Playgrounds

What I'm about to describe is going to sound a little kooky to many of you, but I feel moved to share it.

I spent most of the last week in Portland, Oregon at a little place called the Playground. Founded last year by Havi Brooks, the Playground is home to several different interesting events, all led by Havi. I attended a Rally specifically for folks who have been members for at least a year of a group run by her.

We began each day with some really, really difficult Shiva Nata. (Disclosure: For me, all levels of Shiva Nata are difficult; there's a reason, after all, its practitioners frequently refer to it simply as "the flailing.") At one point Havi had us do some level 7, which is unbelievably brain-scrambling and resulted, for me at least, in a day-long series of epiphanies in a week already packed with them. Shiva Nata was followed by savasana, and then by some reflective journaling and setting of intentions for the work we'd like to accomplish that day.

There were ten of us on the retreat, all of us working on separate projects and giving one another mutual support when we became stuck on a particular part of our projects or when we felt stymied in a more general way. My fellow Rallions were all bright, creative women who were so delightful to finally meet in person after a year of communicating online. I suppose the best way to describe Rally is as a silent retreat punctuated by whimsy and play (and profoundly fabulous pie from a nearby café.) I accomplished so much in three days—lots of writing and planning, but after doing the work I felt less intellectually exhausted (my usual state) than exhilarated.

I've been reflecting, then, on how I can bring the spirit—and some of the physical aspects, because they're also central to the experience—of Rally with me to my home and work.

Some ideas:

• There was one pattern-recognition exercise in particular—it involved various kinds of walking with intention—that I'll be trying out on my students when I'm teaching the capstone writing seminar this semester.
• I'm noting, now that I'm back home, a distinct lack of floor pillows in my house, and they're much needed, particularly when I play with Lucas on the floor of his room.
• Candles! Funky lamps! Plush monsters! A hammock (and we already have a hammock chair ready to mount on the back patio when it warms up).
• I'm going to recommit to practicing Shiva Nata. I was doing it every day for a while about a year ago, but then I stopped, and I'm not sure why. It provides some light, much-needed physical exercise, and I could benefit from the brain workout, too.

Mostly, I want more play—more playgrounds—in my life at home and at work.

What about you? What are you trying out this semester or this year?

Writing Guide Assistance?

I'm writing a very practical, step-by-step guide aimed at undergrads in the humanities or social sciences (but also probably useful to advanced high school students and grad students who need a review) about how to write an argumentative essay. After a dozen years of teaching writing-intensive courses, I'm pretty confident about teaching the essay, so I'm approaching the guide as an (organized!) download of my brain onto digital paper. I'm going to give it to students in my classes and also maybe make it available for Kindle or as a PDF through ejunkie or some such outlet.

I've already received some great ideas about what should be included in such a guide, but I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. What would you want to see included?

I've drafted about half of the book, and I'm thinking it will come in at 40-50 pages single-spaced—longer once formatted into a book—plus worksheets and appendices. It's not a guide for last-minute, night-before-it's-due essay writers, but rather for students who really have no idea where to start and need a good deal of hand-holding between receiving the essay prompt and turning in the paper. Most importantly: I'm not looking for it to be the be-all, end-all compendium on student writing; I want to keep it under 100 pages when it's formatted.

On this first pass, I'm using a hiking/camping metaphor, though I may abandon it because it might be too precious—and it might not resonate with students who rarely leave an urban environment. Anyway, here's a rough section outline:

• Packing Your Knapsack: gathering your tools
• The Trailhead: examining your topic
• Mapping Your Route: preliminary brainstorming
• Foraging: gathering more information
• Mountaintop Vistas: crafting your argument
• Setting up Camp: organizing your essay
• Campfire: revisiting (and possibly revising) your argument, and getting feedback
• Packing Up: final clean-up

Additional topics covered in subsections or sidebars (listed below in no particular order):

• making a checklist from the assignment instructions
• how to narrow your topic if the essay assignment is wide open or vague
• how to figure out if your instructor believes there's a "correct" answer, or if she's less interested in a "right" answer and more interested in seeing how well you make your argument
• how to articulate the thesis statement
• paragraph structure and transitions
• using tables for brainstorming
• advanced strategy: using metaphors effectively
• using a rubric for assessing the paper
• primary vs. secondary sources
• scholarly vs. popular sources
• clustering
• outlining
• plagiarism
• citation styles
• reference librarians are your friends
  
• revision strategies
• recommended resources (e.g. Strunk and White's Elements of Style)
• 20 most common errors of grammar and usage (at least in my classes)
  

As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

Band names inspired by grading my students' papers

• Sketchy Secondary Sources
• The Successionists* (a Civil War-era band)
• Captain Obvious and the Weak Theses

Play along in the comments!

* Yes, multiple students managed to write research papers about the South's succession from the Union.

RBOC, Transitions (and Buried Lede) Edition

More quasi-random bullets, because that's all I have in me. (Now with subheads!)

