Salads Don't Deserve This

The word "salad" in the phrase "word salad" has always conveyed to me freshness and innocence.

Word salads are usually the handiwork of students struggling with time or flailing through difficult material. There is a certain mercy to the stark reality of a word salad. It can't be graded at all, much less assigned a value. The word salad tries to stave of failure but in doing creates failure so spectacular it requires acknowledgment and redress.

The word salad gets offered up in the desperate hope that the consumer of it will give it meaning--not even aspiring to truth.

The creator of a true word salad doesn't have enough command of words to lie.

Let's not call today's press conference a "word salad." It was a meretricious and long-simmering stew that could only be created by someone whose power is anchored in the ability to sublimate the structural integrity of ingredients to a few strong flavors, repellent to many but savored by aficionados. It was a stew to be slurped and savored by those hungry for its peculiar pleasures. But none were on hand, so it got flung.

Monsters and Mythical Creatures of Higher Education

More on that U of Chicago letter to the students...

Things that pose a threat to "freedom of inquiry and expression" in higher education:

1. declining levels of public support for higher education.
2. the widespread belief that higher education exists primarily to train an entry-level workforce.
3. student debt
4. ongoing failures to give all students access to an equal K-12 education
5. the increasing adjunctification of higher ed
6. increasing reliance on private and corporate partners to foot the bill for public higher education
7. the proliferation of third-party vendors and educational corporations in the delivery of higher education.

Things that don't pose a threat to freedom of inquiry and expression in higher ed:

1. professors' efforts to prevent bigoted students from derailing discussion.
2. the acknowledgment that traumatized students may find some material difficult.
3. events, spaces, organizations that give students who have, as a group, been historically excluded from certain institutions the opportunity--if they want it--to have community and a sense of belonging at those institutions.

Things that don't exist*:

1. institutionally enforced expectations that faculty not talk about certain things.
2. institutionally enforced expectations that students be allowed to opt out of anything that makes them uncomfortable.
3. institutionally enforced expectations that students be protected from disturbing ideas.
4. the large-scale excision of intellectually viable yet controversial subject matter from college curricula.

*At least not in my experience of teaching at a public R1 for the past 12 years and interacting with lots of faculty at other institutions.

Preserving Intellectual Safe Spaces for White People

It's been a couple of days now since that University of Chicago letter to admitted students erupted all over the media, and I'm still trying to figure out what an "intellectual 'safe space'" is. I've been in and around higher education since 1992, mostly at R1 institutions like the U of Chicago (where, full disclosure, I got my BA). Here are the "safe spaces" I've encountered:

1. A so-designated room in the Women's Resource Center on my campus. I was part of a panel discussion on trigger warnings (more anon) and it was pointed out to everyone at the start of the event. The discussion--which was not part of any formal class--was pretty dry and academic, which I gather is not always the case. Anyway, no one made use of it.

2. Cultural houses on my campus where students of color for whom the predominantly white and privileged campus is not itself a "safe space" can spend time with people who share their positionality.

3. (Not on my campus, that I know of): stickers given for faculty to put on their doors alerting LBGTQ students that said faculty member is "safe" to come out to (e.g., won't "out" them to others or try to talk them out of being LBGTQ).

I'm guessing "safe spaces" like these are not what Dean Ellison had in mind. Closing off these kinds of extracurricular resources would just be mean, and the University of Chicago's own Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (which provides them on that campus) seems to be in no particular danger. I'm guessing it was exactly to exclude such instances that Dean Ellison modified "'safe spaces'" with "intellectual."

So what did he have in mind?  I've certainly heard of faculty using the term "safe space" to demarcate rules of engagement.  As Dean Ellison himself points out, "Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others." Occasionally professors set down guidelines about how what "civility and mutual respect" mean in a classroom; many trust to their own modeling and guidance to convey that message implicitly. It would be really nice if we lived in a world where professors and students alike could be counted on to civilly and respectfully shut down racist comments and behavior as quickly as they would shut down a creationist demanding equal time in a genetics classroom, but any student of color on my campus can tell you that we are not yet living in that world. I have yet to encounter white students who have been censored by heavy-handed efforts to bring it about.

I have also heard the phrase "this is not a safe space" used to signal to students that class discussion is likely to touch on controversial matters in which students may have some personal investment. I'm sure that those applauding Dean Ellison's letter would be glad to hear of it, except that such statements could be taken to be "trigger warnings" and those are, I gather, a bad thing.

The phrase "trigger warnings" seems to be, uh, triggering, to people who aren't themselves in higher education. It provokes a reaction disproportionate to the words themselves, conjuring up nightmare visions of words, phrases, whole realms of inquiry being declared off-limits and pathetic students cowering in dismay. I don't know where this fantasy comes from. I've certainly never encountered it. The terms is, I admit, irritating, but I'm not sure how one teaches disturbing material productively without the concept embedded in it. In fact, I was using "trigger warnings" before they were A Thing. It's just good pedagogy.  When I've taught Eliza Haywood's 1725 novella, Fantomina, for example, there's a scene of sexual violence early in the story.  I've long been in the habit of letting students know it's coming and that we're going to be talking about it in class--not to get them off the hook for reading it, but because a survivor of rape who knows to expect it is more likely to engage with it intellectually than one who gets blindsided by it.  Depending on the nature of the class (I have had the luxury of small discussion-centered classes), I may mention before we start discussion that some students may have personal experience of sexual violence and so connect differently to the scene than those for whom the question, "Is it rape?" is more abstract.

Is that censorship? It may cause a student who has not considered these matters to think twice and look for some textual evidence before suggesting that Fantomina "was asking for it." There may have been rape survivors who choose that day to take one of their allotted absences. Either way, I'm okay with it--I don't see where either outcome vitiates the intellectual process. Acknowledging the intersection between this three-hundred-year-old text and present-day concerns leads to a deeper discussion than does allowing students to uncritically internalize the narrator's assumption that it's ultimately all in good fun--or asking them to pretend that rape is a thing that only happens in the safe spaces of the printed page.

