It wasn't that long ago that I was a brand new graduate student lecturer at the University of Florida. There was a time when it was necessary to have earned a Master's degree in order to teach one's own class at that institution, so having just gotten the physical proof of my new accreditation matted and framed, I felt quite prepared. Believe it or not, I had been excitedly planning for my new occupation ever since my freshman year in college. The evidence of those early thoughts (and their disorder) can still be found in some of my old spiral notebooks. I was never very impressed with the classes I took during those years, perhaps least so with those in my major concentration of study, sociology.
It does seem odd that one would choose to specialize in an area whose resident experts appeared the least capable, but this to a great extent reflects my somewhat unique way of looking at the world: If a task is important, but the people doing it seem less than competent, then what better area is there to put your efforts? It goes without saying that my narcissistic traits shone through especially well in this case. I can recall telling my friends that I knew I could do a better job than my intro and social problems professors. I was right, but this was of course before I had a full grasp on the nature of academic careers. It wasn't until later when I read my thesis adviser's book on the subject of teaching in higher education that I became more aware of the institutional environment in which my experiences had been situated.
John Scanzoni had by far the most interesting teaching style of anyone in the Sociology department. He taught courses on families and gender, but this topical area itself wasn't what drove his pedagogical methods. He was more of an old fashioned liberal arts educator in that the course materials were really just a foil for activities meant to improve students' core abilities - critical reading, writing, and debating with others in small group settings. It is probably fair to say that vast majority of students hated his classes. This was only natural, since they were devoid of the conventional structures they had been trained to deal with in high school and college.
There were no textbooks, lectures, tests to be found anywhere. All that existed was the imperative to write in a compelling fashion about the big questions that this area of study is predicated around: Why do families look the way they do? What are the social outcomes of their particular organization? How could they be structured in different ways and what might happen if they were? The resources available to you were the library, the professor, and your classmates. It was a bit of a sink or swim situation. A good proportion of students, not understanding quickly enough how to utilize the available life-saving devices, drowned. I liked the course format and did well in it, thus earning the some respect and interest of Dr. Scanzoni.
Still, I soon found out that he was more of a maverick than I was prepared to deal with at the time. I told him what I was working on for my honors thesis and before I knew it, he offered me the opportunity to use the next semester's students to aid me in my research. Of course I took it, but what I didn't understand at the time was that he would basically be putting me in charge of structuring and directing a course for fifty students six weeks later. I was just supposed to be the "head intern" for the course, but in reality, I found myself in the position of having to lead fifty of my peers through processes which I had no prior experience (neither did he), all before I could legally buy beer. The experience was especially jarring because it involved facilitating field research in a poor African American neighborhood (one in which I lived) that happened to be a major hub for the crack cocaine trade in the city.
What followed is best described as a well managed debacle. We had gotten a wide berth from department chair to go about engaging in these activities, but in all truth, no one outside of the class knew much about what happened that semester. Since I had helped Dr. Scanzoni step even further outside the traditional bounds of undergraduate curriculum, this time outside the classroom itself, there was some resulting mutiny and sabotage. After some incidents and altercations with neighborhood residents, some students banded together and refused to go into the field any more. Others tried to shift the direction of the research to their own interests and ends. We found out some of the interviews that students were supposed to have conducted with local parents had been falsified.
All in all, it is safe to say that dissatisfaction was widespread. Surely the students' course evaluations would provide adequate corroboration of this. Yet, I don't know that this wasn't true of his other courses at the time, or isn't still today. I became his formal (paid) teaching assistant the next year when I became a graduate student and I can't say the situation was that much different. Some people like his methods and learned a tremendous amount from the experience, but most did not. Yet, what was interesting about the aforementioned class was its truly impromptu, experimental nature. Did we rob the students of valuable knowledge they might have gotten through another randomly chosen course filled with lectures and exams? Perhaps, but that semester was a unique experience for all of them, regardless of what skills they did or didn't take away from it. They were involved in an exceedingly real and evolving story, both in terms of what happened in the class and what happened to the community we were working with that summer. We engaged in what could appropriately be called action research, but you'll have to read my thesis for more details on that approach and philosophy.
