Little boxes

May 10, 2015 By

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

(Would it be heavy-handed to quote the next verse?)

I haven’t blogged for a while because the new job (director of instructional design and educational assessment), which I’ve been doing on top of being a history professor, has used up all my brain space. The position encompasses even more than I thought it would. (Anyone here ever been responsible for an online testing center before, or merged two testing centers into one? Me neither.) Toss in a mandate for electronic accessibility, a need to represent students’ achievement of university learning outcomes both quantitatively and qualitatively to accreditors, a small staff of bright people who are already pulled in too many directions, software the university adopted that may or may not work as advertised (but which I’m responsible for making sure gets used as it was marketed), an expectation we’ll find a way to lower course resource costs for students, a relationship to be (re)built with the campus’s rapidly expanding online learning unit, and much more. . . and I barely have time to think about anything else.

I really do enjoy the work because I get to think about big-picture things and have interesting conversations with all kinds of people, but it seems every day some issue emerges that causes me some cognitive dissonance or, at the very least, pedagogical discomfort.

Right now I’m stuck on the imperative to be “entrepreneurial” within the context of the university.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I’m all for finding new and interesting sources of funding—by which I mean grants and community partnerships—for scholarly and creative work that might otherwise be impossible. On the other hand, there’s a renewed attention to the bottom line that makes the humanist in me deeply uncomfortable. (I feel compelled to preemptively mention the History department is profitable; it brings in more money to the university than it costs, especially now that we are—to borrow terminology from those darling Silicon Valley start-ups—a leaner and therefore more agile unit.)

But, it ends up, there’s profitable and then there’s profitable. In the new cult of entrepreneurialism, the History department’s metrics make our entire endeavor—our research, courses, and public service—appear, in the eyes of some administrators, barely sustainable. When the provost came to talk to the History department, he recommended we spawn some “self-supporting” degrees or programs that would help to fund our bread-and-butter bachelor’s degree programs.

So, what is a self-supporting program? In my local context, a self-supporting program does not receive any funds appropriated from the state. (This is important because state appropriations to Idaho’s universities fell when the recession began, and have yet to return to 2008 levels. In addition, the state board of education provides Boise State only 2/3 the amount per student as it does the University of Idaho.) In return for not costing the university much, each self-supporting program (I’m told) gets to keep upwards of 90 percent of its revenue, out of which it pays faculty salaries and all its other costs.

There is a tremendous incentive in self-supporting programs, then, to reduce costs incurred by the department and to have students bear as many of these costs as possible.

As any academic knows, one way to reduce costs to the department is to hire very few tenure-line faculty and to farm out teaching to lecturers or, better yet, adjuncts. And there is a widespread belief—which I’m guessing is a myth—that online programs save the university money because they don’t place a burden on the university’s physical plant. In this paradigm, the most economical courses are those offered online and taught by adjuncts. (Of course, it’s not really economical, as there’s a huge support infrastructure in place—from servers and the people who maintain them, to expensive enterprise software and the people who maintain it, to instructional designers, help desk staff, admissions recruiters, the registrar, and all kinds of other units that don’t get reimbursed in any meaningful way by these self-supporting programs.)

But who has time to ensure all those online adjuncts are adhering to best practices in instructional design? A university can moderate such concerns by having “subject-matter experts”—who may or may not be tenure-line faculty—provide the content for each course. Then, in concert with specialists in instructional design, the subject-matter expert develops a course, populating, for example, discussion boards with prompts and exams with questions and answers. This course is then cloned within the university’s learning management system (e.g., Blackboard) and handed off to adjuncts whose teaching experience and subject matter expertise fall all over the spectrum. For purposes of quality control and discipline-specific accreditation (for example, in engineering or the health sciences), the adjuncts typically lack opportunities to make their course their own. The course becomes, for all intents and purposes, a less-than-open xMOOC with better-staffed sections.

On my least cynical, most optimistic days, I can see how this process might work for, say, Boise State’s nursing program, which offers a bachelor’s degree completion program for RNs, for a relatively cookie-cutter MBA program, or for any number of programs that offer continuing education to professionals in fields that require formal accreditations beyond degrees.

It’s going to be a screaming failure in the humanities, however. In some cases, the one thing humanities adjuncts have going for them is a sense of autonomy in designing their courses and agency in teaching them. This paradigm takes away that autonomy, in the name of cost-cutting and quality control. If you think humanities adjuncts are agitated now, wait until universities ask them to teach courses out of a box.

In addition, the humanities typically don’t scale well. Done well, the humanities require significant time for research, reflection, discernment, and revision. When he met with the History department, our provost recommended, for example, we bring in 30 new grad students each year and graduate 11 of them. (As I understand it, we typically bring in 10 students in a good year, and offer support to fewer than half those students. Eleven students is a lot. Because history student projects necessitate many, many drafts and we require a high standard of student work, I had three grad students file to graduate this spring, but only one did.) We have 14 tenure-line faculty in the department, and most of them don’t serve on more than two graduate students’ committees at any one time, but if we’re to keep our graduate programs, our tenure-line faculty are expected to ramp those numbers up considerably while teaching a 3/3 load, plus doing enough research to keep us off a 4/4 load.

Yes, there are examples of individual instructors teaching humanities concepts well online for a large audience of enrolled or open students—I’m thinking in particular of DS 106 in its various permutations—but in every case I can think of, their success relies on connectivism rather than content delivery, and they teach outside of a traditional LMS. The scale derives from an instructor’s generosity with his or her time, and from students’ willingness to expand their personal learning networks, rather than from a widgetizing of course production.