So when I see people applauding Dean Ellison's bold stand for intellectual give-and-take, I'm baffled. Of course, rigorous debate is a good thing in college, as is coming up against ideas that are troubling and challenge one assumptions.  I've blogged about it, in one of my most popular and enduring posts.

It's that one paragraph, though, that undermines the whole enterprise:

Trigger warning and safe spaces are, in my experience, how students of color, LBGTQ students, rape trauma survivors get the support they need to participate fully in the painful conversations that are part of the University of Chicago experience. To take Dean Ellison's words at face value, to assume that he writes out of some rich understanding of the function of trigger warnings and safe spaces would be to sssume that the majority of University of Chicago students are such delicate flowers that the mere acknowledgment that other students come at these matters from different life experience and need different kinds of support constitutes a deadly threat to their ability to engage fully. And one must then echo the many supportive commentators and ask, how are these students going to cope in a world where people of color expect to being taken seriously as human beings? Where trauma survivors expect not to have their experience erased? Where the intellectual enterprise is supposed to take into account the whole of human experience, and not just that of privileged white people?  What a trigger warning Dean Ellison has given!  And what glorious reassurance, that the University of Chicago is a safe place where the world view of white students will be preserved intact and without threat.

But it would be a mistake to take Dean Ellison's words at face value. As I said, above, the "safe spaces" provided by the University of Chicago to its minority students still stand, and I have every expectation that conscientious faculty continue to to frame their subject matter in ways that will encourage participation from all students. All this letter does is make it clear to the mass media and any well-heeled alumni paying attention that the University of Chicago is dedicated to preserving its intellectual-macho brand. The letter also makes it clear to students of color and trauma survivors (both incoming and prospective) that the brand will be preserved at the expense of their access to it.

The whole letter:

What English Majors Don't Know

A short list of things that we can convey to our students.

1. It doesn't have to be like this.  Students who graduate without skills they can market to employers may have made bad choices, but majoring in English wasn't one of them.

 

 2. Few people end up working in a profession directly related to their major.

 3. Even fewer people end up doing the same thing for their entire lives. The statistic of "seven careers in a lifetime" may be mythical, but one doesn't have to search far for anecdata that people change, circumstances and values change, the relevance of particular jobs changes: it's highly unlikely that any industry-specific technical competencies that one gains in college will serve all of one's needs over a lifetime.

4.  Employers care about skills, not majors.  Majoring in English (or other "impractical" disciplines) will make you smarter in a number of ways: able to cope with complex information, comfortable with uncertainty, adept at encouraging inclusivity and diversity, talented at communicating in a variety of ways, skilled at hearing what is not said as well as what is said, experienced in framing problems and seeking out information to solve them, and, yes, good at writing.

6.  Many employers don't know that English majors (and their ilk) have the skills they're looking for. It's on us to get that message out and to help our students learn to make the case for themselves to employers.

5. Few employers care if you're good at going to school.  Granted: maintaining a high GPA is key to landing entry-level jobs at some large companies, and students who have their sights set on law school or other elite graduate study should focus on keeping their grades as high as they possibly can. Outside those specialized circumstances, students may be better served by a mediocre GPA that represents a willingness to take risks, struggle with difficult material, or explore the other kinds of intellectual opportunities that a college campus has to offer.

6. College is a great time to flounder. Students who graduate without a clear professional career path may flounder for a few years before landing in a stable and satisfying job. Students who chose narrow "practical" majors leading directly to a career may flounder once they realize that their eighteen-year-old selves lacked the knowledge to anticipate what their twenty-something selves would value. The more purposeful floundering students can do amidst the extensive resources of a college campus, the better: internships, a wide range of classes, volunteer programs, part-time jobs, student organizations, activism of various kinds, leadership roles.

Skillz in Action! Thinking Critically about Ads Posing as Copy in IHE.

Okay, class, go read this: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/02/08/debate-over-liberal-arts-vs-vocationalism-lazy-one-essay

And then go check out this: http://burning-glass.com/

See, with the right technology purchase, you can turn your impractical liberal arts majors into an entry-level corporate workforce. Painlessly. Effortlessly. It won't hurt a bit. You won't even notice.

This approach requires no major curricular overhaul, no fundamental change to how colleges teach the arts, humanities and social sciences. It should not be a distraction from the fundamental role of these fields: to explore the connections across knowledge and evaluate ideas critically.

How's that again? Just a few paragraphs up, Smigelman was pointing out that academic advisors in the liberal arts, being mostly faculty themselves, were out of touch with the needs of a rapidly changing workplace, clueless about the narrow technical skills that can boost a student's employability. How do you retool THAT academic-advising workforce without distraction from the "fundamental role" of those departments? Has Smigelman ever seen actual actual academic departments collaborate on a certificate program? Has he seen how tapped out faculty advisors already are by the multiple institutional gaps they already have to fill? No biggie:

This is where technology can help. Career applications can tell students what kinds of jobs will be accessible to them and what skills they will need to get there, enabling them to pick courses on the periphery of their liberal arts degree that will give them the practical tools to achieve good career outcomes.

Hmmm. Guess who makes these "career applications"? Yup.

Smigelman isn't wrong about his basic solution: liberal arts students need more help than they generally get identifying their strengths, recognizing the kinds of extracurricular involvement that will help they acquire particular competencies, and learning how to get information about possible careers. But we who help them do that need to keep clearly in mind that our duty is to our students, many of whom will change careers several times in the course of their lives, and many of whom just haven't lived enough yet to know what kind of job will give them long-term satisfaction.

Our duty is NOT to corporate employers who would prefer to offload the training of an entry-level workforce on to institutions of higher learning.

