Do Communication-Intensive Methods Improve Science Learning?

May 6, 2013 By 4 Comments

In January, I blogged about the collaboration between the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and Professor David Gruber, who is teaching Environmental Science 1020.  Both last semester and this semester, students in Professor Gruber’s class were assigned to lab groups and each group produced a Digital Lab Report for one lab.  The assignments we created were specific to the different learning goals of the labs; however, all required students to use at least one (often more) form of media and incorporate writing and critical reflection into the process.  Each group goes through a series of collaborative and creative steps.  These include: free-writing soon after the lab is complete; brainstorming; research to pull in other relevant material; posting raw footage, audio, and pictures on the class blog; and creating a rough draft of a Digital Lab Report (which might be a video, a podcast of a radio show, a timeline, or a Prezi depending on the assignment).  Then, groups present their rough drafts to the class and receive feedback on the communication, critical thinking, and content components of their DLRs.  Students have the opportunity to revise their Digital Lab Reports over the next couple of weeks before presenting their final versions.  For a timeline of this process for last semester’s Mutualism lab, click here.

There are many obvious benefits to having students create Digital Lab Reports.   They compel students to collaborate and converse more about their lab work.  They encourage critical thinking, as students are expected to articulate reflections on their work through the various stages.  They are fun – students often use humor.  They improve students’ media and communication skills because students get feedback on these aspects of their creations as well.  But the one main question at the back of my mind when we embarked on this project was whether communication intensive pedagogy actually helps students to learn science.

After almost a year of observation, I feel confident answering yes. In class last Wednesday students presented their drafts.  Their introductions to their Digital Lab Reports and the DLRs themselves gave us a great deal of insight into how they were understanding (or not understanding) scientific concepts in ways traditional lab reports might never reveal.  This is partially because the DLRs require students to consider their audience and speak to their audience.  This means re-phrasing scientific language to make it accessible.  To do this, students must take in information, analyze it, and reformulate it in their own way.  Furthermore, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the external information and images they brought in as examples gave Professor Gruber insight into how they had remembered and interpreted the concepts he had explicated, as well as what they were considering “real world” connections.  The collaborative aspects of the DLRs means that students have to hash out these ideas and arrive at a shared understanding.  After each draft presentation, groups were asked questions and received feedback from their peers, Professor Gruber, and me.   Through the process of revising their labs, they will have to address the inaccuracies or gaps in their understanding of scientific concepts.  Their next round of presentation drafts will let us know if and how their scientific thinking has changed.

For me, this reveals that communication and technology-intensive methods are particularly beneficial for science courses and have great potential to enhance student learning.

Filed Under: BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), CUNY, EdTech, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Science, Teaching, Technology

Shopping at Whole Foods: Class, Business and Yuppiedom at Baruch College

April 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
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Whole Foods: enter at your own risk.

At the beginning of every semester, students in my speech class interview each other about their life ambitions to collect material for their first mini-speeches of the semester.  And every semester I hear more-or-less the same thing: they want to make a lot of money.  Of course there are anomalies, but money is the dominant goal, at least within what students are willing to share with a room full of strangers.

At the same time, though, I notice a trend of judgment toward certain consumer practices deemed to be evidence of bourgeois privilege.  While I was leading a workshop in a Business Policy course a few weeks ago, a discussion of the business strategies of Whole Foods triggered a set of interesting responses.

A group of students studying the company suggested that Whole Foods sold not only natural foods and nutritional products but also an image of health, purity and affluence. Students were quick to disassociate themselves from the consumer body of Whole Foods shoppers.  Claims of “I don’t shop there” rang out around the room.  A student shared an anecdote about a relative who shops at the dreaded natural food store only for her baby.  Exorbitantly expensive organic bananas received their due share of ridicule.  I kept my dirty little secret to myself: I have been known to walk well out of my way to have lunch at the Whole Foods salad bar.

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Organic bananas for the baby.

I wondered: what does “shopping at Whole Foods” connote in the context of Baruch College?  Is it a useful metaphor for understanding something about the interplay of class aspirations, education and business in this particular academic community?

