Author: Steven Volk

Finding our Voice in a “Post-Truth” Era

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Steve Volk, December 12, 2016

Where to begin?

(Photo: Judy van der Velden/flickr/cc))

(Photo: Judy van der Velden/flickr/cc))

Why not with a definition of “post-truth” from the Oxford dictionary: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oxford has selected “post-truth” as its “word of the year,” narrowly besting “bigly.” (OK, that last part was my own rocket into the post-truthian universe.)

Or perhaps we should start with a New York Times headline from the December 7 edition:

as-fake-news-spreads

From there, it’s but a quick hop to this clip from a CNN interview with a small group of Trump supporters on December 1. You’ve probably seen it, the one where Paula Johnson, a Trump enthusiast from New Hampshire, informed CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that at her (Johnson’s) polling station in Nashua, she caught people voting illegally who told her: “The president said I could vote, I’m here illegally.” Continue reading →

Set for SETS? Student Evaluations of Teaching

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Steve Volk, November 28, 2016

Among the relatively few rules that govern what we do in the classroom and how we do it  is the requirement that all teaching faculty hand out evaluation forms “near the end of each semester” (College) or “before the end of each semester” (Conservatory).  In the unstructured, devil-may-care past, each department (and each individual in the department) was pretty much free to design its own evaluation form, at least in the College, and I’ll just stick to Arts & Science here since the Conservatory has its own rules. That somewhat chaotic system, which made cross-departmental comparisons difficult since different attributes were measured and recorded on different scales ranging 3-point to a six-point scale, was put to rest some years ago. The current forms are designed around a standard one-to-five scale in six broad areas which the research has shown to produce (the most) valid and reliable results: 1) course organization and clarity, 2) instructor enthusiasm, 3) teacher-student interaction, rapport, and approachability, 4) workload and course difficulty, 5) assessments: exams, papers, grading fairness, and feedback, and 6) self-rated learning. We have standard rules about how they are to be distributed, collected, and returned to the faculty.

That said, there remains a lot of controversy about the value of such an exercise, not just among those who would argue that students shouldn’t be evaluating faculty at all (by my guess, a relatively small number) to those who think that the forms don’t actually tell us much about our teaching, to those who think that they don’t tell us anything about student learning – which is something we actually should be measuring – to those who argue that the research clearly demonstrates that SETs are significantly biased against many different subcategories of faculty:  women (female faculty in physics in particular), faculty of color, Asian faculty, international faculty who speak “accented” English, faculty who teach quantitative methods courses, and  “less physically attractive” faculty. Continue reading →

“You don’t pray for an easy road; you pray for a strong back.”

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Steve Volk, November 14, 2016

Frank Tuitt, professor at the University of Denver and organizer for the Making Black Lives Matter in Higher Education event. Photo: Andre Perry

Frank Tuitt, professor at the University of Denver and organizer for the Making Black Lives Matter in Higher Education event. Photo: Andre Perry

More than 250 black faculty members, administrators, graduate students and allies gathered in Columbus a day after Election Day to offer their perspectives in a long-planned session titled “Making Black Lives Matter in Higher Education in Challenging Times: A Conversation for, by, and about Black Faculty, Graduate Students, and Staff-Administrators.” In response to the question, “What has it been like to be a black faculty or staff member on a predominately white campus in the era of Black Lives Matter?” one professor responded, “You don’t pray for an easy road; you pray for a strong back.”

I wasn’t at that conference but I was thinking about the strong backs we will need as I drove down to Louisville, KY, on Wednesday for the annual meeting of the POD Network, a group of some 1,000 “faculty developers.” I’ve never much liked the concept of “faculty development,” mirroring my objections about “developed” and “undeveloped” countries, as if some countries — or some faculty — just needed to be “developed.” But that’s what our job is called, those of us who run teaching and learning centers, work in instructional design, and generally collaborate with faculty, graduate students, students and staff around issues of pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Truth be told, I hadn’t wanted to go. I just wanted to sit in a dark corner of my house. But I figured I could get something out of it, and, now back at home, I realize that I did. It was healing to be in a room of hundreds and hundreds of people who care about the values of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and, frankly, education.  It was healthy to be at a conference where the president of the POD Network used every opportunity to remind us of the values of the organization: Continue reading →

The “Us” in Teaching

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Steve Volk, October 31, 2016

"The Night School" (1873). The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1873

“The Night School” (1873). The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1873

The move to “disrupt” education usually focuses on replacing or at least supplementing face-to-face teaching with a remote instructor. Online teaching offers the promise (not the certainty) of a brilliant instructor orchestrating a well-crafted course that can reach thousands of students around the world. It is distance education, and if the reach of distance education has expanded impressively, the idea itself is hardly new. When I was growing up, I “attended” a distance education course via a television program called “Sunrise Semester.” My teacher, standing in a sparsely outfitted classroom studio in New York (I was in L.A.) endeavored to teach me algebra at 6:30 AM. The fact that I became a historian rather than a scientist provides some indication of how that turned out.