Teaching

• I'm finishing up my grading for the semester. I'm down to the single digits on my lower-division students' research papers, and then I have their final exams as well. I hope to finish tomorrow, and then submit grades on Friday, assuming I can figure out the LMS gradebook.
• That means--yay!--I've finished my first semester on the tenure track. Two course preps down for the year, and two to go--though the next two should be significantly less time-consuming than this semester's.
• One of the students in my public history class said she thinks she's found her calling as a public historian, instead of the schoolteacher path she had always imagined for herself. She's had a really rough time of it lately for reasons that have nothing to do with her academic ability, and it's nice to see her really come into her own as a critical and creative thinker who's willing to try new things. She also discovered her classmates valued her for her informally learned knowledge of local history; they dubbed her "Boisepedia." She talked to the department's internship coordinator today, and I'll be writing her a letter of rec for what sounds like a good position for her.
  
• One of my lower-division U.S. survey students wrote me a really nice note that went a long way toward soothing my I'm-not-a-papered-historian impostor syndrome. She explained she had hated history since fourth grade because that was when she first received a B in any subject, and that my course marked the first time she had been invited to engage meaningfully with history rather than memorize dates and consider only privileged people's histories. She said she now "loves history as a subject" and wants to study feminist theory. Also, there's this: "Most importantly, you helped my writing. I never thought that a history teacher could better strengthen the papers I write. I learned more from you than my [redacted] class. You showed me to come to my own conclusions about the sources I had, not let the sources guide my paper. I will apply this in any future writing I have to do. . . So thank you, Leslie, for making history important to me once more." Her note makes me sad about the state of history in K-12, but for now I'll just enjoy the warm fuzzies.
• I'll be teaching a section of the capstone writing course next semester. Apparently the seminar raises a tangle of issues about students' patchwork preparedness for historical research and writing. This course has, I'm told, been designated one whose products are to be used for assessing the efficacy of the history department in teaching its majors to think critically and write well. In theory, I suppose I should feel some pressure about that. Still, I'm approaching the course more like Icarus than Sisyphus; we'll see how long it takes for me to plummet to the ground, my wings destroyed by my own hubris.
  
• I'm teaching a graduate course next semester called "Introduction to Applied History." I applied for a grant to partially subsidize mobile devices for students in the class, so up to 15 of the students (so far there aren't 15 registered for the course) will each be able to buy an iPod Touch at a 50% discount. We'll be exploring the possibilities engendered by existing apps, sort of a "small pieces loosely joined" approach to local digital public history.
• We'll also be contributing to a very, very large project I began to organize this week. It's a wiki for Boise. It will be modeled on the absolutely fabulous Davis Wiki, but we'll be doing some structured experiments on public history themes as well. I'll also be watching to see what happens when we give members of the public a relatively easy-to-use platform and invite them to create pages on topics of interest to them, as well as edit others' pages. I'm still working on some domain-mapping issues and getting the site ready for launch, but I'll share the link with you when it's ready for a soft launch. There's also some grant writing I need to do related to this project, so it will keep me very busy next semester.
  

• I'm really happy here. Like crazy happy. I like the students and adore my colleagues.
  

Research and Writing

• Goal #1 for the new semester: Revise an article that was deemed very interesting, but "not a good fit" for one journal, and submit it to one (which I've already identified) that is both a better fit for the article and, really, for my work more generally.
• Goal #2: Gather and process materials for another article. This will likely involve travel to archives in Northern and/or Southern California.
  
• Goal #3: Use materials from Goal #2 to craft a chapter to replace one in my dissertation. I'm aiming to have a draft of a book based on my dissertation by the end of summer 2012.

Faith

• I attended Friends meeting again, and I'll likely be going again this Sunday, er, First Day.
• I've been adding blogs by Quakers from across much of the Friends spectrum--from liberal, unprogrammed Friends to orthodox plain folk--to my RSS reader. I've also been lurking on the forums at QuakerQuaker.
  
• As I wrote in my initial blog post about recent developments in my faith journey, what I suspected would happen did indeed come to pass: some folks are seeing my attendance at Quaker meetings as a sign I'm going to be "born again"--that Friends meetings are but a first step toward my permanent embrace of their own denomination. This is incredibly frustrating for me--like I-want-to-scream frustrating because of the arrogance and presumption.
  
• In case any such people are reading this blog, allow me to say this: I'm committed to the Friends for now. If that doesn't work out, I'll likely take some path through Unitarian Universalism, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodists, with a seasoning of Daoism. Any church that uses the phrase "Bible-believing" as a primary way of differentiating its members is not even on the list. I don't mean any offense to friends or blog readers who attend such churches; it's just not my path, and I don't want anyone to have any delusions that it ever will be.
• Another sign that the Friends General Conference may be a good home for me: the yearly meeting takes place at my alma mater. Out of all the tiny towns in the U.S., they pick one that matters tremendously deeply to me. I haven't checked to see how the meeting jibes with my summer teaching schedule, but the seed has been planted. . .
  