As readers will know, the CUNY system at large has historically been held to the standard (and has sometimes been seen as falling short) of enabling class mobility for New York City’s working, middle class and immigrant populations.  Dusana’s post back in February asked us to consider why so many students’ Business Policy presentations seem to advocate business strategies “rooted in exploitation and inequalities” when Baruch’s student body represents so many class, ethnic and immigrant groups who have born the brunt of these same inequalities.  At the same time, though, I think my anecdote conveys a strain of Baruch undergraduate culture that pushes back against the idea that success in business fields must go hand in hand with the assumption of lifestyle and consumption habits associated with affluence.

Baruch is an environment in which outer trappings of professionalism are valued.  Students are often required, for example, to dress professionally for class presentations.  For many students this is not an exercise or performance; they are professionals, coming to class after a day at the office, or heading off to an internship for the afternoon.  Of course, these outward signifiers are not neutral in their cultural connotations any more so than is shopping at an expensive organic grocery chain.

If we choose to read “shopping at Whole Foods” as a metaphor for a set of eschewed behaviors within the milieu of Baruch undergraduates, what specifically does it signify?  Perhaps it is a sign of being duped by a marketing coup that self-respecting business students pride themselves in detecting?  In the student’s anecdote, it was, tellingly, the baby only who ate organic products.  Maybe “shopping at Whole Foods” can be read as a sign of being born into privilege, rather than wealth and comfort achieved through education, work, and entrepreneurship.

These anecdotes encouraged me to consider the difference between professionalism and economic success on the one hand, and performance of affluence in culturally specific ways on the other.  Or at least they attuned me to the inevitable particularity of whatever the approved ways of spending one’s wealth are in a given social context.

But I’ll end this here, because I can no longer ignore my craving for organic gluten cubes and $12 local cashew juice.

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Cashew juice: an investment to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Culture, CUNY, Health, Uncategorized

“Trick or Treating” for Adults, After a Hurricane

November 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The day after Hurricane Sandy departed and left us with the mess, a close friend invited me to go “trick or treating” in the Carroll Gardens.  Now, you don’t have to twist my arm to ask strangers for chocolate; but this pre-Halloween expedition had a twist.  They were collecting provisions – flashlights, batteries, candles, canned goods – for people in the neighboring Red Hook, which had no electricity and was suffering pretty badly in Sandy’s wake.

I couldn’t join them, but a couple of days later I stole the idea and took students from a class I teach at Pratt Institute “trick or treating” in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.  If we started off rather timidly, two hours later we were boldly knocking on doors and could barely carry everything we’d collected.   Our laden arms made for lighter steps: after days of being worried, sad, frightened, frustrated, cut off, and/or inconvenienced there was something alleviating and just plain fun about talking to people we didn’t know and witnessing their impulse to give…something.  There was a British man who didn’t think he had anything that fit our list.  He asked us to wait while he checked and returned a few minutes later with an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels.  “That’s non-perishable,” he said.  Much to my students’ chagrin I gave it back.

As people opened their doors we caught a glimpse into well-lit homes that seemed largely unaffected by the storm but for those minor inconveniences that make you realize how lucky you usually have  it.  Then every so often, one of us would point to something, like a car pancaked under a fallen tree, and we’d remember even life here wasn’t  exactly “like normal.”  What I could load on to my back and bike rack I took to Red Hook the following day; the rest we dropped off at the nearby Brooklyn Tech, which was being used as an emergency shelter for evacuees whose lives had been uprooted.  Opening the doors of the school was a glimpse into a starkly different world – with mounds of donations and people stationed near the entrance to check you in, a depressing feeling in the air, and some of the 500 evacuees wandering in and out looking worn down, bored, anxious, displaced.  Right before we left, a young woman who saw me holding a sketchbook exclaimed: “Can I have that?  I’m going to make art!!”  She seemed the kind of person you could picture smiling through the apocalypse and I hope she’s somewhere around me when that shit goes down. I gave her the pad.

