Tutorial Time: Fun with Gender & Media

Last year I was a teaching assistant for a course called "Sexuality, gender and society". Since I scored the same assignment again this year, I've already started planning for the kinds of activities and discussions we might be able to have in tutorial.

I wanted to make sure I had a solid list of interesting resources for the class, the kind of stuff that students might "get into" more as it provides examples and context for them and connects more to familiar experiences--shorter commentaries, videos and other media, blog posts, web discussions and so on. I'm thinking about emailing the class once a week with these additional links.

Here's a list of some of the resources I may end up using, depending on the syllabus. Most of these could be fitted into more than on category, so they could be used in various contexts for the course.

Gender essentialism and norms...
..."Women, know your limits" from British comedy show Harry Enfield & Friends skewers ideals of feminine decorum and passivity (and the assumption of superior male intelligence!).
..From the blog Sociological Images, a nice piece on performing masculinity, and one on "McCoy Crisps: Men are stupid, shallow, sexist sport-o-holics." Advertising at its least flattering!
...An episode of This American Life about testosterone. What's it like when your body stops producing testosterone, or when your T levels increase suddenly?
...The "nurture" side of the debate, research showing that gender differences are due to socialisation.
...A relatively recent article about Toronto parents who decided to keep their child's gender secret.
...My Body Gallery blog highlights "what real women look like" by displaying users' photos of themselves.
..Malika's Indian Trangender Blog, and a documentary called Middlesexes about trans experiences and issues; a news piece about how Australia is the first country to recognise a "non-specified" gender.

Pop culture...
...The real reasons why guys should hate on Twilight.
...The Celluloid Closet, a fantastic documentary about the history of queer representation in film.
...Buffy vs. Edward Cullen: guess who clobbers whom in this little encounter? A classic face-off between stereotype-busting Buffy and Mr. Sullen Cullen!
...A threaded discussion about female characters in the Harry Potter series; and a blog post on "The women of the Harry Potter universe". For good measure, here's a video of Hermione Granger, another atypical female character, telling Draco Malfoy what's what.
...Music videos: last year in one tutorial we had an interesting discussion about this, so I'd like to bring it back and ask students to bring in their own examples. The one I used before was Janelle Monae's "Tightrope" in which she draws on the aesthetics of 60's Motown and 50's rocker Little Richard.
...A discussion by a group of Black intellectuals and artists, about misogyny in Hip-Hop.

Gender & work...
...A chart (made from a report from Georgetown University) showing that women need a PhD to make as much as men who have a BA.
...At the same time, here's a contrasting article about Canadian women making more money than their husbands.
...From The Atlantic magazine, "The end of men" looks at a "reversal" in women's fortunes that could lead to female dominance in powerful positions in the workforce.
...In Sweden, more men are taking paternity leave; and in Japan, male "Herbivores" eschew high-stress lifestyle choices of their parents.
...Mary Churchill explains why her colleague feels like she "needs a wife", a great discussion of privilege and gender in the academic workplace, where gender disparities persist.

Women in science & technology...
...Women in science don't have as many children as they'd like.
..."Why Female Science Professor?" in which the author describes her experiences as a female scientist. I brought this to class last year and it was well-received.
...Womens' continuing under-representation in science and exclusion from pay parity in STEM and technology-related fields.
...Articles about the gender gap in Wikipedia contributions.
...The Guardian UK reports on the "lost women scientists" of The Royal Society, including Caroline Herschel.

Gender & violence...
...Fulbright Scholar Rumana Manzur of Bangladesh was attacked and blinded by her husband in June, 2011.
...Article from the BBC: the United Nations has classified rape as a war tactic; and a post from Scarleteen on how men can help prevent rape.
...Homophobic violence: Tyler Clementi committed suicide "after his sexual encounter with a man in his dorm room was video streamed over the Internet without Clementi's knowledge" by his room-mate. This was one of the suicides by queer youth that prompted the "It Gets Better" project.

Experiences of sexism...
...The blog Microaggressions documents readers' everyday experiences of sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination.
...From Hook and Eye blog, "This month in sexism" provides some examples of sexism in academe.

Gender & history...
..."Songs of the Suffragettes": I was given digital copies of these fabulous old songs, which were "rescued" from vinyl by a friend in Toronto. I think in tutorial we could have a discussion about the songs' lyrics, style, and political context.
...Episode "The Damsel" from documentary series Terry Jones' Medieval Lives. This is an excellent little piece on women in Medieval Europe.
...An article about Clemence Royer, the female economist who translated Darwin's Origin of Species into French.
...An account of 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, in "Victoria and her Sisters", an episode of Simon Schama's History of Britain.
...A short piece on Nancy Wake, who was a spy in World War II; at great personal risk, "Wake committed herself to fighting Nazis after she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933."

Gender & education...
...A blog post from Macleans has a discussion of the animosity towards Women's Studies in Canada.
...In the US, the UK and Canada, women have outpaced men in university enrollments and achievement. This had fed into a more general concern about boys' literacy and the "success" of males in the education system (and in life in general).
...A male author dismisses critiques of Canada's funding for international researchers, an interesting example of the discourse of meritocracy.

I hope you enjoyed the list (which is really just a brainstorm); if you have anything to add, please leave suggestions in the comments! In particular I'm looking for more resources on gender and race--especially indigenous issues--and masculinities/examples involving men (students requested this last year).

Communication, not Edutainment

This entry was originally posted on March 3, 2011, at University of Venus blog, Blog U, Inside Higher Ed.

