Equality 101

In my last post, I discussed how I might use the seemingly elementary activity of show-and-tell to introduce students to a foundational concept of college-level composition: the Burkean Parlor metaphor. Frequently expressed as the simpler conversation metaphor, this metaphor illustrates what thinkers, researchers, scholars and, most importantly, writers do: we listen to a conversation; we form our own opinions about this topic of conversation as a result of listening; we eventually add our own voices (opinions) to the conversation; and our voices become part of the conversation that others listen to and use to form their opinions. Read the rest of this entry →

In my last post in the Contingent Equity series, I wrote:

The inherent nature of adjunct teaching creates situations where teachers do not and cannot work at their best level. Just as students need to have their basic needs met to learn, teachers need to have their basic needs met to teach. Adjuncts often do not have their basic needs met, and this needs to change.

Last week, The Chronicle published an article called “A Canadian College Where Adjuncts Go to Prosper” that outlined the ways in which one community college is making inroads toward equity for adjuncts. Read the rest of this entry →

During my vacation with my boyfriend and a couple of our friends (to Maui! So fun!), we had a discussion about whether the US should name English as its official language (ironic considering that Hawaii names both English and Hawaiian as official languages). This is a debate fraught with political, emotional, and cultural turmoil, primarily because laws that proclaim English as the official language of a state or nation have far-reaching consequences, especially when it comes to education. Indeed, my conversation with my friends bordered on dramatic simply because we all have had vastly different experiences with people who speak other languages in our work and personal lives (it should be noted that we are all white native speakers).

Before this conversation, I hadn’t really questioned what I learned about the English-only/official English movement as an undergraduate, which is summed up rather nicely by this position statement by CCCC/NCTE:

The National Language Policy is a response to efforts to make English the “official” language of the United States. This policy recognizes the historical reality that, even though English has become the language of wider communication, we are a multilingual society. All people in a democratic society have the right to education, to employment, to social services, and to equal protection under the law. No one should be denied these or any civil rights because of linguistic differences. This policy would enable everyone to participate in the life of this multicultural nation by ensuring continued respect both for English, our common language, and for the many other languages that contribute to our rich cultural heritage. Read the rest of this entry →

Research shows that students perform better for teachers who are invested in them. And by invested, I mean teachers who know their students. It’s a lot of work to build relationships in the classroom and a student/teacher relationship is a complicated one. As teachers we are authority figures, confidantes, parental figures to some students, role models, and guides. We facilitate our students’ educational experiences. It’s a heavy load, if you think about it.

One strategy I use to get to know my kids at the start of a year or semester is a bio-poem. I teach social studies, but I find that particularly when we are doing biographies or examining a historical figure, I can pull my students in most easily when I can relate the content directly to their lives. The bio-poems help me tease out personal elements that I can use as the connective tissue between the student and the history.

Even if my kids can’t read, they can relate to Gandhi, to Malcolm X, to Alexander the Great. And it’s incumbent upon me to foster that engagement by knowing my students.
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A couple weeks ago, I came across an article about a study called “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors.” The study was written by Scott E. Carrell of the University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Basically, these researchers examined how student evaluations correlated with teaching “toughness.” The study found, not very surprisingly, that students rated easier teachers higher and more challenging teachers lower. Read the rest of this entry →

by Bill Watterson

I stumbled across this article, ”Writing Centers: More Than Remediation,” via the most current NCTE Inbox, and it reminded me of one of my major pet peeves in my field: teachers requiring their students to visit the writing center.

Now, I understand why some teachers may feel compelled to attach class credit to writing center visits. They see terrible writing in their students’ essays, and, like their students, they’ve been led to believe that the writing center is supposed to fix terrible writing. Teachers, by and large, don’t view the writing center as a punishment; these types of writing center visit requirements are usually mandated out of a sense of service and an ethic of care for their students. Read the rest of this entry →

In my most recent post, I discussed my experiences in a workshop for incorporating multimodal/multimedia assignments into an advanced composition course. Today, I’d like to share my thought process as I design this advanced composition course and as I think about my own affordances and limitations, my own abilities and constraints, both material and theoretical. My goal in teaching is to make the course accessible and meaningful for all of my students; that goal drives my thinking and writing here.

