Last fall, the academic career coach Jennifer Polk conducted an informal Twitter poll: How many of you, she asked her followers, received any meaningful pedagogical training during graduate school?
Replies ranged from the encouraging to the mostly dispiriting, with one doctoral candidate noting that the only training the program had offered took the form of “trial by fire.” Just 19 percent of the 2,248 respondents said they had received at least “decent” training — a number that, however unscientific, is also symptomatic.
This statistic reflects something that many of us could confirm firsthand: Teaching remains undervalued in the context of doctoral training and the profession at large. The result, by this anecdotal reckoning, is that less than one-fifth of aspiring college teachers are effectively taught how to teach.
The absence of that training for Ph.D.s will come as no surprise to many in higher education. What’s more surprising is that the lacuna persists despite the fact that in many fields, the jobs students compete for may increasingly emphasize teaching.
The American Association of University Professors estimates that over 70 percent of all faculty positions are non-tenure-track, so these are teaching, not research, appointments. Yet this information has generally failed to inform graduate curricula. It’s an issue that Paula Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, has been writing about (and organizing around) for years. As she recently put it, “More graduate programs should step up and educate their students about careers at teaching-intensive institutions.”
So why aren’t they? One explanation lies not only in teaching’s largely devalued status within research institutions, but also in a culture that casually denigrates teaching more broadly, an attitude reflected in everything from the pay scale of educators to their depiction in popular media. Also at the heart of the problem may be the unexamined assumption that teaching (not coincidentally, a historically feminized field) is more vocation than profession — an expression of discipline-based enthusiasm, or altruism, or love.
Ennobling as such rhetorical constructs may be, they obscure not only the very real labor of teaching, but the fact that teaching is teachable: something that results not from divine, Dead Poets Society-like bursts of inspiration, but, as in other career fields, from study, apprenticeship, and practice. There are any number of books — including Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, and Cathy Davidson’s The New Education — that offer excellent advice for college instructors.
It’s also worth noting that the resistance to addressing pedagogy in graduate education may be practical, as well as philosophical: Teaching someone to teach is hard. Like writing, teaching is a craft, learned not just in a single class, practicum, or workshop. Rather, it’s a recursive process, developed through trial and error — and yes, by “fire” — but also through conversation with others: a mentor, a cohort, your peers.
This idea has shaped the work we do at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center, where programs like the Open Teaching Initiative and our blog, Visible Pedagogy, aim to build communities of practice across disciplines, and to encourage what I’ve come to think of as social teaching. The concept is simple: Teaching too often takes place in private, behind closed doors, and would benefit instead from being made more public. Like our research, it should be shared with colleagues, and informed by the ideas they share with us.
(And the benefits are not just pedagogical: For students, there is intellectual and professional value in taking their teaching public, which can lead to unexpected connections and collaborations.)
It’s a belief that’s also central to the CUNY Humanities Alliance, which, among other things, establishes mentoring relationships between LaGuardia Community College faculty and Graduate Center students in the humanities, who spend a semester observing their mentors’ classes before teaching sections of their own. A program at the University of Washington called Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics similarly focuses on preparing students for the realities of a faculty career. It pairs six Ph.D. students with Seattle-area community-college professors in their disciplines, and allows them to shadow the faculty members as they teach classes, advise students, and attend meetings.
These programs, some of which were funded by grants, model a replicable approach for graduate curricula elsewhere that doesn’t require any outside support to adopt. Programs could, for example, facilitate partnerships between students and faculty, or help students set them up among themselves, with more experienced graduate instructors serving as mentors.
There are any number of approaches to teacher training that departments might take; any number of doctoral programs have already devised flexible, responsive curricula. As part of Idaho State University’s Ph.D. program in English and the teaching of English, students take four courses in teaching (including at least one internship) and dedicate portions of both their qualifying exams and dissertation to pedagogy.
Closer to home, I can report that the Graduate Center’s English department recently revised its first exam to focus on professionally oriented tasks, including the preparation of syllabi. At nearby Fordham University, the English Ph.D. program requires “sequenced pedagogy training” in the form of a two-part teaching practicum students take in their second and third years.
Some may argue that any time spent on teaching represents time not spent on research. And of course, graduate students’ primary goal must still be the completion of their dissertations and degrees. Yet given how readily some discussion of teaching might be integrated into their coursework — and how greatly they stand to benefit from such training, both as graduate instructors and as future faculty — it’s hard to reconcile decisions not to provide Ph.D.s with any meaningful introduction to the field.
Jennifer Polk’s survey should serve as a reminder to colleges of their responsibility to prepare students for actual faculty jobs, rather than aspirational ones. It’s time we stop treating teaching as ancillary to graduate students’ preparation, when it will, in many cases, be the substance of their chosen career.