How do we, as tutorial leaders or professors, deal with the revelation that students find classes or entire subject areas "boring?" And to what extent is it our responsibility to get them "interested?" These were questions that came to mind as I read Itir Toksöz’s recent UVenus post about “academic boredom”. While she was discussing the boredom she experiences in conversation with colleagues, my first thought was that boredom is not just (potentially) a problem for and with academics, but also for students.


I see boredom as something other than a mere lack of interest. I think of it as a stand-in for frustration, which can, in turn, stem from a sense of exclusion from the material, from the discussion, from the class, from understanding the point of it all; ultimately an exclusion from the enjoyment of learning. This can happen when the material is too challenging, or when the student doesn’t really want to be in the class for some reason.

Boredom is sometimes about fear, the fear of failing and looking “stupid” in front of the instructor and one’s peers. In other cases it can also be a symptom that someone is far beyond the discussion and in need of a deeper or a more challenging conversation. All these things can be called “boredom” but often they are more like communicative gaps in need of bridging.

In other words, boredom is often a mask for something else. We need to remove this mask, because of the negative effects of boredom on the learning environment and process. It causes people to "tune out" from what's happening, and in almost every case it creates or is accompanied by resentment for the teacher/professor and/or for the other students. As a psychological problem, this makes boredom one of the greatest puzzles of teaching, and one of those problems that most demands attention.

It’s even more important to uncover the causes of boredom now that many students have access to wireless Internet and to Blackberries and iPhones, in the classroom. Professors and TAs complain that students are less attentive than ever while in class, because of this attachment to their devices—something I’ve encountered first-hand with my current tutorial group.

I think the attachment to gadgetry comes not from the technology itself, but from the students. In my blog I've written about the issue with students using technology to "tune out" during lectures, and they do it in tutorial as well; they're "present, yet absent". To understand this behaviour we need to keep in mind that the lure of the online (social) world is reasonable from the students’ perspective. Popular media and established social networks are accessible and entertaining, and provide positive feedback as well as a sense of comfortable familiarity. Learning is hard work, and the academic world is often alienating, difficult, and demanding. It's all-too-easy to crumple under the feeling of failure or exclusion. Facebook is welcoming and easy to use, while critical theory is not.

The other side of this equation is that in the process of negotiating and overcoming "boredom" there's a certain point at which I can meet students halfway, as it were—but I can't go beyond that point. Like everything else in teaching and learning, boredom is a two-way street, and the instructor is the one who needs to maintain the boundary of responsibility. I'm not there merely to provide an appealing performance, which leads to superficial “engagement.” I’m not “edutainment”.

However, I think it's part of my job when teaching to "open a door" to a topic or theory or set of ideas. I can't make you walk through that door (horse to water, etc.) but I can surely do my best to make sure you have the right address and a key that fits the lock. And that means using different strategies if the ones I choose don’t seem to be working.

Holding this view about boredom certainly doesn’t mean I’ve solved the problems with student attention in class; I’m reminded of that frequently. It just means I have an approach to dealing with the problem that treats their boredom as something for which there’s mutual responsibility. In an ideal learning environment there must also be mutual respect—but unfortunately mutual “boredom” is easier and often wins the day. My hope is to help cultivate the former by finding ways of unraveling the latter.

"Myths & Mismatches": Where from here?

The last series of blog posts left me all blogged out for a couple of weeks, but I thought I'd offer a follow-up post regarding my thoughts on the e-course by Jo and Julie, on career planning and professional development, and a few other things.

What I found helpful about the course was that it provided me something to respond to, and in the process I found myself thinking harder about my current decisions. And because I'm feeling "stuck" and unfocussed at the moment, this was a valuable exercise. I tried to imagine my self in a particular role, and asked: what would I look like doing this job? How is that going to happen? Where do my current actions take me in terms of that kind of goal? Fairly basic stuff, but I find writing it all down tends to help me with coherence and direction. And when I'm feeling lost, I like to focus on the tangible aims that make it easier to make decisions in the present--since they build towards something in the future.

Some of the things I'm doing at the moment in order to provide myself direction--in a few different aspects of (academic) career development:

Making a decision about an academic "subject area" in which I could work comfortably, i.e. as a member of a department or program or team. This sounds like a no-brainer, and for most people in a PhD program it hasn't been an issue since at least the MA level. But because of the way my interests have developed, choosing an "area" has been a less than straightforward process (my degrees are in Communication Studies, Linguistics, and Education).

A related task is to work towards drawing my various projects into a well-articulated and coherent research "map" that works within that subject area. I have diverse interests, but diversity is only a strength if it's grounded in something stable like a good knowledge base, along with a plan regarding how the various pieces fit together and reinforce each other. I know well enough how everything is related, but I need to work actively to make those connections clear to others. This is important no matter what line of work I end up following.

...Alongside the usual academic channels, I've been experimenting with using social media to meet new colleagues and develop professional relationships, to "network" and to share/publicise my own work, to develop opportunities for contributing to ongoing debates (such as writing articles for other blogs and web sites), and to keep up with news/issues in my fields. As a result, I'm thinking about blogging and other "public communication" as part of academics being "public intellectuals", not just professors or employees of the university. I'd like my blog to be a way to share my ideas even as I'm developing them in other ways (e.g. through research).