Over the next two days I went to Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Rockaways, Queens.  Most of what I did in both places was to deliver food and provisions to the homes of the elderly or infirmed who couldn’t collect it and had no heat or light in their public housing buildings.  I met people who were just so grateful for a warm meal, a mother and adult son who were living with a leaking roof and gusts of cold air blowing through their broken window, children desperate for a flashlight.   On the way to these sites, I passed a standstill line of cars over twenty blocks long waiting for gas, kids playing on fallen trees instead of jungle gyms, and streets along the coast where houses had been completely decimated.   Returning to my warm apartment where everything was fine except for the cell phone service had the same strange contrast of “trick or treating.”  Just like there is something eerie about comparing photos of lower Manhattan where folks were groping around in the dark for days and people living in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side still have no running water or flushing toilets to images of upper Manhattan, where as a friend aptly put it, women could still shop at Bergdorf’s and don their high heels.

But then this is New York.  Just walk down Madison Avenue from 120th to 80th Street sometime, think about the controversy over Stop and Frisk policing, or consider the city’s growing chasm between rich and poor and the effects of “city renewal” on the latter.   With Sandy, it was the very blatant division of have and have nots across new lines at a moment of collective uncertainty and crisis that had a visceral effect and appealed to an underlying ethic of compassion and justice most of us share.

Over the past days, I saw a lot of people coming together to help each other and themselves.  Many are people I know from CUNY who have been working morning to night since the storm to make sure their fellow New Yorkers have at least their very basic needs met.  Many are people who’ve been working on issues related to housing, debt, education, policing, labor, income disparity, environmental justice, you name it long before this storm hit.   I hope the important work of repairing and rebuilding the physical and social infrastructure of our city doesn’t stop with the obvious, but addresses some of the divisions that go back further and deeper so we can come out of this stronger than we’ve ever been.

Filed Under: CUNY, New York, Politics, To Ponder

Pastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics, ctd.

October 29, 2012 By 2 Comments

At the request of the author, we have unpublished “Pastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics.” All of the comments were unpublished with the post.

The author writes:

It was only speech. It caused no actual harm.

To be clear, this was the author’s decision and the author’s alone. We will be deliberating internally about any changes in policy to come about as a result of this episode.

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Education, Language, Liberal Arts

To Be or Not To Be

September 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

A few years ago I came across an anecdote by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh that’s stuck with me since. The tale goes something like this: A healthy child is born to a well-off family and all his neighbors agree that he is lucky. As a teenager, he loses his leg in an accident and they talk about his great misfortune. Years later, a war breaks out and because of his injury he is spared from the draft. Once again, he’s lucky. But later when the dead are counted and the damages assessed, he finds himself alone, having lost almost everyone dear to him. Again, he is unfortunate.  And so on. You get the drift. The obvious lesson is to take the long view, remembering that all that happens to us in life can only be interpreted according to (changing) context.

Maybe the allure of this tale for me was also a matter of context. In the time since I read it, I’ve embarked on the protracted path to a doctoral degree in Anthropology. And when you are on this road, to not “take the long view” generally means a steep fall to misery.

Women's Work, Women's Knowledge

A bit more specifically, my research is on food sovereignty, women’s agricultural labor, and rural social movements in the Himalayan region of India.  But, lest my name or ample supply of melatonin should fool you, let me explain that Hindi is not my mother tongue and my family does not speak it. There are more official languages  in India that I can count on my fingers and countless dialects. My family hails from a southern state called Tamilnadu where, for historical reasons too involved to delve into at the moment, Hindi has been considered the linguistic equivalent of the evil Darkseid.

Taking on learning a whole new idiom of sounds, an unfamiliar script, and a new grammatical system in the midst of the other requirements of my degree was daunting to say the least.  My first day in class I found myself sitting in a roomful of NYU undergrads, most of whom were about half my age and came from homes where Hindi or some cognate was spoken.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so obtuse as I did sitting in class, trying to latch onto something recognizable in the swirl of foreign sounds, wondering why my efforts seemed to have so little pay off, and not knowing how I was going to physically get to campus four days a week in the midst of work, teaching, and a full time graduate course load.  Google Translate didn’t help. Inevitably, my homework returned to me bleeding red, often with unhealable wounds.  To say I was discouraged would be a massive understatement. Wasn’t a doctorate about becoming “expert” enough to share valuable insights?  And if so, shouldn’t I have chosen a place and language with which I already had comfort and fluency?

