Since the time I left UF after the Spring 2006 semester, my thoughts have of late drifted away from teaching. However, I know that its something important that I am good at and love dearly. So, what could bring me back to it? I really lack the desire to go back to teaching the same old stuff under the same kind of institutional framework, so I'll try to better conceptualize what I am looking for in my next experience. I want to find a place where I can make a difference by helping other make a difference - not ten years down the line, but now.
I want the kind of job that never really stops... no set hours, interacting all the time and accessible till I disconnect myself. Basically, I want to be a project coordinator. The pay does not matter – I would do it for free. The job would put me in close interactions with lots of different kinds of people from bums to businessmen to bushmen and other different sorts of folks. Somewhere straddling academia, education, business, therapy, and organizing. I would like to work in a multidisciplinary social sciences/liberal arts context where the emphasis was on producing social innovations to solve pressing social problems. I would like to have the ability to travel with and for work.
I am not adverse to working with anyone over the age of fifteen. I would prefer to work near beautiful places and big cities, but I would certainly could compromise if I found a truly appropriate professional environment. Given my financial security and what I know about the effects the tenure system (as it is currently practiced) has on universities, I'll gladly forgo job security for a contract position. Anyhow, I have two connected conceptualizations of the job floating around in my mind.
The first would be a higher ed institution looking for a few PhDs with an interest in participating in a new mandatory undergraduate thesis program. The idea would be for us to collaborate with “upperclassmen” (post gen ed*) individually or in small groups to produce a final project that strives to embody what they learned and labored in those last years. My job would be to work with them to transform their already established interests (this was the key stumbling block in my undergrad sociology courses) in some social phenomena into a well organized and executable action research project. This would mean making sure that they had a grasp of the relevant background literature on similar topics and getting them access to training in the relevant methodology they planned to use. Moreover, it would involve systematic networking for resources that could aid them in undertaking and completing the project in an optimized fashion. For this to occur, I would need a keen knowledge of both the course offerings at my institution as well as the research interests and activities of the professors.
Furthermore, it would involve helping them in two other potential areas – procuring finances for more resource intensive projects and in locating potential student collaborators with similar interests or complementary skill sets. In these ways, I would be less like a cloistered academic and more like a combination of academic adviser, human resource manager, social science generalist, and research grant coordinator. I would teach no classes and would be evaluated solely on the quality of the work my students produced. My colleagues and I would have a significant amount of sway when determining when a student has gone far enough to be granted credits as well as degree honors. In many ways, I would still be an instructor in the sense of spreading knowledge and facilitating it acquisition. My research requirements would be fulfilled by the few stellar projects that garner attention and publication. Finally, the projects would be designed with the thought of making a positive contribution outside the lives of the students who produce them in return for institutional accreditation. The next step of the process revolves around the issue of either securing an existing position of this general nature or finding means to cause it to appear somewhere...
The second is more experimental and tied to my newfound belief in the power of web applications. It would probably be more possible to execute at a charter school looking for some wise professionals and higher degree holders interested in putting together an curriculum for web application development. I always wanted to teach high school anyway and I am very much in favor of the recent Gates Foundation initiative to blend high school and college campuses. I think the curricular goal would have to be plainly stated as IT literacy - the ability to responsibly use appropriate technology to communicate, solve problems, and access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information to improve oneself and the community. I would integrate social science education by encouraging them to pursue projects directly aimed at social entrepreneurship. Again, the students would have to find an issue (a social problem related to their already established interests) they felt to be important and possible to address through a web application. Then we would set forth to build them. We would have class wide presentations of ideas and work to improve them through critique and reformulation. Each student would be assigned a particular technical skill set to become versed in (php, drupal, flash, mysql, linux, etc) which they would later use to help further each others projects. If some ideas never panned out, students would team up with others on projects they liked.
So, there are a number of different areas of understanding the curriculum would have to target:
social problems and social science methods
entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship angles)
existing web tools
existing web technologies
concept design and pitching for seed money
marketing skills
The only problem is, I am having trouble even finding candidate schools that might be interested in this kind of program... I certainly don't want to go through the trouble of trying to start one. Moreover, why would someone trust me with creating this new curriculum? I think I need to have a success with YouFitter or one of the others first to avoid the “those who can't do teach” thing. Perhaps I could also try out this format online. It wouldn't have the same kind of classroom feel, but it might well help me get some resources organized and test out the structuring of ideas and activities.
Anyhow, one of my problems with teaching is that I have either very limited or no control over who will be in my class. It would seem that a teacher would know what kind of students with what kind of existing skill sets would be best suited to working within a particular kind of educational environment. I would rather be busy recruiting talented students and going over applications than dealing with apathy. If I build in some kind of educational resources into the mentorship program and granting process for Evasion Ventures, it might actually help the entire process.
*At issue here is that some educators' idea that there is a set of basic knowledge and skills that every student should have before they enter a specialization. The problem is determining what that foundation should consist of and how it may vary between different specialization trajectories. There have been serious shifts in the idea of a liberal arts education since it was first conceived for the children of imperial aristocracies around the world. I don't wholly buy their argument and would instead opt for acquiring general education through work on intellectual projects with a specific end outside the acquisition of a “general” education. The distinctions between high school, college, advanced courses, and graduate research are evaporating as the economy changes and, but there will be some significant bureaucratic residue left to deal with in higher education for a considerable time in the future. I see little need for distinctions between students at the collegiate level. However, I am in favor of constant evaluations of students' multiple areas of development and a more targeted curriculum to strengthen their weaknesses.