The debate over "practical" majors vs. the liberal arts is not lazy: it strikes at the heart of what higher education is for. Is the purpose of our college and universities to educate human beings and citizens, or is it to train students for their first post-college job? Ideally we do both, but many of us in the liberal arts find ourselves desperately trying to carve out room for the former, while multiple institutional pressures tend toward the latter.

Student who know they want to go into human resources (Smigelman’s example) or advertising or sports management can probably work electives and minors into a suitable program--and more power to them. Similarly, though Smigel doesn’t say this, liberal arts majors can find ways to develop skills through their other activities--every serious student organization needs someone who can run Excel (another of Smigelman’s examples), a part-time job in an institutional communications office can provide on-the-fly training in Adobe, internships make it possible for students to sample potential careers, getting involved in a volunteer organization offers ample opportunities to develop organizational and management skills. And yes, faculty in the traditional liberal arts disciplines can do much more than they do now to encourage these kinds of engagement and to encourage students to situate what they learn in the classroom in relation to their overall life goals.

But how many happy human resources managers knew at eighteen that such a career was what they wanted? And how many students have diligently shaped themselves for a first post-college job, only to discover a couple of years in that it’s not what they expected and that their talents seek a different outlet? Most people do many different things in the course of their lives, and few people end up doing a job directly related to their undergraduate study. Much as we want our students to be employed upon graduation, when we spend four years directing them to jobs that “represent compelling targets” and making sure that they acquire “technical skill bundles” along the way, we’re diverting energy away from the fundamental work of our disciplines and making the interests of employers our own.

It's not lazy to see this as a problem worth arguing about within our institutions and departments. It IS lazy to pretend that a software program will allow us to serve our students without inadvertently selling their souls.

Humanities the Sh*t Out of This

Humanities departments don’t just have an image problem, they are stymied by a paradox.   

Any argument for the employability of majors in history, English, philosophy, art history, classics, or the like cosies up to the premise that the goal of higher education ought to be career training, above all else. Greater knowledge and understanding is, for the humanist, worth pursuing for its own sake. Our disciplines lead to no patents and offer few insights with monetizable implications for meeting current needs. Nor should they: while some solid work in the humanities reaches a broad audience, the arc of direct market value tends towards bland truths, false commonplaces, and lucrative lies. Moreover, teaching students to excel at entry-level professional tasks defeats the goal of a liberal arts education: informed and open-ended grappling with the complex truths of human life.

Nonetheless, humanities departments need students to major in their disciplines if they are to survive, and students insist--reasonably--that the credential they earn should pay back the debt they incur to get it. Those not committed to the liberal arts (much less the specifically humanistic ones) will be quick to tell you that a humanities BA is an expensive journey to a career in fast food service. Those committed to the liberal arts may point out that humanistic study equips students with crucial critical thinking and communication skills, but there is no pithy alternative to the fast-food myth. The absence of a linear career path from these majors makes specific examples seem anecdotal to the point of irrelevance.  

The humanities disciplines didn’t used to have to make the argument.  For a while in the early and mid-twentieth century, knowledge of history, literature, and culture was the marker of a mostly elite, mostly white, class status.  A degree in history or English or the classics was a membership card for the applicant pool to corporate training programs and entry-level jobs in a variety of white collar fields.  As the number of students entering college has increased, the array of majors has grown as well, and other pipelines from the academy to the workplace have proliferated.  At the same time, the academic humanities have expanded in the last few decades to cover broader swathes of human experience, and in doing so they have jettisoned their role in shoring up existing power structures. These disciplines have turned their attention to minorities, women, previously underrepresented pockets of experience, and bottom-up narratives: a more accurate and truthful exploration of the world, but one that has diminished the complicity that made the academic humanities valuable partners in stabilizing corporate institutions.    

Humanities departments can assert their continuing relevance--but they also have good reasons not to. Preprofessional course offerings? They draw butts to seats, but not everyone wants to teach grantwriting or build coding opportunities into undergraduate research projects. Extracurricular professional experience like internships and volunteering?  Students get a lot out of such opportunities, but they may legitimately wonder why, if such activities beyond the classroom get them a job, they need to pay for a degree. Lingering remnants of cultural elitism? Well, yes: dwindling state support means that humanities programs flourish best in expensive institutions serving the already well-off students who can afford to attend them.

We can do better.  Another option:

Humanities faculty can recognize that it's skills, not majors, that employers look for. Without changing anything in the curriculum, they can teach students to recognize the capacities they are building in their humanities disciplines. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the top five skills that employers seek are not STEM-specific. Nor are they obviously pre-professional: they are skills that one needs to accomplish anything, from community organizing to building a boat to managing a household.  According to a 2015 survey of employers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), they are

• ablity to work in a team structure

• ability to make decisions and solve problems
• abiity to plan, organize, and prioritize work
• ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization
• ability to obtain and process information

(https://www.naceweb.org/s10022013/job-outlook-skills-quality.aspx.)

These top five skills  are not humanities-specific either, but there is not one that isn’t improved by rigorous study in humanistic disciplines. Consider, for example, “ability to work in a team structure”--a phrase that (along with its associated buzzword “teamwork” appears in many entry level job ads.  It is meaningless out of context. “Teamwork” in an operating room differs from “teamwork” on a political campaign, which differs still from “teamwork” in one of the sports where the metaphor originates.  

Of course the humanities don’t teach deracinated “teamwork” in any formal sense.  Small-group activities are a common pedagogical strategy, but an occasional twenty-minute exercise in isolating images in The Wasteland  with two or three classmates, or even a semester-long project in researching and presenting a historical counterfactual, will hardly prepare students to  tackle consulting problems for a Big-Three firm. Yet we do teach students to fully inhabit viewpoints that differ from their own; to understand their internal logic and coherence and then to step outside them again.  We teach students that this is what it means to listen carefully. Our students get comfortable with disagreement and learn to ride it to a better understanding than they could have produced on their own. They learn to examine a phenomenon from several different competing perspectives and to gather information while living with uncertainty about which one to embrace. They get practice in synthesizing a range of views in order to arrive at their own informed course of action.  These are all capacities that are relevant to “teamwork.”