There’s a lot that can be said about the potential of distance learning, but much is sacrificed as well. By removing the teacher, what online learning disrupts is the personal interaction that has been at the heart of teaching and learning since, well, the beginning. Socrates and Plato, the Buddha and Trapusa.  Removing the physical presence of the teacher removes a vitality that is often at the core of what we are able to accomplish in the classroom. Continue reading →

More than Cleaning: Custodians and Student Success

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Steve Volk, October 24, 2016

When you think of successful university careers, you might think of presidents, provosts, and deans; when you think of the wisdom to be found on campus, you’re likely to think of professors sharing the fruits of their decades of research on chemistry, classics, or quantum mechanics. You almost certainly won’t think of the folks cleaning the bathrooms, washing the floors, and changing the trash bags.

— Serena Golden, review of The Philosopher Kings, a 2009 film about eight custodians  who worked at top-drawer universities.*

And yet I have been thinking about the people who clean our offices and the students’ dorm rooms, mow the lawns and rake the leaves, prepare and serve the students’ food, patch the roofs when there’s a leak, deliver food to our workshops, and – bottom line – make our surroundings not only habitable, but pleasant. They are, as Peter Magoda, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, observes, with a nod to Ralph Ellison, “an invisible campus culture.” [“Teaching, Learning, and Campus Custodians: Untidying Conceptualizations of Wisdom in the Academy,” About Campus (July-August 2014), available via Ohio Link]

cotton

Window at Calhoun College (Yale) broken by Corey Menafee

I’ve been thinking about service workers on campus since I read of the Yale dishwasher, Corey Menafee,  who broke a windowpane in Calhoun College – yes, that Calhoun College, the residential hall at Yale named after the South Carolina politician, Secretary of War and Vice President who staunchly defended slavery – that depicted enslaved people picking cotton. Menafee felt pressured to resign from his job after being arrested by campus police on felony charges before ultimately being taken back by his Yale employers after a five-week, unpaid, suspension.

I have been thinking about service workers because the dining workers at Harvard are on strike for pay that will allow them to make ends meet in one of the most expensive cities in the United States. [UPDATE: Harvard reached a “tentative agreement” with striking workers on Oct. 25, 2016.]

But it’s not wages and working conditions that I want to write about today – although there’s plenty to be said on that account. Rather, it’s the role that service workers – particularly custodians, food servers, and those who interact with students on a daily basis – play in the education of our students, not to mention our staff and faculty. (I have learned more about Guyana from the gentleman who delivers beverages to CTIE’s Brown Bag Pedagogy sessions than from many of the books I have read on that subject.) Many of the service workers on campus, certainly those in the dorms and dining halls, will likely engage more frequently with the students than many faculty. So, as Magoda, author of the recently published The Lives of Campus Custodians: Insights into Corporatization and Civic Disengagement in the Academy (Stylus, 2016) cautions, “failing to recognize and benefit from their wisdom represents squandered learning opportunities to the detriment of the entire campus community” [3]. Continue reading →

PowerPoint: Let’s Make a Meal of It

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Steve Volk, October 3, 2016

PowerPoint is used by a huge (I believe that’s the technical term!) number of faculty, students, administrators, business people, yoga instructors, plumbers, toddlers, and just about anyone else you can name except your cat. (Now we know who’s the smart one in the family.) In this post, I wanted to raise the question of whether we should be sharing slides with our students: If yes, then when (before or after class), and in what format (verbatim from class or edited, as slides or PDFs); if no, why not?

But then I thought: Why not make a whole meal of it and go over various aspects of PowerPoint use, not necessarily the technical (how do I get the transitions I want between slides, how on earth do I insert video, etc.?) but more the educational and aesthetic side of it. So, put your napkin on your lap, have your fork and knife at the ready, and let’s tuck in. Continue reading →

Locate and Contextualize: Facilitating Difficult Discussions in the Classroom

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Steve Volk, September 26, 2016

All images from Lewis Caroll, "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" (London: McMillan, 1871)

All images from Lewis Caroll, “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” (London: McMillan, 1871)

As part of a class assignment, two Muslim students from Middle Eastern countries attended a Catholic Mass in Philadelphia. What happened next was sobering. The students were members of a course in religious studies, “Religion in Philadelphia,” taught by Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez of Temple University. In the course Alvarez sought to introduce her very diverse students to a variety of religious practices and institutions in the Philadelphia area.

I’ll quote from the article that Alvarez wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Fostering Open Communication in a Culturally Diverse Classroom”) to describe what happened next:

They were enjoying the beautiful building and taking in unfamiliar practices — holy water, repeated kneeling and standing, communion lines — when a parishioner photographed them with her cellphone and then abruptly left. After the mass ended, they ran into her outside the church, where she asked them if they spoke Arabic — yes — and if they were Catholic — no. When the students walked to their vehicle, multiple police cars stopped them.