In a climate that favors entrepreneurialism and self-supporting programs, the problem is that the humanities—and increasingly so, when we teach them well—are about building community, about collaboration and connection—not about sharing content in a way that can be measured by exams. The learning management platforms on which universities offer online courses are optimized for sharing content and quizzing students on their knowledge of that content, not for genuine connection and community-building.

But back to the provost’s recommendation that the History department develop some self-supporting programs: what kind of student is going to pay premium rates for a humanities degree? Humanities degrees do indeed provide a significant financial return on their investment by mid-career but our students don’t usually understand that, focused as they are on getting that first post-baccalaureate job. In the cold calculus of universities with dwindling state support, the humanities may slip from being the bread-and-butter liberal arts courses at the heart of a quality undergraduate education, becoming instead a luxury for those who can afford higher tuition for History courses one administration here dubbed “boutique.”

Meanwhile, of course, employers are asking for students who can think critically and creatively, synthesize complex information from multiple sources, and write well. I can’t wait to see how universities get remote nursing or business adjuncts to teach those skills online.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, Technobabble, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Mass firing in the History department at Boise State

March 8, 2015 By

This past week, the History department chair sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Grim News.” In the e-mail, she detailed extensive cuts to the History department’s funding, apparently emerging from the Provost’s office. Among the cuts are:

  • The Public History faculty line I recently vacated
  • 2/3 of the funds we use to support graduate assistants
  • Two lecturerships
  • A visiting lecturership
  • All adjunct funding

I’ll have something more substantive to say about this soon, but right now I’m grief-stricken.

In the meantime, you can read this Idaho Statesman article to get a sense of the university’s party line. As you might imagine, though, “declining enrollment” is not the whole story.

I’ll leave you with these tidbits, calculated by one of our endangered lecturers, who used to work in college finance and administration:

The department offered 49 full-semester 3-credit courses with 1,385 students total in Spring 2015. Of these:

  • 17 classes with 556 students were taught by tenure/tenure-track faculty (41%)
  • 15 classes with 449 students were taught by 3.5 lecturers (33%)
  • 14 classes with 340 students were taught by 8 adjuncts (24%)
  • 3 classes with 40 students were taught by full-time faculty not housed entirely in the history department (2%)

The lecturer estimates the department’s instructional expenses constitute less than 45% of the revenue it brings in through teaching alone, and that there’s no way the now diminished tenure-line faculty can accommodate all of the students currently being taught by lecturers and adjuncts. Even trying to accommodate them will mean History faculty won’t have time to do research during the academic year. Currently we have two NEH fellows, an NSF fellow, a Fulbright scholar, and the editor of a top journal—as well as everyone else’s research agendas—so our department isn’t exactly shirking its research responsibilities. Many of us have also service commitments that already are untenable.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Two quick updates, perhaps burying the lede

March 1, 2015 By

Just a couple of things:

  • I’ve been in the new job a month. I’m loving it. It’s a great blend of intellectual work, collaboration, and practical application of all kinds of things I’m thinking about. (Bonus: We’re no longer living hand-to-mouth. I can pay bills without breaking into a cold sweat. That’s a good feeling.)
  • Received tenure and promotion in the History department.
Filed Under: Tall tales and true

Ch-ch-ch-changes

January 23, 2015 By

In my last post, I quoted Frederick Buechner’s thoughts on calling—that it’s “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

And then I asked, “At what point do we acknowledge that the world’s deep hunger has met our deep gladness in a way that is unsustainable, that exhausts us?”

As I said, I’ve been thinking about this exhaustion in the context of teaching, advising, and mentoring. I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that I have a very low teaching load—a 2/1 (meaning I teach two courses in the fall, one in the spring), and that’s technically an overload because of various pilot programs in which I’ve participated, and because I coordinate the department’s internship program. There have been many times when I haven’t taken course releases, or I could technically have been on a 0/-1. I didn’t think it would look good to have such a low teaching load pre-tenure, so I taught extra courses.

I also had been cautioned by my mentoring committee that I needed to cut back on my service responsibilities. I was, we all acknowledged, headed toward burnout with too much service and overload teaching–and not enough time for research and writing. My calendar was full. Plus, my take-home pay hasn’t been enough to make ends meet. It’s been very stressful. Because I’m an exceptionally high-functioning depressive with a perhaps overdeveloped sense of commitment to others, it’s likely very few of my colleagues or friends noticed I spent much of 2014 in a depressive fog.

Fang knows otherwise.

As longtime readers know, I’ve gone through several rounds of interviews for excellent opportunities in California—program coordinator and director jobs—but none of them worked out. So when a similar position opened up here at Boise State back in September, I applied for it.

Today I signed the offer letter.

On February 2, I’ll be the director of the university’s Instructional Design and Educational Assessment (IDEA) Shop and associate director of its Center for Teaching and Learning. According to the job ad, my primary responsibilities include:

  • Providing strategic direction and management for the IDEA Shop, inclusive of both instructional design support and the campus online testing center.
  • Coordinating and supporting the professional development of instructors to increase digital fluency and further the pedagogically valuable uses of educational technology
  • Advocating for and contributing to a campus vision for excellence in teaching and learning (with a special focus on the integration of technological tools and strategies), moving institutional educational technology projects and initiatives forward.
  • Building and sustaining relationships with faculty, department chairs, and deans to facilitate curricular innovation and advocate for research-based practices.
  • Partnering with other campus units (for example, Office of Information Technology and e-Campus Center) to explore and support new technologies for educational applications and to provide faculty development for a variety of technology-enabled pedagogies.

