Archive for the 'Higher Education' Category

Guerrillas in the Midst

Published
by
Luke
on May 28, 2010
in Baruch College and Higher Education
. Closed

This post originally was published at my personal blog, Bloviate. If you wish to comment, click on the title and add to the discussion there!

One of the secret missions behind my work with Mikhail Gershovich in developing an open source publishing platform at Baruch College is to gradually integrate into the school’s general education curriculum the deep, critical examination of how digital tools are changing the way we think and live. This curricular purpose is not currently present on any kind of scale at our college. Because of political realities at the school, we’ve very much built Blogs@Baruch in a haphazard, take-what-we-can-get kind of way, and we haven’t had the luxury of being systematic about the thing. But we’re now two years into our experiment, and we’re widely established enough throughout the college that we’re confident we will continue to operate. We’re now able to theorize what we’ve done and to strengthen our case for more attention to the types of curricular innovation we’d like to see.

Creative Commons License photo credit: jectre

Of course, we’re far from the only ones considering these questions, and we’re certainly not the only ones who’ve borrowed the terminology of revolution to cheekily make our case. Matt Gold has already done a fantastic job creating a hit-and-run guide to guerrilla pedagogy that delineates the tools, philosophy, and connective processes requisite at its core. Gardner Campbell has argued for a trajectory in liberal education towards the development of media fluency and in favor of a shift from both “signature pedagogies” to “pedagogies of signature” and from general education to generalizable education. Gardner has also spoken passionately about the role of movements around the integration of digital tools into the work of higher education in destabilizing the institutions at our center. Joss Winn and Mike Neary have written of “The Student as Producer,” connecting pedagogies that place the student squarely in the role of knowledge-maker within broader efforts to combat the corporatization of higher education and to reimagine a university that for once might be fully committed to the development of humanistic thinkers. Jeff McClurken has argued smartly that digital literacy is something that should be developed within the disciplines and shown how, though I’d guess he’d agree that such an approach does not preclude a broader college-wide addressing of these questions. And besides being actively involved in building the tools from the ground up, Boone Gorges has brilliantly theorized the structural similarities between the types of communication and personalized connections that happen within social media and the specific goals of a college’s general education program.

There are others, many others, who’ve been doing this type of work and thinking, and their models and theories are very much the fuel that propels us along our path.

Che Groom

Creative Commons License photo credit: 5tein Blogs@Baruch has evolved along three broad publishing contours in its first two years, and each can be seen as a step towards developing a foundation upon which those in power at the College might do some tough thinking about how the general education could be reimagined. This said, I have no idea whether or not they might do this, or even when the gen ed was last revisited. But if they call, we’ll be ready to contribute what we’re learning.

Non-Course Publishing

We’ve become the go-to shop for folks at the College who want to get stuff online. Student publications, online magazines, faculty development sites, exhibits, extra-curricular project journals, document reviews using CommentPress, grant competitions and committee sites… we host them all.

Members of our community now recognize that they no longer need HTML skills to be able to publish to the web or CSS skills to control how what they publish looks. On the flip side, each of the individuals and groups involved in these projects has been forced to confront questions of audience, tone, purpose, tools, design, and connectedness. This has spurred conversations that otherwise might have been offloaded to a contracted web group, or might not have happened at all. The Schwartz Institute, through our nurturing of these conversations, has joined the staff of the Newman Library at the center of thinking on campus about the role of digital tools in the varied work of the college. This broad “culture of self-publishing” is raising the overall digital literacy of staff, faculty, and administrators at the College by creating and sustaining unavoidable engagement with the implications of doing professional and intellectual work on the open web. This engagement has been more incidental than systematic, but it’s been ongoing and persistent, and more and more people are taking part.

Course-based Publishing

Our most exciting work is taking place inside of courses. We’ve supported more than a hundred course sections over the last two years, and they are inspiring faculty members towards more experimental and experiential pedagogy. We’ve featured much of this work at Cac.ophony.org. Some courses are using Blogs@Baruch as little more than an open CMS, taking advantage of a flexible aesthetic to create a more intimate relationship between students and their engagement with course materials online. Others have used the system to explode students’ prevailing understandings of audience by creating and capturing collaborative writing through the integration of wikis, scaffolding research papers in public groups, or bringing in the voices of outside authorities. Many have used the power of writing for classmates’ consumption (and beyond) to raise the stakes of an assignment. Some have staged engagement with a difficult text through a dialogic close reading that evolves into performed knowledge about the themes of the work. Many have taken advantage of lowered barriers of entry to the production of multi-media work to create opportunities for students to engage with course themes and texts through video and other media, and then to write about how the process impacts their understanding of the genres engaged in the course. Most have embraced the connectedness of the web to integrate additional resources into their teaching and expose students to critical research methods.

