Category: Education and Administration

My Department of Communication Studies & Multimedia has a new web site designed by two of our multimedia students and organized by Robert Hamilton. Bravoe.

There is no seeping fear like the first year you teach school. Reading Frank McCourt‘s Teacher Man brought it back to me. There are no easy secrets to get you through, just doing it until you can smell the type of class you have as they walk in. Just doing it until there are some moments that worked and stories to tell.

It wouldn’t have helped my teaching if I had read this book back then at 23 when I first taught, but I would have recognized the fear when I wondered at night just what I thought I was doing.

I’ve had to ask myself what the hell I’m doing in the classroom. I’ve worked out an equation for myself. On the left side of the blackboard I print a capital F, on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from the left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM. (p. 253)

Continue reading Frank McCourt: Teacher Man

Let’s face it; research and teaching are in conflict in the university. Despite all the talk about connecting research and teaching there are few models for how to do it systematically. For most of us it is a matter of time. Time to teach is time away from research. It’s that simple.

So what are the models for connecting the two?

• Scholarship of teaching is the model where faculty do research about teaching. (See my entry on the Boyer Report). This model has the advantage that it can legitimize those interested in teaching and learning as researchers. If systematically deployed it also would mean that there are teaching scholars accessible to those who are interested, but not devoted. The down side is that it doesn’t make sense, except in small undergrad institutions, for all to be teacher scholars.
• Undergraduate Involvement in Research is a second model where undergraduates are involved in research. See Mitchell Malachowski’s opinion piece “Undergraduate Research as the Next Great Faculty Divide”, in Peer Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 2006. This is done informally by many of us where there are opportunities. McMaster has an Applied Humanities course which is an inverted form of an independent studies course. The researcher proposes the topic and tasks and then recruits students to join them. Unfortunately, as Malachowski points out, in many disciplines where solitary research dominates, there are few opportunities to involve students in anything more than glorified photocopying. (See quote in the Extended Entry.) To involve students systematically, by which I mean across the curriculum, we need to adapt our research. I can imagine a discovery-centred university that values the learning through research of both students and faculty (and staff) where the structures encourage learning and research to adapt to each other.
• Undergraduate Led Research is a related model where undergraduates are given credit or funding for imagining and conducting their own research. Senior undergraduates interested in continuing to graduate school are often ready to run with projects on their own and they can be given opportunities structured like a research culture with poster sessions, mini student conferences, and so on. This is not for all students, however.
• Researchers make better Teachers is the standard answer we give, but I don’t think it stands up. Top researchers rarely see undergraduates, they get endowed chairs with little teaching or release to run projects. If we believed this the last people we would give teaching relief to would be the top researchers. Instead teaching release is treated as an incentive, especially today when teaching means large classes that need to be entertained rather than the conversations where research experience could make a difference. No, if we want student-centred programs it is best to not hire too many superstars.

Are there other models then?
Continue reading Undergraduate Research

Models of Research/Creation: Click for PowerPoint Slides
Yesterday I presented at OCAD on Research/Creation: State of the Art. I was surprised at the anger in the audience with this SSHRC program. Some were there to learn about it, but some where there to question the program and how it has been run. We didn’t have a full airing of the grievances, but I think some of them are:

1. The Canada Council is sending university artists to SSHRC and SSHRC is saying we only fund research/creation (not art)
2. The adjudication panel was not made up of practicing artists
3. It isn’t clear how research can be woven into creative practices
4. There is an emphasis on teams and training of graduate students which disadvantages artists whose practices are solitary

How to respond? One side of me was surprised at the sense of entitlement behind some of the questions, as if SSHRC should be funding art. On the other hand, if people are telling university artists to use this program and not to apply for Canada Council grants, then we have a problem. Perhaps it is fair to say that SSHRC tapped into a need which they couldn’t meet with just one program and without the Canada Council. What they are doing is great, but we need a greater variety of programs and more funding. (Then again, who doesn’t feel they need more programs and more funding?)
Continue reading Research/Creation, Again

The Globe and Mail has an Associated Press article by Justin Pope, Classes without the commute (Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2006) about the growth in people taking online courses, including con-campus students. The story points to a Sloan Consortium survey, Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. (The free PDF of the complete report is available.) This report concludes that there is still significant enrollment growth in online courses, though Chief Academic Officers still believe that it takes more effort to deliver online and students need to be more disciplined to succeed.
Continue reading Online courses for campus students

SSHRC in their Transformation added the new value of “interactive engagement” to what social science and humanities research should involve. At McMaster we discussed how researchers can engage the broader public better and more. It is not as easy as it sounds. Intellectual Entrepreneurship: The New Social Compact by Richard A. Cherwitz (Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2005) is a short opnion piece that nicely sets out the challenges. He argues that professors are becoming (should become) intellectual entrepreneurs – something I have heard in other contexts regarding intellectual property and research. Cherwitz believes,

Public intellectual practice is a noble quest – one that doesn’t inherently or automatically require us to choose between a commitment either to research or service or between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge.

Continue reading Engagement and the Professoriate

But if educators were unsure what to do for undergraduates, the implications for graduate education were clear enough: The drive to ever greater research-based specialization was on. Over the past two decades in particular, universities have further reorganized themselves to emphasize research, especially scientific research. This has meant adopting the superstar model of faculty recruitment (which generally includes an enticing package of high salaries, research funding, and reduced teaching). It has also meant the creation of research centers, stocked with graduate and postgraduate students, as sites often equal in importance to the disciplinary departments, and more important than departments for their capacity to attract external research funding. The rapidly growing research specialization of the university has had the effect of making the content of undergraduate majors themselves more and more specialized and research-based.

America’s Top University – Does college need to be reformed? By Stanley N. Katz is the opening article in a series, Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education.

We all know the problem, but we don’t really want to do anything about it. We like our research perks and we don’t want to end up back teaching enourmous classes which we know are not about learning so much as processing.

The solutions are obvious, but they mean redesigning universities, not just fiddling with curricula. The solutions are:

1. Look at the student experience, not courses. Design for a breadth of experiences from small group learning to project learning. And … yes, include lectures in that experience.
2. Weave students systematically into research if you believe in the connection. Don’t leave it to luck or the need for bottle-washers in the summer. Create a team research model where students can join teams and apprentice.
3. Trust students, don’t treat them like cheaters who have to be processed and examined.
4. Allocate the teaching resources to when the students need good teaching, not when it is convenient to teach them. First year classes should be small not big. By fourth year students should be capable of independent study (if you taught them, that is.)
5. Teach students to assess themselves. After all, if they don’t know what they know, how will they learn on their own.

COU – CUCC (College University Consortium Council) has an interesting report dated September 2005 on “Student Mobility within Ontario’s Postsecondary Sector” which looks at students going from university to the colleges and the other way. It seems the number of college students planning to go on to university is going up. “College studentsí goals increasingly include both a diploma and a degree.” (p. 17) Also, the largest percentage of university graduates going to college are in teh social sciences and humanities.

Seven percent of each of social science and humanities graduates was attending college at six months
and just fewer than 5% were attending college two years after graduation. Graduates from the social science or humanities areas made up the majority of those going on to college. Although these areas made up only 36% of surveyed graduates they are responsible for 60% of the graduates who attended college at six months and 50% at two years. (p. 14)

I’m guessing that a number of humanities students go to college to get a job specific diploma once they have a sense of their career goals.