I’ll manage a terrific team of instructional designers who help faculty teach more thoughtfully, often with technology. I’m looking forward to being part of a regular team again.

The job pays more than an assistant professorship does, and it’s a 12-month position, so I’ll finally be bringing in a salary on which we can live. And if my tenure application goes through—it’s with the provost now, having passed departmental and college-level reviews—I get to keep tenure and can exercise retreat rights into the History department or into a comparable professional position, depending on circumstances at the time.

I’m excited to get started.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, Technobabble

Listening

December 14, 2014 By

I.

I inhabit a lot of different social and cultural worlds, and sometimes the adjacency of posts on Facebook is stunning. I can’t share tonight’s example because a lot of people might misunderstand my motivation for highlighting it. I will say this: as someone with a diverse circle of Facebook friends, I have the privilege of listening in on conversations that a lot of people don’t get to hear.

As a progressive, I get to eavesdrop on the conversations of my (often profoundly) conservative friends. As an atheist, I get glimpses of the perspectives of my pastor friends. As a white person, I get to listen in on conversations about the struggles and fears of my friends of color. Tonight, reading two Facebook posts and their ensuing comment streams side-by-side, I saw worlds colliding. One friend’s circle occupies a cultural context that lets its members clearly see the collision; the other friend’s circle does not, and might even deny that their worlds are colliding. It’s stunning, really, especially since, when worlds collide, neither world survives.

Hug your kids or the people you love tonight, and know that people you might see as very unlike you are doing the exact same thing.

 

II.

Elsewhere in my Facebook stream, a friend shared his pastor’s comparing having a call—by which she meant knowing what you are alive to do—with being pregnant with Christ. He wrote, “Your call in the world, the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need, is the same role as being Mary or Elizabeth.”

The post was an explicit invitation to ponder, and another friend alluded to Frederick Buechner’s quote, from Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, that “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

But what do we do when we sense so much deep hunger? And if we’re fortunate enough to feel deep gladness in a number of ways?

 

III.

It might seem odd for a depressive to admit to deep gladness, but there it is.

 

IV.

At what point do we acknowledge that the world’s deep hunger has met our deep gladness in a way that is unsustainable, that exhausts us?

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of teaching, of advising and mentoring. It’s a labor of love–and I mean that in a literal way, not in the way the cliché often gets used. Which is to say: I don’t mean that it’s work I do because I love it; rather, it is work that requires love.

It’s exhausting.

 

V.

I passed a couple of hours earlier this week talking with two friends–one a coworker, one a grad student–for whom being Christian is not only at the core of their identity, it is their primary identity. They were both stunned to learn I am not a believer–or, not a believer in any conventional sense–and we had a wide-ranging conversation that moved from them probing me about my failure to believe to me trying to understand the nuanced differences between their denominational commitments and perspectives.

I love talking with people whom I admire but with whom I disagree profoundly about important things. Such conversations are how we grow.

 

VI.

That’s part of why I haven’t been writing in these parts for several weeks. I’ve been having amazing conversations about religion, education, technology, parenting, marriage, humanities, citizenship, librarianship, and the past. The conversations have taken me back to reading poetry, as well as new nonfiction and fiction. And, of course, to research, old and new.

I’m learning so much, but this semester has been a time of listening and quiet reflection rather than writing. I’ll be using my voice again in 2015.

Until then, I’m wishing you all the best for the holidays and the new year.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true

Humanities = employability

October 20, 2014 By

I found myself in a meeting on Friday with several science faculty, and I had the opportunity to share with them what I’m doing in my Digital History course this semester. When I mentioned in particular that my students were mapping the neighborhood’s irrigation ditches, an engineering professor asked me how they were doing that. I said I had a student minoring in GIS and she’d likely in the end use Google Maps or maybe even Illustrator just to indicate where the water flows through the neighborhood and where it disappears underground.

She clarified her question. “No. . . How do you get your students to do things you haven’t taught them to do? If we ask our students to do something new, they say they can’t do it because we haven’t yet taught them how to do it.”

I pointed out that history, and the humanities more generally, provided students with plenty of opportunities to take initiative in research and communication, and that we tried to cultivate independent thinking in our students. Plus, I try to model this spirit of inquiry in the classroom. I pointed out (once again) that I’m a history professor without any degrees in history, and I’m a technologist without any formal training in that field. I’ve decided to eschew impostor syndrome in favor of openly making up my projects and career as I go along.

The professors seemed a bit flabbergasted. Maybe they hadn’t ever considered the humanities as anything other than courses that taught students grammar and asked them to read a lot.

For me, job #1 is ensuring students are critical and creative thinkers who can use technology thoughtfully so they can both tackle big problems and make a living. I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy—or even think it was morally defensible—to teach a course that didn’t inspire students to stretch themselves, that required them merely to learn content or basic skills. If your students don’t get past “comprehension” in Bloom’s Taxonomy, you’re doing it wrong. Students need to get to synthesis, evaluation, and creation in as many class meetings as possible.

In light of this discovery that the university apparently is producing STEM students who lack initiative and intellectual curiosity, I’ve just suggested it fund an interdisciplinary project that would bring some of this humanities secret sauce to STEM students. Here’s a smidgeon from my response to a CFP aimed at gauging faculty interest in new, interdisciplinary projects:

a) Project description – provide a short description of your project idea

Students need more opportunities to practice solving problems across disciplines, and Idahoans often need low-cost solutions to the challenges they face. My years in the classroom have taught me that humanities students (and especially history students), if given the right tools, support, and encouragement, are both persistent and creative researchers and makers. They seek out new knowledge, teach themselves and each other skills, and work together collaboratively with little complaint or friction. I’d like to bring this “humanities secret sauce” to students across the disciplines, as I’ve heard from faculty that their students don’t always demonstrate this initiative and ability to learn new things—or synthesize their knowledge and skills—outside the classroom.