These courses have done three types of work. First, they’ve produced models that are replicable within this college and beyond, and fueled a buzz and interest in teaching with digital tools that hadn’t been very present on campus until recently. Second, they’re helping us develop a local “community of practice” committed to dialogue around the implications of digital pedagogy, which has filtered into the faculty development initiatives already afoot at the Schwartz Institute. And, third and most importantly, these courses have worked to instill in students a critical sense of how to exist intellectually and professionally on the Web by spurring dozens of small conversations about online ethics, linking, sharing, identity, performance, knowledge building, collaboration, mashing, hacking, looking, listening, and learning. These conversations have not been systematized, but they’re most definitely happening.

Social Publishing

The third contour in which we’ve been working is social publishing. This is an infant compared to the two toddlers described above, and is based primarily in our work supporting Freshman Seminar, which draws all incoming students into conversations on Blogs@Baruch. I’ll spare you the details of how the project has evolved, which you can read up on by following this tag on Cac.ophony.org. We hope that our pending integration of BuddyPress will both challenge some of the alienation that happens on a purely commuter campus, and enable what Matt Gold has called “serendipitous connections” around shared interests that otherwise might not happen. Matt and George Otte’s framing and stewardship of the CUNY Academic Commons is very much our model for structuring and naming such a possibility. This coming Fall our first year students will be writing creative blog posts that integrate freely-available digital tools to examine their own processes of identity formation. In doing so, they will be sharing and connecting their experiences to others at the school and beyond, and also reflecting upon the choices they make and tools they use. This is non-credit bearing work, but we hope that it will provide for our students a critical base from which to use the web to engage and learn that they will carry through their four years at the College.

All of the above work intersects only incidentally with the formal general education curriculum at the College. And, yet, I think we can safely say that what we’ve built with Blogs@Baruch has impacted the generalizable education that our students are getting. What’s needed, however, is some kind of systematization, which will create more points of reflection and articulation, more staging towards digital and media fluency, and more buy-in across the curriculum. As guerrillas, we’ve made and built our critique while modeling an alternative approach to supporting educational technology that saves the College money and raises its profile. If we are indeed in the midst of the revolution that will remake higher education, then we stand with our colleagues at the vanguard, arguing that universities must embrace the core values of the open web, and work them systematically into curricula.

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

Published
by
Michael
on May 4, 2010
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction and teaching
. 2 Comments

I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.

The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?

Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.

I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”

Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.

Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.

Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.

Is this really such a disgraceful idea?

Digital R&R Makes You Smarter

Published
by
Wendy
on April 19, 2010
in Art, Fun, Higher Education, Pedagogy, Technology and literature
. 3 Comments

Gaiman Neverwhere
Photo credit Comixology

Recently I was reading a comic book on my iPhone on the subway ride to Brooklyn, and a few people noticed what I was reading and asked me about it. The first person to ask me was someone who had never seen a comic in that format and wanted to know more, so I told him what I was reading and how I had found it using the Comics app I’d downloaded from Comixology. [I didn't mention that I had just learned about the app from Joe Ugoretz's tweet about it -- thanks, Joe!] Later in the same ride, I met a nice guy named Greg who just wanted to know which app I was using to download comics, to discuss with his friend nearby, both of them being great comic book aficionados. It turned out his friend, Karen Green, curates the graphic novel collection for the library at Columbia University and actually writes a column for Comixology called Comic Adventures in Academia.

We talked about what series the two of them were reading, and the ones I had tried in my new exploration of the genre. Comics are a little small in this format, but the iPhone presents them to you one frame at a time in a cool way. From there we moved on to a more general discussion of graphic novels and what they have to offer, including for instructors. I admitted I was a little self-conscious about my students knowing I read comics in my spare time (although Karen Green said, “Don’t be!”) I often find comics that are so well-written I want to share them. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, for example, is so literary, so steeped in Shakespeare and classical mythology, that I had wondered if I should recommend it to students. (Karen said, “Absolutely!”) I found her column online later and saw how she takes a proactive role at Columbia in “influencing faculty to use comics in their coursework in innovative ways,” which made me start thinking about how graphic novels could be used in different courses. I think I just like fantasy and science fiction in whatever format it appears: novel, film, graphic novel, digital comic. That’s why I am enjoying the comics app I just discovered, and may start to think of ways to occasionally use comic books in coursework. I have been teaching an online course called Digital Information in the Contemporary World, and it fits in nicely there. In another kind of course? I’ll have to read more of Karen’s column for inspiration.