Two years since my first Hindi class I’ve adopted the long view.  I just returned from a summer in India where after a month of intensive language study, I visited potential research sites and had the surprising experience of going to places I had been before with a new ability to converse with people.  On earlier visits, I had felt mute in areas where English wasn’t spoken, like some vital part of myself had been amputated. Now despite all the flaws in my comprehension and speaking, my skills were good enough to  ask and answer questions, to talk about things that mattered.  Besides the obvious practical benefits, the forced humility, the struggle to mold my mouth to new sounds, the necessity of listening closely, and the attempts to understand and put into practice a different grammatical logic has deepened both my ability to empathize with others and my understanding of myself.

Speaking Hindi while Making Rotee

There are many things in Hindi that have made me re-think things I previously took as self-evident.  Here I will mention one.  My teacher this summer — a grammarian and proud owner of over 400 dictionaries –  asked me to define “hai” (है). My answer was rote: “to be.”  “That is wrong!” he barked.  I was confounded.  In every Hindi class I had taken the meaning of “hai” was either directly taught or implied as “to be.”  But, no.  If the English “to be” was the  infinitive form of a verb, what was the equivalent of “hai?” I was stuck. I had only ever used “hai” conjugated in sentences.  Exactly.  “Hai,” he explained, derives from the Sanskrit “asti,” which means existence.  है has no infinitive because according to the philosophy from which it has evolved there is no abstract state of being, no sense of existence outside of particular circumstances, relationships, things, people, events.  He, for one, could not understand the English “to be”  in the same way, perhaps, it would be difficult to conceive of “sunset” without “sun.” The complacent translation of “hai” as “to be” in Hindi classes was not only a misinterpretation but an imposition that effaced something critical.

When I left class, I had है on the brain.  I thought about how “I have one brother” in Hindi was “mera aik bhai  hai.” But translated literally it was more like “My one brother is.”  Thus the Hindi sentence suggested existence not ownership, and the “I” and “brother” were not emphasized as separate subject and object but were merged in a relational state of existence.  It was different from when you said “I have two clocks,” which incorporated the additional word “pas” to connote material possession of an object separate from oneself.  I was realizing how much these distinctions mattered.  They challenged assumptions I made about language and life.  I saw that in my notebook my teacher had written “मेरा मन है (Mera man hai).” It means “I have a mind” – or translated literally: My mind exists (as part of myself).  But then, the Hindi “मन,” which derives from the Sanskrit “मनस्” does not just mean “mind”  but “mind-heart-consciousness.”  These are understood to be interrelated at the source – another good thing for a doctoral student to keep in मन.

All images by the author.

Filed Under: Culture, CUNY, Interpersonal Communication, Language

Speaking, Acting, and Taking Your Shoes Off

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sydney, 1938 / Sam Hood (State Library of New South Wales collection)

In preparation for an upcoming CLASP (CUNY League of Active Speech Professors) symposium at Hostos Community College, I have been reflecting on this meaty topic: Theatre Practice and Communication Studies–the Intersection of Two Vital Disciplines.

Over the last few years, I have had opportunities to think about this from a number of perspectives, but when trying to compose my thoughts in a coherent form for the panel, I needed a jumping off point. I went back and looked at an article about the role of the introductory theatre course in the liberal arts curriculum, which the Institute’s Director, Mikhail Gershovich, co-wrote with theatre scholars (then Fellows) Amy Hughes and Jill Stevenson. A baseline assumption of the article is the reciprocal exchange between actor and spectator that makes theatre studies “an ideal forum in which to explore the means and methods of effective oral and written communication.”[1]  As I read, I discovered one potential source of my writer’s block; the panel topic requires elaboration on a point of intersection that has become intuitive. I have conditioned myself to take these principles for granted in my teaching and my coaching of students, as I time and again return to the basics of theatre collaboration: as the article spells out, in the classroom these basics (ideally) translate into encouraging cooperation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, diverse talents and ways of learning. Speech and theatre arts become just two chummy pals, the cookies and milk of the liberal arts curriculum.