Accordingly, I propose creating the Curiosity Shop, a place where the Boise State community, as well as everyday Idahoans, can bring persistent issues or problems, and students can—working alongside these individuals—address these challenges using research, experimentation, and communication. The atmosphere of the Curiosity Shop will be permeated with curiosity, deep inquiry, empathy, creativity, improvisation, and perseverance. Working in multidisciplinary teams, students will learn to prioritize challenges, research possible interventions, and then propose, fund, implement, iterate, and evaluate their solutions.

b) What are the broad research questions?

  • Are there differences in how students in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences tackle problem-solving? If so, what are these differences, whence do they emerge, and do students’ problem-solving styles change during collaboration on interdisciplinary teams?
  • What kinds of technologies, digital or otherwise, do students employ while solving diverse problems? What patterns emerge in this use, and what does their use say about students’ habits, beliefs, and values?
  • How do these students’ problem-solving styles and choices of technology jibe with or deviate from employers’ expectations of entry-level employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities in various fields?

Here’s hoping the appropriate committee bites. Our students can change the world if we let them.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true

On instructional design

October 14, 2014 By

On Wednesday morning, I’m interviewing for a director-level position that bridges academic technology, instructional design, and faculty development. As a result, I’ve been even more reflective than usual about the choices I’ve made regarding teaching and technology.

I.

This semester, in addition to continuing to build or maintain a slate of existing projects, I’ve tackled two additional experiments. First, I’m part of a pilot cohort of faculty experimenting with building e-books for our courses; as I build an interactive book using iBooks Author for my graduate public history course, I’m drawing on Creative Commons-licensed and public domain material, as well as my own commentary. (More on that in another post.)

Second, I completely blew up my digital history course a few weeks into the semester. I began the course with a traditional syllabus packed with readings and marked by some practice, but on student request, I changed the course so that 85% of the work—and thus of students’ grades—is connected to a single large project. You can check out the new syllabus, but you’ll find most of the course now consists of in-class work days for the 11 undergraduate and 5 graduate students in the course.

In the summer, a resident of Boise’s Central Rim neighborhood approached me about helping her and her neighbors better understand the history of their irrigation system, the Lindsey Lateral. The neighbors believed some residents hadn’t been getting all the water to which they are entitled, while other yards in the neighborhood were completely waterlogged and some basements flooded. The neighbors wanted an historian to trace the history of their water rights so they could make a case for various agencies or individuals to fund repairs to the ditches and canals that run through and under the subdivisions that constitute the Central Rim.

I admitted I’m no legal expert and instead offered to use the neighborhood as a subject in my Digital History course.

That course introduces students to the digital humanities and asks them to consider the various issues and potential opportunities at the intersection of digital technologies and our understanding of the past. In a previous iteration of the course, I had students interview digital humanists, explore exactly how far they could get with their research if they used only digital primary sources, build augmented reality tours, and write grants.

This semester, students have elected to focus almost entirely on the Central Rim Neighborhood project. That meant exchanging a lot of great course content and additional topics for hands-on skill-building, but I’m fine with that. Now students are working in teams to interview neighbors (with some of these captured on video as mini oral histories), document the history of irrigation, trace the development of the neighborhood from the first irrigated orchards to suburban subdivisions, and explore the evolution of the neighborhood into a particularly close-knit community where neighbors not only know each others’ names, but also know a lot about one another.

I’ve largely left the design and development of the website up to the students, providing them with suggestions and advice when they ask for it and inviting guest speakers to help them understand both the neighborhood and project management. I’m uncertain what form the project website will take on December 15 when we unveil it to the neighbors, but I know it will include roughly three roughly 1,500-word essays on irrigation and what it has allowed to flourish, the neighborhood’s suburban development and architecture, and the Central Rim’s sense of community. There likely will be several interview videos edited down from an hour to ten minutes or so. I hope there will be maps, historical images collected from neighbors, “then and now” photos and maps that can be revealed and compared with sliders, and more.

While building this website, students are, depending on which teams they choose to join or assist, learning

  • how to find primary-source documents in municipal, county, state, university, and public library archives, as well as how to access information in digital databases;

  • how to navigate the U.S.’s complex system of copyright and permissions for images and documents;

  • how to craft good interview questions and keep interviewees focused;

  • all kinds of video production skills;

  • web design and development;

  • how to read and interpret a variety of maps;

  • some basic GIS skills;

  • photography;

  • project management;

  • collaboration across media;

  • how to interpret local history for a public audience;

  • how to read historic photographs;

  • how to make sense of secondary sources that frequently disagree with one another;

  • how to design an efficient and effective editorial workflow;

  • how to identify, research the potential of, and employ or implement various multimedia platforms, software, plugins, etc.;

  • and more.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to implement the skills I myself have learned since first standing in front of a college classroom in 1999. I feel all my pedagogical work—in literature, composition, American studies, museum studies, education, and finally history classrooms, and through my professional work as academic technology and faculty development staff—has led me to this pedagogical moment when I turn over the class to my students, when I become the ultimate guide on the side—not the instructor who directs activities minute-to-minute during the hour and fifteen minutes of class, but the consultant to whom students often turn (though increasingly less frequently as the project develops) when they want advice.