Miscellany

• I've been watching The Wire. Fang has all five seasons on DVD, and I'm one episode from finishing season 4. It took me half a season to appreciate the series, but now I give it my highest recommendation. The writing and character development are impressive.
• Because of how busy I've been, this year's Christmas shopping is being (literally) brought to us by Amazon Prime. How I adore that program!
• I need to get back with the Weight Watchers program. After initially losing 15 pounds, I've put a few pounds back on because I became lax about counting points. I eased myself back into it today by having meals that I know are reasonable, but I didn't count the points. Tomorrow I'll begin accounting for points again, which will initially be a headache under the new points system, but I'll adapt.
• Lucas went in for his annual well-child check-up, where he was treated to five separate vaccinations. I had, finally, the new Tdap vaccine for adults. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I had some whooping cough fun earlier this year; I was also diagnosed with pertussis a few years back. The injection site on my arm is still sore, so I can only imagine what Lucas's legs must feel like, as he was due for another round of DTaP, chickenpox, and MMR vaccines; a polio booster; and--according to his records, though I vaguely remember him already having one--his first Hep A shot. The clinic staff were terrific, though; the entire sequence of vaccines--administered by two nurses synchronizing the injections--took less than 45 seconds. Still, it's not easy to hear him howling with every new stab of the needle.
• I went to a birthday party with Lucas last night and connected with some more local parents. That's a very good thing.
  

What are you up to these days? Toss me some random bullets in the comments.

Public Service Announcement: For Folks on the Job Market

A good friend is hiring for a position in her organization. She instructed her assistant to run Google and Facebook searches on each applicant.

I present, then, an object lesson in why folks on the job market need to set their Facebook wall posts to be private. Here's the most recent update from one applicant:


And yes--as the applicant in question might say--THAT SHIT'S REAL.

Project-manic

My therapists have never liked it when I used the word "manic" to describe my better moods. I don't mean it in the clinical way they understand it, though; I suppose a better term for what I experience is "project-manic." It's a state where, for a week to a couple of months, I am intensely focused on getting things done in a particular aspect of my life--maybe it's a creative project, maybe it's work stuff, and too infrequently it's cleaning and organizing the house.

This time my project-manic phase is centered around work. After years of not submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal (see: full-time staff job, adjuncting, and motherhood), I've submitted two in the past month, both distillations of stuff from my dissertation. So I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I have most of the material I need, I think, for the next article, but it's probably going to take me a couple of months to write it. Still, submitting three articles in a year is pretty damn miraculous for me. Fingers crossed that they meet with sufficient acceptance.

My application was also just was accepted to participate in a program about teaching and learning with mobile devices. I proposed a project for my applied history grad course next semester, and I'm excited to see how that works out.

In other news:

• Lucas is learning to spell. He's been writing and typing his classmates' names, and every day he comes home able to spell more of them from memory. He's also been drawing a ton of fun stuff. Here's one Fang and I have dubbed "Fat Elvis":

• Jake the puppy (9 months old) now weighs at least 100 pounds. Here's a photo of him from about a month ago (photo by Lucas!), as well as a picture that puts his paws in scale--I have pretty big hands for a woman.

• I'm glad I bought that extra ice scraper last week.
• Good god even small oak trees have a lot of leaves, as do whatever kind of trees those two in the front yard are.
  
• Living indoors too much, and wearing scarves when I'm outside, turns my skin back into a teenager's--and not in a good way. As I've pointed out before, developing wrinkles and battling acne simultaneously is not fucking fair.
• Lucas is going through a pink stage. He frequently comments on what a pretty color it is, and he's declared he doesn't want to wear his black knit cap with the silver Spider-Man logo on it because he wants to get a multicolored hat that is mostly pink. On the one hand, I'm glad he hasn't yet been swayed by some of the most basic gender norming processes, but I also worry what the other kids will say to him if he wears a hot pink hat to preschool. (I have memories of one particular day in my own kindergarten experience when a boy and I wore the same style of red shorts with white stripes down the side, and I was told repeatedly by the boys that I was wearing "boy shorts." Such comments were really tough for 5-year-old me to handle, and Lucas is that age now.)
  
• I'm helping Fang reestablish his freelancing practice, which means much projectizing at home (after Lucas falls asleep) on top of my work-work. With the pay cut I took to come here, I should probably pick up some freelancing or consulting work, too.
  
• I changed my NaNoWriMo project to writing a couple ebooks for Fang and the biz; the cheesy Jefferson time-travel project will have the wait until at least the summer.
• It appears most of my lower-division students can't write a research question to save their lives, even after much coaching about what makes a good question. My faves are all along the lines of "Did the Civil War have a good or bad effect on the United States?" and "How did the California gold rush change life in the entire U.S. from then until today?" Needless to say, tomorrow's class will include more coaching so that I don't have to read 50 really really really really REALLY lousy papers.

By request: on professoring

A friend just nudged me for an update on "professoring." Consider these, then, random paragraphs of the very very early tenure track:

Teaching is going pretty well, I think. I have the usual mix of students who clearly enjoy the courses and are getting a lot out of them, those who are aiming for a B or C, and those few (especially in my lower-division general ed offering) who might be disaffected by just about any history course they take.