David Parsons posted here on cac.ophony recently about students bringing distracting gadgets into the classroom, and included some amazing footage of professors smashing the offending technology in front of the class. [Can they really do that?!?] Szidonia in her comment wondered whether overuse of technology shrinks our brains. I guess my own experience with digital comics and graphic novels more generally is that I feel they have worth to me personally and potentially as teaching tools, even though the enjoyment I take in reading them makes them feel like guilty pleasures.

Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion

Published
by
Luke
on April 9, 2010
in Administration, Art, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Higher Education, Liberal Arts and Media
. 2 Comments

Several units at Baruch College, including the Schwartz Institute, are planning an initiative for the next two academic years: Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion. The broad goal of the project is to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center while more deeply integrating the performing arts into the curriculum and the life of the College. We are finalists for a Creative Campus Grant, a competition funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, and organized by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. The project will proceed even if we don’t get the grant (winners will be announced in August), although the programming will be more robust with the additional resources.

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

  • Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
  • Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
  • Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

How blunt is too blunt?

Published
by
David Parsons
on February 24, 2010
in Higher Education and Interpersonal Communication
. 3 Comments

Untitled
Creative Commons License photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?

Blogs@Baruch Semester in Review: Part Four, Extra-Curricular Blogging

Published
by
Luke
on December 17, 2009
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education and Technology
. 1 Comment

The Baruch College community has begun to see Blogs@Baruch not just as a blogging platform or substitute course management system, but also as powerful tool for meeting a wide range of self-publishing needs.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 12.30.35 PMA variety of constituencies at the College have begun using the system for a range of internal and external communication. We have some fantastic librarians at the Newman Library, and they’re using Blogs@Baruch for a Reference Blog, an Idea Lab, and a Graduate Research Blog. They’ve also begun using CommentPress to discuss a Library Planning document. The Institute shares many interests and goals with the College’s librarians, and we have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in collaborating with them to explore the role of technology and self-publishing in cultivating digital literacies among our students. This semester’s conversations were a great start.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 12.29.08 PMThe Baruch College Honors Program has begun using Blogs@Baruch this semester for a number of projects. They’re now hosting their homepage on the site, taking advantage of WordPress’ elegant content management features, and offering the staff an easy way to stay in contact with students (current and prospective). Also, first year Baruch Scholars have been given their own blogs to cultivate over their careers here, and their posts aggregate here. This is envisioned as a kind-of low stakes eportfolio project: give the students the space, and encourage (but don’t require) them to explore it. Another interesting Honors publishing initiative is the Change For Kids blog, where students working as reading tutors in a number of New York City elementary schools are blogging about their experiences, taking advantage of the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on and work through the challenges of working with children. Kudos to the Baruch Honors Program!

Frank Fletcher, the Executive Director of the Graduate Programs at the Zicklin School of Business, has been spearheading the business school’s move towards self-publishing. Frank has been encouraging his colleagues in Zicklin to explore a variety of initiatives on Blogs@Baruch over the past six months, and is now publishing to Lexington 24:25, where he’ll highlights developments in the MBA program and “identify emerging needs and trends in management education.” We look forward to supporting Zicklin, particularly in their efforts to connect Baruch students with potential employers and alumni.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 12.27.53 PMThree journals are now hosted on Blogs@Baruch. Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics is edited and authored by Baruch undergrads, launched last month (see details here), and we look forward to seeing that project continue to evolve. Dollars & Sense, which used to publish the selected journalism of Baruch students once a year as a beautiful (but costly to produce) magazine, now publishes on a rolling basis, for free, using Blogs@Baruch. While I myself miss the bound hard copy version, and see this transition as a microcosm of the larger troubles facing journalism, I’m happy that the faculty members who oversee the project– Josh Mills and Andrea Gabor– see the opportunities that are made available by self-publishing. For instance, student work produced in the fall doesn’t need to wait until the spring for publication; a wider range of work can be featured; and it’s now easier to share the work of our students with a much broader audience. Finally, iMagazine, the journal of student writing overseen by the Baruch College Writing Center, is in the process of migrating to Blogs@Baruch; stay tuned for a launch early next calendar year at this url.

