, especially in the humanities. Blogging is seen as a bit of a waste of time, as well as effort not only because it is not legitimate, but also because, as Dr. Davis at Teaching College English discovered, some still see it as a commercial enterprise. Even if it was, is it such a bad thing? Why shouldn't an academic make money with their writing?

There are two very powerful forces at work when it comes to your writing and research, whether you're an academic or "journalist" - the idea of the public good and the ability to pay your bills and keep a roof over your head. Does the Huffington Post, who is about to make a ton of money off of their sale to AOL, owe it to the hundreds of bloggers (this one included) who contributed material for free? What about Big Media's request for volunteers to go through all of Sarah Palin's emails, for free as well? I'm all for crowdsourcing, but when does it cross over into exploitation?

As an academic, I do blog here about teaching and general issues in higher education and about my research on another blog. I applaud new initiatives that seek to make research more open, available, interactive, and dynamic. I am very excited by the announcement, made today, about PressForward, an effort to create and support "legitimate" online publishing opportunities and ventures. The more we start including things like blogging on our C.V's, the more people will become aware of the value of the activities, and thus become more legitimate. Why can't I receive credit for co-creating and moderating the #FYCchat on Twitter?

This summer, I have been really obsessing over the question of legitimacy, in our publications, our writing, and the way we write. Heck, I'm even thinking about it for my (traditional) academic article I'm writing. But one issues I haven't seen addressed (nor have I really addressed it myself) is the question of money. If 75% of us are off the tenure-track, then how we make ends meet with the work we produce is the elephant in the room.

Who Will Be Our Future Professors?

2011-06-21T20:54:00.000-04:00

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

A video has made the rounds online recently, a hysterical and painfully accurate description of the future that awaits a student who is interested in getting a PhD in English. Another -- less popular, no less hysterical -- concerns the probable future of a student wanting to get a PhD in Political Science. On The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas H. Benson has written about how students looking to do a PhD in the Humanities shouldn't bother, unless:

You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

In the face of all of this negative rhetoric surrounding getting a PhD and aspiring to become a professor, I ask, who will be teaching my children (currently aged 3.5 years and 21 months) when they are ready to go to university (if they chose to go)? Who will be teaching any of our children? What if, as the advice tell us, we opt out?

This is particularly troubling when we start to think of the situation in terms of minority or non-traditional students. The number of undergraduate students who fall into those categories is increasing, but it doesn't look like that the number of people representing those groups in the professoriate will be increasing at a comparable rate. And, as studies have shown (at least in STEM fields), race matters. And if we truly value diversity, what does it say to our students when the professors teaching them come from an incredibly small (and, one would imagine, fairly homogeneous) part of the population?

But it also matters because of the message we're sending the best and the brightest minds: don't aspire to become a professor. If you have a passion for the humanities or social sciences, either channel it in a different direction or try to find another one. Do we not want the best and the brightest teaching in our institutions of higher learning? Who do we want teaching our children: those with privilege or those with passion? The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but nonetheless, it would seem that the small number of the former would lead an even smaller number in the latter.

This impacts every level of education. It is our universities that train and educate future K-12 teachers, administrators, and, more importantly, future elected officials, leaders, and CEOs. Who so we want educating our leaders, decision makers, and policy shapers? Do we allow the dangerous image of the spoiled and pampered university professor to continue unabated? Do we participate in the active discouragement of an entire generation of young people who may serve to inspire and innovate, shape and motivate through the universities?

We cannot give up working to change higher education. I refuse to see an entire lost generation of potential (and passionate) academics.

Bad Female Academic: Motherhood

2011-06-19T20:35:00.000-04:00

It has been almost impossible for me to "hide" the fact that I am mother during my academic career. When I moved to the States and began my first job as an adjunct instructor, I was quite visibly pregnant. It was a strange and wonderful experience to discuss the book Manliness while 7 months pregnant, talking about gender roles. When I was looking for tenure-track jobs, I had my husband and infant daughter in toe for the MLA interviews, made noise about being able to bring her for on-campus interviews, requested time for pumping, and always asked about on-campus childcare options. When I started my tenure-track position, I was once again pregnant, and had to take maternity leave at the beginning of only my second semester. And in my current position, I have often had to wear my son on my back while teaching because there was no one else to look after him.

I am an admitted mother-hen when I teach. But I am also quite clearly still a mother while I teach. We live less than a block from campus, so often the kids will come to campus to visit. I teach in a small town, so I almost always run into my students while I am out with the kids. My kids become over-simplified examples for class (how my daughter's former love of all things Elmo, including canned beans, is no different than Katy Perry shilling ProActive). But, especially with the students I teach (non-traditional), my kids seem to humanize me and bridges the gap between us. Many of my students are from large, close-knit families, where they have plenty of young cousins, nieces, nephews, or young kids themselves. For many of my students, talking about my kids before class shows that I am a human being outside of the classroom.

Too bad that feeling isn't universal throughout academia. I still remember the stark difference between the reactions to me at the regional state university campus where I taught and the small, highly-competitive liberal arts college where I coached swimming to my visible pregnancy. At the liberal arts college, female students and faculty would visibly recoil upon seeing me, while at the state school, most girls would ask me my due date and if they could touch my belly. Academia tends to see pregnancy and motherhood as the small liberal-arts college looked at me: as something freakish, something to be feared and avoided. If one becomes a mother, then one also cuts herself off from many, many professional opportunities.

The double-standard for male and female academics when it comes to parenthood is also a constant source of frustration. My husband also has had to bring our son to meetings on campus because of the lack of child-care options; he is viewed as a loving and doting father, not to mention devoted husband for "allowing" me to continue my career. But when I bring my kids to school, I am seen as unprofessional for bringing my role of mother into the classroom or a wife who has been asked to sacrifice too much in the name of her husband's career. I cannot be who I am not, and I am a mother who is an academic, an academic who is a mother. Why those things remain seemingly incompatible is beyond me.