While I won't swap social media for more traditional fora such academic conferences, participation in the latter is restricted for me because of the expense (travel, accommodation, registration fees) and timing. Sources like Twitter are an ongoing means of conversing with others whose interests I share, engaging in long-term exchanges that keep me thinking and that open up the discussion to anyone who can use a hashtag.

I'm working on teaching through practice (even just with my small tutorial group this year) and through development of approaches and philosophies; and I'm thinking about pedagogy rather than "teaching", about theory and overall strategy as well as classroom tactics and practices. I'm looking for ways to examples that "stick".

And in the context of our wired classroom, where students can use laptops and Blackberries to "tune out" from course discussions, I'm trying to understand and take into account the issues involved--"student engagement" and technology in the classroom; consumerism and credentialism; cognitive development in learning; differences in learning "styles"--and translate that back into an approach that gets students interested enough to abandon Facebook in the middle of class (high hopes, I know).

I still see teaching and learning as being about relationships, communication, partnership, mutual responsibility, motivation, feedback, confidence, hard work, listening, and changing your approach when something doesn't work. Most important to me is to create an environment wherein questions and discussion can happen. With all that in mind I'm considering things like course design (in the abstract) and how this relates to pedagogy, particularly in terms of how different aspects of the course (curriculum/readings, assignments, tutorials and TAs, lectures) all have to work together in a way that makes sense to students.

I think that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed the series of "Myths & Mismatches" posts, and if you're following my blog--thanks for joining me!

Go on, have a laugh

This week’s long and rambling post, after a hiatus of about a month, comes out of my thoughts about the tutorial group I’ve been working with this term.

After each class, on the bus ride home, I think through the things that seemed to work and the things that didn’t. Which students were really engaged in class, and who was tuned out, playing on a laptop or sending text messages? Did we use media in the class and did that work well for the group? Did we look in a deeper way at the key points from the week’s readings, or did we spend a lot of time on irrelevant tangents? Perhaps most important, what was the overall dynamic in the room and did it help or hinder the discussion of issues important to the course?

Last week, I was “chuffed” when a student said she had remembered the meaning of a term based on a joke (a humourous anecdote) I had told about it. Her comment made me think about how humour is something I use in class, in a number of ways according to context—and I realise now that I’ve been 'using' it right from the moment I stepped into a classroom to teach for the first time. It turns out that my teaching role models are my favourite stand-up comedians as well as the best professors.

This led me to ask: What's the function of humour in the classroom?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that humour, being humour, simply isn’t taken seriously as a pedagogical tool.

And yet there's a use for it. When I was first learning how to lead tutorials, humour had the function if dissipating my own sense of awkwardness at the situation. Since I wasn’t used to taking on authority, and didn’t feel comfortable with that role (i.e. the kinds of expectations there were from the students), the laughter made it easier for me to deflect and dissolve my own anxiety and that of the students as well as creating a “cushion” for those times when I felt incompetent and unhelpful (usually this was just my own perception as I later learned). Another effect was that students seemed to feel more comfortable in a classroom where a few laughs were encouraged.

To me, humour has also been a means of highlighting the ridiculousness of 'normality', which is an entry point to critique (for example I showed this sketch in tutorial, as a way of addressing essentialism). I can't count the number of times I've found myself inadvertently 'opening up' (making accessible) a perfectly 'serious' issue by making a joke.

Humour is an important strategy when lecturing with a large class, as well. In some ways, the skills demonstrated by stand-up comedians could be seen as a pretty fair fit with those required of lecturers in the university setting--keeping the attention of a large audience for a couple of hours without them being distracted, in such a way that afterwards they somehow remember what you talked about. Those skills are applicable across boundaries. And just as many professors make jokes about their academic material, many of the best comedians have a serious point driving their work.

Two of my favourite performers of stand-up comedy are Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran. Like all successful stand-ups, Bailey (who is English) and Moran (Irish) have 'trademark' on-stage styles. From Moran's shows, what strikes me in terms of applicability to teaching are his uses of narrative, creative language, and vocal modulation. In this clip, he discusses the idea of having untapped personal "potential": "leave [it] absolutely alone", he advises, before launching into a lengthy, fantastically detailed description of what you imagine your potential to be ("flamingos serving drinks")--as opposed to what it actually is. Like the best lectures, this performance is impossible to re-create through quotes alone because Moran's style is the greater part of what makes the material funny and engaging.

Bill Bailey, on the other hand, has a way of soliciting responses from the audience and incorporating them into his act; he also takes slight in-the-moment thoughts and accidental slips and turns them into commentary and productive tangents. In one section of his show "Part Troll", he involves the audience in making the sound of "a giant breaking a twig", then invites them to shout out the names of famous vegetarians (which he re-imagines as a horse-race). Bailey has a knack for creatively incorporating the unexpected into his 'act', in ways that generate relevant connections without losing the overall 'thread'. I think this translates as an important classroom skill because it can help to involve students in a discussion, if we can relate their contributions, their experiences and examples, to a theme that's part of the course--without 'losing' the point at hand.

I don't consider teaching to be all 'performance'--and not all humour is helpful or appropriate in the classroom. But after watching so many tedious, montonous lectures in which students (in some ways justifiably) tuned out of the course and in to their iPhones and laptops, I've developed an appreciation for presentation--and I'll take my role models where I can find them-!

Technology and Research, Part 2: Tweeting and Blogging

Continuing my little discussion of the ways in which I've most recently been using online technologies in my daily research and writing habits, today I'm moving on to the complementary combo of Twitter and Blogger.