Issue #1: Incorporating Multimodal Work

The primary issue here isn’t whether or not to incorporate multimodality; it’s how to do so and how frequently to do so, given my material constraints. I’ll be teaching advanced comp in traditional classrooms, possibly even without digital projectors, which means that in-class time will be dedicated to talking about how to do — rather than doing — these multimodal projects. Read the rest of this entry →

This series began last week with an introduction to the topic of contingent faculty equity and some of the big, broad reasons all educators have a stake in how well contingent faculty are treated.

Among the many problems contingent faculty face in their jobs is the lack of job security, which usually results in a loss of academic freedom. Contingent faculty, by definition, do not have access to any form of official or documented tenure. Typically, adjuncts are renewed just weeks before the start of the next semester; many adjuncts have been given courses mere days before the first day of classes. I actually got my first adjunct gig two weeks before the start of the semester, and I’ve gotten many teaching gigs just weeks or days before the semester begins. Read the rest of this entry →

Over the past few weeks, Ileana and others have been discussing the importance of teacher sabbaticals and self-care. Indeed, teachers need the same kinds of things to do their jobs well as students need: support, stability, guidance, compassion, and time to destress and unwind. Unfortunately, at many institutions of higher education, the majority of teachers do not have access to these basic requirements for a job well done.

These teachers are who we now call the new faculty majority, but they go by many names: adjuncts, contingent faculty, sessionals, seasonals, part-timers, non-tenure-track faculty, and so on. But many of these teachers share one thing: they are underpaid and overworked.

You’re probably thinking, well, yeah, aren’t all teachers underpaid and overworked? Pretty much, yes. Contingent faculty face a unique situation within this larger, systemic problem, which is that contingent faculty are often really, really underpaid:

Contingent faculty members, particularly part-time/adjunct faculty, are paid very low salaries (less than $2,700 per course on average.) They generally receive few, if any, health or pension benefits. This means that they must look for other ways to provide for themselves and their families, which diminishes the time and attention they can devote to the institution and to students. (AFT FACE Call to Action, 4 [PDF])

And really, really overworked:

The teaching loads associated with these positions are generally larger than those given to tenure-line faculty, leaving less time for the fixed-term faculty member to pursue scholarship or even keep up with developments in the discipline. Many of these positions are designated as “teaching only,” and therefore carry explicit limitations on the potential for support to pursue research or attend scholarly conferences, a real handicap for faculty seeking another academic job for the following year. These positions, like all contingent academic roles, are structured primarily to meet the needs of a department for instructional personnel, rather than the career objectives of junior faculty. (AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006, 7 [PDF])

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Last week Cathy posted an article regarding in what order she attempts to grade her material (stronger writers vs. weaker writers – who should we tackle first?).  I found myself in a similar situation when I had my sophomore research essays last fall.  With the students who did turn them in on time, I tried arranging the piles similarly.  Let’s be honest, I wanted to read those written by my stronger writers and dreaded reading the papers that would, as Cathy noted, take more time and a more thorough read-through since they needed more help.  I decided rather than proceeding this way I would ask advice of my more ‘seasoned’ co-workers.  Many admitted they did the same thing, but others suggested trying to ‘blind read’ them (remove the name from the top and read it without any bias associated with that name).  The problem I ran into with this method is that I had already read their rough drafts and pretty much knew who had what paper.  I tried it out and it did change scores one or two points, but nothing as drastic as I might have expected when I took away all previous expectations for that student.  Plus this method would be completely unfair to my special ed. students whose expectations were different.

So, what to do?  One teacher joked that you just look at their class average and add five points.  Troubling as it may sound, many of their grades ended up somewhere in the range of where they usually were at with other grades in class.  However, there were many papers that surprised me in their quality (yes, I did check for plagiarism), so this method would not work either. Read the rest of this entry →