The course complements and builds on the research and writing skills students learn in their lower-division history courses. Through teaching courses at all levels, I have developed a very clear sense of what students can and will do, as well as learned how to write an assignment that allows for students to successfully meet a challenge. Because I can design assignments that match—and increase—students’ motivation and ability to learn, I can trust my students in fairly radical ways.

It’s completely liberating. I set course-level learning objectives and ensure the assignment allows for students to achieve them. Students keep me informed of their progress by reporting on their work to date, but also through the questions they ask. Students get a learning experience—I’m loath to call it “authentic,” as I know there are countless forms of authentic learning, and I don’t want to claim this experience as more so than others—that stretches both their knowledge of the past and their skill sets (“competencies,” if we’re going to use trendy terminology), and I have far fewer individual student assignments to grade—though I do give students feedback whenever they request it.

II.

In addition to reflecting on my own teaching, I’ve been reading up on instructional design, as I realized that while I develop learning experiences all the time, I likely did not know the terminology of the field.

What I discovered was a bit astonishing.

Freely available and easily found resources online—the kind of resources I’m guessing most entry-level instructional designers access to learn the discipline—are often horrifying. There’s far too much information online about how to turn a PowerPoint into “computer-based training” or “web-based training,” or how to create “instructor-led training.” Terminology is revealing, and talking about learning as “training,” or about a learning experience as “computer-based,” “web-based,” or “instructor-led” completely erases the student-centered nature of the best learning experiences. Much of the “training” instructional designers receive apparently centers on delivering content or creating “performance-based training” in which students learn, for example, how to complete small tasks such as entering metadata into a database or creating an invoice.

I gleaned a lot about what employers—primarily corporate employers—might expect from instructional designers by looking at this list of interview questions, which is excerpted or adapted in multiple places and held up as a good, representative list. Many of the questions can be answered with a quick Google search; far fewer get at an instructional designer’s philosophy, engagement with “subject-matter experts,” or reflective practice.

And yet in working with some talented instructional designers here at Boise State, it’s clear instructional designers, at least in an academic setting, do so much more. When they are given the time and space to undertake research on what’s going on in the field, allocated funds to attend conferences and workshops for professional development and cross-pollination, and encouraged to have genuine conversations with faculty about teaching and learning, instructional designers can help faculty advance student learning in really interesting ways.

In recent years, I’ve identified three species of instructional designers in higher education. The first of these emerges from, or adheres to, a corporate ethos: content should be delivered efficiently and cost-effectively, and learning must be measurable. You might have encountered this species of instructional designer in your campus’s extension or dedicated online learning office. Their job is to help faculty move face-to-face courses online in such a way that a course might be taught using the exact same materials, activities, and tests for several semesters (because it’s expensive to redesign activities) and by any number of relatively interchangeable instructors. In this species’s ethos, learning experiences should be standardized and replicable. Changing a syllabus, activities, assignments, and assessments mid-semester, as I have done with my Digital History course, is nigh impossible and certainly frowned upon. (I know because I asked one of these instructional designers about this very contingency.)

The second species of instructional designer is more likely to be affiliated with a university’s “Center for Excellence in Teaching,” a language lab, or similar department where good pedagogy, rather than efficiency and low cost, is (in theory or practice) the primary concern. They read academic journals and higher ed publications. These instructional designers run programs in which small cohorts of faculty pilot emerging technologies in the classroom—mobile learning or ebooks, for example. While the first species of designers works on an assembly line, building widgets and assembling them into courses, this second species observes how faculty think, synthesizes these observations with deep knowledge of how students learn, and makes recommendations about how the entire higher ed factory might retool to increase student learning, graduation rates, and employability.

The third species of instructional designer—though individuals of this species might not even identify themselves as such (they may, for example, be programmers, faculty, or “technologists”)—questions the factory as a model for learning, throws spanners in the works, and argues that a public playground, with its sandbox and free-form play structures, is a better environment for learning and collaboration. These designers coax faculty into this space, wait for their eyes to adjust to all the sunlight, and encourage them to get their hands dirty in the sandbox or rebuilding the jungle gyms. From these people emerge such well-regarded initiatives as A Domain of One’s Own, Reclaim Hosting, Connected Courses, and the cMOOC.

The first species of instructional designer is likely to turn faculty away from teaching with technology, or at the very least leave a bad taste in the instructor’s mouth because this kind of work decreases faculty autonomy and flexibility and promotes a corporate ethos in higher education.

The second species may get faculty interested in one or two technologies, but the technology an instructor pilots may either quickly fade from the instructor’s courses (e.g., mobile learning) or become the instructor’s one go-to use of technology (e.g., clickers). These faculty may still see technology as a way of delivering content and checking for student comprehension, rather than as a transformative teaching tool.

The third species doesn’t necessarily make it easy for faculty to adopt new technologies, but these designers appeal to professors’ natural curiosity, desire for intellectual challenge, and propensity for problem-solving. These designers introduce faculty to an entirely new way of seeing technology as a teaching and learning tool.

I admire, and I’m most comfortable working with, the second and third species. I enjoy interacting with both of them tremendously.

III.

But the third species? They’re my people.

They’re student-centered, faculty-understanding, institution-transforming. Administrators often see them, at least at first, as guerrillas or unnecessarily radical. But as their successes pile up, and as people from other colleges and universities take notice of their work, a grudging admiration builds, as does trust.

