Two years ago, I stepped down from a deanship at New York University, having spent 33 of the previous 37 years in leadership posts at three universities. I’d always thought the transition from professor to administrator was hard, but returning to faculty life has turned out to be no less difficult.
I have resumed teaching and doing research as a "clinical professor" — NYU’s lingo for a non-tenure-track, full-time, teaching-oriented appointment. In the process, I’ve learned a few things that might benefit other academics going through the same back-to-the-faculty transition.
One of the reasons I love teaching is that each semester provides a fresh start: empty grade books, eager students. I also cherished this time when I was a student myself: poring over course syllabi, purchasing new textbooks, meeting my professors. Although I reside on eastern South Dakota’s frigid plains, the first day of class consistently brings me a warm feeling.
But once the newness of the semester fades, it’s not long before I casually share with a colleague something a student did or (more commonly) failed to do. This habit started in graduate school. Years ago, student shaming provided a humorous means of connecting with my fellow TAs: in my early 20s, commiserating over student issues felt normal, even cool. Perhaps, too, a case can be made that swapping stories of students’ shortcomings had little effect on our students themselves. They didn’t hear us laugh at their misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences. Yet, 10 years later, I’m haunted by the thought that I might
have spent more time complaining about my students than championing their success.
I had just received a private tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and seen treasures like B. F. Skinner’s famous Teaching Machine, but as I sat in a curator’s office and looked out over the National Mall, all I could think about was my dissertation.
With a big deadline looming, I was angry at myself for taking a whole three hours away from my writing. I had asked to meet with the curator because I had applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at the museum, but the whole thing felt like an exercise in futility. After all, I hadn’t heard anything back from the 60 other applications I’d sent out. Why would this one
end any differently?
While there is a tremendous amount of value to being able to see your students’ faces during distance learning, we can’t force them to be on camera, just as during in-person teaching, we can’t force unengaged students to lift their heads or remove hats or hoodies that obscure their faces.
With experimentation and persistence, however, you can arrive at strategies that work. Whether they need options, encouragement, or trust in order to turn their cameras on, there’s likely a solution that is the right fit for your classroom, circumstances, lessons, and students.
We are a group of undergraduate and graduate students from York University connected with each other through sociology professor Cary Wu’s research methods courses. Led by Dr. Wu, we recently came together as a virtual group to discuss what makes in-person classes unique and different from online-learning. Through this productive discussion, we were able to determine what it is about in-person classes that we long for. Here, we share with you seven main themes that emerged in our conversations.
Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
Maybe you have colleagues who are the first to leap onto technology trends. No doubt you’ve heard them reminiscing about all the stuff they started using before anyone else — class Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, in-class polling. Or maybe you’re a member of Club Early Adopter yourself?
I am, or at least I’ve aspired to be. (Have I told you about the web pages I put up for my class back in ’95?) Back in the day, those of us in the club had to kludge together solutions using tech that wasn’t made for teaching. Today, however, you have your pick of hundreds of products, custom-built for education or even for specific disciplines. Furthermore, many of the earliest technologies — think: web pages and blogs — are now something truly anyone can use, no matter your level of technical expertise.
Internationalization continues to be a priority within many Canadian universities. While it is imperative to attend to the ethical dilemmas that accompany the intensification of internationalization, different ethical frameworks operate according to different orientating assumptions. In this paper, we seek to pluralize and deepen conversations about the ethics of internationalization
by illustrating how three global ethics approaches address questions of international student mobility, study and service abroad, and internationalizing the curriculum. We conclude by emphasizing the need for both scholars and practitioners to engage in multi-voiced, critically-informed analyses, and dissensual conversations about complex ethical dilemmas related to internationalization.
When I first began teaching online courses, I did so with a fair amount of uncertainty and trepidation. Could I replicate in a digital environment what I believed was essential for an in-person course? What I learned, however, was that I didn’t need to replicate my face-to-face pedagogy exactly. I could find different, albeit related, techniques and practices to achieve a
similar outcome online.
One of the most intriguing, and perhaps intimidating, aspects of walking into a class for the first time and introducing yourself is deciding who you will be. The teaching persona you present to your students on that first day of class will set the tone for the rest of the semester.
As teachers, we get to consciously decide who we will be in the classroom. The creation of our teaching personas deserves careful consideration and is something I frequently discuss with my graduate students prior to their first teaching opportunity. In reflecting on the evolution of my teaching persona over the last two decades, and in discussing how my colleagues have developed and refined their own teaching personas, I offer an overarching recommendation for the basic elements of a teaching persona that will enhance the engagement of the teachers and students and contribute to a vibrant community of teachers and learners in the classroom. Simply, I recommend that through our teaching personas, we bring PEACE to our classrooms.
The first thing I thought, once I got the good news that I’d received tenure, was how ill-prepared I’d been for the process. Now that I am approaching my one-year "tenure-versary," I realize how equally unprepared I was for being a tenured professor.