When I think back on this experience in reference to what my own courses late became, it does make the latter seem a bit disappointing. When I began teaching Principles of Sociology on my own, I took the mandate to educate very seriously. The students were predictably horrified, as would be expected by anyone with experience with freshmen gen ed courses. The expectations I placed on both myself and them were pretty high. I employed a textbook mostly just as a background reading device and publisher-provided fodder for multiple choice exams (which I still value in some small way). The rest of the course consisted of my own "lectures" on whatever readings I had chosen to engage as a corollary to the chapter we were "covering" that day. For instance, for race and ethnicity, I chose to compare the experiences of Jewish and gypsy peoples. For "economy and society", I focused on the very marginal concept of participatory economics. For deviance, I wrote an essay on my experiences in the "traveling kid" subculture and associated far left political activism.
It is important to note that I had to educate myself almost from scratch on almost every topic I chose. This is very different from the notion of "course prep" that most professors embrace, which basically consists of making commentaries on the chosen textbook materials. Moreover, I insisted that each student read my "lectures" online before class and send me a question and a comment, the best of which I used to structure our discussion. I also had them write a current event analysis each week and work on their research proposal (my version of a term paper) throughout the semester. Finally, as a mark of my own forward thinking innovation, in the early days of Wikipedia, I required students to write a substantial new entry for the online encyclopedia, one of adequate quality such that it would avoid the first knee-jerk-delete reflex of their vigilant editors at large.
This resulted in massive expenditures of effort on my part, even with small class sizes of 50-60 students. Still, I calculated that I was making almost $20/hr and receiving tuition waivers, so being 22 years old, I couldn't complain. After all, I could say that I had my own college course! I actually ended up posting the materials to the Wikiversity, where content moderators used to wanton plagiarism required me to prove my authorship. Moreover, I felt good about how I was going about teaching the course. Many of my colleagues brought their political positions to bear quite a lot in their own courses and for the most part, I felt myself to be above that. However, the longer I taught, the less I believed that any of these convictions really mattered one way or another because I became less convinced that the students were really learning anything at all. Sure, I could tell them all about the world and the many different ideas floating around in it, but even with all the reading and writing projects I endeavored to make them complete in a quality fashion, it still all seemed like too much of an exercise, both to them and myself.
Sure, there were some great students that I felt were growing intellectually through the experience. The process was fun for me even when there were few of them, because regardless, I love to read, write, and talk. Unluckily, the situation eventually became increasingly demoralizing when I began to concede to myself that I wouldn't be causing too many breakthroughs anytime soon. The students just wanted their degree and no matter what kind of novel approach I took to credentialing them through this one course. I was in the end just another gatekeeper holding letter grades over their heads. I was never naive enough not to understand this basic fact of college life, but I had hoped that I could achieve more by putting my own rigorous mark on a small part of the process. So, gradually I became less and less interested in working hard for them. I spent less and less time prepping new course material, ever more content to gently pad and increasingly coast on what I had already created. I saw myself becoming another professor who only changes the dates on their syllabus.
I quit teaching at the same time I finished taking mandatory courses for my PhD. I walked away from the education system entirely for the first time in my life, after almost twenty years in Florida's best public schools. This happens to everyone at some point, but I think it might have been a bit more darkly momentous for me. When I returned to the university two years later, I was demoted back down to being a teaching assistant again. My pay and hours were roughly the same as when I was teaching my own course, but it turned out to be a lot less work. It was more like data entry and secretarial work with a hint of teaching thrown in to assuage the ego. The woman I assisted was a permanent lecturer, meaning that she didn't do the research that all the other professors in the department did. She obviously liked teaching a lot because she taught twice as much of it as everyone else and did a slightly better job at it too. Still, I never felt the urge to switch places with her, not even for a pay hike.
This gets at the heart of my newly discovered reluctance to enter academia as it currently exists. I never liked the idea of writing for scholarly journals with extremely limited readership, but before I thought that might just be a prerequisite to be able to teach. However, now it seems that I have also lost the desire to teach, at least under the preconditions that I have experienced. On the other hand, I recognize that it will remain a major job option for me when I finish my dissertation and I have also decided that this aversion is probably a pretty silly one. In the great scheme of "making a difference", perhaps it doesn't rank too high. Yet it still gets fairly good returns in terms of social status, workload/pay, and autonomy, especially when taking into account the relatively small amount of true effort it requires. Still, I can't imagine shirking the responsibility of teaching anymore, no matter how lowly it might be ranked in my future job descriptions.