Each of these five skills can similarly be divided into component parts that students excel at in different ways; each presents ways to recast “critical thinking” in terms that are intelligible to employers, yet also help students understand their individual strengths and interests.

When students learn to recognize what they do in these terms, they gain agency. Not all students will want to work for companies that are large enough to belong to NACE, much less have a recruiting staff to fill out questionnaires about their practices. Still, knowing they have skills that are valued by such employers makes it easier for students to recognize the choices they have. Being able to talk with some specificity about the particular ways they excel within these broad categories positions them for the work they want to do. Moreover, naming and distinguishing these skills provides a framework for students to consider their priorities beyond paying down student debt and becoming financially independent. What sorts of interactions particularly energize them?  What kinds of problems do they want to solve?  What personal trade-offs are they prepared to take on in pursuit of success?  What values do they want their working life to reflect?

We in the humanities need to wrestle better with this paradox: the impossibility of asserting our relevance without validating the increasingly narrow and instrumental expectations for higher ed. We may not be able to communicate to the corporations that increasingly drive higher ed the importance of the alternative we offer to the limited values of the marketplace.  We can, however, show our students how their learning will help them both succeed within a world that needs their skills and resist the devaluation of their humanity.

"Literature is Ha-a-a-ard!" Wails Empathy Barbie

Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University asks  "Why College Students Are Avoiding the Study of Literature" in Commentary Magazine.  His answer: because we (mostly college instructors, but also high school English teachers) teach it badly.

(Some might point out that students avoid the study of literature because like to get their Gen Ed. credit in ways that require as little writing as possible--and many literature classes involve a lot of writing. They'd also note the widespread perception that college-level study of literature dooms one to a life of penury and irrelevance.  But Morson doesn't go there.)

No--we systematically ruin literature, in three distinct ways, according to Morson: (1) We load up with critical vocabulary so that students can treat the study of literature as a kind of forensic autopsy that destroys the subject in the course of analyzing it.  (2) We encourage students to judge the literature of the past by the moral standards of the present, which leaves little room for enjoying literary works on their own terms.  (3) We treat literary works not as art but as documentary evidence--we encourage students to read literature as a tool for understanding particular historical moments, not as an aesthetic experience.

Guilty on all charges.  Note that accomplishing both (2) and (3) could be considered a feat of intellectual incoherence and sleight-of-hand so prodigious as to warrant at least some degree of grudging respect.  Yes, of course.  Every semester, I fail my students in all these ways, sometimes in the teaching of a single text.

On Chyme, K - 12, and the Liberal Arts

"It takes a great deal of conformity to be a happy K-12 teacher these days." says Fie Upon This Quiet Life, in a thoughtful riff on "The number one problem with K-12 education -- the loss of academic freedom."  

The K-12 problem is also a postsecondary education problem: college instructors find themselves not just teaching students the subject material but also acculturating them to an entirely different conception of "education" than the one they bring with them to college.  Students want to be led to predetermined right answers and to be rewarded for demonstrating their ability to repeat them.  It's on us, then to get them comfortable with the idea that getting it right can involve first getting it very, very wrong and that the "right" answer may mean "the answer that most effectively explains the phenomenon, where the definition of 'most effective' may be subject to interpretation."  

Anna Fischer-Dückelmann,
via Wikimedia Commons

A few years back I contemplated a decisive break with academia.  My new career path, however, required me to return to school, so I found myself in a 100-level nutrition class at my institution.  The facts about nutrition that I learned were largely a more fine-grained and detailed version of things I already knew.  The eye-opener was the class itself: Powerpoint slides supplied in advance with key words omitted, so students would have to listen to the lecture to fill in the blanks.  Study guides ahead of each quiz or exam.  Opportunities for student questions that mostly consisted of students asking to have certain missing words repeated or variations of "will this be on the test?"  I sat there and realized that while I had been in graduate school and teaching classes myself, college education had changed beyond all recognition.  The old term, "spoon feeding," no longer seemed adequate, but I did learn a new metaphor for what I was experiencing. This was chyme-feeding (chyme is the mass of partially digested matter that passes from the stomach to the small intestine).  

But who was I to judge?  I was surrounded by earnest and hardworking students.  Well, there was that guy a few rows down from me who spent every lecture surfing the Louis Vuitton website, but mostly they were taking a summer class to speed up their path to careers in health services, they wanted to learn the material quickly and efficiently, and the graduate instructor teaching the class knew how to deliver it in a way that would get them to the best possible grades on the quizzes and multiple choice exams that made up the bulk of the course.  

"I don't believe any of this stuff we're learning," I heard one buff student say to the lass he was flirting with over the break on day.  "Scientists change their minds all the time.  They don't know."  He went on to describe at some length his own nutrition and fitness regimen.  He clearly cared about the subject matter, but saw no possible connection between the things that might be conveyed in this class and his own health concerns.  Though an isolated assignments asked us to keep our own food diaries and chart our nutrition while reflecting on our choices, and another asked us to analyze the nutritional claims of a consumer product, but there was nothing in the design of the course that would encourage this student to see such exercises as anything but hoops to jump through on the way to a credential.

That summer I became viscerally aware that the kind of liberal arts education I had known myself as a student and that I tried to recreate in my own classes could change lives.  Could.  But I also realized why communicating complex humanistic subject matter to students was so damn hard--they had no tools for recognizing complexity and struggle in learning as a good thing.

The liberal arts need to be in solidarity with K-12 educators and to see their struggles against test-driven curricula as part of our own struggle to maintain norms of academic freedom and shared governance within increasingly corporatized higher education.

  

Turns out You Can Get Paid to Do This!

My first post for Vitae is up today: The Problem with Learning Technology.  FYI.