Just be to clear, I have never tried to use my position as a mother to "get ahead" (I took six weeks off when my second was born, had no mat leave support for my first, just the summer "off"), nor is it all that I talk about in class. I'm also not a Tiger Mother or a mother who thinks that my role is part of a larger, full-contact sport. I take my role as a mother seriously, but I am also a serious academic. A confession: last month, when I went, by myself, to a conference, I was thrilled. Not only because of the wonderfully stimulating conversations that were taking place within my field, but because I got a break.

Yeah, a break.

I went back to work in part because I had to for financial reasons, but also because I wanted to. No, that's not accurate; I needed to. Good Female Academics choose: be a good mother or be a good academic. I didn't. Or, I did temporarily, by giving up my tenure-track job. But I won't apologize for loving my job as an academic, on or off the tenure-track. Not to mention those parts of my identity that have nothing to do with my kids, my husband, or my job.

How Universities Are Like Newspapers

2011-06-16T13:44:00.002-04:00

This post originally appeared on So Educated.

I was on the phone with a reporter who was trying to track down my brother for a story the other day. Nothing bad; she was a Montreal reporter looking to talk to fans who had made the trip to Edmonton for the Grey Cup (the Canadian Super Bowl). At the end of our conversation, she thanked me for all of my help and wished that all of her leads were as helpful as I was. I am sympathetic, I said, I originally wanted to be a journalist. Really, she asked, what did you end up doing? I'm a professor, I answered. She laughed, saying, "that sounds like a much better idea."

Sigh. Not really, unfortunately.

When I started out as an undergraduate, the Internet was still in it's infancy. But the newspaper industry was already losing money, shedding full-time writers, and increasingly relying on freelance reporters and wire stories. At least, it was in a shrinking English market in Montreal, a city in a predominantly French province. My program was ahead of it's time, offering classes in web publishing, such as it was at the time. But the idea of getting into a dying industry wasn't very appealing to me. I have a few friends who have "made it" as journalists, but they work in really isolated locations and often do so much more than writing stories; they are editors, formatters, and web designers.

So I choose to enter a field where I, too, will be paid little while I pay my dues, in an industry that is under heavy fire and on the brink of, perhaps, dying. There are fewer and fewer full-time positions, and the people in those positions are being asked to perform increasing duties within the institution. If you are lucky enough to get a full-time positions, it is often, once again, in a small, isolated location. The biggest difference? Instead of starting my career as a fresh-faced 23-year-old with a brand-new BA, I am starting it ten years and many tens of thousands of dollars of extra debt later.

In both industries, the wild Web is radically changing how we do our jobs and deliver our content. We are both increasingly using low paid (or free) labor who are more than willing to undervalue themselves in the name of exposure or experience. Newspapers, and thus aspiring journalists, are about ten years ahead of universities in term of their downward trajectory. If universities, and aspiring professors, want to know what things are going to look like in another decade? Look at newspapers, for better or for worse.

(I'm not sure how the resiliency and durability of magazines fit into this little analogy. The highly specialized liberal arts college?)

Journalism schools and aspiring journalists have had to adapt. PhD programs will have to adapt as well. There is a new hashtag making the rounds on Twitter, #NewPhD, in the hopes of fostering a exactly that, new types of PhDs to meet the demands (or lack thereof) of the new university and economy. Just as journalism students quickly realized that they wouldn't make a living working for a newspaper, so too are we realizing that we will not make a living as a university professor, as we have historically understood it. So what will we do?

Some of us, like me, will move to the middle of nowhere in order to be able to work as a professor (ok, full time instructor, but it's still better than adjuncting). Others, however, will re-imagine what it means to be successful in or out of higher education. And we all need to fight to play a role in whatever form higher education takes in the future.

Education: It'll Probably Make You Cry

2011-06-13T20:33:00.000-04:00

I was talking on Twitter last week about how the competitors are often reduced to tears during their rehearsals but then come to celebrate the growth they've achieved. As one of my Tweeps points out: Any goal I've achieved is fraught w/ tears, exhaustion, happiness. If it's easy, it wasn't worth it.

A few nights later, I was watching a documentary called Run Run Revolution. A trainer takes 10 ordinary high school students and trains them to run 10km at the Boston Marathon. It's a fascinating look at how much you need to sacrifice and be willing to do in order to achieve a goal. As the trainer tells the kids on one of their first practices: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Why is it that we embrace pushing ourselves (or others) physically, but shy away from pushing ourselves intellectually? I was taken to task on Twitter for, in one person's mind, encouraging teachers to make their students cry. I don't want to humiliate, belittle, or insult my students, but I do want to make them as uncomfortable as possible. And sometimes, challenging students leads to tears.

The harder we work, the more satisfied we are with the results. But we also learn more, achieve more, and grow. I'm not saying that if we don't cry then we haven't worked hard enough. But we need to engage our minds in our educations the same way dancers push themselves to become better or runners push themselves to become faster. As a graduate student, I wrote on the most challenging works we read in class, to push myself. I recently wrote an essay on a novel that I've struggled with for years. It bugged me that I didn't get it and I looked for a reason to finally sit down and figure it out (I think I did). And it felt fantastic.

I'm all for making learning engaging. And, yes, it should be ultimately enjoyable. But that education should always be fun every step of the way I think is ultimately false and dangerous; as soon as it stops being fun, students will give up. In the moment, it will be hard, it will be uncomfortable, and not a lot of fun. In the end, it will be fantastic. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Bad Female Academic: On Being a Wife

2011-06-11T17:55:00.000-04:00

When my husband and I got engaged, I figured out that we were 256 times more likely to get divorced. More likely than whom? Two people whose parents didn't get divorced, didn't live together before marriage, and didn't have a whole pile of advanced degrees, and who didn't intend on becoming professors. You know, "average" people. I kept reading these stats that said that people who had divorced parents were twice as likely to get divorced themselves. Or people who lived together before marriage were twice as likely to get divorced as well. Basically, I found enough "twice as likely" stats to figure 256 times (two to the power of eight).