I had a personal low point this week. It came when I caught myself trying to devise a way to create a online course that would require the least possible effort from me. I was basically trying to plan ways to independently aid and abet the McDonaldization trend already occurring in public higher education. This is far from where I know I really want to be going, but it shows the extent to which I have been seduced into educational apathy. After thinking about this dilemma for a long time, the only suitable solution I can come up with is to embrace the potential efficinecies of information technology, while at the same time pushing the boundaries of experimentation that teaching at a university affords. This middle ground is about keeping courses I teach as fresh (uncanned) as possible, while reducing the my own level of repetitive labor.
While this might sound like I'm inviting the old burdens back upon myself, I have come to realize that those old teaching experiences were the richest I've had. Running Dr. Scanzoni's course and tecahing my first couple of courses gave me some of the most rewarding work experiences of my life. I learned so much more about managing people in the field and in the classroom because it was all so new and expected. Granted, I never could put the pedagogical pieces together quite right, but the attempting to fill in gaps as quickly as possible actually made me feel alive as both a teacher and a learner. I believe that the reason it felt this way was because though I was still just another small piece of the huge TA lumpen proletariat, I was still trying to use my teaching position as a research opportunity.
That's right - it was all about me! I'm no saint - I want the glory! We all do, even the enlightened old professors with thirty years behind the podium. Thinking of teaching as being as much about the needs of the teacher as it is about the needs of the students seems like a better approach. This doesn't mean letting teachers slack off and devote all their energy to extra-classroom research activities. It means letting them blend the two in a creative way, but not in the sense of assigning their latest book or journal article as course reading. For instance, I produced an ASA poster board and got to sit on a well attended panel next to Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) as a result of my initiatives. This is merely a modest start. Since a teacher's level of engagement must be a powerful predictor of pedagogical effectiveness, it has to be a serious priority. Instructors who just go about fulfilling the teaching portion of their job descriptions have little hope of excelling in the classroom. This is why I favor allowing instructors to do anything that gets them excited intellectually, so long as it involves the students and the general topic they are supposed to be addressing.
I'm not talking about how psychologists use undergraduates as passive research subjects, either. Yes, it might still be difficult to work within the constraints of the standard size, standard length college course, but there is still so much that is possible even under this schema. Classes could start businesses or nonprofit organizations together. They could build websites, write graphic novels, or produce movies. They could do anything but go through the overly well trodden exercises we now consider to epitomize learning. Learning is best thought of as a by product of engaging activities. I want to start collecting accounts of experiments in higher ed to catalog the variety that has already existed. That way we'll know what's been tried, how it has fared, and what to think about trying next.
I often hear complaints about how teaching is devalued by the university system. Despite my own pro-teacher attitudes, I must confess that I would rather see the whole system overhauled and 90% of professors taken out of classrooms and put back to the work on research jobs they'd rather be doing anyway. The whole idea that students need to sit at desks and take notes on any individuals' impressions of general topical matters is patently absurd. Let the most entertaining analysts and instructors record themselves and post it online for an unlimited number of people to view, that way we can reduce the yawning epidemic among young people. Sure, I'm worried about reducing diversity of analysis too, but I don't think the current model fares any better. The truth of the matter is that agressive streamlining of higher education is coming and there won't be any unions strong enough to slow the momentum it is getting from private sector initiatives. The question is what should replace it.
I have to echo Dr. Scanzoni's call for the convergence of research and teaching. The university is a perfect site for innovation not just because student labor is free (it's like an unpaid internship), but also because anything almost anything goes there. Being an academic means getting more than academic freedom, but educational freedom as well. We should embrace the potential to do more than sub-secondary education teachers can do in their increasingly regulated classrooms. We're still mostly free from school boards and federal mandates, at least for the time being. Let's use it to begin thinking beyond how higher ed is currently done and consider the vastness of potential formats.