For many months, I was so focused on the details of achieving tenure that I didn’t think enough about what the promotion would mean — specifically, how it would change my daily workload, my job expectations, my work-life balancing act.
When I was offered my first full-time administrative job in 2006 — as an assistant dean in the graduate school — there were two naysayers to whom I paid close attention: my wife and a prominent senior colleague.
My wife wanted me to decline the job because she foresaw what it would be like to care for two toddlers with me gone all the time.
The senior colleague was John Miles Foley, an expert on oral literary traditions. Hearing that I would have to forgo a yearlong research leave to write my second book if I accepted the assistant dean’s job, he urged me not to do it: "If you go into administration now you will be making a mistake. There are a lot of people who can do that work, and it should be done by senior members of the faculty. Now is the time for you to build a real career in scholarship."
Race, abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are among the most uncomfortable topics for college students to discuss, according to a report on a survey of nearly 20,000 full-time undergraduate students at 55 four-year colleges and universities. The report, “2020 College Free Speech Rankings: What’s the Climate for Free Speech on America’s College Campuses?,” released on Tuesday, says that about six out of 10 students said they had censored themselves on these and other thorny issues out of fear of how others would react.
Every semester I teach a journalism course at the University of Kansas on design basics for 80 to 100 students. One day I noticed that a student who attended every class had not been turning in his weekly journal assignment.
I asked him to see me after class. As we talked in my office, he began to cry and revealed he’d been under a lot of personal stress — taking classes while trying to work 30 hours a week at IHOP to help his mother and pay his own bills. His biggest need was money, and I managed to get him some immediate financial support from the university. But he was also enormously relieved just to tell me what was going on in his life — he had no idea, he said, that professors noticed students.
In this study, we explored experiences of Ontario students who engaged in a university-to-college (UTC) transfer. Data was
collected through qualitative interviews with 20 participants who began their post-secondary journey in a university program
but left before completing it and subsequently pursued a college program. We focused on motivations for transfer, the decision-
making process, and participants’ reflections on their decision to transfer. Framing the transfer decision within a model of
educational decision-making that draws on Rational Action Theory (RAT) and Bourdieu’s habitus, we argue that motivations
for leaving university were distinct from, though related to, motivations for pursuing college. Reasons for leaving university
were clustered around three themes: academic struggles, mental/physical health/special education need struggles, and future
prospects. These were highly interconnected and characterized by difficulties, from mild to severe, coping with university.
Motivations for pursuing college were more practical, relating to subject interest, college learning environment, location, and
future prospects. Both decision processes showed evidence of rational cost-benefit analysis characteristic of RAT, but within
a framework of habitus-influenced ideas about success and identity. While most participants reflected positively on their
decision to transfer, there were some negative reflections related to a sense of personal failure and/or the negative reactions
of others, particularly parents. Personal and external negative reflections were tied to cultural and societal expectations about
high achievement and perceptions of university education as superior to college education, again showing the influence of
habitus. We conclude with policy recommendations.
Keywords: post-secondary education, post-secondary transfer, Ontario, education policy
The coronavirus has colleges and universities swinging into action to move courses online. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out just how prepared (or not) academe is to do this on a large scale. Those of us in online teaching and educational technology have moved quickly to help, too, and it’s astonishing how many helpful resources have already been pulled together.
Even just a few weeks into the crisis, and really only a few days since class cancellations started to become a reality, there are top-quality guides free for the taking, created by people who really know their stuff. I will make no claim to have read all or even a fraction of them, but there are several that are clearly share-worthy:
By now, most final-year undergraduates across the northern hemisphere have found out what their years of toil (or Xbox playing) have amounted to in terms of the degree scores that will forever adorn their CVs.
In the UK, this was historically all about the relief or despair of finding out which side of the magic boundary you fell on between upper and lower second-class honours degrees; only the former are typically regarded by employers as a “good” degree. In a few cases, it was also the moment when extra dedication was justly rewarded with a first-class degree.
Every March, as faculty interview season gets underway at two-year colleges, I find myself thinking back on some of the memorable train wrecks I’ve witnessed.
There was the extremely promising — not to mention sharply dressed — candidate who, when asked why he was interested in this particular job, replied, "If you’re implying that I don’t really want to teach at a community college, I assure you, you’re mistaken. I’m not wearing this Brooks Brothers suit for nothing."
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
Last year I wrote about the role of confidentiality in presidential searches. There is an understandable need to protect the privacy of candidates, especially in the early stages of a search. However, once the search committee decides on the list of finalists, the need for transparency should outweigh concerns for secrecy to protect the candidates. Yet, recent events suggest that some governing boards actually are moving in the opposite direction and taking extreme steps to prevent the campus community from learning the names of those being considered as their future president.