The incident thankfully ended without further offense to the students when they explained the nature of their assignment for their religion course. But it left them, their classmates, and the instructor deeply shaken. While the professor had prepped both the students and the institutions they would be visiting in a responsible and professional manner, Alvarez was left to wonder whether “in today’s xenophobic climate” she could “continue to assign interfaith exchanges to my diverse students?” Continue reading →

Good Job! Responding to student answers in order to spur learning

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Steve Volk, September 19, 2016

Me: In the chapter you were reading this week, Silverblatt argued that the Spanish inquisition as carried out in Peru in the 17th century was a “modern” institution. Would you agree and how does her argument fit with what we’ve been discussing in class?

Student: This chapter really made me think about what “modern” actually means in terms of what we’ve been talking about. I mean, the Inquisition seemed to have a whole bureaucracy that went with it and even thought it followed different sorts of rules than we have now, there still were rules and procedures for actions that seemed to treat everyone who got caught up in it equally. It makes me think that Spanish colonialism was attempting a new approach to control that brought it into new territory.

Me: Good job!

You: I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!

Sheet Music, NY Public Library, 1896

Sheet Music, NY Public Library, 1896

The bread and butter of much of what we do in the classroom involves questions and answers. Whether the class is fully discussion-based or primarily lecture-driven, our questions – and the students’ responses – are a critical way to engage learning, assess who has done the work we assigned, discover what questions remain, and edge into new territory. The “Q&A” of a class is probably the prime argument for face-to-face, synchronous learning since it is in these question and answer exchanges that we often discover the most productive, and unplanned, learning opportunities.

In earlier articles (here and here, for example), I’ve written about ways to foster or organize discussions in class. But the casual, usually unplanned, questions we scatter about, and the answers they elicit, are a much more common occurrence in the classroom. They are like seeds to the soil, each with the possibility of germinating and growing into full-fledged discussions and greater insights. Continue reading →

Office Hours: The Doctor is In

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Steve Volk, September 12, 2016

A Scene In The New York Eye And Ear Infirmary, Second Avenue And Thirteenth Street, During The Hours For The Reception Of Patients. 1875. NY Public Library

A Scene In The New York Eye And Ear Infirmary, Second Avenue And Thirteenth Street, During The Hours For The Reception Of Patients. 1875. NY Public Library

After a faculty/staff workshop last week, I was able to chat for a moment with one participant, new to the college. She remarked that she was surprised that so many of her students had shown up for office hours in the first week of classes. Most, she remarked, were worried that they were already falling behind or that they were not “getting it”. I wasn’t surprised, but I also suggested that the students who came to her office were not necessarily the ones she needed to keep an eye on. Often it is those who don’t show up that one should be concerned about.

My experience, shared by others, is that two different kinds of students most often come to office hours: those who are quite prepared in the class, know the material, and know that office hours will help them to excel in the class or are a way to get to know the faculty member, which they understand is important. The other kind are students who are struggling, but often know the ways that they are struggling. In other words, they can generally form a question as a way to begin a productive conversation.

But the students who don’t come to office hours are often the very ones who could use the most attention: the students who: (a) are so confused by the course material that they can’t formulate a question about it; (b) are embarrassed by having to ask a question, thinking that since they have gotten into a selective college, they should be able to figure it out for themselves; or, (c) worry that they are imposing on the instructor’s time and have had no previous experience asking for help outside the classroom. Continue reading →

Transformative Mentoring Communities

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Steve Volk, September 5, 2016

Quote

 

               Marge Piercy, “To be of use”

York Minster Cathedral, England

York Minster Cathedral, England

Our work as teachers, at its best, can be transformational for the students we reach. We work hard to make this happen even if the results we seek are often hidden to us or only apparent years later. The labor of teachers reminds me of those medieval architects who planned the great cathedrals certain only that they would never see the results of their efforts. If we are fortunate, we discover that the seeds of growth we scattered have taken root. A student from years ago sends us an email of thanks, or we come upon a happy notice in the alumni magazine or the New York Times. And we are very pleased.

And we should be. Even if we are quite privileged to be teaching where we are, we are nevertheless part of a higher education sector that faces massive challenges, from growing student debt to decreasing legislative support for the very notion of a liberally informed public. And the crisis in higher ed is but a small part of the nation’s problems, tested as it is by growing inequality, persistent discrimination, and a political system that has become increasingly unhinged. And our country is part of a world torn by violence and baking under the fierce sun of climate change.

Still, in the face of all these impediments, those who work in our colleges and universities (not to mention in the K-12 sector) are committed to the proposition that we can make things better one student at a time. Yes, in the most transactional sense, we claim our salaries on the basis of just doing our job, not changing the world, but our job is teaching and the goal of teaching is individual (as well as collective) improvement and empowerment. We seek to make a better world one student at a time. Continue reading →