Since one of my goals over the past six to eight months has been to interact more with people who share my research/academic interests (outside of my graduate program), I've been doing more social media exploration than usual. A relatively recent major change to my online habits has been my increasing use of Twitter as a way of connecting with strangers and keeping up with news.

I operate with a kind of minimalism when it comes to technological tools--as I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to want only the tools I need, and only the tools that work. It's for that reason that I (and others) didn't start using Twitter until quite a while after I first looked at the site and logged on to create an account. I simply couldn't see any point; like so many people, at first I thought of Twitter as a useless stream of trivial chatter that would only further clutter my already-limited field of attention.

In spite of my own skepticism, at some point earlier this year I decided to try "tweeting" a bit more in earnest. Since that time I've decided that there are "two Twitters": the banal barrage of idiotic celebrity gossip and predictably dreary/melodramatic personal updates, yes, that Twitter does exist (of course!). But the flip side of it is a fascinating and wide-reaching series of exchanges, often with people I'd never have encountered otherwise; it's a stream of useful news and links that I couldn't possibly have rounded up on my own; and it's a means of responding to those things, and sharing my own, in such a way that the conversation continues and expands.

But it does take time to learn how to use Twitter effectively as a tool--assuming you know what you want to accomplish with it. At first, without a list of "followers" and with no sense of who else was using this tool and what they might be doing, I felt as if I was sending messages into the aether with little idea of "audience", tone, or purpose. Fortunately I had a few friends already tweeting busily, who helped set an example for me in terms of Twitterquette.

Among the more important things I learned was that while it's more or less true that the more accounts you add to your own list, the more "followers" you're likely to gain, the best way to get the most out of Twitter is by participating actively. For example, a means of navigating Twitter is through using "hashtags", or words/terms attached to a tweet with a # sign: e.g. #CdnPSE for "Canadian post-secondary education". You can "meet" other followers by using tags, and interact with them by "replying" to their tweets or by "re-tweeting" them (passing their content around). A system of crediting others is integral to all this; another aspect is that of suggesting users to other users (often with the tag "FollowFriday or #FF). I found that one of the biggest challenges here was feeling confident to interact with strangers, but once I was over that hurdle things became much more rewarding.

To sum up: I like using Twitter because it affords a form of participation in an ongoing conversation, but it's one that isn't limited to--for example--my Facebook contacts, who are an entirely different group. While on Facebook I keep things generally quite private, on Twitter I'm happy to see strangers adding me to their lists--unless they're bots or marketers. (Now the only thing I can't find, or haven't found yet, is the perfect Twitter client. But that's a whole different blog post...)

Tweeting got just a little bit easier a couple of months ago when del.icio.us (as mentioned in the previous post) also linked to the site, so now you can bookmark, tag, and send a link to Twitter--with a comment--all in the same pop-up window within your web browser (for Firefox, anyway). The other way I access the daily news is through Google Reader, so now I have a Reader-->del.icio.us-->Twitter process that works pretty well for finding and reading relevant news, saving articles for later, and sharing them with people who are likely to want to read them.

And lastly, there's the blog. Even as an ex-zinester I've never felt comfortable writing blogs; the required regularity felt somehow journal-like, and I'm terrible at keeping journals. So I began, in fact, with a photo-blog that was at first a daily affair but eventually became weekly as the posts grew longer and often incorporated multiple pictures. A year later, after I'd managed to maintain Panoptikal and even pick up a few "viewers", I decided to incorporate my academic interests and my new Twitter habit by starting an education-oriented blog (the one you're currently reading), with the goal of practicing writing outside a formal academic context.

I've found that the blog is a great place to say something shorter and less formal than I would in an academic paper or presentation. It's a place to brainstorm without pressure, a venue for painting a small picture of my own views and for developing them further, and conversing with others about the issues raised. It's also something expressly public, so it's accessible for those who can't view journal articles or even private web sites where such conversations might happen in a more regulated environment (for example, Facebook). For anyone considering becoming an academic, the public nature of blogs can be a means of reaching a broader audience, of "engaging" multiple publics in the conversation about your research--and seeing immediate commentary. To keep building on that conversation, I embedded my Twitter feed and a list of links from del.icio.us into the blog's format.

At this stage you may be thinking--this sounds like a lot of effort; what's the point of all this reading and commenting and tweeting? The interesting thing is that I wasn't sure myself, for quite some time, why I was "doing all this". But I got more of an idea this past Friday when I got to sit in on a workshop run by Alex Sévigny, a friend who also happens to be a successful professor, a professional communicator, and a prolific blogger and social media buff.

The overall event, organised by Hamilton's Cossart Exchange, was ostensibly for graduate students who are interested in developing non-academic careers. But I think Alex's message was valid beyond its immediate context. His point was that for those people operating outside of existing/rigid employment structures, the process of "self-branding" (as unpleasant as it may sound) has become an integral part of professional success. Before social media, this was more difficult; but now that so many of us have access to social media tools, the opportunities have expanded dramatically. Development of an online "identity" or "face" helps you to make yourself known to potential employers and collaborators, and helps you connect better with those you've already met.

So it turns out that maybe there has been a use for all my blogging and tweeting, one beyond the immediate gratification of chatting with strangers about the things that interest me most. And here's the lesson for grad students: so many of us are spending too much time online anyway, we should really learn how to channel those efforts and make them count towards career-building (!).

The Down-side of Technology? On Class Time.