Math people, lay off. It was a joke.

Or was it? I knew that my husband and I had the odds stacked against us. I also knew a lot of academic couples who lived far away from one another, and I vowed that that wouldn't be me, wouldn't be us. I was getting married because I wanted to spend my life with my spouse. I can't say it's been easy, but I don't regret giving up my tenure-track position, even though I am ambitious. But I think it's unfortunate that I now have to deal with the gendered expectations that come with my choice.

I am far from being a Good Faculty Wife; I'm not a good cook, I hate housework, and while I am a fabulous companion at university events, I don't demurely take a back seat to my husband's (and his colleague's) opinions. There is also an assumption that because I have willing moved to the middle of nowhere for my husband's job that I have given up on my own. My husband is expected to be able to go to conferences or last-minute meetings because I'll be there to cover for his duties at home. Or, worse, the assumption that he has no duties at home because he has a Wife.

At the same time, I refuse to hide the fact that I am married and that my husband is a professor at the same institution where I teach. It's a small town and a small school, and I'm even using his last name. Let them think what they want about how I got my job; my C.V. speaks for itself. My mom told me it's not who you know, but how you use them, and I am not above using my husband's position as leverage in order to improve my own. But even before we started working together, I never shied away from the fact that I was married, part of a package. I would always carry a copy of his C.V. to on-campus interviews and ask the dean/provost (when it came time) what, if anything, they might have available for him. I refuse to conform to the expectation that one cannot be a dedicated academic and wife.

And that's just how I am treated as a wife. As an academic, people think I have given up. I can't be ambitious and be a wife at the same time. It's not true, however, that taking a step back from the full academic grind means that I'm cut off forever from it. Or at least, I hope not. Many people, though, hear of my choice to follow my husband as a tacit admission to having abandoned my academic career. I'm "just" an instructor.

I resent that I am seen now as mostly a wife and just an instructor. There's a lot more to me. Including my role as mother. But more on that next week. Because if there's one thing worse than being an wife in academia, it's being a mother.

"Why High School Sucks"

2011-06-09T15:05:00.000-04:00

This post originally appeared at So Educated.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am talking about education reform with my advanced writing students at the rural state college I teach at. At the beginning of the semester, while going over the syllabus, when I mentioned that we would be talking about education reform, I felt the air go out of the room, saw eyes glazing over, and realized I was quickly losing my class on the first day. What was I going to do? Rebrand the section of the course. We were going to talk about why high school sucks (academically), and what could be done about it.

When we came to the unit on education, I started with a free write asking them the first part of that question, reminding them to focus on the academic parts of their high school experience. And, if their high school didn't suck academically, explain why. Most of my students wrote more in that free write than the entire semester thus far put together. I received spontaneous and passionate reflections on their experiences, many filled with anger, frustration, and regret.

A few themes emerged from their work. The curriculum was too easy and too repetitive, not to mention irrelevant. Teachers weren't demanding enough of the students and inconsistent in how they distributed grades. For example, if you were on the football team, you got good grades regardless. Teachers didn't know their material or weren't engaging (human tape recorders, as one student put it). Students were taught to the test and nothing else. In other words, the students were forced to memorize, but never shown how to contextualize or apply the information. There was too little choice, too few opportunities for students to learn about what they were interested in. And, most significantly, they arrived at college wholly unprepared and ill-equipped academically.

Over and over, I read the words "pointless," "a joke," and "boring." Many of my students probably only realized this once they reached college. Looking back now, they remember most fondly those teachers who pushed them to be their best, and not just on a standardized test. Out of the forty or so students I had answer this question, only three came back with positive experiences. Each of them had gone to private or magnate school with high academic expectations and excellent teachers. Each one of them also attended school in or near an urban area.

When we talk about school choice, what is forgotten are the large numbers of students for whom the only choice is the local school that serves the entire county or region. The teachers often attended the school themselves, left for a few years to get a teaching degree, then returned home. Because of the decreasing number of students, lack of resources, and lack of expertise, these schools can't offer students very many academically challenging courses or optional courses. Some of these schools are in areas where there isn't even high-speed Internet access. When talking about education technology, one of my students pointed to a preschool teacher using a CD player that she had recently seen. For some, the CD player and VCR are the only education technology available.

None of what my students said will sound particularly groundbreaking or revealing to those seeking to reform and transform the way we educate students. The challenge becomes how to solve these problems in rural areas. How do we offer these students choices and variety, or ensure that they have excellent teachers? How can we relate and contextualize the curriculum to the world around them, both preparing them for college but also relating it to the only reality they know? If these schools are ultimately "punished" through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, where are the students going to go?

Many have already (rightly) criticized the film Waiting for Superman along with the image it presents (one hero to swoop in and save us all). For rural students and schools, it is even more telling: Superman left the farm to go and save the city. For these students and schools, the message seems to be clear: you are on your own.

Bad Female Academic: Administrative Ambition

2011-06-05T20:40:00.000-04:00

There is a pernicious belief in higher education, perhaps even more dangerous than believing that if you are a good researcher than you can't be a good teacher and vice-versa. That belief is that good academics don't want to be administrators or can't be good administrators. Especially for those on the tenure-track, administrative responsibility is often the kiss of death, because of the politics. Being a position to make decisions very quickly can made friends into enemies. And once you get tenure? Well, why bother?

Another reason that administrative ambition is met with distaste is that faculty are increasingly disillusioned by the university administration and administrators. As an increasing number of classes are being taught by part-time, underpaid adjuncts who are off the tenure-track, the number of full-time administrators is growing even more, and beginning to outnumber the faculty. And the relationship, through budget cuts and skyrocketing administrative salaries, is causing an increasingly adversarial relationship between the faculty and administration. A good academic doesn't want to do anything with the increasing corporatization of the university.