The student profile here, however, is very, very different from anywhere else I've taught. I don't have the institutional data with me--it's on my desk at work--but here's what I recall:

• Number of students (grad + undergrad) at the university: 19,993
• Average student age: 26
• Overwhelmingly white
• lots of married students and students with kids
• 30% Latter Day Saints
• Most selective public institution in Idaho, but (prepare yourselves for cognitive dissonance)...
  
• 4-year graduation rate of 7 percent, 6-year graduation rate of 28 percent (yes, you read that correctly)
  

In other words, I'm not in the UC Davis classroom anymore. That fact is in many ways a relief, as these older students often bring deeper analytical skills to class discussions--although the writing skills of students here are on average even more dismal (many of them have let me know they never had to write a thesis statement in high school, whereas I very clearly remember learning that skill in 7th grade). I'm really enjoying working with older undergraduate students; my sense of my upper-division public history course is that most students are in their mid- to late-20s, with a smattering of students in their 30s and 40s and about the same number of traditional undergraduate age.

As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching two new-to-me courses, one of which is new to the university: the first "half" of the American history survey (which covers from the beginning of time to 1877) and an upper-division public history course. Next semester I'm tackling two also-new-to-me courses, a graduate seminar that introduces public history to students in the department's Master's in Applied Historical Research and a capstone senior writing course. This semester's survey course is kind of killing me, but I know I'm working less than do a lot of people teaching the course for the first time. Refusing to perform 50-minute lectures three times a week (or even once a week!) helps, as does my belief that students needn't memorize facts--because it means I myself don't feel obliged to establish a comprehensive understanding of 400+ years of U.S. history in a mere 15 weeks. I've been emphasizing critical and creative thinking skills. Best teaching decision to date: having students read Clarence Walker's 2010 book Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slim volume that allows for all kinds of discussions of race and class in early America as well as the current political fascination with the Founders and Constitutional originalism.

I've agreed to sign on to a couple of grad student thesis committees, probably chairing both of them--one on the Master's of Applied Historical Research track and one in the more traditional M.A. program. I suspect I'll gain several more grad students after I teach the M.A.H.R. course in the spring.

Next academic year I'll take over the department's internship program for undergraduate and graduate students. I'm inheriting it from a professor emeritus who appears to have kept the program in very good shape, so I'm not too worried about it.

I've been spared departmental committee work this year, but I am taking over advising the undergraduate history club and its attendant spring conference-going. I've also taken a 16-hour student advising workshop, joined a very interesting faculty interest group on community outreach, and signed on as P.I. to a really interesting NSF grant application that needs an historian of women in science. I also just committed to serving on an advisory committee for the campus's observance of women's history month. Plus, next month I'll be stepping in at a Northwest women's history conference to cover for a faculty member from another Idaho institution; I'll be chairing a session and participating in a roundtable discussion.

The faculty interest group on community outreach promises to be very, very fruitful. Without giving out too many details on a project that we just hatched: a faculty member from another department has a small army of undergraduates he wants to put to work in community outreach, and he knows he wants the students to work with a particular population and to engage in some kind of writing, but he wasn't sure what should be driving their work. I offered to collaborate by helping the students learn to interview members of this group and construct a public history project that draws on both student research and first-person narratives from the group. Assuming we can get a couple of local agencies to participate (I think they will, as it would highlight their work) and can get IRB approval (it's sort of a sensitive population), I think it'll be a terrific project, the kind that births not only journal articles and conference presentations but also exhibits, podcasts, and lovely books of the coffee-table variety that seem to be popular locally.

I've also been helping several students from a colleague's class, as they're required to talk to another history faculty member about the context surrounding famous court cases. So far I've talked with students about the Mountain Meadows massacre, the Scopes trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Stanford White murder, and Margaret Sanger. It's been a nice way for me to very quickly review different eras in U.S. history, some of which I haven't had to think about much in the past few years.

I also sent off a journal article today, and I printed out a chapter of the dissertation from which I hope to harvest two or even three articles, as it's a looooong chapter packed with not-quite-fully-formed ideas that I believe merit further development. I'm also occasionally visiting the university library's archives to work with the papers of an Idaho woman who was an amateur mycologist, and I hope over spring break to visit the Smithsonian again, or maybe the New York Botanical Garden, to see the papers of a couple other women. I have the tiniest embryo--more of a zygote or blastocyst, really--of an article about California women gardeners and nurserywomen in the first half of the 20th century, but I'll need to visit an archive or two in southern California to really flesh it out.

My colleagues are excellent, alternately funny, warm, and quirky, as good professors should be. My new-kid-on-the-block antennae are picking up some vibrations of tension and dissent, or rifts among or between certain faculty in the department, but nothing too troubling. I love my job (except for grading, of course), and I feel extremely fortunate to be here.