I want to raise a topic that of course has no easy answers, but which has been coming up quite a bit recently in my job as a teaching assistant for a lecture class of about 100 students. I know many others have discussed this too, so I'm just adding another thread to the long conversation.

Last week in class--in the lecture right before the tutorial I teach--I sat in the back row, as is now my habit, and a fellow TA sat next to me. In the second half of this particular class there was a film being shown. During the film, some students chatted, other used their computers to look at Facebook or other popular sites, and/or to chat online with friends (this they do every class), and hardly any of them took notes even though the film's content will be on the exam. From where we were seated, we could also see many students thoroughly tuned in to their mobile devices (Blackberrys, iPhones etc.).

The main reason that we were paying attention to this is that the instructor had asked the students not to use Facebook during lecture. Her reasoning, simplified, is that while it's more or less each student's personal choice whether or not to engage with the class (student responsibility), other students might be distracted by your Facebooking activity--so it is about respect for one's classmates, as well.

However, this logic has failed; in our class, it's not unusual to see students wearing their ear buds during lecture and watching videos on their laptops.

After last week's class we (the course director and TAs) had a discussion over email about how to handle the students' use of these technologies in the classroom. The question is both a pedagogical and a pragmatic one: what model of learning underlies our reaction to the students' "offtask behaviour", what will the reaction be? What is the next step forward from the argument about "respect" (such a painful position to abandon)?

To me this is not really an issue about the technology per se. After all, when students had only a pen and paper they could still indulge in the habits of doodling or daydreaming or writing and passing notes (as pointed out by this author). In our class, private conversations happen during lecture and there is laughter at inappropriate moments, showing that students either weren't listening or didn't care about what was being said. It's not that new technologies create rudeness or boredom; they just hugely expand the range of distractions in which students can engage, and they do it in a way that's difficult to censure explicitly (you can't take away a student's mobile phone).

Not only is technology not the only "culprit"--it's also not the case that all students who use Facebook or surf the web are "tuned out" of class; they may be looking up something related to the course, for example, or otherwise using technology to add to their learning experience. Pedagogically, there are many ways for instructors to make use of technology in the classroom--but I think it can only happen when students are already interested and motivated, and keen to interact in class.

A well-known example is that of a professor in the United States who collaborated with a class to create this video, one in which certain relevant points about technology and education are conveniently highlighted--even as students are engaging actively in the solution to their own problems (more info and discussion here). The video "went viral" on YouTube--providing a great demonstration of students and faculty engaging with the world "beyond" the university and doing it through making their own media content.

How can we create this kind of engagement, which has to come from students, not just from professors? How do we convey the "rules of the game", which require student participation, without being forceful, pedantic or dictatorial, without fostering resentment? It seems strange to ask students to participate in their own education.

I'm still a student myself--and I know I need to bring something to the educational equation (interest, energy, effort, attention, a desire to learn, a degree of self-discipline) or the result will be negative. There must be a balance of responsibility, between what the professor or teacher does--what the university provides--and what students need to do for themselves. Consumerist attitudes towards education (encouraged by high tuition fees) and the imperative to "edutainment" are skewing this balance as a marketised, customer-service model becomes more the norm at universities; yet so often in the past it has been slumped too far towards the weighty dictates of the institution alone.

As someone teaching--even as a lowly tutorial leader--my observation is that practices of "dealing with" changing student attitudes often happens through a kind of informed yet haphazard, everyday decision-making, through experiential negotiation of the common ground shared by ethics and praxis, driven by a need to act in the immediate present, to be proficient at teaching in a classroom. The loss of students' attention feels like failure of a kind, but what does one have to do in order to "succeed"?

And so to return to the immediate problem, what should my colleagues and I do about our "classroom management" troubles? Should technology such as laptops or wireless Internet access be banned outright from the classroom? Such tactics feel paternalistic. Are there other ways of working with students to create a better environment for interaction and learning, such as making rules and setting parameters? What about when students don't want to work--how do we walk the peculiar line between exercising "authority" and asking people to exercise authority over themselves?

Decisions, decisions. Part 2: Tenure and what else?

As I discussed in my last post, the "vanishing tenure" problem is partly a simple matter of numbers, but it is also something more. There are now (not coincidentally) many, many more graduate students than there ever were in the past--both in terms of gross enrolments and also by proportion. In Ontario this is by design, as is evident from recent government policy. But does the government intent to expand graduate programs in order to create more tenured professors? No. Their primary goal is to develop self-sustaining "human capital" and to boost the provincial (and ultimately, national) capacity for constructing a competitive "knowledge economy".

So according to that logic, most of us should be looking to build careers in other, "knowledge-intensive" fields. But how many of us currently in grad school (especially on the PhD track) know what those fields are, and how to access them? Can professors (our supervisors) help or not? How can we find appropriate mentorship for this kind of transition? What is this alternate path we're expected to take, and where does it lead? Was this what we were encouraged to expect when we applied to graduate school?

Here we hit upon a cultural snag that is not being addressed by government policy: in many PhD programs, there is a perpetual assumption (or implication) made that non-academic jobs are inherently less desirable and somehow not "pure" or good, since in the academic system, designed to replicate itself, graduate education has historically been a process of "socialisation" to the professoriate. This ethic is still being inculcated in graduate school, and it's one that goes directly against the exhortations of government policymakers and professional pundits alike. This is why there are so many articles and blog posts dedicated to the subject of "escaping" academe, and why graduate school has been characterised as a "ponzi scheme" and even a cult.