When I was a PhD student, because of various organizational difficulties, I decided to become president of the Graduate Students' Association. And, I loved it. Maybe it's because I was lucky enough to be at a university where the students (both undergraduate and graduate) were respected and an integral part of the decision-making process. Maybe it's because I was in Canada, where presidents are academics and not from corporations and we don't have high-profile/high-money sports. And I know that I was following a long line of serious, highly effective GSA presidents who set up a wonderful set of expectations for me to fulfill. Regardless of the reason, I came away from the experience motivated to move up the academic ranks with the goal of eventually going into administration in order to work to try to make the university better.

But even before my PhD, I would get involved, usually through student government. I was taught that if you didn't like how things were going, you figured out how best to make them better. So, I did. And I always liked it. I figured that academia would be a great opportunity for me to do research, teach, and...be an administrator.

Yes, I am a bad female academic.

My dirty little secret. I have ambition, and that ambition involves moving up the administrative ladder. This, as I have outlined above, can be a dangerous thing to admit. Between the idea that true academics shouldn't aspire to administrative positions and the idea that, as a woman, it could be seen as threatening to express any sort of ambition, I'm pretty much waving the white flag. I'm either going to be taken advantage of on the lower rungs, make too many enemies, or burn out. Or maybe, just maybe, prove that you can be a good faculty member and a good administrator.

The major roadblock to my plan? I'm not on the tenure-track. By choice. But that will be for next time.

The Academic Essay: Twitter has ruined me

2011-06-05T16:00:00.043-04:00

I finished the article I was working on, the one I had put aside because I had missed the deadline. Turns out I was able to submit the paper late. So I've been trying to drag the article out of my brain, kicking and screaming for the past four days. I've been thinking and reading and researching and outlining the paper for a few months now, but the writing this time around has been the most difficult part. Much more difficult than I am used to. And part of the reason is Twitter.

Part of the reason I had so much trouble is because I could expand, in fact my brain actively resisted and rebelled against expanding, a fairly simply concept (history has been unkind and unfair to Black women) into 2-5 pages of theoretical whatever that I know I need to have to make it an acceptable academic essay. It was so hard. Why, my brain kept insisting, do we have to do this? Why? Is anyone really going to argue with you on this point? I didn't realize that was my problem until I tweeted that I was having a problem. I thought it was because I was having trouble dealing with the non-linear structure of the narrative. Nope, I was able to tweet out exactly what each part should be and in what order. The problem was I was more comfortable tweeting it out in 140 characters than expanding it to 20-25 pages.

I'm pretty sure Mark Bauerlein would point to this and say "I told you so," along with a number of other luddites (my husband included). But I have to ask the question, is this really a bad thing? I mean, sure, it's terrible for my career because you don't get tenure based on tweets. But looking at the larger picture, is this not an example of thinking differently about how we share our research? Why is the research paper the gold standard? Reducing years of research to a handful of tweets might be a bit extreme, but I really wish sometimes that there were other outlets for my research that were recognized by academia. Outlets that were more accessible and more reasonable in their demands.

I think, however, that Bauerlein might agree with me that the explosion of research publications has made it almost impossible to "keep up" and write a reasonable five pages as an intro or theoretical grounding for your essay. It has lead to the use of a small handful of theorists in everyone's work, lest we appear we know what we're talking about (I'm writing on postcolonialism, I quote Spivak). Part of my difficulty also came from the fact that I was completely unsure I had done enough "research" for the opening section, but I knew I knew enough for Twitter. I couldn't get into the writing because I could give up on the researching and reading.

We keep putting more and research out there and keep demanding more and more research still. It's beginning to get inhuman. Maybe at the end of the day, that's what my brain was railing against.

On Deadlines: I'm as bad as my students

2011-06-04T13:00:00.000-04:00

I had a deadline yesterday. It was a call for submissions that I came across a few months ago, on otherness and historical fiction. I immediately thought of The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson. It is a book that has following me around for a while now, and this would be the perfect opportunity to finally try and figure out what is going on. I was thinking about how Hopkinson was re-writing or re-inserting the histories of Black women into History. It was due yesterday.

And, I didn't get it done. I debated asking for an extension, but at the end of the day (actually, it was half-way through the day) I realized that taking the weekend wouldn't even help this paper be as good as it needed to be. I had almost ten pages and was barely a third of the way through what I wanted to say. The ideas and analysis were finally starting to come together, but it wouldn't get done on time. So, I gave up, went grocery shopping, and decided that I would take the few days before leaving for Montreal to finish it up.

I'm almost always like this when it comes to submitting papers and answering CFPs: last possible minute, and usually asking for an extension. I've talked about deadlines before when it comes to undergraduates, and we know all about how desperately undergraduates plead with us for extensions. Why can't our students get organized and get their work in on time, we lament. Well, why can't most of the academics I know do the same?

One of the biggest differences between when our students ask for more time and when we as academics ask for more time is that academics tend to actually use the time to make the paper better. One of the other differences, of course, are the stakes. Most of the time, academics are submitting their work voluntarily; we choose where and what we want to submit, apply for, or participate in. Undergrads choose to come to school, but they don't choose their deadlines and assignments. One might argue about the stakes as well: which of the two groups face the higher stakes? Undergrads fear failure, lower GPAs, and everything that comes with it. Academics face not meeting tenure requirements. I don't, but that's a different story.

I guess, for me, I don't have the pressure on me. I'm not being graded, I'm not up for tenure, and I know that even though I've missed this deadline, I can finish the essay and submit it elsewhere. Now, if this was a book manuscript, it would be entirely different; I was late once with my book manuscript and then had to wait three extra years for its publication. In this case, the stakes are higher if only because other people are dependent on my ability to complete my work on time. That not only makes their jobs more difficult if I'm late, but also could impact my ability to get published in the future (do publishers talk amongst themselves about academics who are incapable of meeting deadlines, naming names?).