That’s not an easy chasm to cross, however—it takes a patient and perceptive administrator to see someone whose work looks potentially institution-undermining as someone who deeply loves seeing students succeed and who puts their needs first, often in unconventional ways. Instead of asking students to use the enterprise LMS and e-portfolio, the third species gives them free hosting and a makerspace. At first it’s not clear the students can—or even will try to—build anything with server space, a 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi, or access to the full Adobe Creative Suite.

But then suddenly your campus becomes an internet of things, a playground hacked by students to meet their own needs and those of their peers. Your students’ amazing work, instead of being a series of documents and images awkwardly stuffed into the class-by-class structure of that expensive e-portfolio system, shines on an amazing, responsive multimedia site they built themselves. Even if they don’t program themselves, your faculty learn to speak the language of the web developers they hire with small grants or borrow from an academic technology department.

The transformation is there, waiting to happen, if we hire the right instructional designers and give them free rein.

And, of course, if we hire leaders who will both help them and get out of their way.

Filed Under: Administrivia, Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Technobabble

All I have are bullets (many of them literal)

September 7, 2014 By
  •  You may recall I fought very, very hard to keep guns off of Idaho’s college campuses. On day 6 of the semester, a gun went off in the middle of a class at a public university classroom on the other side of the state; a professor was negligent with his concealed firearm. Honestly, my money was on a student, later in the semester.
  • I hope the students in that class are allowed to drop the class without penalty, transfer to another section, and sue the state. (I know for a fact there is pro bono legal assistance available; if you’re one of those students or another who was impacted by this crime, you can get in touch with me and I’ll put you in contact with the right people.)
  • The concealed carry permit holders I spoke with who wanted this law passed all emphasized how highly trained they are before being issued this particular license. I was skeptical then, and I’m even more skeptical now.
  • A nine year-old with an Uzi. A 5-year-old with a shotgun. An 8-year-old boy with an Uzi. Why do people give guns to children? Why is it legal for children to use firearms?
  • I’ve seen people I admire post photos of their kids–some younger than Lucas–firing weapons. It chills me to the bone, and saddens me, too because both common sense and extensive research suggest this is not a good idea.
  • I’m sad so many of my friends, both male and female, live in fear at a time when crime rates are at historic lows.
  • In talking about recent incidents of gun violence, my mom and her sisters recalled my grandfather, a police officer who never really enjoyed being a police officer, told his daughters that “If you decide to carry a gun, do so knowing you likely will be killed by a gun.” (Research bears this out, by the way.) I’d extend his caution to family members: if you carry a gun, your family members are in jeopardy, too. (Especially in Idaho, which is second only to Kentucky in the number of domestic homicides committed with a gun.)
  • It frustrates me when proponents of less restrictive gun laws claim the statistics, and researchers’ interpretation of them, are not objective. As a professional researcher, I can assure you they are.
  • Here in Idaho, more of my friends own guns than don’t. They see guns as a solution to a problem that I see as improbable based on crime stats: the likely sudden outbreak of armed violence on a personal or community scale. And when there is an identified threat, the solution is always to be armed. Right now, there’s a lot of talk about a prowler breaking into homes in northwest Boise and its neighboring city, Meridian. I see locked windows and doors, good relationships among neighbors, a deep-barked dog, an alarm system, and neighbors’ willingness to call police as reasonable solutions. My friends suggest that a gun is solution #1.
  • It makes me profoundly sad to know that the odds are good that I will lose at least one of these friends to gun violence or negligence. I adore many of these people, and I know not all of them keep their guns stored in safes or with trigger locks. (One study showed that 43 percent of gun-owning households had at least one improperly stored weapon, and others demonstrate that firearms are not used in successfully in self-defense as often as people claim they are–in fact, they’re more likely to be used to escalate an argument or in ways that are illegal.)
  • It makes me sadder to hear, on many occasions, that my gun-owning friends have felt threatened by the mere presence of men who are not white—even, in one case, when being passed repeatedly by them on the highway.
  • I don’t mean to belittle these concerns—not at all. Rather, I’m profoundly saddened a (our?) culture has inspired these concerns.
  • I don’t know what the solution is, other than ending racism and increasing restrictions on gun ownership and access. Since ending racism is nigh impossible, I continue to work for the latter.
  • Some people think my sentiments here arise from a hatred of guns. Really, though, I feel as I do because of my deep love for people.
Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Nope

August 14, 2014 By

Today, a friend and colleague asked me if I was energized for the fall semester.

“Nope!” I texted to her.

I meant for it to be funny, but in the context of the conversation we were having, my response came across as angry and sad.

Why was I sad? I enjoy teaching. I like students. It’s always nice to catch up with my colleagues when they return to their History department offices. The week before school—that’s next week—involves a lot of prep, yes, but also a lot of good conversation and über-pleasant collegiality.

I paused a moment to probe the source of my sadness and anger. Was I experiencing the first twinge of a depressive turn, a chemical low combined with feelings of overwhelm?

No.

. . .

Since the beginning of last academic year, I have interviewed for four different staff jobs at three different colleges and universities, making it through several rounds at each campus. Two of those campuses still have not hired anyone for the positions for which I’ve interviewed; I’m uncertain about whether someone was hired for the third; and the final job was offered to me last Friday. Each of the positions was in different fields–research and social media; proposal writing; directing an events center/intellectual hub at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges; and an academic specialist within a student affairs department.

I couldn’t accept the student affairs job because it didn’t pay enough to live on–it was questionable it would cover the rent in its California town–and the university hadn’t provided the department with any leeway in negotiating the salary.

I would have loved to live in that town. I know lots of people in and around the place.

Undoubtedly this missed opportunity is making me less enthusiastic to return to the classroom. But that regret is not the biggest factor.

