I asked readers for their thoughts, and several of you wrote it to share your experiences. On the plus side, you pointed to several disciplines that have created groups for faculty members who either teach at two-year institutions or teach in the first two-years of college.
“Such connections are already strong in my discipline and can take many forms,” wrote Kevin Patton, president emeritus of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society. During the early days of the pandemic, the society offered virtual town halls about science and teaching topics, which proved popular with community-college faculty members. (Several readers, in fact, noted an increase in turnout when their disciplinary meetings went virtual.)
Patton also wrote that podcasts can be a great way for academics to stay on top of scholarly updates and teaching tips. He offers his own, The A&P Professor.
Sylvia Gray, a history instructor at Portland Community College, noted that she had struggled to stay connected until she came across two societies that enabled her to keep up on scholarship and talk about challenges specific to community-college faculty members. They are the East-West Center’s Asian Studies Development Program and the Community College Humanities Association.
Because she teaches Asian history at an introductory level, she wrote, the ASDP has been particularly useful. “Their attitude in conferences of ‘yes, and …’ has been so exceedingly welcoming and helpful. The culture they have promoted is respect for people’s learning at all levels, so some of the attendees are true experts in the field, and yet those of us who cannot claim to be ‘experts’ are still very welcome, both personally and professionally.”
Wheeler Conover, a chemistry professor at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, said that he’s active in the American Chemical Society, including its division of chemical education. He also participates in the ACS’s Examinations Institute, which develops national exams and concepts content maps.
Yet, when the exam committee met, “I would often be the only member from two-year colleges. If we were lucky, there would be two. Mind you, we educate 40 percent of the chemistry students in the United States. It’s not because you’re not wanted, because they would take every CC faculty member they could get. It’s because many folks use the exams but cannot go to the meetings to participate in the major development work. It’s gotten better over the years, but you still have to go to at least one major meeting to participate fully. Time and money are the biggest factors.”
Conover is also a member of the Two-Year College Chemistry Consortium. I reached out to Kathleen Carrigan, a chemistry instructor at Portland Community College and former board member of the consortium, to find out more about the group, which is part of the American Chemical Society. Carrigan said that meetings of 2YC3, as it’s known, provide a chance for peers to connect in a nonstressful environment. “Nobody is bragging about their credentials. They’re there to say, ‘I have a student who is working full time and wants to go to nursing school. But he can’t give the time to this class, so how can I help him?’”
The switch to virtual meetings helped increase meeting attendance, but recruiting new members into the group itself remains a challenge, Carrigan said. One possible pivot might be to change the focus of the group to include any faculty member who teaches in the first two years of college.
I heard from several members of one group that has done just that: the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges. Mary Beth Orrange, a SUNY distinguished service professor, emeritus, at Erie Community College, wrote about her long association with the organization, which has been around since the 1970s and has evolved to support faculty members from a range of institutions who teach the first two years of college. “From our experience, the distinction between two- and four-year college faculty is shrinking as it pertains to the first two years of college,” she wrote.
Members of the math association can also participate in a variety of interest groups, like one for adjunct-faculty issues and another for developmental math. And it has created resources for instructors who aren’t able to attend in-person conferences, such as webinars and traveling workshops, notes George Hurlburt, the math association’s president-elect.
Finally, one reader pointed out that if you’re looking to create deeper connections to your discipline, your campus teaching and learning center may be able to help.
“Center directors could be your best allies in promoting exactly what you’re talking about in your article — partnering with discipline-specific associations to attract and engage more community-college faculty, and help make them even better teaching professors,” wrote David Massey, who teaches philosophy at Indian Hills Community College, in Iowa.
“It might be that if center directors see your article and potential roundup of responses, they might consider making promoting and funding faculty participation in disciplinary associations part of their services.”
If you work at a teaching and learning center at a community college, have you come up with ways to help your faculty members stay on top of teaching innovations within their discipline? If so, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
Breaking Bad Habits
In a recent Twitter thread, Lindsay Masland, interim director for faculty professional development at Appalachian State University, asked people to describe “pedagogical sins” that they no longer commit. “I’m wondering,” she wrote, “are there things you used to do in your teaching that now fill you with cringe?”
Readers were more than happy to confess. Here are a few of their misdeeds:
- Setting rigid attendance policies and deadlines. This seemed to be the most common sin. One faculty member said she even asked, in her first year of teaching, for a student to provide a funeral program. (“I cringed then, and I cringe even more now.”)
- Asking under-represented minority students to share experiences with the class, on the belief that the instructor had created a safe environment for them.
- Trying to come off as stern and demanding so students would take them seriously.
- Using high-stakes assignments with no scaffolding.
- Framing the syllabus as a series of “don’t dos” (“Realized this set an antagonistic tone for the course.”)
- Cold calling on students. ( “I was taught to ‘encourage’ quiet students to participate by asking them questions in class. I’m sorry to all the students I’ve ever done this to!”)
- And the ever-popular: “Pausing during a presentation, looking at students, asking something like ‘does everyone understand that?’ and looking around the room for eye contact/body language that supposedly indicates learning.”
If Jesus Had Course Evals
Leave it to McSweeney’s to come up with another clever higher-ed parody: What would Jesus’s negative course evaluations look like?
How about, “I wanted to like this class, but on the first day, he submerged us in a river instead of going over the syllabus, and that was kind of a lot.” Or, “Doesn’t respect students’ time. A line of us had been waiting outside his office for over an hour. Finally, he showed up, said, ‘And the last shall be first,’ and started seeing us in reverse order. Made me late for work-study.”
That got me thinking. What’s a funny or absurd comment you’ve received from a student on a course evaluation? Maybe it was completely unrelated to the class, or it was a wild misinterpretation of something you taught. Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story might appear in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beth
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