But I am also all to aware of all of the pressures academics face, all of the demands on their time, each one professing that it is THE most important deadlines. Between students who expect their work handed back to them instantaneously and administrators who keep coming up with new and bizarre reports and measures that need to be filed and reported yesterday, the pit-falls for professors on the tenure-track are perilous. Even off the tenure-track, I find myself pushing my writing down the list of priorities because other "more important" deadlines keep popping up.

But, I am also a procrastinator par excellence. This isn't to say that I'm not working; on the contrary, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to write before finally sitting down to write it. But I wait until the last possible minute to start actually writing. Actually, I find that I am starting to write a few seconds past the last possible minute now. I am still learning how it takes me to write something now. You'd think that after an MA and a PhD, a long(ish) list of articles, a book, and a number of book reviews, I'd know how long it takes me to write. But, apparently, I don't.

As I said in the title, I'm as bad as my students.

Who Speaks for Rural Education?

2011-06-02T21:56:00.000-04:00

On Fridays this summer, I'm going to be reposting my writing that has appeared elsewhere on the web. This post originally appeared on So Educated.

In my upper division writing classes, we are talking about the current debates surrounding education reform, as well as dissecting the rhetoric curretly being used in the popular media to shape these debates. In class, we watched trailers for the documentaries Waiting for Superman (see below), Race to Nowhere, and Schooling the World. My students, while interested, saw little of themselves in the situations described by the first two trailers. The third, dealing with the exporting of Western schooling internationally, particularly in poor, rural areas, resonated with them in a way they didn't really understand.

waitingforsuperman.com

I teach English and writing at a rural state university where the majority of the students come from even smaller surrounding communities. The economy (when there was one) is largely based on argriculture and coal mining. I am in a heart of the Bible Belt as well. My students have come to university with the goal of providing a better life for themselves and their families, to hopefully break the cycle of poverty. These are not students who are over-scheduled and suffering from the pressure of raised expectations. Nor are their failing schools the product of inner-city poverty or unsafe learning environments. Many of my students are caught between two worlds: the traditional one they come from, where hard physical labor, strong family ties, and God are valued above all else, and the more contemporary one they are confronted with when they arrive at university.

This is, admittedly, an entirely new experience for me. It in no way resembles my own experience growing up (middle-class, professional), nor have I taught students with this kind of background before. My experience with non-traditional students has been of the more traditional variety: first-generation, minority students who almost all come from an urban environment. I am, however, committed to helping these students achieve their goals, get an education, and hopefully make a better life for themselves. Hearing about their experiences in high school, however, leaves me wondering if some of them even have a chance.

When politicians and pundits speak about raising standards and educating everyone, they rarely mention those significant parts of the population that do not have access to quality schools because of their isolation and relative poverty. The need is there; Teach for America is hoping to place over 500 teachers in the Mississippi Delta alone. But if you look at the TFA map, the majority of their placements are in urban areas. The best and the brightest are, apparently, not interested in moving to rural, isolated communities. Or, perhaps, the communities are not interested in having them come to teach in their schools.

teachforamerica.org

My university trains and educates the majority of the teachers in our region. Our library, however, has two to three times as many books on issues and challenges in urban and minority K-12 education as they do on rural education. None of the education faculty seem to specialize in issues concerning rural education, either. How are we shaping the future teachers who will be educating the children in the rural areas? What are the challenges unique to rural areas in the United States? Should we be looking beyond our borders to see how other countries have either failed or succeeded at rural education?

I am, as I said before, not an expert. But I hope to learn and share my journey with you. I want to find those voices that I know must exist who speak for rural education. I want to help make those voices heard. I want to educate myself, my students, and the more general public. At the end of the day, I want my students, and subsequently their children, to succeed. My work and writings here on SoEducated.com is one of the ways I am working towards that goal.

Being a More Efficient, Productive Academic II: Thinking About References

2011-05-31T20:57:00.000-04:00

I talked in a recent post about adapting our writing for not just different audiences, but different modes and mediums of communicating our research and thinking. What this means, however, is that we as academics need to start re-evaluating how and what we use as sources. In other words, what is acceptable to use as sources and how do we integrate them into our work?

As I was working on adapting some of my blog posts into a longer piece of a more "formal" publication. In my blog posts, I link to other blog posts (written by experts), press releases (from legitimate faculty organizations in higher education), and news stories. I started feeling nervous once I actually started to transfer links into footnotes. Are these sources good enough? Should I be hitting the databases or Google Scholar to essentially pad my essay with more legitimate sources?

Truth be told, I don't have time. Between my "actual" research and writing, my blogging, my teaching, and my life (yes, I have one of those, too; my family insists on it), I just don't have time to become a true "expert" in all of the fields that I write about. Again, this is the danger and argued shortcoming of being a "generalist" but I wonder if that's really fair. I never claimed to be an expert, and through careful online research, I'm able to find what I need to inform my arguments and make my point.

I'm not saying that this essay (if published) should necessarily count towards tenure (not that I'm on the tenure-track), but it does show that I'm engaging in larger discussion about the field and the profession. But, again, as we change how we share our research and thinking, we are going to be forced to really figure out how to integrate these new sources into our own work. And so on and so forth. I keep thinking back to a student's essay that linked to a number of digital recordings of old blues songs that informed her argument about the book we read. It only worked if I could click on the links she provided. She conceived her paper to be read while listening to the pieces. Except I required that it be handed in as a hard copy.

These are questions I am starting to ask myself as I conceive not only my own research and writing, but assignments for my students. We still prioritize the journal article and the research monograph, but for my students, that isn't the case. And, really, am I any different? I read journal articles because I believe that is where the best thinking is. I don't necessarily think that this is going to be true for much longer. If we teach our students to think critically and more broadly about what they use, then why do we necessarily always lead our students to the conclusion that peer-reviewed journal articles are best?

I'm interested in knowing what readers thing: where are "references" going in the future?