"Teaching with Technology"? Oh, Wait: You Meant "Delivering Content." Never Mind.

I've been sucked in again--a one hour brown-bag hosted by the university's "Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning."

Best Practices for "Back Pocket Video Production
Video pros and experienced faculty share their tips and tricks for producing video content for course enhancement and student assignments with only their phones and other "back-pocket" devices.

Sounds pretty innovative, and why not?  Most students carry around with them the capacity to shoot video; so do I.  They live in a world replete with screens and moving images; so do I.  They document their lives relentlessly with their hand-held devices, and I was born too early to understand how this unlimited capacity for self-expression across a variety of media platforms shapes how they understand the world.  I ask them to delve deeper into the printed word by writing about what they read--how might I harness their use of another media form?

I have some ideas, myself, but there are a lot of things I don't know about how to make them work:

• Like many non-tenure-track faculty with no research budget, I have to rely on a shared office computer or technology I've purchased for my personal use.  Where and how should I store video files that I create (or ask students to create) for a class?
• What are some rookie mistakes to avoid when using a handheld device to shoot video that's going to be viewed by strangers, rather than an audience of sympathetic family or facebook friends?
• What are the best platforms for making student-made videos available to their classmates?
• What FERPA and copyright issues should I be worrying about when using a site like YouTube for educational purposes?
• What kinds of video-centered assignments work well in a class where video production and visual media are NOT the main focus of learning?
• How have instructors successfully prompted students to exploit the communication possibilities of hand-held video?  What do students do better with video than with more conventional kinds of assignments?

So I went to the brown bag lunch.  Here's what I learned.

• Shooting video with a smart phones can capture ephemeral moments and otherwise undocumented voices.
• You can deliver course content effectively via three to six-minute videos that explain and reinforce key concepts.  
• Students like short home-made videos a lot, learn from them, and stop asking their instructors to repeat basic information in office hours.
• Production values matter: here are some cool toys we have to help make your videos more professional (turns out that "back-pocket" in the course description referred specifically to little backpacks full of gadgets that instructors can check out of the library).
• Editing your videos makes them better: here's how iMovie works on your handheld device.

There's nothing particularly wrong with any of that, only I don't teach big lecture classes, and I try to minimize the amount of time I spent talking at my students.  The bulk of learning takes place in my class when students discuss and interact with texts with my guidance.  Learning about a different way of talking at them doesn't help me guide that process more effectively.  Yet every time I trot hopefully off to an event that promises to help me innovate, I find myself talked to as if delivering information is the only thing I might want to do in the classroom.  "Innovation in Teaching and Learning"?  It looks suspiciously like draping Freire's banking model with enough cords,  dongles, and screens that we can make it unrecognizable and scalable.

On Civility

Things that college should teach students:

• That the world can become unrecognizable when viewed from inside someone else's experience.
• That the things that make other people different from them  are not be the most important things about those people.
• That opinions and attitudes they haven't yet encountered exist in the world.
• That ideas they take for granted are not universally shared or understood.
• That they know more than they think they do, but that not everything they know is accurate.
• That the ideas they take for granted can prevent them from understanding ideas they haven't encountered yet.
• That ideas they take for granted may look less appealing when they are articulated.
• That they can change their minds.
• That one's mind changes gradually, incompletely, and painfully.
• That anger can have content, that you can learn from someone else's anger.
• That legitimate, righteous anger exists.
• That ideas get argued by people with different experiences of the world, which are relevant
• That ideas get argued by people with different relationships to authority, power, and legitimacy, which are also relevant.
• That ideas make a difference in the world and can be worth getting angry about.
• That hurt feelings are a data point to take into account, but may or may not be relevant upon closer examination.
• That they can get over hurt feelings.
• That learning more about a contentious issue can lead to more questions and uncertainty rather than less.
• That uncertainty and confusion are starting points for learning.
• That if they haven't, at some point, found themselves struggling to put words to an idea that they feel strongly about but can't explain adequately, then they've missed an opportunity to learn.
• That if they graduate without having felt, at some point in a class, unsettled, uncomfortable, misunderstood, confused, then they've missed an opportunity to learn.

When the Words Crumble

The Chancellor just wrote to all of us here, explaining her decision not to have the Board of Trustees approve the hiring of Steven Salaita,  Her letter, which is also posted on her institutional blog, concludes,

I am committed to working closely with you to identify how the campus administration can support our collective duty to inspire and facilitate thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues.

I really shouldn't be sitting here writing this right now.  I have a syllabus to finish fine-tuning in preparation for classes on Monday.  Its subtext is not particularly unusual and can be summed as follows:

words matter

No doubt in the weeks ahead, as I discuss on this blog some of the innovations I'm planning and describe my successes and failures, I will say more about how my carefully thought out sequences of readings and deft writing prompts serve that goal.  But for now, I'm just writing against a profound sense of futility.   Everything I do rests on the assumption that it is important for students to read closely, think hard about what they read, and communicate as clearly as they can in response to it.  And our Chancellor says this:

I am committed to working closely with you to identify how the campus administration can support our collective duty to inspire and facilitate thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues.

Does anyone ever really read the last sentence of an administrative email?  It's ordinarily an anodyne string of words, that seeks to do rather than say: bringing closure to the business at hand with a tone of warmth and collegiality.  L'Affaire Salaita has taught us, however, that this kind of formulaic boilerplate has content.  Sometimes.  For example: "This recommendation for appointment is subject to the approval by the Board of Trustees..."  Since the Board of Trustees historically has only met to approve appointments after the appointed faculty has been on the course roster for months, relocated to the institution in question, and taught for several weeks, the phrase "Is subject to" has generally meant "will receive."  If it didn't mean that, the course schedule, payroll, office space allocations for the semester due to begin Monday would be thrown into disarray.  But things are proceeding normally.  We're to assume those words bore the full weight of their literal meaning this one time, for this one hire.  