Plus, Fang likes it here, too, as does Lucas. I now have an Idaho driver's license that's good for 8 years, and I hate hate hate taking tests and going to the DMV, so I figure we'll be here at least 8 years. :)

A bleg for U.S. historians

Hey, U.S. historians--

When you're teaching the intro survey, what documents or images or material culture do you use to illustrate the transition from Puritanism to Enlightenment thinking and republicanism? We've been spending a lot of time in Puritan New England, and my students are hungry for something new (as am I).

I'm looking for enlightening (ha!) sources from the mid-1700s that illustrate this shift in theology/politics/everyday life. I have a couple of ideas (e.g. comparing/contrasting this and this), but I'd like to hear what other folks use.

I should mention we've already looked at Winthrop, Mather, Whitefield, Edwards, and Puritan children/families (via tombstones, architecture, furniture, family manuals, wills, sermons, and Bradstreet).

Thanks!

How do you use history?

I'm kind of thinking aloud here, and as an academic I'm hesitant to put baby ideas into print, even virtually, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

In a month I set off on the tenure track in history, with a trifold focus on U.S., gender, and (especially) public history.

Whereas public historians traditionally have done history for the public--e.g. in museum exhibits or in documentary films--there's a small but growing group of public historians who want to foster and study history done by the public, by passionate amateurs and average folks instead of created for them. I'm one of those historians, and as I transition to life on the tenure track (I'll have 4-5 years to prove I deserve to be employed for the next 30-35 years), I'm searching for a project or two in which I can make significant progress in 3-4 years.

I'm hoping you can help me by telling me a bit about how you use history in your life, either everyday or on special occasions. I want to find a project that not only interests me, but that really gets people excited about engaging with the history of their family, neighborhood, house, community, hobby, or whatever else they're passionate about.

Just FYI, clusters of things that have piqued my interest thus far, in no particular order:

The use of mobile devices to experience additional "layers" of a place

- augmented reality
- GPS-enabled smartphones that provide text or video about a place
- smartphone apps that let people contribute their own stories about a place while they're in it

Crowdsourcing histories

- Davis Wiki does this in cataloging the present and past of an entire city, with no aspirations to objectivity
- The public's use of virtual spaces like the Smithsonian Commons or the Powerhouse Museum's collections database--creating new taxonomies and folksonomies, repurposing historic material in creative ways

Conservatives' uses and abuses of history and historiography

- The Texas school board's revision of the history and social studies curriculum to deemphasize the contributions of people of color and to lionize some very bigoted people.
- The Arizona law that implicitly forbids the teaching of many kinds of ethnic studies.
- Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers' reinscription of white male privilege in the American historical narrative

The thousands of ways people use history in everyday life, sometimes without realizing they're doing history

- Connecting to their past through personally or communally resonant objects
- Historical reenactment
- Video games, simulations, or alternate reality games inspired by historical places or events
- Communities of genealogists
- Memorials, formal and informal
- Oral histories gathered by amateurs
- Scrapbooking and photo albums

I'm really curious about what happens if a historian (me!) approaches conservatives' uses of history almost at face value, with a good deal of curiosity rather than immediate criticism (academics' typical first response). I'll be living in one of the country's most conservative states, and I'm wondering if there are ways I might engage with some of the more conservative groups in constructing historical projects and programs that

a) are meaningful to them
b) depend on their participation

but also

c) are packed with opportunities for people to learn to do history in more rigorous ways, rather than stick to simplistic K-12 textbook views (or Fox News' views) of history
d) get participants to think critically and creatively about people, places, and events, in light of existing evidence or evidence they've gathered (e.g. through oral histories)
e) prod people on the ends of the political spectrum to engage with one another's stories and in important conversations about community, through historical research and production

Regardless of your political persuasion, if you had access to an eager, energetic, and open-minded historian who wanted to work with you and your friends/neighbors/affinity community on a meaningful project, what might that project or program look like, and why?

Thanks so much. I can't wait to see what my brilliant and creative readers share.

Accessible Course Hacks: A Brief Primer

This is a last-minute submission for Hacking the Academy.

Because "disability" is an extremely slippery category, it's not easy to state what percentage of students on any given campus have a disability, but various studies have estimated that between 3 and 11 percent of undergraduate students enter college with some kind of disability. If we're including physical, learning, and emotional disabilities—both those students are aware of and those they are in the process of developing or identifying—I suspect the number is much higher.

So I'm puzzled when faculty members—and there have been many—say to me, "In all my years of teaching, I've never had a disabled student in my classes."

After all, if you're teaching a class of 300 students—and my university has classes that enroll upward of 900, so I'm being conservative here—and 10 percent of them have some kind of disability, you're looking at 30 students who right off the bat might need some kind of accommodation but might not ask for help.

Accommodating students is usually really easy once they ask for help. After all, in order to comply with state or federal laws, most universities have administrative or student-services units that work with students with disabilities to determine for which accommodations they're eligible and ensure they get the needed assistance. Often, the only time faculty hear about students' disabilities is when they receive a note from the student disabilities center informing them that certain students qualify for additional time on an exam. Such accommodations are ridiculously simple to provide.

