The life of the blind

November 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

out over the edge
Creative Commons License photo credit: HikingArtist.com

In the debate workshops I hold in support of management courses at Baruch, students practice articulating their positions on a wide variety of issues that generally revolve around the intersection of business and society.  A recent workshop focused on the merits of “Direct to Consumer” advertising of pharmaceutical products, a practice session that quickly spiraled into a much wider debate about the pharmaceutical industry in general.  Since I was playing devil’s advocate to the students representing Big Pharma, I essentially argued that, if money has infected all levels of medicine, from doctors to research scientists to the government that’s supposed to regulate them, then the consumer (or, “patient”) has literally no reliable source of medical information. American health care has been made into just another giant corporate industry.  If everyone in medicine has been bought, who can you trust?  I then reminded them of Dr. Jonas Salk, who, when asked if he owned the patent to the polio vaccine, famously replied “There is no patent.  Could you patent the sun?”

Later, on the train home, I realized that invoking Dr. Salk’s idealism most likely came off as incredibly corny to these business-minded Baruch students, who live in a world where the profit motive is applied to an ever-expanding number of things previously deemed too sacred to be corrupted by human greed.  The uncritical acceptance of this phenomenon is disturbing, to say the least. When I suggested that one of the team members could address ethical or moral issues, each team seemed to agree that morality was a side issue, something to be tacked onto the end of their presentations if they had time left over.  The students ended up covering a lot of ethical territory in their presentations anyway, but I still left the workshop with the sense that the next generation will happily go to work patenting the sun.

This semester, as I begin to more earnestly prepare myself to “go on the market,” I realize that my fears of a profit-driven health care system can be equally applied to another previously-sacred but increasingly-sold-out institution, higher education. A couple weeks ago, many of us had a cynical laugh at this viral video, which depicts an older professor giving a budding graduate student a brutal rundown of the horrors that await her in academia.  The student’s idealism is a subject of particular ridicule; her love of Dead Poets Society and desire to “live the life of the mind” come across as pathetic, clichéd attempts to sentimentalize an institutional experience that is more likely to constitute long hours of unrewarding labor, for a terrible salary.  The idealistic student should either drop their romantic illusions or get out of academia altogether.  In both scenarios, the idea of the “life of the mind” is left as a closed option, a laughable and childish delusion held by people that don’t understand the “realities” of higher education.

The conflict, for me, is that even though I laughed at the video, I really liked Dead Poets Society when I was young, and I’m betting that many of you did too.  I was the student who was entranced by the prospect of a “life of the mind.”  And though I’ve grown to accept the financial imperatives of living in twenty-first century America™, I still feel like those early idealistic motivations are primary in my inner life.  I’m as cynical as the next graduate student, believe me, but I also recognize that cynicism as a defense mechanism against the terrible feeling that graduate school is just a process by which I fashion myself into an educational product to be sold to the highest bidder (or any bidder, actually).

All of this makes me wonder, what is the point of our education?  We frequently lament that our undergraduate students view their educations as simply a means to an end, a way to “get a job.”  We fret that so few of them seem to want to “learn for learning’s sake,” instead concerning themselves with gaining “marketable skills.”  But isn’t this how so many of us have come to look at our graduate school educations, as little more than a path to the middle class?  I realize we all have loans to pay off, and I certainly enjoy my Blu-ray player, but I have the suspicion that, despite the mad rush of the market, most of us chose to pursue our degrees out of at least a small sliver of youthful idealism.  As that idealism, that feeling that the work we do actually matters and improves the world, is increasingly ridiculed and written out of our collective script, I can’t help feeling that the loss of the humanistic impulse in education is as scary and tragic as the “privatization” of human health care.  With those kinds of impulses and motivations fast disappearing, who is tending the light at the end of the tunnel?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Jobs, Politics

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

How to prepare and present a conference presentation

October 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

Two of my last three weekends were dedicated to that time-honored grad-student rite of passage, the academic conference. Reflecting on my own performances as well as those of my colleagues, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the conference presentation. I hope that my fellow cacophoners might share and amend these guidelines I humbly offer. In the spirit of the efficiency celebrated by conference presentations themselves, I will organize these ideas in outlined bulleted form. I work within the social sciences, but I believe much of what I share here may be of use to you  budding humanists and natural scientists, too. Here goes:

Find a suitable conference

  • Sign up for email listservs for subfields and organizations you are interested in. Throughout the year you will get call-for-paper announcements (CFP) offering panel discussions to be a part of. Pay attention to the deadline and guidelines for CFPs. Read their panel description closely. Often they will have a certain rubric within which they are working, with a theoretical approach either tacitly or explicitly signalled.
  • There are many regional and graduate-student conferences organized for people still early in their careers. If you are at the dissertation proposal stage or still formulating your project, these kinds of events are a good idea. The grad student conference I attended in Boulder, Colorado, included very helpful workshop sessions on writing and theoretical approaches to the conference theme (“states of belonging”).
  • Many conferences also accept individual papers. You submit your abstract and they will place you with other “orphan” presenters. You run a greater risk of not getting your paper accepted or getting stuck in a hodpodge potpourri panel (like I was last weekend) if you opt for this approach.