Even though I recognize that disciplinary battles between theatre and speech have a long and sordid history, I’ve often found the opposite to be true—that faculty boldly yell across these divisions, in an effort to get past what are really just departmental (or bureaucratic) boundaries—boundaries which are changing more slowly than our pedagogies. My charmed vantage point might have to do with the fact that I have had “communications people” expect certain strengths from me as a “theatre person,” and vice versa, and rarely confront the kind of “get out of my playground” mentality for which many academic fields are famous.

This can sometimes cause problems, too. Maybe you’ve had the same experience: when considered the “theatre person” in the room full of “communications people”– disciplinary divisions being what they are—it is assumed that you’ll be the one capable of immediately engaging students in a full body warm-up, making inflexible students flexible, convincing shy students to pop from their shell, evoking diaphragmatic breathing from the whisperers, and, at a moment’s notice, reveal a grab bag of tricks and strategies that will free them from their frozen stances. Because of these assumptions, when I began teaching Public Speaking– and before that, English as a Second Language– I occasionally felt like a fraud; I didn’t actually have in-depth training in voice or movement as an actor, beyond an inglorious stint on an improv team in college. (Many of my performance experiences were  in the realm of performance poetry, which privileged the word over any other consideration.) My academic theatre training focused on dramatic structure and playwriting, along with critical reading of texts– theatrical theory and plays– and I believed my strengths in the speech course would stem from there, through structure, research, and analysis. (When forced by curricular fiat to take acting courses, I shrank in fear of being asked to remove my shoes in the presence of other students.)

But I warmed to the challenge of being the “theatre person” among the communications people in part because I realized that their expectations reflected a true need among our students—and a potential gap in public speaking courses. The hope that a “theatre person” could more efficiently tackle these needs inspires me to believe in the best that theatre training can and should offer, within the context of a communications course. It is this inter/disciplinary “hope” that has slowly infused my speech teaching practices with “borrowings” from the theatre discipline: I now rely on my comfort watching and discussing the body and its relationship to breath, or my familiarity with the push and pull between the rehearsal process and the eventual work, and I follow my desire to push the desks aside in order to transform a classroom into a training space.

Additionally, in my experiences at the Institute– where one of my responsibilities last year was to support sections of Introduction to Theatre Arts– I met instructors who wanted to integrate communication goals into their coursework, but felt that approaching the course through dramatic literature tied their hands. They had fallen into a routine of assigning play reviews and response papers, rarely asking their students to move from a written to an oral form of communicating ideas. Usually this was “fixed” easily, since the instructor had already designed the course to encourage active learning and collaboration, allowing for numerous places of oral communication interventions. Taking it a step further, we would brainstorm where public speaking challenges might belong in this model of the theatre arts class—a discussion that frequently boiled down to assignment design.

In the context of the proposed Pathways Initiative– which would mean real changes to prioritization of Speech Communications courses within the CUNY curriculum– it is important to go beyond oral communications as something that can be “tacked on” to any discipline with ease, and to ask real questions about the actual needs of students, not disciplinary divisions. (And this post is in no way meant to be reflecting simultaneously on Pathways, although I invite thoughts on how it relates.) The CLASP panel is looking at intersections between theatre practice and speech not because intersections are all the rage, but because it is the divisions that have proven unproductive with time. For the individual instructor, the most important challenge becomes seeing beyond the intimidating gaps separating that “Other” discipline, and rather to see shared goals between the two.

[1] Amy E. Hughes, Jill Stevenson, and Mikhail Gershovich, “Community through Discourse: Reconceptualizing Introduction to Theatre,” Theatre Topics 16, No.1 (March 2006): 86.