There are other ongoing initiatives: the journalism department is using Blogs@Baruch to plan a new The East 20s, a food news site being created by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch, and to serve the multimedia reporting of its students. The Baruch College Teaching Blog remains active. And, well, we can even include Cac.ophony.org as a Blogs@Baruch initiative; our fellows have simply been killing it this semester.

These are just a few of the most exciting non course-based uses of Blogs@Baruch; there are others in the planning stages that promise to take advantage of the power of this publishing platform to create unique opportunities for members of the Baruch community to interact with each other and audiences beyond the campus. One is our plan to support selected student bloggers who’ll be tasked with chronicling their lives at the College for a broader audience. I’ve often said that we have the most interesting students in the world, but few of them know just how interesting they are. Blogs@Baruch, by providing multiple paths into the work our students and faculty are doing, makes the case more powerfully than I ever could.

I want to be an academic when I grow up!

Published
by
David Parsons
on December 11, 2009
in Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Pedagogy and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

curvy_road_horizontal
Creative Commons License photo credit: andysternberg

Recently a Baruch undergraduate student, after listening to my advice on her Sociology 1000 paper, asked me, “So, what are you?”  I replied in the usual way, explaining that I’m a Writing Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and that my role is to help students with specific writing assignments in their Sociology/Anthropology courses.

The student looked at me, still confused.  ”Yeah, but, are you a professor?  Or a student?  Or what?”  At this point I extrapolated my role even further, describing each step of the graduate school journey, regaling her with such terms as “adjuncting,” “Level III,” “dissertation committee” and, of course, “tenure-track.”  After shaking the glaze of catatonic boredom from her eyes, she asked me a follow-up question that ended up stumping me completely:  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

This brings me to the (intended) subject of this post, which is the sometimes difficult task of answering students’ questions about graduate school and academia as a career. Of course, every academic has different ideas about WHY they became an academic, with some I’m sure regretting the entire enterprise, but I think that answering these kinds of questions presents an excellent opportunity to clarify your own ideas about academia, career, your particular discipline, and even your sense of self.  Particularly for those “Level III” graduate students looking at impending job interviews, this may be a good time, as scary as it can seem, to practice formally justifying your major life decisions.

For reasons that remain unclear, lots of students ask me about graduate school.  Below are three typical student concerns, and a few ideas for how to approach them:

1.  ”Will I be able to make money?”

This question comes most often from one of Baruch’s numerous business-oriented students.  I often will engage them in a conversation about current events, particularly developments in the world of finance since say, oh, last October.  I try to honestly explain that academia is an industry like any other, subject to booms and busts, internal corruption, and strained budgets. However, in general, education is also a field with considerably more historical permanence than, for instance, day-trading.  With this question, you would do best to take a middle route.  It’s probably a bad idea to reinforce the whole teleology of the “job at the end of the college tunnel” anyway.  Say something about learning for learning’s sake, but don’t get preachy.

2.  ”Are you glad YOU went to graduate school?”

Ooh.  Hmm.  This can be a tricky one, especially if caught on a bad day.  First of all, as academics, we already have a tendency to make answers to questions like these extraordinarily complicated.  But there’s no need to confuse a student with all those shades of grey.  Here, then, is the best place for you to articulate your career goals, your internal philosophy, your academic raison d’être.  While everyone’s graduate school experience has been mixed (I can personally, nearly instantly, think of dozens of wonderful aspects it has added to my life, while simultaneously considering the many drawbacks), a student really wants to hear your honest, overall evaluation of a significant portion of your life and whether or not it was “worth it.”  Again, this is a good opportunity to justify yourself and, not unimportantly, to sound convincing while you’re doing it.  Even if you’re only convincing yourself, and barely.

3.  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

Ultimately, you can’t answer this question for a student.  Each person needs to come to these kinds of decisions on their own terms, but you can certainly give them advice as seems appropriate, without necessarily saying “yes” or “no.”  It should also be mentioned that just because a student is interested in graduate school doesn’t mean the impulse should be automatically encouraged.  Sometimes, students are just asking because they are curious.  Others are fishing for feedback, wanting to know if you think they are “smart enough” for graduate school.  Either way, these conversations collectively point to yet another process in the academic’s journey:  becoming a mentor.  Just like we had figures in our undergraduate years who pointed out the paths to us, so too must we become mentors and guides for our students.  That process of transformation, from student to teacher, is arguably lifelong.  In talking to students about graduate school and the vast range of experience that comes with it, we can begin to consider our own steps and the many reasons behind them.  At the very least, you should be able to ask yourself the question “why am I an academic?” without it sounding in your head like it’s being screamed to the gods.