As I mentioned in my last post, this socialisation/enculturation model worked well in the past, when very few students went on to complete PhDs and then filled the professorial positions available. But it is directly at odds with the form of systemic expansion we're now experiencing. In another previous post I discussed a breakdown of graduate mentorship; now not only are mentors becoming scarce, they may not possess the knowledge, social capital, or indeed even the motivation to help graduate students find non-academic work. What's worse is that after years of graduate study, many students remain in denial even when faced with the reality of the academic job market.

For current graduate students, I think the important question to ask in the face of all this is not "why did you really go to graduate school?" but more fundamentally, "will you make a decision about why you're there?" rather than continuing to assume that your PhD will (and should) lead to a job as a tenured professor. In suggesting these kinds of questions, I don't mean to imply that we should take an entirely instrumental view of graduate education or discount the joy of serendipity. But we do need to learn to think twice before counting on that desirable academic position waiting somewhere down the line (or thinking that once we obtain such a position everything will be fine).

And this isn't a negative thing. We do have options: the choice is not between "tenure-track professordom" and "failure". The choice is not between an endless cycle of job applications and contract positions while waiting for that elusive permanent academic position to appear--and "giving up"; it is not a choice between intellectual martyrdom and "selling out". And while the question of "alternative" careers is addressed more or less and differently across disciplines and programs, there is still a strong culture of replication in PhD education, one that is bolstered by increased competition for scarce resources.

As graduate students or prospective grad students we need to think about why we're being encouraged to go to graduate school and what will become of our lives because of it. I don't believe that we should accept the sacrifice of balanced and healthy lives in order to realise the Academic Dream. Nor should we feel that achieving this Dream is the only form of sanctioned success.

Among those who have made the decision to follow the academic trajectory, there will have to be more consideration and awareness (in all disciplines) of the fact that while the traditional tenure arrangement worked in the past, the current system--stressed with undergraduate and now graduate expansion, limping by with proportionally less government funding than ever, and increasingly reliant on exploited contingent faculty and rising tuition fees--cannot be what it was even 50 years ago, and what it is in so many people's minds still.

This is not a matter of ideological positioning, but one of recognition: universities have changed, for good or ill. But while we face certain contextual realities, our actions in the present and our choices for the future will reflect principals and values, and it's those choices to which we now need to look, and to those principles we'll have to rally.

Our systems can no longer afford to bear those who in the past sought tenure for its security and financial rewards--nor those who seek to contain their knowledge within the mythical Ivory Tower. In my opinion we need to resist the purely bottom-line oriented, economic model of governance that frequently predominates, the one that treats knowledge as an object and education as a commodity; but resistance will be a matter of principle as well. And in order to have other, better options we'll need to be ready to participate and collaborate, to help think of new solutions for sustaining this oldest of institutions, to contribute to its re-invigoration with all that our fertile brains have to offer.

The inculcative ethos of the academic PhD sets up the question--should we "abandon" the academy, or is it more ethical to tough it out and fight for the old ways? I think the answer to these questions is both yes and no. Tenure as we know it is not the solution to the need for more teachers at universities. But neither is the exploitation of thousands of young (potential) scholars who have the desire to build fully-rounded academic careers. On the other hand, the features of tenure--academic freedom and job security, fostering long-term commitment to the institution and to students--still have a definite purpose and should be incorporated into/cultivated by whatever model we create. Academic freedom is now more important than ever and still under threat, as some recent cases in the United States show.

A related point: just as the academic career shouldn't be a sacrifice, teaching shouldn't have to be a labour of love. We need to come up with a way to change the distribution of work in universities such that those who are happy to teach and good at it are offered long-term stability and rewards , just as tenured, research-oriented faculty are now. And we should strive to allow for more movement between academic work and other kinds of engagement and research, with recognition of that "other" activity in the promotions process. These kinds of changes will help to overcome the problems with inequity and faculty diversity, as well as opening up more options for students, allowing them to develop the necessary social capital to move to positions outside the university. This could also help to dispel the misconceptions and negative stereotypes that abound in public discourse about university education and professors specifically.

And of course, all this will entail a different understanding and practice of graduate education, one that can encompass preparation for academic careers but also for other applications of graduate-level skills and expertise.

I've been lucky to have a lot of good guidance on my own journey. I have role models who work or have worked both within academe and outside it (often simultaneously), so I have something to look to when it comes to "imagining" a different kind of career or even a different "way of being" as a professor. These people have helped me to acquire the explicit and tacit knowledge I needed to understand and participate in academic life, and they've provided invaluable support and encouragement.

But they've also taught me to consider other possibilities, to think reasonably about my goals and how best to achieve them. Now I'm asking not only "is there a tenure-track job for me?" but also "would I do a really good job as a professor? Would I be happy?". For me this is important, partly because I want a mantra of feet-on-the-ground guidance in my attempt navigate the murky bog of dissertation-writing, "professional development", fellowship applications and the post-grad-school job search. I'm hoping the combination of keeping informed, building social capital and cultivating self-awareness will be enough to keep me afloat through all this chaos. I've learned to plan and prepare, and to make decisions in stages.

Perhaps, after all, these are the skills we should cultivate in our graduate programs: self-knowledge, adaptability, independence, creativity, and the ability to question our own assumptions, as well as the resilience to deal with the outcomes of that questioning.

Decisions, decisions, Part 1: What's in store?