So what does our Chancellor mean when she calls herself "committed to working closely with you to identify exactly how the campus administration can support our collective duty"?  After all, what is a Chancellor supposed to do, if not support the faculty in doing the work of the university?  Of course, "supporting our collective duty" generally means stepping back and letting individual departments and colleges get on with the work of deciding whom to hire and tenure--not "working closely."  Same with "facilitat[ing] thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues."  That project is dear to many faculty who host conferences, engage with other scholars in a variety of formats, bring speakers to campus.  In this case, Wise's efforts to "work closely" seem to have backfired, as the list of faculty now boycotting the campus grows daily.  One conference "on challenging issues" scheduled for the fall has already been cancelled, as have two prestigious lectures.  

One obvious way to signal a commitment to "working closely" would be to address these consequences of her decisions.  In the absence of such acknowledgment, one is left to wonder what this "working closely" means.  If she's serious about refusing to tolerate "disrespectful words or actions that demean," I for one would be happy to help her organize a week long series of talks, teach-ins, and screenings about the use of native American caricatures, to conclude with a ritual bonfire on the Quad where newly enlightened students could burn their Chief t-shirts.  I'm guessing that's not what she has in mind though.   

So I'll get back to work on my syllabus and try not to think about the contrast between what I want my students to learn and how my institution communicates its mission.  

The Pedagogy of Confusion

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Never mind the feedback we get from students, confusion can be a good thing, according to recent pedagogical research described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Counterintuitively, clarity limits what students learn:

"It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen," he [Derek Muller] said. "One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before."

Nothing surprising here, particularly not for anyone whose classroom practices have been influenced by Ken Bains's pivotal What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard UP, 2004).  Students take information on board more effectively when they grasp that there are flaws, gaps, misconceptions in their understanding.  Since students rarely know what they don't know, a good instructor will find ways to stimulate their awareness.  The problem is, students resist the notion that their coarse-grained understanding of the world is wrong.  They expect education to feel like an ongoing and consistent affirmation of what they already know, and they are poorly equipped to cope when it doesn't.

In my teaching of Enlightenment era literature, I create an atmosphere of productive confusion by setting students to work on the first day on a poem from the period that fails to display the powdered-wig-decorum that they expect.  Joseph Warton's "The Dying Indian" or the unknown Ephelia's "Maidenhead" work well for this exercise, but they don't come easily to students.  They find it frustrating.  I usually have to gloss a few key words, advise them to read sentence-by-sentence rather than line-by-line, and set them to work in groups with clearly defined goals before they can make sense of either poem.   More than that, I have to be on: monitoring the groups closely, listening for that moment when productive confusion shades into irritability, deciding when to decipher a line for them rather than letting them work it out for themselves, picking the moment when the small-group work has ceased to be productive and it's time to guide the class to shared clarity.  I don't always get it right, and even when I do, there will be individual students for whom my explanations come too late (after they've already tuned out) or too soon (before they've time to arrive at the limits of their comprehension).

According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed,

Technology could provide a solution. Mr. D’Mello and Mr. Graesser have been experimenting with 'affect-aware technology'—software that attempts to read facial cues and adapt to a student’s level of confusion. The technology is still in the early stages, but Mr. D’Mello says reading emotional signals in humans could be an important next step for software that responds to the needs of individual learners.

A better solution?  A different model of what learning looks like. Even for the majority of students who respond well to the exercise, I have to start a semester-long process of selling the idea that discomfort and uncertainty are necessary parts of learning: this is not a view of learning that comes easily to them.  Increasingly test-centered education has taught many students that knowledge consists of arriving at predetermined correct answers, and that good teachers deliver them to those correct answers.  They've experienced wrong answers (or difficulty in framing an answer or productive confusion about the questions being asked) as pedagogical design flaws, not as intrinsic features of the process of trying to understand the world.

Some part of the world is always going up in flames, but as I write this towards the end of the summer of 2014 there's an urgency about teaching students to grapple with confusion.  Chasms are opening all around us, from the methane holes in Siberia to the fractured suburbs of St. Louis.  For all our sakes, our students need skills in confronting confusion.  They need practice in pushing past their unacknowledged longing for order so that they can recognize its distorting effects.  

Acad Men; or, Entrepreneurial in All the Wrong Places

This right here is why education is not customer service, as described by a math professor in an op-ed piece for the New York Times:

With the college students I teach, it’s a straightforward transaction. They’re paying me to teach them math, and my job is to cajole or incentivize them into doing the work that’s necessary to learn the subject, whether they feel like it or not.

Jordan Ellenberg's point here is that coaching (as in Little-League "have fun while learning the sport" coaching) is a good model for teaching.  Mine is a little different: for administrators and educational entrepreneurs looking to make education cheap and scalable, education has to be equated with the delivery of information, preferably information that can be neatly packaged in textbooks, online courses, and marketable units.  Instructors experience education as a complex interaction: that combination of cajolery, incentivizing, performance, and passion that can cause students to absorb the information that gets delivered.

The customer service model of education (which David Perry has taken down in the CHE) prevents the two sides from noticing that they are talking past each other.  Administrators want their "customers" to buy their brand of academic credential and so strive to create a mutually beneficial and trouble-free commercial transaction. Instructors, too, want happy "customers."  Instructors are acutely aware of how students are responding to a lecture or discussion.  Every classroom interaction provides implicit feedback that a good instructor will use to shape future interactions; many instructors know that they can reach happy, engaged students better than hostile, bored ones and so they look for ways to make their instruction both rigorous and user-friendly.

Teaching is ultimately about getting students to do things.  The administrative customer service model stops dead at the doorway where the educational package gets delivered, as if that was all that mattered.  Instructors know, however, that the doorway is where education starts.  The instructional version of customer service stands over customers as they open the package and try to assemble the contents; it helps them read the instructions, find the right tools, recognize when the thing they've ordered works like it's supposed to, and use it effectively.