 

Filed Under: BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), CUNY, Faculty Development, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,

Knowledge Politics #1: Critical University Studies

March 9, 2012 By 4 Comments

Following my last post, I had a bit of a heated exchanged with a commenter named Ryan. What came up for me from that was a desire to more fully articulate the relationship between knowledge and politics. I attempted to do something like this back in October, but as usual I bit off more than I could chew and wrote a long and probably esoteric-sounding post. I want to try again, so in the coming weeks I will attempt a series of posts that focus on the politics of knowledge from a few different angles. I hope this will be a place to work through some of my questions, and I eagerly welcome comments and feedback.

There has been much discussion recently of how to make teachers more “accountable” through measurable data, and of how and when to involve new technologies in the classroom or even to develop internet-based courses and degrees. These are important issues but, as with so many things, public debate surrounding them is for the most part superficial and shortsighted. Instead of having a real conversation about the politics of knowledge, we are distracted by reductive ideas of accountability and shallow notions of technological advance.

CUNY City College of New York

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Filed Under: Administration, Culture, CUNY, Education, Higher Education, Law, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Online Learning, Peer Review, Politics, Scholarship, Teaching, To Ponder, Uncategorized

A Valentine for CUNY Speech Students

March 1, 2012 By 2 Comments

I CUNY SPEECH

On Valentine’s Day I participated as a member of the jury for the CUNY wide speech competition. This is an annual speech competition organized by the CUNY League of Active Speech Professors (CLASP). CLASP is a faculty led organization that promotes and supports faculty teaching speech courses, speech events and professional development related to communication and speech.

The CUNY wide speech competition is in its 6th year and involves students from all the CUNY colleges with speech courses or programs. The students are selected by faculty from each CUNY campus and come together for one event in the spring.  They compete in either the informative speech category or the persuasive speech category. Unfortunately not all CUNY colleges offer speech courses and so not all of CUNY is represented.

Every year this competition is a jubilant showcasing of the best and brightest of CUNY undergraduates, who come from every background and study in every discipline.  This year was no different than before as 12 handsome and poised young men and women sat on the side of the stage waiting for their turn to step up to the front of the stage and take the audience by storm.  Each speaker was articulate and passionate, with a speaking style so distinctive that I often felt I was watching a CUNY version of Leonard Bernstein’s musical about New York, On the Town.

All of the students used the three classic elements of Aristotle’s poetics. They had a clear sense of purpose, a definite authenticity to the argument and its facts, as well as the way the whole speech was structured. The use of evidence was a little weak because many students cited websites more frequently than established authors or institutes of research. On the other hand this was a big help to the jury for without use of evidence as a heavily weighted category, it would have been impossible to select a winner based on delivery alone.

One student gave a speech on how young people should not have sex before a certain age. Throughout the speech in an almost revival style she repeated the title of her speech, “I’m not saying no, I’m just saying not yet.” By the end of her speech several audience members were saying the phrase with her. Another student took the audience through the step-by-step process of how animals are used in bio medical research. Though half of the audience, including the jury, did not understand most of the scientific vocabulary we all oohed and ahhd as we watched his slides demonstrating the process of cell deterioration resulting from pesticides on our vegetables.

One of the more moving speeches was a persuasive speech on the Dream Act where a young woman established her credibility by recounting how she had lost out on a scholarship to MIT because of her unclear legal status. This young mother of two ended her speech, front and center, by asking the audience to support our children’s future, our neighbor’s future and our country’s future by advocating for the Dream Act. She received resounding applause from students in the audience.

One of the reasons why I like the CUNY speech competition so much is my personal belief that speaking in public is a crucial part of any urban student’s education. Formal and competitive persuasive speech demands of our students a commitment to something and a desire to have the public’s attention beyond all else. It is fundamental for an individual to learn how to educate and advocate for the beliefs and policies that will determine their own lives. In a city and a country where no one seems to listen unless you are in the public eye, it is a pleasure and reassuring to see students taking a step into the spotlight and trying out their own voices.

