As May draws to a close and many of us are settling into summer routines, it’s a great time to take stock of the state of the profession and think about what challenges we can prepare for in the coming school year. This week’s articles take a look at some ongoing debates in the profession.
With many of us at ProfHacker advocating or practicing some level of public scholarship, it can be valuable to learn from the experience of academic “celebrity.” Claire Potter reflects on her experiences building an online presence in “Becoming Tenured Radical: A Historian in the Blogosphere” at The American Historian:
While I am only well known as a writer in certain circles, nearly all of them academic, the idea of celebrity captures the spirit of what it has meant to develop an online persona. That is not because being the Tenured Radical has made me rich or even more than modestly visible outside higher education, but because blogging is a performance, and one in which I reveal only a part of myself. I think this is true of most bloggers and many scholars. We are often shyer than we seem online (OK, I’m not, but other people are), and we are capable of taking risks on social media that we know would never be appropriate in a work of scholarship.
Participating in online discourse means dealing with the consequences of attention. Steven Berg discusses bringing comments and trolling into a critical lens in the classroom in “The Pedagogy of Trolls” at Hybrid Pedagogy:
The pedagogy of the trolls is more than learning how to help students deal with personal attacks. It is an empowering pedagogy that allows them to realize that they have something meaningful to contribute; that their assignments are meaningful because what they have to say is meaningful. For many, the public writing is the most meaningful part of the course. But, more importantly, it gives them a confidence that they cannot gain by simply turning in assignments for their professor to read and return.
With corporate models for universities again in the news, Rebecca Schuman takes on the ongoing debate over university models of students as customers in her article “College Students Are Not Customers” at Slate:
If students are customers, then the university is a business. A business’s only goal is to succeed, as in make the largest profit possible, which it usually does by purveying the cheapest product it can at the highest price customers will pay. In this model, tuition should be as high as the school can get away with, and all courses should cater purely to the tastes of the lowest common denominator of the customer base. In practice, it follows that each class should be five minutes long, taught by holograms of Rihanna, and consist entirely of self-graded multiple-choice tests composed in emoji.
Many of us in higher education are familiar with the uneven distribution of service assignments, which reflects some of the same trends as the larger workforce. In The Atlantic, Bourree Lam suggests that “Being a Go-Getter Is No Fun,” looking at recent research suggesting that being perceived as competent at work can ultimately lead to more work:
In a survey of more than 400 employees, they found that high performers were not only aware that they were giving more at work—they rightly assumed that their managers and co-workers didn’t understand how hard it was for them, and thus felt unhappy about being given more tasks. Further, in a survey that was completed by more than 100 couples, partners who had greater self-control said they also felt burden and fatigue from being relied on more at home.
Laura McKenna draws attention to the consequences of poor adjunct working conditions for education in “The Cost of an Adjunct” over at The Atlantic:
Adjuncts readily admit they cannot support students outside the classroom, such as when students need extra help understanding an assignment, general college advisement, or a letter of recommendation for a graduate program. And even if they had the time to provide these services, many colleges don’t provide their adjuncts with office space, so they meet with their pupils in coffee shops or at library desks. Olson for her part said that in the past she’s had to meet with students by the trunk of her car, where she kept all her books and papers as she commuted between different college campuses. Without formal meeting spaces, students may find it difficult to locate their professors when they need assistance on their classwork.
Instead of a video this week, here’s a great podcast to check out on “Play in Education” from Chris Friend, Stephanie Vie, Kyle Stedman and Jesse Stommel. You can also subscribe to it at HybridPod.
[CC BY 2.0 Photo by Flickr User Kyla Duhamel]