Almost every day I take time to read the higher education (PSE) news from Canada and around the world. And every day a cluster of common (and inter-related) themes tends to dominate the articles and blogs.

One of those themes is: How many (or how few) tenure-track jobs are there available for new PhDs in various fields? Can we give tenure to "adjunct" (contract) faculty whose working conditions are insecure? Given the lack of tenure-track hiring, should we be encouraging and preparing grad students for careers outside academe? And inevitably the questions arise--should we retain the tenure system in universities? Can we keep it, and if so, how and why? What purpose does it serve, and for whom?

I'm going to try not to repeat too much what others have already said, since the discussion has been a regular one over some time and many of you have been following it with interest. What I write here is profoundly influenced not only by what I "study" (post-secondary education) but also by who I am, since the question of tenured academic employment is more than merely theoretical for me--it's about actual life choices I need to make in the immediate future. My personal perspective is that of a PhD student who will need to decide, within the next couple of years, about either focussing on an academic track or looking for work outside the PSE system (and possibly returning to it later in my "career"--if I'm lucky).

I feel deeply conflicted about this issue. On the one hand, I love the "ideal" of the academic life: I love teaching and would like to be able to do research of my own (and even write the book I have planned). I was drawn into grad school because I loved the conversation, the learning, the sharing and development of knowledge and ideas that occurs when academe is at its best. And I like participating in the continuance of the university itself, in decision-making within the institution.

But then again, close observation of the academic environment over the course of about 7 years has led me to doubt the reality of the "life of the mind", to question its continued existence in its (past and) current form, and to think through the privilege that is necessary merely to have access to such a life, let alone to live it through the university. I feel more trepidation and doubt now that I did at the end of my BA. What kind of career might be possible for someone like me in the increasingly competitive environment of the university--and would I want it?

I do love teaching but I frequently feel frustrated by the context of teaching, wherein I've often felt stressed and compromised and have seen many others in the same state. Universities have continued to expand during the last 30 years in spite of relative declines in funding; the growth in undergraduate numbers has meant an increase to the amount of teaching work, and this task has been transferred to inexpensive contract faculty rather than to new tenure-track hires. Universities are now dependent on such faculty, and on inexperienced graduate students, to carry out undergraduate teaching at budget rates--in spite of the potential for negative effects on the learning environment.

Even as the need for teachers has increased, research and publishing are still the main means to reaching desirable tenure-track jobs. For those unable to score such a position immediately after the PhD or post-doc fellowship, the "hamster wheel" of contract teaching can take up all the time that might have been put towards writing. Gender also matters: not only is teaching itself feminised, but as a female entering my 30s I will face difficult choices about family and career--choices that often put women at a disadvantage in the university workplace, wherein we already earn less on average than male scholars. Contingent faculty also have much less input--if any at all--into the way the university is run, so they are shut out of decision-making processes that affect them.

The question of "tenure or no tenure, academic work or not" is not only about choice of jobs. Academic training involves 10 or more years of post-secondary education, which can mean stalling the supposed milestones of adult life (buying a house and/or car, having children, building a long-term retirement plan and so on) until your late 20s or early 30s--unless you had a healthy amount of economic privilege to begin with. This is a significant investment of time, money, and other resources. If you've managed to accumulate a mound of student debt during your time in university, then you'll also be trying to find ways to juggle that with your regular living costs. In other words, you'll want a steady, reasonable income, not the tenuousness of contract-to-contract teaching work.

The lack-of-tenured-employment problem is not just a short term one, a "dip in the market". On the contrary, it is bound up with the structural changes associated with massification that have occurred in universities over the course of the last 60 years or so. For a while, the potential problems were allayed simply by injecting more public funding into the system (from the 1960s to 1970s), and hiring more full-time professors, as a means of increasing accessibility for previously excluded groups. But the recessions of the 70s, followed by 1980s neo-conservatism and (here in Ontario) the Harris Conservatives in the 90s, have made fiscal instability the norm. Hence contract faculty also serve as conveniently expendable labour when budgets shrink.

The future of tenure as a system is shaky, primarily because of these structural issues. As our PSE systems are stretched to their limits, old ways of doing things have come under attack not only by those marginalised by the existing, unequal tenure system but also by increasingly influential "stakeholders" outside the university. Tenure was a system that functioned reasonably well when universities were elite institutions with few undergraduates and even fewer graduate students, but in Canada at least, the beginning of the end of that arrangement came in the 1960s. And it's somewhat ironic that while universities have become more "accessible", tenure is now becoming much less so.

Even as contract faculty form associations to lobby for their rights, we see regular stories from the United States and elsewhere about PSE institutions making it easier for themselves to dismiss tenured faculty as well. So changes to tenure are already becoming an issue that affects everyone, one that needs to be resolved fairly and sustainably and in the near future. If we don't come up with a more equitable solution by design, then the situation is likely to degenerate along the current well-beaten track--with persistent inequalities between a small, elite group of well-paid research professors (and increasingly, administrators), and the non-permanent faculty who pick up the expanding teaching duties necessitated by mass post-secondary education.

None of this looks to me like the kind of situation on which I want to stake my own career and livelihood. And I think the "rational" decision would be to choose some other field. But my love of learning--and of helping others learn--is not necessarily rational, though I do have a healthy desire to see things change for the better and to put my own energy toward that goal. As always I'm walking a line between intuition and "reason", frustration and elation, helplessness and empowerment, and looking for some happy middle ground on which to build a launching pad, a castle, a jungle gym, whatever seems necessary. Of course that must be done whilst successfully navigating the way through the PhD process, but I'll get to that in my next blog post.