I've found that it's very easy to accommodate students in other ways as well; it's usually not any additional work, and is in fact a matter of being cognizant and thoughtful. Let me use blind or low-vision students as an example. I arrive at my first class already having posted an accessible version of the syllabus online, and I have both standard and large-print versions of my syllabus available. When I've taught low-vision students, I simply need to remember to e-mail any handouts to them in advance of the class so that they can pull them up on their laptops with screen readers or transfer it to their Braille PDAs. I also am careful to describe any images or video I'm sharing with the class.

When I accommodate students with disabilities, many other students benefit. Drawing again on my examples above, any student might appreciate having a digital version of the syllabus handy. And if I e-mail class handouts to the entire class instead of just those students who have been cleared for accommodations, more students arrive ready to discuss the topic at hand because the handouts I send help to frame their understanding of the material they've read or viewed or listened to. In the case of images I'm projecting onto a screen during class, I frequently have students describe images to one another because they all—sighted or not—find new layers to an image when they discuss it with their peers. In fact, sometimes I'll pass out an image to a group, and only one person in each group gets to look at it at first—they have to describe it to the other students in the group, and the other students ask questions about it, which tends to deepen their understanding of what's going on.

There are dozens, and probably hundreds, of ways we can accommodate students with a variety of physical and learning disabilities, but the most important thing, I think, is that we adhere to principles of the universal design for learning as we develop our courses. To borrow a phrase from the disability movement, we need to "build in" such accommodations instead of "bolting them on" after the fact. Yes, there are certain things—like the amount of extra time a student should receive on an exam—that are best determined, out of fairness to all students, by experts who have documented the student's disability, but there are plenty of things we can do to accommodate students without having to worry about establishing an accidental legal precedent.

It can seem overwhelming at first, I know, but really it's about being mindful—double-checking, for example, that the blog platform or course management system you're using is accessible to all users—rather than about opening yourself up to a ton of additional work. One small step I typically take is not only to include a statement on my syllabus saying that I'd like to hear from students with disabilities, but also emphasize my interest in teaching all students by highlighting this section of the syllabus on the first day of class. Since I began making a bigger deal out of my desire to accommodate students with disabilities in simple ways, I've had greater numbers of students approach me for assistance, and they've never asked for anything unreasonable. Many of them end up going to student disability services for the first time ever to document a learning disability they have suspected for some time. I've taken a good deal of satisfaction in helping students better understand how they themselves learn, as well as in presenting them with resources they might use to explore the complexity of their various identities, including their status as people with disabilities.

RBOC: My Brain is Full edition

Long time, no blog.

I've been fighting off some kind of lung plague for three weeks now, and I haven't been feeling very bloggy. More nod-off-on-the-couch-and-watch-reruns-of-Bones-y. (Which, I might add: Why did no one ever tell me that the show is about a woman scientist working in a Smithsonian-like museum? Hello--that was my dissertation topic.) So instead of any semblance of sustained thought, I present a long-overdue random bullets of huh-huh-huh.

But first, a question: I'm supposed to give a talk about teaching next Friday, kind of a "last lecture" thing for a small audience of (usually senior) faculty. Typically speakers talk for 30 minutes and then take questions for 20. Number of times I've talked for 30 minutes straight in the past several years: 1. (Job talk. I'm chatty but not lecture-y.) This Faculty Mentoring Faculty Program presentation will be videotaped and made available online. What teaching topics would you want to hear about? Bonus points if you can describe the topic without using the words assessment, literacies, instructional technology, or student learning outcomes. Extra bonus points if you use the phrase rats off a sinking ship.

Now, the bullets:

• I was interviewed last week by a reporter for the Sacramento Bee. He grilled me about the literature of the TV show Lost. I blame my friend Dr. Andy, who handed over my cell phone number to the university news service when the folks there were looking for someone to comment on the show. The reporter's sole follow-up question was on the symbolism of rabbits on the show. I think I last used the word "symbolism" in 1998. Where are the English and cultural studies faculty when you need them? (I'll post a link to the interview when it's available. They asked for a photo of me, which is unsettling, as I thought I'd be one source among many, not the entire horse and pony show.)
  
• Tomorrow I'm talking to a TV reporter about Lost, but I'm not sure what about the show most interests him, other than that ZOMG the show is ending, how will fanfolk ever live without it? The reporter's first and last names are both those of nice East Coast colleges. If I were writing a short story about an English professor, I'd probably give him the same name.
  
• Dr. Andy tells me I should write an article or book about Lost. My first thought: Ooh, shiny! I then reminded him I'm about to launch onto the tenure track in history. Put down the contemporary pop culture references, Leslie. . .
  
• I remind myself that (ack!) I'm moving to Boise in less than two months and I have yet to sign a lease, line up movers, find a preschool, get health insurance, or do just about anything else. It's just a tad too early to do anything of these things because apparently everything in Idaho (except for sign-ups for the best preschools, whose deadlines have long since passed) happens at the last minute. "Show up with your stuff and then find a place," was how one property manager put it. "You can sign up on July 31st for health insurance on August 1st," enthused the insurance agent. Um, no. But if this is the case everywhere in the Gem State, I'm looking forward to my first trip to the DMV. (Though on a side note, I don't think any DMV could beat my trip to the Iowa City DMV. No lines, and they handed me new license plates within minutes.)
  