Frederick B. Robinson, Public Speaking Class 1910 (City College Archives)

A day after the speech contest I found in some of my research papers on the history of CUNY, a 1910 photograph of Frederick B. Robinson, future CCNY president, lecturing female students in the art of public speaking. Though Robinson was later criticized for denying free speech to CCNY students during the turbulent 1930s. I thought it was worth mentioning that public speaking has been a core part of our university since the Free Academy’s beginnings. The original curriculum listed public oral exams and rhetoric as a course for the first entering freshman class.

Filed Under: CUNY, Oral Communication

Ethics and Politics in the Classroom

February 22, 2012 By 6 Comments

Last year I walked to class one day with a student. He told me that where he comes from professors are highly respected and that for him it was an honor to be walking to class with me. He also expressed surprise and curiosity about my being a professor at such a young age, since in his country the title of professor is usually attached to much older people. Finally, with no prompting from me, he began to explain to me why he is a proud Republican.

an honor to be walking

He told me that, as a devout Christian, he would like abortion to be completely outlawed. Furthermore, as an immigrant to this country, he would like all forms of governmental safety net to be abolished, forcing people to work harder and making things “more fair.” Finally he suggested that U.S. society can basically be understood as a conflict between white people and black people in which black people are responsible for most of the problems.

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Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Asides, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Debating, Education, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, New York, Pedagogy, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized

Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations

December 21, 2011 By 5 Comments

The very existence of my research site is unethical.  It is a place of poverty and death—a mountaintop tuberculosis sanatorium in Romania where many patients are incurable. They know their situation is hopeless. Dozens of patients I have personally known died during the course of my research. Some have told me that because they are dying, they want to tell me their stories and to help those who still might live.  I enter into every interview knowing that I may not have the opportunity for follow-up questions.  My months living there were filled with ethically tricky situations, from patients (and nurses) asking for my medical opinions to being propositioned sexually by patients. The worst was when Florin a chubby-faced 20 year old patient committed suicide the same day I interviewed him. His doctor gave him the bad news that he had the same highly resistant strain of TB as his father and he would have to stay at the sanatorium much longer. He was so scared, that evening he left and hung himself. I didn’t find out until months later when I asked his father, now also dead of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) how his son was. I didn’t know what despair looked like until I saw that man, cheeks sunken in, wearing his dead son’s brightly colored hooded sweatshirt. When he finally died, I was disgusted with myself for thinking it was merciful–that maybe death was better than constantly being tortured for infecting his son with a deadly disease.   My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this—in fact nothing did. Here I was worrying about protecting my participants from my research, but who was protecting them from their own lives?

© Jonathan Stillo This couch, where crying relatives sit waiting for the patient to be admitted is the saddest place in the sanatorium. Sometimes, the goodbyes said here are final ones.

The most important “ethics review” I ever received did not come my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the Romanian medical ethics board which both approved my anthropological research on tuberculosis in Romania. Rather, it came from Mr. Gheorghe, a fifty year- old Roma man dying of MDR-TB,   when he stepped out on the sanatorium balcony and told anyone within earshot something close to the following: “Jonathan is a good person. He wants to know about your lives and your families. You should talk to him.” I could feel myself blushing as he said this. His opinion mattered to the other patients, especially because he was the one selling them cigarettes out of his nightstand. Suddenly, other patients seemed eager to speak with me when they had been aloof and skeptical only days before.  Gheorghe didn’t live long enough for me to thank him, he died of a “massive hemoptysis” a technical way of saying he coughed up a massive amount of blood. This is how TB patients often die and it is terrifying.

©Jonathan Stillo Hemoptysis- As patients grow sicker, they cough up blood, sometimes pints at a time.