Nope.

. . .

I realized my lack of enthusiasm can be chalked up to the prospect of guns in the college classroom. Earlier this year, the Idaho legislature passed a law allowing anyone with certain permits or law enforcement experience to carry concealed weapons pretty much anywhere on campus. (Excluded: venues of 1,000 or more people.)

Have there been concealed weapons in my classroom before this semester? I can’t know for certain, but in 15 years of teaching, four of those in Idaho, I’m guessing that yes, a student brought a weapon to one of my classes.

But never have I taught in a context where the state openly welcomed guns in the classroom, where legislators encouraged students to arm themselves.

. . .

If I were a better historian and less emotionally exhausted, I might provide a brief history of how guns have been used again and again to subjugate already marginalized individuals and communities. I need not remind my readers of this: Gun violence and the threat of gun violence are all over the news this week, here and abroad, in Iraq, Syria, and Gaza. Gun rights activists in the U.S. like to speak of tyrants who are coming for their guns, but let’s be clear–the ones talking about bringing guns into the context of everyday life are the most dangerous. Those who suggest guns have a place in the college classroom are tyrannical, for the presence of gun—or the suggestion or possibility of its presence—renders exceptionally difficult the free and open exchange of ideas.

Last spring, when my colleagues and I stood on Boise State’s central campus raising students’ awareness about the guns-on-campus bill, I spoke with several students who couldn’t wait to bring guns into the classroom and in fact admitted they had already concealed weapons in Boise State’s classrooms. These young white men envisioned themselves as potential vigilante heroes in an “active shooter” situation they believe is inevitable in any “gun-free zone.”

. . .

The reality is this: there are going to be guns in my classroom, and there’s nothing I can do about it.  This reality will change my relationship with students. It will diminish teaching and learning.

And by standing up in front of the class and not saying anything about it (because I can only imagine the hellfire that would rain down on me if a student complained to the campus lawyers or the media); by drawing a paycheck from the state; by submitting my tenure binders in the next month; by continuing to show up and pretend (as a historian!) that guns, and especially guns owned and carried by conservative white men, haven’t been an instrument of oppression and torture in this country; as if Idaho doesn’t have one of the highest rates of homicide by gun in domestic violence cases and one of the highest rates of suicide by gun; as if our very few black students aren’t placed at a dangerous, life-threatening disadvantage under this policy—I am complicit.

Am I submitting a letter of resignation?

Nope.

To be blunt, I can’t afford to do so. We’ve exhausted our savings, and non-minimum-wage jobs are few and far between here. I have to keep my job until I find another one.

. . .

Still, I am complicit. And it’s profoundly troubling.

I went looking for a wisdom in the Quaker nonviolence testimonies, hoping one would capture what I’m feeling and provide me with some comfort or inspiration.  I came across this passage by John Lampen, published in Catherine Whitmire’s collection Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity.

When we are confronted with hurt to ourselves or others, and the rational ways of mending it are not effective, we are forced to choose between complicity in the universal wrong and an act of sacrifice. Then the divine voice inside us insists that this is the most important choice of all. . . .

The journey, the renunciation, the heroism, may be called for within our own hearts, a private matter between us and God. It happens when we accept the hurt, and do not let it enslave or degrade us, but endure it, and refuse to pass it on. When we choose this path, we cannot foresee its end; we can’t say it if will do any good. It is a starting point, not a solution. We don’t know what will be asked of us next. But by this sacrifice we have identified ourselves with whatever power there is in the universe to redeem and recreate.

. . .

I can’t make the big sacrifice that needs to be made in this situation. I can’t walk away until I have a job offer sufficient to support my family.

My options thus are reduced to small resistances, to letting my life speak rather than my lectures.

What forms might such resistance take for this assistant professor? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Filed Under: Sometimes I teach

On fear at 39

June 2, 2014 By

Years ago, when I was working in academic technology and faculty development, I teamed up with a group of extraordinary women—Laura Blankenship, Barbara Sawhill, Barbara Ganley, and Martha Burtis—to present in various ed tech venues about a phenomenon we termed Fear 2.0, the constellation of fear-mongering around the use of social media in higher education, student-created media shared publicly, and born-digital, non-peer-reviewed scholarship.

Recently, I’ve been thinking again about fear.

Several weeks ago, a friend told me that when she heard several loud booming noises on her block, she retreated to the basement, opened her gun safe, retrieved her handgun, and began loading magazines in the dark, lining them up just under the windowsill, all while peering through the mini-blinds to scout for threats.

Two senior colleagues whom I also consider good friends reminded me that I should be careful what I post on social media, particularly when it’s about Boise State. (So did my mother, repeatedly, though she has never been on social media to see what I post.)

Every few weeks at his Taekwondo studio, along with Taekwondo techniques and forms, my son learns a new self-defense method to geared explicitly to protect him against strangers who mean him harm.

A month ago, two older women tried to make me feel anxious about dressing appropriately for a job interview for a relatively senior, high-profile position.

Another friend told me it takes several days for her to open readers’ reports on the articles she has submitted to academic journals. She fears the commenters will be abusive (as they sometimes are; in fact, just this week I received feedback on an article from three readers, all of whom offered great suggestions for revision, but one of whom couched it in the form of ad hominem attacks).

The common thread here, of course, is anxiety, paranoia, and fear.

I’m not going to say I don’t feel fear.

Reading the #YesAllWomen thread on Twitter last week, I was reminded that as a woman, I live an imperiled existence relative to men.