Being a More Efficient, Productive Academic while Thinking Differently About What We Produce

2011-05-27T08:19:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of discussion, as we gear up for conference season and meeting our summer research/writing goals, about how to be more efficient or productive. Digiwonk asks if it is, indeed, ok to reuse and recycle your work in higher education. In response, Jo Van Every writes that recycling is, in fact, a wonderful thing, especially if you keep your audience in mind (hmmm...that sounds suspiciously like advice I've given my undergrads...). Digiwonk continues with her great advice by showing how much you can accomplish with just 30 minutes of (really focused) time.

But much of the focus on adapting or recycling is based off of more traditional means of communicating our research: changing the conference presentation into an article, public lecture, book chapter, etc... This, unfortunately, doesn't help me very much, as I no longer write my conference presentation. Yes, that's right, I don't try to cram everything I have to say into 8-10 pages for a 20 minutes presentation. I have an idea of what I want to say, some speaking notes, a few important quotes written down, and that's it. While these presentations are intended to eventually become an article, it's not as easy to convert a few notes and quotes as it is a more polished conference presentation. But this again has to do with audience; I'm thinking of them sitting through my presentation, not of me later trying to hack out an article.

But I also think that focusing on primarily adapting our conference presentations (or seminar papers or carving up our dissertations or Master's thesis for articles) doesn't encompass the rich and varied nature of what many academics produce and write today. For example, I just adapted some of my blog posts for a call for submissions on the state of higher education today. The tone clearly called for a style that was less formal and more conversational, making it an easy (or easier) transition. Again, this may work against me and reflect my (destructive) generalist tendencies, but I've worked hard on these blog posts and I'm still old-school, so I get a kick out of seeing my writing in print.

But it goes beyond that. Failed grant applications become the basis for the next grant application which becomes a book proposal. Abstracts that weren't accepted become the basis for the next project or a place to hold ideas. Today I submitted a book proposal for that project. It was remarkably similar to the "research narrative" I submitted to earn my summer research fellowship. But again, this isn't old news. And it still relies on old/traditional means of sharing our work and research.

Websites and blogs become incubators and collective spaces for working through problems and ideas. As I work through my Dany Laferrière project, I record my progress and process on my (other) blog. I'm not sure what it will turn into, but I know that it allows me to record my thoughts, observations, and stray ideas as they happen, but it also serves as a way to share not just my research, but the process behind the production of my final project. Maybe it stems from my dissertation research, dealing not only with archival research, but the creative process and collaborative forces participating therein that I am aware of how mysterious the process of creating a piece of work appears to be. But I am also aware of how enriched the process becomes the more people who are involved.

Why not have a blog that reflects our process, our progress, and our questions as it relates to our academic work? Why must we keep thinking in terms of the seminary/presentation/paper/monograph? Check out Sample Reality's post examining the same ideas: It's about sharing.

Memories: Old-School Social Media

2011-05-25T20:30:00.001-04:00

I was just in Sherbrooke where I did my undergraduate and Master's degree. I started (wait for it) 15 years ago this fall.

Shudder.

When I started at Sherbrooke, I moved into residence and two important improvements had been made over the summer: networked telephones and high-speed internet access in each room. Previously, if you wanted a phone or internet in your room, you had to pay to get a phone line put in and pay for dial-up access. But our university was known for its engineering and computer programming degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level, and many of the students lived in res. It just made sense.

Keep in mind that at this point, no one owned a cell phone or had high-speed internet access at home. Few people had email addresses, and the internet was in its infancy. My father, in an attempt to entice my brother and I to spend more time at his place, had had dial-up internet access (through AOL) for a few years. He found these things called BBS's. I didn't understand any of it, but he totally geeked out over them.

When I arrived in Sherbrooke, I was assigned an email address (at first, my student ID number - so much for privacy). My friends back home, as well as my mom, all had email addresses through school or work. It was amazing. We could "talk" with one another almost instantaneously. We forwarded endless joke messages to each other and just generally kept in touch with what was going on in our lives. Most of us remember the sound our computer made when we would get email; the university gave us Eudora. Da-da-dum-da-dum.

And then, we discovered ICQ.

The little green flower in the bottom right-hand toolbar that would squeal "Ah-Oh!" when you got a new message and flashed yellow. You knew instantly when one of your friends was online and you could talk to them in real time. Eventually, everyone moved to Windows Messenger (why? Why did we do that? Oh, right, because we all got hotmail accounts), but I won't ever forget the excitement I felt when I heard the two noises indicating that someone had wanted to "talk" to me through the miracle of the internet.

The network phone (you called one number and each room had its own extension) was coupled with the drastic drop in long distance costs. By my second year, we paid $20 a month for unlimited long distance within Canada. And our phones had a little red light that flashed when you had a message. It didn't matter what time I came home (and in what condition I was in), I would check for that red light, then check my email and ICQ to see who had said what.

During my degree, I took a course in basic web design, worked on an government intranet newsletter, wrote for a blog before it was called blogging (it started as a listserv newsletter), and had a professor who tried to integrate online discussion boards into his graduate course on Canadian drama. I learned how to first use physical indexes, then CD-ROMs, then online databases to do my research. While I didn't have the most technical education when it came to social media and learning about how to use the internet, but I was exposed, and exposed myself, to many of the early social media tools.

I was reminded of all this when I stayed in residence while in Sherbrooke this past year. The phones were still there, although probably used much less now that everyone has a cell phone (although you still have things like roaming and long-distance in Canada). Strangely enough, even though there was wireless internet access all over campus, we were limited to a hard line connection in residence. I had brought an iPad, meaning I couldn't access the internet once I got to my room.

It was actually kinda nice. After spending five years in a res room tethered to my computer (a massive black tower and monitor, then a seemingly 10 pound ThinkPad with a 10 minute battery life), I liked that once I got to my room, it was time to either read a book or go to sleep. I guess I'm just getting old.

Too-Late Advice to Students: Take Pride in Your Work

2011-05-25T11:46:00.000-04:00

I was having a conversation on Twitter the other day with a fellow prof who was elbow-deep in grading. She posted: "Oh yes! be proud of what you turned in! Sounds so easy..."