• What have I done thus far? Ordered my textbooks for fall. I made a lovely matrix to evaluate potential textbooks for my U.S. history survey to 1877, filled in several cells with details after browsing a dozen or more textbooks online, came up with my own "gut check" scoring system. . .and then threw a mental dart that landed, conveniently, on the one desk copy I've received from a publisher. What can I say? I like paper. (Plus, the textbook's writing didn't make me cringe. I learned the writing in many (most?) of today's history textbooks kind of sucks.)
  
• The department chair contacted me this week to let me know I don't need to teach one grad seminar and two lower-division courses in the spring. Instead I can teach one grad seminar and any upper-division course of my choosing, preferably one with a focus on gender. I'm thinking of tackling the capstone writing course for history majors. The class size is apparently pretty small, so I could give students' papers a good deal of individual attention. Your thoughts?
• We've had nothing but bad luck with trees lately. Our landlord sent out some apparently tree-hating in-law of his to trim our trees. We now have no cherry saplings, a fig tree trunk that protrudes about seven feet from the ground where there used to be a glorious sweeping fig tree, and the shoulder-height remains of a few 15-foot-tall oleander bushes in the backyard.
• Well, we thought, at least the neighbor's big, lovely, leafy cottonwood tree (my favorite species!) provides us with shade. I came home this afternoon to find the neighbors have completely removed the giant tree.
• I'm glad we're moving in July. Summer in Davis with no shade = unbearable.
• After months of working on it, I finished my first copyedit of Fang's 750-page novel. Yes, our next talk about it will be how to cut it by at least one-third. Can you say "trilogy"?
  
• Sometimes it bothers me that Fang is a much more prolific writer than I am. He made the good choice as a writer not to sweat through an M.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in mumblety mumble like some people you might know.
  
• Our puppy, Jacob, is getting big. He's about 45 pounds now--halfway to full grown. As puppies go, he's very manageable, despite his oafish size. Pictures soon, I promise.
  

What's on your mind?

Arizona tries to say adiós to ethnic studies

On Thursday, the Arizona State Legislature passed House Bill 2281, a measure that prohibits public school districts from offering classes that "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group," "promote the overthrow of the United States government," "promote resentment toward a race of class of people," or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

I'm worried less about the specific language and provisions of the bill than about the motivations of the people who authored it and voted to pass it.

At the heart of the bill seems to be an uneasiness with Chicana/o studies. The bill was inspired in part by the Tucson school district's inclusion of Mexican American studies in its curriculum (which was previously called Raza Studies and included the works of educational reformers like Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed), and has been supported vigorously by State Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne.

Mural photo by Urban Sea Star, and used under a Creative Commons license

According Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, the Raza Studies program students—approximately 1200 Latino students—outperformed their peers. Citing research by Dr. Augustine Romero, Rodriguez writes,

Horne is seemingly unaware that students from Raza Studies, who are taught about their indigenous cultures, consistently outperform students from all backgrounds at TUSD. They also have a very high college-going rate.

Paul Teitelbaum reported in February about students' appreciation for Tucson's raza studies program. Students and alumni, he writes,

countered the racist lies being made about the ethnic studies program, explaining the importance of oppressed youth learning their own peoples’ history. At least a dozen ethnic studies students and alumni recounted how important the program is/was to their academic success.

Students explained that the ethnic studies program combats the mythology incorporated in euro-centric history books that does little or nothing to portray the lives and history of the Indigenous people of Arizona. Ethnic studies programs teach oppressed youth the true history of how their land was stolen, their lives uprooted and their culture all but destroyed. Studying the rich history of the Indigenous peoples reveals the actual historical events that led to the ceding of one-third of Mexico to the expanding U.S. empire, and the forced removal of peoples from their ancestral homelands. “What we learn is the unique experience of Mexicanos who lived through the circumstances surrounding the defeat of Mexico and theft of Mexican land in 1848,” one student explained.

Dustin from Savage Minds wrote particularly eloquently about this issue when HB 2281's predecessor bill, Senate Bill 1069, was approved by a state senate committee in June 2009, so I'm going to quote him at length.

At risk for conservatives like [former National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne] Cheney is not history, per se. After all, the Massacre at Sand Creek happened, the Constitution really did set black people’s worth at 3/5 that of white people’s, and police and militia really did attack the children of striking workers in Lawrence, MA, as they approached the train station en route to lodging away from the hunger and violence of the strike. In a place like Tucson, which was after all part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the history of “la Raza” is particularly relevant.

What is at risk is the notion that American history should not be just (or even in many cases) the facts of our past but should be a story that edifies national citizenship. [...] [To conservatives,] there is a narrative of history that Americans should share, and this narrative is one that celebrates the triumphs and high values of our nation while downplaying the embarrassments and shortcomings.