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Coming up soon, in Part 2: Why do so many of us want to be professors? The culture of graduate school, changing needs of grad students, the uses of tenure and a few ideas about (positive) future prospects.

The basics: About this blog, and me.

Since this is a new blog, I thought I would start out by describing it and myself. I think setting a kind of 'tone' in the first post might help me to frame the rest of what I write here.

A bit about me, to set the context: I'm a graduate student, an international transplant (from New Zealand to Canada), and I've lived in four Canadian cities, in three different provinces. My degrees are in three 'disciplinary' areas (Communication Studies, Linguistics, Education), and my education history is a long and somewhat messy one that I won't recount here. I've worked variously as a fast-food jockey, an ESOL teacher, a scrap-yard cataloguer, a dishwasher, a researcher, a graphic design assistant, and a census-taker. I've also participated both as volunteer and paid worker in quite a few elections (aided in campaigns, worked on election information distribution, registered voters, acted as scrutineer, assisted Returning Officer, etc.)--since well before I was allowed to vote.

These days I'm working on a PhD and I have a teaching assistant position each year. Though I haven't yet taught a whole course myself, I've taught more than many PhD students at my level, since I started my first TA position when I was still an undergraduate. My grad school teaching experiences have also been a bit more diverse than the norm--I've been fortunate enough to work with different courses every year (sometimes in different departments), including in the teacher training program run by my "home" faculty. Working with teacher candidates is rewarding because of the very real and direct challenges they face in their own classrooms during practicum, which foreshadow what is to come later in professional life. The discussions have a kind of relevance and immediacy to them that can seem absent with first-year undergraduates. Still, it's a different experience working with the younger students, and it's rewarding in other ways.

There are probably a number of things about the way I try to work--as a writer/researcher, as a teacher--that will bleed through to this blog, just as the questioning I bring to my research also comes into the classroom when I'm talking with students. Teaching, and reading, have taught me that I have broad interests and a pretty tangential way of thinking; so I've learned to keep relating things back to a theme or to some common question. And one way in which I like do that is to return to the discussion and definition of key terms and basic concepts. In tutorials I've tried to emphasise asking fundamental questions, the answers to which often seem “obvious” but which tend to help demonstrate how the "easiest" question can turn out to be the toughest one to answer.

This kind of questioning is more than just an exercise devised to provide fodder for course grades. My feeling is that if underlying, often apparently "only" philosophical, issues are not debated and fleshed out, then the overall direction of teaching and learning and also of our theorising and policy-making, will be uncertain and/or skewed. There will be a lack of solidity to the proposals, and no cohesion around the principles. We want a "knowledge economy", but we don't know (or bother to define) what "knowledge" is. We talk about increasing a nation's economic worth by raising the number of post-secondary graduates it "produces"--but we don't question the reduction of civic participation to numbers of degrees earned. We want children to "learn", but only if this learning shows up in the results of standardised tests. We demand “evidence” of progress, efficiency, and effectiveness, without wondering about what it is that we allow to “count” as proof, and who defines it.

When these fundamental concepts are left un-discussed and undefined—as well as un-critiqued—outside of scholarly journals, the scaffold of common understanding on which politics and policy should be built becomes biased and superficial, and is weakened at its base.

Being critical is about more than just talking about what’s wrong; eventually we must be able to propose solutions as well. This will mean learning how to work with people whose views we may not share. For this reason I think we also need to cultivate an environment of mutual respect for discussion.

That's a difficult task. I know that naturally, there will always be some perspectives with which I agree more than others (and some that to me are just egregious). For example I tend to be anti-marketisation, because looking at the effects of that particular trend in governance is part of my academic work--and I haven't seen much evidence of its 'success' (depending of course on how you define that term). But that doesn't mean I won't try to have a reasonable debate with someone who is strongly pro-market; without that kind of debate, we can't solve policy problems and we certainly can't delve deeper into the core issues that drive governance decisions. And it doesn't mean that I'll argue blindly for some other viewpoint, since I'm still unsure about what the "best" answers are to the challenges of our current context. I have no problem admitting that. But I try to resist the binary options that are so often placed at the heart of political debates and the programs they support or attack.

That's partly why I'm doing a PhD--not so I can bolster my pre-formed opinions with a credential, but so that I can try to understand the situation (in its often stultifying complexity) and make a contribution to improving it. Perhaps it sounds ambitious, but surely it's a project in which we all have a role to play, as educators, students, intelligent and informed commentators, and engaged members of society. Surely we all have a stake in whatever 'solutions' are chosen, which makes the quality of debate all the more important. If we can't talk across--and beyond--our differences, then small, ideologically-driven factions will be more likely to gain influence over government and policy-making, something Canadians are already starting to recognise.

Learning how to understand others’ points of view, working to negotiate reasonable compromises across differences, thinking critically about language and information, allowing multiple forms of evidence and experience to inform our conceptualisations—these are all broad skills that will be necessary for us to cultivate if we are to resolve the great social, political and economic dilemmas that will confront us in the coming decades. Education will play a role, but that role will depend on whose idea of “education” is prioritised and mobilised through policy and governance.

I suppose talking about the context of what I write here has ended up leading to a rather lengthy ramble on the importance of education for the future of our species—a predictable message after all! I can only hope I’ve at least couched it in interesting terms.