Indeed it does. This is something I tell my students early and often about their work. Yes, we talk about ethos, about the students taking the time they need to write well, how important it is to follow directions, and how they should focus on working smarter, not harder. But if none of these lessons stick, then I have one more way to try and try to get them to take their work seriously: appealing to their sense of pride.

How many of your students, when it comes time to hand in their papers, do so quickly, with averted eyes, often shoving their paper in the middle of the pile as if to hide it, and then quickly retreat to their seats, never daring to engage you? Of course, this is before electronic submissions, but one could imagine the students throwing their hands up and simply pressing send/submit/upload, seconds before the deadline. How many of them hope and pray that their efforts will earn them whatever grade they "need" rather than feeling confident in the work they have submitted?

Pride. Take pride in the work that you do. Come to class to hand in your paper feeling proud of the effort and the results. Know that this was really, truly the best you could do, rather than the best under the often self-inflicted circumstances? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to look your professor in the eyes when you place your paper confidently on the top of the stack? Maybe even throw in a little, "I hope you enjoy it" for good measure? How much more pleasant would your college/educational experience be if every assignment wasn't fraught with anxiety, doubt, and despair?

This also works with students who have had to face legitimate obstacles during the semester. You might not have earned the A, but you passed, and there is a certain degree of pride you can take from just getting to the finish line. Looking at the stats from my institution, this is no small feat. And before I am accused of indulging in my students' snow-flakery, I think that students who managed to pass my courses even thought their house burned down, they were arrested, their mother died in a house fire, or their father going into rehab (all documented) deserve to take some solace from the fact that they didn't flake out. We all have times in our lives where we simply go through the motions because other things have taken over. It's life, but it doesn't make it any easier.

It's something I'm also trying to remember myself this summer as I try to grind out research articles and hopefully the solid beginnings of a book. When I press send on the email submitting my work, I want to know that it was the best I can do, and that I feel good about it, regardless of if it's accepted or not. Makes resubmitting it elsewhere that much easier, too.

New CRW Summer Feature: Bad Female Academic

2011-05-23T14:06:00.000-04:00

Finally.

I have been thinking about this post and summer series for a while now. It fits in well with what I write about both here and for the University of Venus. I was planning on doing these posts on Friday, but it looks like Mondays it is. Makes more sense, as I will have the weekend to write them. Although, over the summer, every day looks a lot the same (take care of kids in the AM, write and research in the PM, rinse, repeat).

What is this weekly feature? Every week, I will look at all the ways I am a Bad Female Academic. Some weeks, it will be about why am I a bad academic more generally, sometimes about how I am a bad female. Other weeks, it will be why I am a bad combination of the two. I specifically want to deal with the ways in which our communities (large and small) try to limit who I am and how I am allowed to view and understand myself. The pressures academia places on me are well-knows, as are larger societal messages about who I am supposed to be as a woman, mother, and wife. When these two worlds collide...

I am inspired by two people in particular: Her Bad Mother and Worst Professor Ever. But unlike Worst Prof (and more like Bad Mother), I tired to leave academia and found myself pulled back in (OK, so once you have kids, you're pretty much stuck with them, but you get the analogy, right?). In my mind, the work of breaking the stereotypes of what it is to be a "good" mother and a "good" academic (which, in my mind, sounds an awful lot like being a "good girl" - actually, go and listen to the Barenaked Ladies song, you'll see what I mean). They are chains hanging around our necks and I want to really take a long, hard look at them.

But mostly I'm just tired of all the things I should or shouldn't be doing, worrying about what everyone else thinks, and just be who I am, which is, apparently, a Bad Female Academic.

Innovative Education for Me, But Not for Thee

2011-05-19T13:36:00.000-04:00

Whenever I read Cathy Davidson, I am find myself moving from being inspired and invigorated to very, very depressed. Take her latest, for example, "Going Interactive in a Big Way: How Can We Transform the Lecture Class?" I read it and thought, yes, this is what I want to try and do in my classes! This is, indeed, the future of education! We should be asking our students to think critically about the Internet and electronic medium(s)! Why can't students take responsibility for their education in my class? Onward and upward over the summer in order to reimagine (yet again) my classes!

And then doubt starts creeping in. I remember all of the requirements and limitations that are imposed on my because I'm teaching general education courses. I remember that I don't have tenure, nor am I on the tenure-track, so I am in a vulnerable position, making it that much riskier to be daring in how I teach my (supposedly) standard and increasingly standardized courses. I also fear letting go of control of my class, allowing my students more input and control. I fear giving up lecturing, the only way I really know how to teach, after all. And, above all, I fear failing.

I realize that it is a total failure of imagination at this point that I either can't conceptualize how to make my writing classes more interactive, or I can't imagine it being successful. Which is total crap because I know that it works. But there is a persistent message about the students that I teach, which is that they aren't prepared to learn this way or that it doesn't really benefit them (hence the increasing standardization of the curriculum). They don't know what they don't know, they don't know what they need to know, so it is up to us to preach it to them. But in a writing class, where the goal is to improve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, won't just about anything do?

Other challenges that I am trying to overcome are that a) the classes are lower-division and b) required. In my mind (and, again, this might be totally false), upper-division classes that the students willingly chose to take are easier to make interactive because the students are more experienced and there because they want to be. Convincing these students to be innovative would appear to be less work. A freshman who has no idea who I am, what college is about, or what to expect (or the wrong idea of what to expect) might not look to kindly on a teacher who walks into class and says, we need to learn how to write, how do you want to do it?

I feel like an old dog. Can I learn and teach these new tricks to my students? And why do I think that my freshmen/sophomore non-traditional/first generation students are any less capable than upper-division students at highly selective colleges? Why am I helping to perpetuate the myth that innovative teaching is only good for the best and the brightest? I want to be braver, and I am ashamed that I am not. I talk a big talk, but when it comes time to walk the walk, I falter. I pat myself for the (minimal) work that I have done, but when confronted with the reality that I am just simply repackaging the same old pedagogical framework, I am left unable to respond.