Rethinking academic labor

Published
by
Hyewon
on December 10, 2009
in Higher Education and Jobs
. 1 Comment

I don’t know how many of you are in the job market this year, but according to the report published in the November issue of MLA Newsletter , it looks grim in the field of English and foreign language departments. Catherine Porter, the president of the Modern Language Association, notes that job advertisements were down by 40% in English and by 52% in foreign languages, compared with October last year.

What is more alarming is that some scholars warn us that this recession, unlike others, can be not so much a silver lining for an upcoming bounce-back as the beginning of all-encompassing transformation of the postsecondary educational system. Time will tell us whether this is true or not. But in the ensuing paragraphs of her column, Porter suggests a number of ways to explore the impending issue of the productivity of academic labor in higher education. For example, she proposes that we should redefine productivity—in both teaching and research—in a broader context of globalization and the advent of the digital humanities. She also introduces various models for curriculum development and assessment created by universities and scholarly organizations including Carnegie Mellon’s hybrid model combining “on-line learning environment with instructor-led courses” (I would like to know more, but it was only briefly mentioned). Finally, the significance of graduate education and professionalization is emphasized with regard to collaboration among multiple disciplines and the role of graduate students as teachers.

I hear many different voices in response to Porter’s column including that of a CUNY professor. Despite the controversies surrounding the topic of academic labor, her column allows me to be more aware of what we do in the Institute—the development of Blogs@Baruch and the pilot project of Great Works assessment tool, for example—in a larger context of the ongoing transformation of university education.  Working for the Great Works assessment project, I have become more interested in kinds of models and platforms that we create and bring to the table. My initial idea of assessment was so naïve that I thought it would simply simulate the input-output corporate model to evaluate students’ achievement in a specific course. I now realize that the model is not given, but created by the collaboration among faculty, students, and university administrators. It also may not only seek an assessment of final outcome but also intervene every stage of learning process.

Scenes From a Classroom

Published
by
Erin
on December 9, 2009
in Higher Education and Interpersonal Communication
. 1 Comment

Last month there was a spirited discussion on this blog after James Hoff admonished us to rethink our use of technology in the classroom. He made several excellent points about the potential downsides to using technology with our students and pointed out the danger in not encouraging students to be wary, even critical, of big-business sites like Facebook and YouTube. Although I agreed with a lot of what James wrote, I thought his responders too brought up some great points in opposition, and I found the discussion that followed in the comments thoroughly engaging. But given that almost all of that conversation tended towards the theoretical and the non-personal, I think it’s worth adding to the discussion some highlights from real-life moments in a classroom.

After teaching Writing to first-year students for over eight years, a few weeks ago I experienced a “first” in the classroom. One of my students read a paper out loud to the class in which he came out as gay. In this day and age this may not seem all that remarkable – especially considering that the younger generations seem to be more accepting and less homophobic with each year that passes. Still, in a world, a country, a state that does not give gay people the same rights that everyone else has – namely, the right to marry — and in a city where the number one insult hurled on the playground is still “faggot” (I personally heard it shouted 3 times by three different boys recently), I find my student’s decision admirably brave. In his paper he spoke about coming out to a small group of friends and family as a gay teen in North Carolina and how he eventually started posting videos on YouTube instructing other teenagers on how and when to come out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPwQGCjaGho[/youtube]

Even though he was used to coming out online, in the classroom he was visibly nervous — his voice cracked and his hands shook as he read. Later, as we discussed the student’s essay, I was impressed when a few students in the class were able to note the irony of the situation – that the physical proximity involved in facing a handful of your peers, can be much more intimidating than divulging even the most intimate of secrets to thousands or even millions of people in the safety of cyberspace. True, my student agreed, though people may leave comments on YouTube videos, it is a different and often less intense moment of exchange than the face to face. To be sure, I have felt the reality of this in my own life as well as in my teaching. It is one of the reasons I use blogs or BlackBoard as an integral part of my course each semester. It doesn’t always work exactly how I want it to, but I use these technologies in the hopes that it will enhance face to face interaction and enrich classroom discussion, not replace it. I would argue that my student’s experiences on YouTube likely paved the way in giving him the courage to come out in person in a public way, such as he did that day in our class.