But of course, it's also more complicated than that.  As anyone who has advanced beyond the minimum-wage front lines of retail knows, the customer is not always right.  Customers can be greedy and mendacious.  Customers can be out to scam the company.  Customers can desire what's bad for them, for their health, for their neighborhoods, and for the planet.  Moreover, customers are made, not born.  Customers don't always know what they want until it's getting sold to them.

Somewhere between administrative pressure to offer better and narrowly conceived customer service and act of salesmanship performed by a talented instructor lies the black hole into which the future of the literature and language study has fallen. In Unmaking the Public University (Harvard UP 2008), Christopher Newfield explains the problem:

In its attempt to be realistic about economic forces, LCS [literary and cultural studies] learned one half of the lesson of business. It was the half the culture war taught again and again: the market was to be adapted to, not to be criticized or changed. The market model blocked rather than answered a simple question: who or what decides the level of demand? The other half of the lesson of business, the half LCS ignored, was the requirement to respond to "market" environments by increasing one's own influence over the market's demand decisions. This meant learning how to manage markets--how to discover hidden demands, how to create demand for products one thinks are important, how to adapt the market to one's output, how to subordinate markets to the needs of one's "customers," not to mention the wider society. (150)   

Recently, a three-part series in Inside Higher Ed urges academics (particularly those outside the STEM fields) to find markets for their skills and knowledge beyond their day jobs.  "My purpose in offering this series" writes Kerry Ann Rockquemore, "is to both encourage any academic who has a big idea for change to move forward AND to encourage college and university incubators to rethink who belongs there and which ideas are worthy of support."

Nothing wrong with that! Academics have good ideas, institutions can be remarkably short-sighted, the remuneration and prestige of conventional academic work is dwindling. Why not find alternative ways to matter and get paid for it, particularly if you can do some good in the process?

What's remarkable here is not that Dr. Rockquemore has perceived a need and is filling it, but that she's advocating a mind-set that the academic humanities seem incapable of applying on a disciplinary or institutional level but that individual faculty members are, presumably, receptive to.  As she explains,

At the most basic level, there are three components to making a new venture successful. Your idea has to help people solve a problem that they already know they have and are actively seeking to solve. It really is that simple: there’s a problem, people know they have a problem, and they are looking for an answer to the problem.

Right. "There's a problem": dwindling public resources for higher education are putting a squeeze on the humanities.  "People know they have a problem": well, yes--see the ample stats on the oversupply and underemployment of Ph.D. grads.  "They are looking for an answer to the problem": see every tendentious blog post ever on what to do about the oversupply/underemployment problem.

A real solution to the problem has to involve addressing the dwindling public resources for higher education.  It involves reframing the problem in the entrepreneurial way that Dr. Rockquemore advocates: what problems does the tuition- and tax-paying public have that literature and language education can solve?  How can we explain what we do in those terms and make them persuasive to people who aren't already convinced of the value of a broad liberal education?  How can we reframe the conversation so that it's not about job skills, narrowly conceived, but about informed citizens, well-lived lives, an educated society, the ability to understand?

If we who are in the literature and language business just laugh those questions off as quixotic and ill-conceived, maybe we don't deserve the limited public resources we're getting.  If we mean what we say to each other about the value of what we do, then we need to use our powers over text and language to say it to others.

The Tombstones of Education

Were I the Queen of Higher Education, I would banish all college textbooks from my Queendom. Books, proper books could stay: anything that reasonable people might purchase, independent of a course requirement, for their edification or entertainment, could be used in a college-level class.  But the hefty, slick, overpriced repackaging of knowledge for the captive educational postsecondary market?  No.

Many instructors (including me) get frustrated that students don't buy the assigned textbook, anyway.  Banning textbooks is not capitulation to their misguided frugality. It's recognition that students don't view their textbooks the way we expect them to--and they may have a point. Students don't buy the required textbook because:

1.  The information it contains is available more cheaply elsewhere (this is particularly true of textbook anthologies).  Students in my "Intro to Fiction" course routinely come to class with printouts of the assigned short stories rather than the textbook I painstakingly selected.

2.  The textbook is superfluous.  Many lecture-heavy courses involve Powerpoint presentations that contain all the required material and that the instructor makes available.  Additional study guides further predigest the material in advance of exams.  The supplementary power of the textbook simply isn't worth the hefty price.

3.  The textbook costs a lot.  Students who otherwise no longer recognize the existence of library print holdings can be motivated to discover the library course reserve desk when it saves them several hundreds of dollars per semester.

4.  The textbook is not as crucial as the instructor thinks it is.  Students limp along without some of the required readings, simply because life is short, there are a lot of demands on their time, and they can.

When they do buy the textbook, they use it poorly.  Many forces in their K - 12 education have taught them to view learning as information processing.  Those who aren't trying to preserve the sell-back value of the textbook read with highlighter in hand, so as to sift out the information that doesn't matter from the information that does.  Rather than taking on board whole concepts and ideas, they search for the keywords that lock on the learning goals or questions that they've been given to guide their reading.

I realize that things may be different in STEM disciplines that involve a lot of problem solving. Textbooks save instructors from having to devise problem sets, and they often give students several different channels for learning problem-solving strategies, practicing solving problems, and trouble-shooting their failures.

But these are precisely the kinds of skills that textbooks fail to encourage in other disciplines. More and more, we need to teach students to learn.  Textbooks, which repackage reality into easily assimilated clumps of information, too often prevent us from doing that.  Students want to adroitly navigate the world of information--hence their zeal for finding workarounds.  By abandoning textbooks, we can better work with that grain rather than against it.

Of course, since I'm not actually the Queen of anything, I don't have to abide by my own edicts, even as I'm formulating them.  But I have not ordered a textbook for the course I'm teaching in the Fall (a 100-level intro to poetry), and I am thinking about how to make my 1600 - 1800 global literature survey and Intro to Fiction classes textbook-free as well.