My students deserve an innovative and non-standardized education as much as anyone else, perhaps more. One of my projects for this summer is figuring out how I can combine the requirements that are imposed on me and my desire to do better for my students. I know it's going to be a struggle, but I have to try.

Bad Female Academic: Loving Research AND Teaching

2011-05-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

It's no secret that I love to teach. This blog is a testament to how much I love teaching. This is a complex statement to make as a female academic; because of my mother-hen tendencies, I could/can be seen as being too maternal, and thus a less serious "academic" in the broad sense. A good female academic keeps her professional distance and teaches because she has to.

But.

I absolutely and positively adore my research. In fact, as my husband recently pointed out to me, I actually get more satisfaction from being a successful researcher (publications, awards, etc) than I do from being a successful teacher (excellent evaluations, etc). I am so excited to be spending my summer doing research and writing, even though I don't have to because I am "just" an instructor and only required to teach. I put myself forward and won a summer research fellowship precisely because I have an excellent research portfolio to go along with my teaching success.

Good female academics, especially those off the tenure-track who also happen to be trailing spouses, don't strive for research excellence; we should be grateful that we have a job with benefits. But good female academics, on or off the tenure track, need to be careful about how successful they are in their research when they teach at primarily undergraduate teaching colleges, like the one I teach at or the one that Dr. Crazy teaches at as well. She herself recently won...something (it's not entirely clear) that celebrated her research excellence and was (initially) ignored. You can read about it here and here.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the culture in my department, but there is something disturbing about this attitude towards research excellence:

But that doesn’t change the culture of my department. The culture of my department is one in which mediocrity is celebrated, because it’s not threatening, and excellence is downplayed, because it might make people “feel bad.” The culture of my department is such that when you do something great, people act like you did a violence to them, like you’re a “braggart” or that you’re somehow “less than” they are. The prevailing attitude is something along the lines of, “I’m a great teacher because I’m shitty at research. I don’t publish because I’m committed to my students. I don’t have a reputation in my field because I’m so committed to our university.”

There is an assumed conflict between being a good researcher and being a good teacher. Now, Dr. Crazy doesn't mention this, but one can imagine that it becomes doubly threatening when the young female academic is outpacing her senior male colleagues. Good female academics know their place.

I am not a good female academic. I value my research as much as my teaching, and I'm pretty good at both. I'll probably never win a national research or teaching award, but I have been recognized as providing good work in my field(s). I am unapologetic in my quest for recognition and the money that goes with it. Politically, this is probably a terrible move, but I think (hope) that it will help my career in the long run.

Because, as I will examine in my next Bad Female Academic post, I am also ambitious.

Rhetoric, Critical Thinking, and The Bible

2011-05-16T13:45:00.000-04:00

In one of my classes, the students are required to write a pursuasive essay. In our class, I decided to have the students read and write about "the future." As I have written here previously, we read the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, read various essays on the (possible) future, and viewed multi-media pieces on the same subject. As our textbook tells us, "Everything is an Argument" which leaves plenty of room to play and analyze the rhetoric used to make arguments about the future.

The final essay was the culmination of all of our work on rhetoric, research, and imagining the future. I was quite impressed with the results I received from my students. They were mostly thoughful, well researched, if a bit on the depressing side (not very many happy pictures of our future). Certainly there were some that were unfocused, others that were poorly researched; over-all, however, I was quite happy with my students` work. But there was one essay that gave me pause.

One student chose to write about how we are currently witnessing the End of Days as desccibed in the Bible. The student went on to very logically and meticulously show all of the ways our world currently resembles what is "fortold" in the Bible. Rhetorically, it was very pursuasive. The Bible says this, our world looks like this, therefore we are at The End of Days. On the basis of the research the student had done and the rhetorical strategies the student employed, this was a strong B or even A paper (give or take some grammatical issues). But, what to do, how to evaluate, the "reliability" of the Bible as a source?

Adding to the complexity of the issue, the student in fact had done much the same thing in an assignment I had devised, asking them to compare our world to the world imagined/fortold in Fahrenheit 451. By the end of the essay, the students had come to various conclusions about how similar our world is to Bradbury`s imaginary world and what that could mean, what lessons we should be taking from that comparison. How is Bradbury`s fictional world (as a source) any different from the Bible`s vision of the future?

Please don`t think that I am so naive that I don`t know the answer to that question already. But, I teach in a place where the Bible is still an important document that many of my students (and their families and communities) revere. And I know that others react with a quick dismissal of any student who would quote the Bible or any religious text as a sign that the student has shown no critical thinking or even, perhaps, doesn't deserves to be in university. And this is where the conflict, for me, comes to head. The difference, of course, is in how we know the students treat the two works: the Bible as fact and Fahrenheit 451 as fiction. If the student didn`t actually believe the Bible but instead treated it as a work of fiction, would the final product thus be more worthy? And how am I to know, one way or the other, what the student believes? It certainly, for me, isn`t my place to judge a student`s faith or beliefs. But I know there are people who would expect me to fail or at least grade the student more harshly based on the fact that, for them, the Bible is a reliable source.

I am particularly troubled because I know that this is generally a good student; they do the work, they make a real effort, and has shown great improvement. And the work the student did was good; knowing that the Bible is a contentious document, the student really did go out of their way to outline as many similarities as possible. Not to mention that every other source the student used was a "legitimate" source as we discussed in class. But I also know that this student`s essay is going to be read by my colleagues (anonymously) for our general education/student learning outcomes requirement. And while this student will never know the things that I know will be said about her/his paper, it stings me nonetheless. And I also know that my colleagues will wonder what grade this student received on the paper. They`ll never know, but I know they`d be troubled to learn that it is probably a much better grade than they hoped.

So I`m going to ask for this advice. What can I or should I do in these situations?