Classrooms can be intimate settings. In a discussion-based class where students are given the space to think about ideas – their own and others – and they are invited to share their questions and reflections with peers, conversation can have all the excitement of discovering a new friend or even a new romantic relationship. I have been in both positions – as a teacher and as a student- in classrooms where the group is invigorated by the level of discussion and the energy in the room is electric as the world of ideas opens up before us. As a student, I have had the same experience with online discussion as well – where everyone is online, checking the discussion board several times a day, thoroughly absorbed by the course content and what each person in the class has to contribute to the discussion. I am trying to figure out how to replicate this in my own teaching. Most of us who have been teaching for any length of time know that when a class is working well, the instructor doesn’t even need to be present – students are able to generate lively discussions all on their own and sustain them. But let’s face it, sometimes we get a class that just won’t talk. I happen to have just such a class this semester. I have struggled terribly with this incredibly taciturn group all term, trying every trick in my WAC arsenal to get them to open up and talk to each other. But often the class ends up feeling like a question and answer session rather than a group discussion. And even online our discussions don’t seem to ever pick up much momentum.

Still. One day a few weeks ago after a stilted yet somehow contentious conversation about social class in America, (we were discussing a Dorothy Allison essay in which she explores and explains her working-class identity), I went home and tried to compose, to the best of my ability, a summary of the discussion based on my memory and a few notes I had taken during the class. I typed the summary and posted it on BlackBoard and invited students to add to it or to change something if they’d felt I’d misremembered or misrepresented something they had said. No one changed or challenged a thing, but two students did make posts in which they shared some of the things they had been thinking, but had not shared in the moment. Both students explained that it had taken them some time and some distance from the conversation for them to process and articulate their thoughts. Both students made excellent, thoughtful posts that were moving and personal. And although no one else in the class responded to either of the posts (I did), I could see that their posts were heavily viewed and so I felt like their contributions enlarged the discussion in some way.

Somehow, even though my class this semester is struggling to communicate with each other face to face and via technology, I can see that both venues have value and both go a long way towards drawing our students in to a public conversation about the world around us. Becoming part of a public conversation is a process, and feeling entitled to participate fully in that conversation might take longer for some than others, but as educators, it is our duty to encourage students to participate via whatever means are at our disposal. It is when technology takes time away from students’ opportunities to engage in the conversation that I think the real dangers arise.

Studio H

Published
by
Luke
on October 8, 2009
in Baruch College, Higher Education and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Professor Vera Haller gave Tom and me a tour of the Baruch Journalism Department’s spanking new Studio H yesterday. We were blown away. The room, made possible by a generous donation from the Harnisch Foundation (overseen by Baruch graduate William Harnisch, class of 1968, and his wife Ruth Ann) provides a space for our talented journalism instructors to explore the future of the field with their students.

studioh

The room features 24 new large screen iMacs, loaded with the latest productivity software. A quarter of the machines have dv-decks, a dozen have microphones, all have nice Sony headphones, and students can arrange to borrow HD cameras for their assignments. The faculty workstation controls a beautiful projector and two flat panel displays, which can be tuned show cable news or the screen of any computer. JBL speakers in the ceiling provide terrific sound.

What struck Tom and I most, however, was how the space was laid out, with workstations on the exterior and a seminar table in the middle. Talia’s post last week wondered about the impact of computers on the writing classroom. Space was conceived in Studio H in such a way that everyone can see what everyone else is doing… there’s simply no hiding. The class can move from the workstations to the table for discussions, editing sessions, or workshops. This flexible approach to classroom design is terrific, and reflects the goal of the Journalism Department to create a newsroom-like atmosphere for the students.

In a conversation with Vera, we imagined an assignment where students could watch a YouTube clip of a breaking news story — a press conference, perhaps — and then attack it like a newsroom would on deadline. This is not a new assignment idea, but Studio H allows faculty members to more realistically mimic the conditions of a news room, with noise, movement, openness, connectivity, chaos, and even a large digital clock counting down to deadline. What a great example of how space can create pedagogical opportunity.

Congrats to the Baruch Journalism Department and its students on this wonderful new addition. We have a long history of supporting the department’s blogging and multimedia reporting initiatives, and their students do fantastic work. We look forward to seeing and helping publish the work that Studio H helps makes possible.