Write a strong abstract

  • Most conferences want you to participate (and want your conference fees payment), but they do have limits and criteria for accepting papers. A compelling abstract is critical. Often this is an awkward exercise because  you have not written the paper for which you must make a synopsis.
  • You usually have 200-300 words to work with (the conference I attended last weekend confined me to only 100!), so you don’t have space to elaborate sophisticated concepts, nor to tell everything about your project. Use keywords that signal a certain literature that, after studying the CFP, you know the organizers will be attuned to.
  • Allude to a piece of research you have conducted or a fieldsite/event/documentary source that will serve as the material your paper examines.
  • HAVE A POINT your paper will advance. Even if you don’t yet know what that point is, make a concise and intelligible claim. Emphasize the innovative. The abstract doesn’t have to break new ground; it need only suggest your paper might do so.

Write the paper

  • The organizers will often want you to submit the paper for a discussant to read before the conference and prepare comments. Do NOT send a whole dissertation chapter draft or anything over 20 pages. At worst, the discussant will bear some contempt for this burden; at best, you are diluting her ability to give you concise feedback on your work. A presentation is typically limited to 15 minutes. It takes roughly 2 minutes to read a double-spaced page of text. So anything more than 7 or 8 pages is more than you can say in the presentation.
  • Write a ‘data-driven’ essay. If you are an anthropologist, load it up with ethnographic material. If you are a historian or literature scholar, delve into the primary texts. This will give your discussant a better chance at assessing your analytical points. If you saturate your argument in theoretical goop, it will be frustrating for an outsider with a different perspective. (There are moments when strategic obfuscation is advisable, of course.)
  • Most importantly, you only have time in a presentation to develop ONE maybe two points. In any case, no one will remember more than two points, so keep it tight. It is always more effective to go in depth into one particular aspect of your research than try to sketch together myriad pieces in one whirlwind showcase.
  • Signal early on what your intentions with the paper are. ‘Map out’ the argument so your audience can get a sense of what is to come.

Prepare the presentation

  • The text you submitted to the discussant and what you will say in the presentation should not be the same. There are different opinions on this, but I believe priority #1 is to keep people’s attention for the time you are talking. People generally stay more tuned in when they sense that someone is speaking to them, not reading to them. Some reduce their presentation to a series of points they talk through. This has the advantage of being “live,” but it also runs the risk of rambling. You might run out of time without a prepared text. One of my panel co-presenters last weekend ran well past his 15 minutes without ever coming to anything resembling a conclusion; he had to be unceremoniously cut off at 20 minutes with a curt “thank you” from the time-keeper. Ouch. Remember that by going overtime you are antagonizing your audience and colleagues on the panel. Be courteous.
  • If you are going to read your paper, go to the trouble of making it ‘sound’ better to listeners’ ears. Good general rule: Edit your text so that almost every sentence does not exceed one line in length. Cut down compound and complex sentences into simple declarative ones.
  • Remove all but the most essential references in the spoken version.
  • Practice reading your paper aloud for flow, emphasis, and timing. Replace unnecessary jargon or technical terms with more colloquial speech. You want to be familiar enough with the writing that you can pick your head up and speak to people.
  • Rules of PowerPoint: your PPT slides should absolutely NOT replace your paper; i.e. you should not simply read a bunch of bullet points and text excerpts off the screen to your audience. Yawn.
  • Your PPT show should complement your discourse. Show an image to illustrate a point you are making. Consider inserting a blank slide for portions of the presentation when you want the audience’s attention on you, not on the screen.

At the event

  • If you are using audio-visual equipment, get to the panel session room early to test it out.
  • Listen to your co-presenters’ talks and take notes.
  • Graciously thank the organizers and/or sponsors before you get into your paper.
  • Towards the end of your presentation, a time-keeper will usually hold up signs signaling your remaining time. Just acknowledge these with a nod and adjust your speech as needed. No need to interrupt your own talk with an exasperated “whoa! only 2 minutes left?”
  • If there is Q&A or discussion time, try to make an effort to identify connections between your paper and your colleagues’. If the discussant or an audience member says something misinformed about your research, keep a poker face or just politely nod.

There must be more to add to this, so all ye commenters please fire away…

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Higher Education, Jobs, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style

Guerrillas in the Midst

May 28, 2010 By

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.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education

The Humanities Drive; Skills Ride Along

May 4, 2010 By 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?

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Higher Education, Pedagogy, teaching, To Ponder, What if . . ., Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Digital R&R Makes You Smarter

April 19, 2010 By 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.

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Higher Education, literature, Pedagogy, Technology

Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion

April 9, 2010 By 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.

Filed Under: Administration, Art, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Media Tagged With: , ,

How blunt is too blunt?

February 24, 2010 By 4 Comments

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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?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication Tagged With: ,

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

December 17, 2009 By 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.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Technology Tagged With: , , ,

I want to be an academic when I grow up!

December 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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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.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Pedagogy, Uncategorized
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