And of course, as a parent, as one therapist pointed out to me, it’s normal to always feel “a low-level terror.”

Plus, even my work duties can inspire fear. For example, this week I have to provide the names of eight potential external reviewers for my tenure case. The very thought gives me palpitations, as my work is deeply interdisciplinary and I’ve neither focused my publishing in traditional journals nor have I shopped around a book manuscript.

To list particular scholars for my tenure case is to constitute a new tribe rather than to delineate an existing subfield to which I belong. And that’s a frightening thing, as I’m asking these people I’ve never met to say Yes, this is an established scholarly community and yes, Leslie belongs, even though that community (which must comprise only tenured faculty, not alt-ac folks or museum professionals) does not in fact exist in any form these people would recognize. In fact, the people on my list might never have heard of one another, so diverse are my interests and publications.

But there are other options.

I returned last week from the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History. There, I reconnected with Cathy Kudlick, a mentor and former colleague who embodies (for me, at least) fearlessness, who in turn introduced me to the absolutely amazing Katherine Ott, a deeply generous and insightful soul who also struck me as fearless.

In talking with Katherine, I was reminded of my Fear 2.0 days, and I expressed to her the belief that, though I may be on the job market now or in the future, I’m at a point in my life where I worry very little about what people will think of what I say on my blog or in social media. Rather, I want to be relatively transparent; I don’t want to work for or with anyone who would reject me outright because of what I write here. Katherine made clear that was an obvious conclusion, but it’s taken me a while to get here.

Thank you, digital world, for making it easy for folks to discern that I am not the right person for them—and conversely, for me to discern that they might not be the best colleagues for me.

Once again I’m at an inflection point.

The last few years have been full of them.

I interviewed a month ago for a terrific staff position at a phenomenal institution, and I felt I nailed the campus interview, really connecting with the students and faculty—but at this point I’m guessing the job has been offered to someone else.

At about that same time, I realized my antidepressant had stopped working. It’s not a big deal in the long run; it happens, and I know intellectually how to deal with it, even if emotionally I feel like a wreck. I am fortunate, as I’ve said before here, to be an exceptionally high-functioning depressive, so I was able to show up for work and get things done; doing so just took more energy than usual.

But the combination of high (a strong interview) and low (transitioning to a new antidepressant) kicked me back into a deeply self-reflective mode in which I asked myself, yet again, what I really want to do with my life.

Today is my 39th birthday, you see, and I’m finally feeling that time is not unlimited—nor is my energy.

The answer? Beyond being able to support my family—a dicey proposition at best at the moment—I want to be in a place where I can be professionally fearless, where I can admit I’m still learning, where no one is going to try (even with my own best interests in mind) to shame me or frighten me into silence.

Also, about that supporting-my-family thing: I want to shift my perspective.

I’ve been helping a family member with a job application this week, and the application requires a salary history. Twenty-four years ago, this woman, working as an entry-level public high school administrator, was making 10% more than I earn today.

If I have one fear, it’s financial insolvency. I have expressed my concerns about salary and cost of living to a few colleagues, and while many of my junior colleagues understand exactly what the challenge is in living on my salary, a senior colleague recently pointed out to me that (more than 10 years ago) another colleague (whose life context is entirely different from mine) managed to make the salary work with two kids instead of one.

I don’t need that kind of comparison and subtle shaming.

I don’t need to be told it’s more expensive to live in California than it is in Idaho. Because here’s the deal: it was cheaper to live in Davis than it is to live in Boise. Really. No one believes me, but my bank statements don’t lie.

I especially don’t need people who own houses to tell me my rent is unreasonable (it’s not), when they haven’t looked at rental prices in a decade or more.

And yes, I realize some parts of California are exceptionally expensive places to live. Salaries in those cities also often are commensurate with the cost of living, unlike my salary here.

Confessing about professing

I admit it: I take a good deal of pride in being able to say I’m a professor. I love being called “professor.” I’ve worked toward this title my entire adult life. And many of the people I’ve most admired over the past 20 years have been my professors. To be counted among them is a joy. To give it up would cause me great sadness.

Yet I’m not yet convinced the profession is sustainable for me, either financially or emotionally.

I really had hoped that by the time I turn 40, I would be able to support my family without fear of not being able to pay the bills. That’s looking less likely with each passing year because of career choices I’ve made and because of a lack of state and public support for higher education, especially here in Idaho.

Dancing with fear

Seth Godin emphasizes that the process of building a professional life and forging an individual identity requires a good deal of dancing with fear. He’s absolutely right, and since my internship with Seth last summer, I’ve been more serious than ever about identifying points of resistance and dancing with the fears that underlie that resistance.

For me at this moment, this dance is about balancing progress toward tenure (playing the game) with a desire to experiment in new fields (breaking the rules), about bringing home a paycheck while also seeking more remunerative work, whether that be a different job or launching a freelance/consulting endeavor that I hope will provide me with a comfortable income—all while living in a context (academia) where I’m supposed to do the work because I love it (which I do), because I’m supposed to eschew material reward because only the uncultured value money.

I want to be fearless professionally, but there it is, laid bare:

I’m so tired of the fear that comes with living paycheck to paycheck.

I’m weary of the fear-mongering around work I enjoy but which other people deem professionally risky.

I want to do new, exciting things, but sometimes doing them—thanks to an academic culture that rewards conformity over risk—jeopardizes my ability to put food on the table.

Still, I’m off-contract in the summer. Summer is, then, the best time to embrace fearlessness, to break new ground, to embrace the advice a spectral James Joyce gave to Seamus Heaney:

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst
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origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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