It took years for me to obtain the official permissions required to live at a Romanian TB sanatorium. I even had to sign a waiver for the U.S. National Science Foundation that they were not liable if I caught the disease. But just having the permission of my university and the Romanian government were not enough. I had to actually ask patients for their permission to ask them about sensitive issues, sometimes asking dying patients about their regrets and about how their families will survive without them.  Part of my initial problem was I didn’t know how to ask the patients to let me interview and survey them. Following my IRB protocol, I showed them my stamped informed consent, a full page of Romanian legalese with talk of risks and benefits. I would read sections out loud and the more “informed” the patients became the more uncomfortable they became. This level of formality does not exist in most aspects of their lives. They could not understand that if I only wanted to talk with them, why I needed such involved paperwork with multiple signatures, dates and stamps.  In fact, when I submitted my original protocol to the Romanian medical ethics board, I was laughed at and told that this research did not need approval because it was not “clinical”.

What did patients care about? That I would protect their identities and that the process was voluntary. Everything else, including talk of risks and benefits, names and numbers of people to contact, made them uncomfortable.  They just wanted my assurance that I would maintain their confidentiality by not publishing their names.  Many patients did not even have an expectation of privacy and did not feel qualified to make the decision as to whether or not they should participate in my research. They did not want to hear about protocols. Rather, they wanted someone that they trusted to tell them it was ok and that they could trust me. A document from my IRB could not accomplish this, only someone else vouching for me could.

I gained the endorsement of Mr. Gheorghe by accident.  There was no plan, he just seemed willing to talk so I sat on his bed with him and asked about photographs on his wall, one of a handsome young man in a military uniform (him during socialism), another of a strikingly beautiful woman on a motorcycle (his 18 year old daughter) and my favorite, him and his wife proudly standing with their eight children in front of their rural home. He told me that doctors never sit on patient’s beds and they never ask about things like this. Visiting doctors and researchers only care about numbers and information on the patient charts. They are not interested in patient’s lives, only their disease.

In my last post, The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook,  I suggested that the reason for the existence of IRBs is not primarily the protection of research participants. Rather, it is to provide legal protection to institutions such as hospitals and universities which despite their non-profit status, operate more like businesses every day. Every researcher connected with the CUNY system must undergo an online ethics training course where they are without fail, asked questions about the Tuskegee syphilis study and the importance of informed consent. The problem is that researchers in any time are operating under the ethical norms of their particular time and place. Withholding antibiotics from those men long after their syphilis could have been cured is ethically unconscionable now, but then, it was not, at least to enough of the people involved. Today, it is still the medical industry (specifically pharmaceutical companies) that is pushing (and in my opinion far exceeding ethical boundaries, in spite of the presence of IRBs in virtually every medical and educational institution.

US CDC Venereal Disease Branch (1970-73) Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo

In Romania, people generally don’t sue each other, especially the impoverished patients I work with. They live on a mountain “beyond the sight of God” as one patient put it. They don’t have access to lawyers and cannot even call or email the contact info on my informed consent because they lack internet access and money for international calls. When these patients give me their informed consent, it is informed by the personal relationship I have with them and those they know. They do so with the knowledge that they would have little recourse if I did behave unethically. It makes their consent all the more meaningful. Ultimately consent, at least in my research site, has little to do with my protocols and institutional approvals. For the patients informed consent is not something I read out loud to them, it is earned over the course of months through drinking coffee, staring off the balcony and exchanging stories of our families. It is something I take seriously not because of the IRB, but because I know that the people sharing their lives with me trust me on a personal level. I owe it to them to behave in a way that is ethically appropriate and respects their humanity and dignity. I think at this point we have a system of ethics approval which is designed by clinicians and enforced by lawyers for the protection of hospital and university endowments in a litigious society. It is the worst of possible worlds and despite best intentions 20 years from now, future researchers will read of all of the unethical research that took place even in this age of IRBs.

I think part of the issue is that ethical research means different things to different people and institutions. In the technical, clinical and legal language of U.S. IRBs, it means limiting “risk” to the study participants. This definition of ethics was inadequate for one of my Romanian transcribers who did not want to work on my project unless there was an actual benefit to Romanian TB patients—that I am not simply studying their “biosociality” or some other nebulous academic nonsense, but rather trying to use my research to improve people’s lives. I told her that is the only reason why I research. This is the same concern that many patients had. However, it never comes up in my U.S. ethics reviews.  I wish it did.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, CUNY, To Ponder
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