Online Re-, Dis-, Mis-, and Anti-Education

I am really good at going to school.   A few years ago I was contemplating a career change, so I waded in gently, taking one course towards retraining at a time at the nearest community college, where tuition was only slightly more expensive than the required textbooks.  When I could take a course online, I did.  It saved me forty minutes of commuting time (not to mention gas money) for every brick-and-mortar class meeting and didn't lock up my schedule as I continued to work full-time.

Online education was a surprise.  My education, from high school through to a Ph.D., involved top-shelf, private institutions, but the best science class I ever took was the required chemistry sequence that the community college offered online.  Few of the classmates I got to know in brick-and-mortar classes felt the same way about it.  They mostly urged one another to take chemistry in person if possible--it was just too hard without the discipline and structure of regular lecture meetings. So tempted as I am to use my experience as evidence that online learning can work, I resist.  It can be excellent, but its excellence depends on the same factors (pedagogical labor, student preparation and motivation) that shape non-online learning.

The other surprise was just how bad it can be, and just what a difference that badness makes. Where the pedagogical labor is missing, all the excellent student preparation and motivation in the world will not make up for it.  The worst class I ever took was also online, a four-credit Introduction to Psychology.  By the end of the course, I had honed my skills in the following:

Ban Disconnection, Not Laptops

It's a great party, so no one complains when the NewYorker is late to it, but hasn't the issue of laptops in the classroom been fairly well canvassed by now?

I ban laptops, mostly.  In my small (<40 students) discussion-based classes, students build skills in interpretation and analysis.  For the most part, the information that gets delivered can be recorded on post-it notes attached to the relevant pages of the book we're discussing--and that's the method I recommend.  I point out that our classroom as is akin to a nature preserve or national park: one of the few remaining spaces where face-to-face conversation among people who are otherwise strangers is a method of attaining knowledge.

The Diversity Question

"You're a white instructor seeking employment at an institution of higher education where the enrollment of white students and the employment of white instructors over-represents the proportion of white people in the population. We recognize that these numbers are a problem for our institution, and though we may well will hire more white people for this job, we want to make sure that those white people we hire see it as a problem, too. So, what steps might we expect you take in the classroom to compensate for the fact that your sheer presence in no way (you're probably cis and lacking a visible disability) contributes to the diversity of our campus?" 

That's not the question that gets asked in interviews. For examples of questions that do get asked when college teaching staff is getting hired, you can google "interview questions about diversity in the classroom"--but at many institutions, they amount to the one I asked above.

The MLA Task Force on Being Nice to People Leaving Academia But Otherwise Keeping Things the Same

If modern languages and literatures survive as academic disciplines, it will be because students (and the people students become when they graduate: tax-payers, tuition-payers, and folks who make decisions about allocating public resources) recognize that taking these classes in college makes a difference.

But you wouldn't know it from reading the Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature.  The document has been well chewed over by now, and the indigestible truth lies strewn in tatters around us: there are far more qualified potential professors than there are jobs for them and Ph.D. students ought to be supported (not vilified) for their efforts to find work outside academia.  The bulk of the report's recommendations, though, have been slurped down like the tasty morsels of cluelessness that they are: alt-ac training?  technological know-how? watered down dissertations?  five years to degree?  Doctoral education confronts a supply-and-demand problem.  As many academic bloggers have pointed out, fantasizing about some alternative demand (that only a retooled supply of literature and language Ph.D.'s can fill) won't fix it.

Who Are the Warm Blankets?

The New York Times recently (4/11/14) published an interview with Daniel Chambliss, author (with Christopher Takacs) of How Colleges Work. That book title seems a little less imposing when you learn that the college in question is specifically, an elite SLAC.

Although Hamilton, a small, selective, expensive liberal arts college in upstate New York, has little in common with the large state universities and community colleges that most students attend, Dr. Chambliss said the lessons learned could apply everywhere.

Depends on the lessons, doesn't it? "It comes down to factors like dorm design, friends and extracurricular involvement more than what happens in the classroom," explains the New York Times interviewer, Tamar Lewin. This summary already points to some limitations of the project. For commuters, nontraditional students living outside the dorms, students combining their studies with full-time employment, there isn't a whole lot of college outside the classroom. 

 
Still, granted that "college" means "traditional students on a four-year plan," I'm willing to reserve judgment and read on, particularly as I spend a lot of time on this blog arguing for the importance of "what happens in the classroom." Turns out that it's more important than the interviewer first let on:

What should colleges do to make students’ experiences better? 

They should be looking for things that give the biggest payoff for the least effort. One hospital study found that patients reported a better experience if a nurse had offered them a warm blanket while they were on the gurney waiting for surgery. There are all kinds of “warm blankets” colleges can offer. Students who had a single dinner at a professor’s house were significantly more likely to say they would choose the college again. In learning to write, it made a lasting difference if students had at least one experience of sitting down with a professor to go over their work, paragraph by paragraph; for the students it was someone serious saying their writing was important.

This prescription doesn't surprise me. Students benefit from the close attention and care of the people who teach them. What seems puzzling is the equation of that care with "warm blankets." It's not that hard to get blankets warm and keep them handy. Creating an institutional culture where students can expect at some point to dine in a professor's home (when such practices haven't been the norm) is monumental. So is creating a teaching environment where students have the expectation that "someone serious" (not, presumably, a part-time composition instructor) will have the time to give them one-on-one attention to their writing. 

The institutions where these kinds of things routinely happen are not the kinds of institutions that supply most undergraduate students with a college education. And it's been a long time since the student-centered, labor-intensive dimensions of teaching have been at the center of the public delivery of higher education.

At many institutions, these kinds of outcomes can only be achieved if the "warm blankets" are contingent and underpaid faculty tasked with delivering one-on-one student attention. But I'm pretty sure that's not how they do it at Hamilton College.