In Arizona, and in the Southwest in general, this narrative takes on special importance as an assimilative tool, because for the most part, it is not the history of the people who live there. Latino children in traditional US history classes get the dubious pleasure of sitting through months of a history that, unless by some miracle the teacher manages to get up to the 1960s and the agricultural worker strikes led by Cesar Chavez, is unlikely to contain a Latino name except as enemies. This narrative that largely excludes the Latino experience form American history defines our history largely as the history of white folks, predominantly male.

With such narrow-minded thinking behind the bill, why do I say I'm not worried about its actual provisions? Well, the bill specifically protects instruction about Native Americans from being impacted by the bill. It also retains the rights of schools to group students by English language ability, which sometimes results in ethnically homogeneous classes. Most importantly, it also teachers to continue discussions of "controversial aspects of history," "the holocaust," "any other instance of genocide," and "the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race, or class." As far as I'm concerned, that's a loophole big enough to drive a César Chávez Day parade float through.

The bill makes a couple of asinine assumptions: First, that classes about a particular ethnic group are designed exclusively for instruction of that ethnic group, and second, that it's possible to recognize the full humanity and instructional needs of students without considering how their life experiences have been shaped by their ethnic background—by the privileges they have enjoyed or the prejudices they have endured.

As for that bit about current courses in Tucson or elsewhere promoting "the overthrow of the United States government"? That's slippery slope thinking. After all, instruction about Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, and the Mexican resistance to U.S. colonialism following the American annexation of Texas qualifies as a treasonous curriculum only if one equates any challenge to the status quo (including white hegemony in, say, agribusiness) with a direct assault on American governmental institutions.

And oh—one sign that your legislature might have passed a bill that is racist in intent? When folks at the Stormfront white supremacist forums (and no, I'm not going to link to the forums themselves) cheer and think about relocating to Arizona. At this moment I can't imagine a bigger red flag.

On a personal note, issues of race in the teaching of history are very much on my mind these days. Yesterday I submitted my textbook orders for the history courses—an introduction to American history through 1877 and a seminar on public history—I'll be teaching this fall. I'll be teaching at a mostly white regional public university in the Pacific Northwest, and it's unlikely many of the students in my courses will have had to grapple meaningfully with issues of race in American history; nor will they likely have been victims of everyday or exceptional racism. The bizarre rewriting of the state history curriculum by Texas conservatives and the fearful and racially-motivated HB 2281, along with countless other recent examples, will, I think, serve as excellent case studies for my students as we consider how history gets written—who writes it, who gets represented in mainstream narratives, and how. In fact, these two incidents of state intervention serve as excellent arguments for a broader embrace of public history—of history of, by, and for everyday people—over solely triumphalist national narratives.

So I want to know: No matter where in the world you live, where and how have you encountered what were, until 30 or 40 years ago, considered "alternative" histories of "minority" voices? And how are you representing your region's or nation's history to the next generation?

We are not curators

There's been a ton of talk over the past year about how participating in social media—whether through blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Flickr, or whatever—can be a form of curatorial practice.

And I totally get the appeal of that particular metaphor. In fact, I understand that some people mean to use it in a very literal way, in the sense that they see themselves as imposing a welcome order or useful narrative on a very unwieldy collection of internet artifacts. I've seen some people I think are absolutely brilliant using the term this way.

Those who know me well know I don't roll out my Ph.D. lightly. But as an (OK, adjunct) professor of museum studies and soon-to-be assistant professor of public history, I have to call bullshit on this one. As a lover of metaphor and as a poet who embraces all the possibilities of metaphor, I completely expect commenters to tell me to loosen up in this case. In fact, I suspect I'll come across as a snob. But really, this distinction—what is curating, what very much isn't—matters tremendously.

Educators with some facility in social media have become particularly fond of the term. But education isn't curating. Curating isn't education. In fact, in many museums, curators and educators are, alas, at odds with one another. Traditionally, curators have developed a depth of expertise in a content area over years of study, while educators tend—and yes, I know I'm generalizing here—to be younger folks with less education and experience. Education positions have a ton of turnover, a ton of burnout; curatorial positions come with more prestige and a sense of ownership of a position, sort of like tenure. Curators have at least a master's degree and frequently a Ph.D. Educators have undergraduate degrees and increasingly, in this era of incredible competition for jobs, master's degrees.

I don't mean to imply that curators are above the fray, that they hold themselves at arm's length from education. But their function is different. Curation is not a process of choosing the best resources to help other people learn. It's much, much more, and to suggest that social bookmarking, sharing links via Twitter, or using an internet platform's algorithm to help you determine which songs belong on your internet radio station is curation is ridiculous. Differentiating among things you like and dislike, or resources that you think are good or bad, and then sharing those opinions with people as a collection of internet or educational resources, is not curation.

When people talk about "curating" via social media, they're really talking about filtering, and curators do so much more than filter. You can't, I'm afraid to inform Robert Scoble, just "click to curate." In fact, the absence of talented curators makes a given educational context degenerate, in newcurator's most excellent formulation, to reality television.

Educators also do more than filter. They translate the curator's research and expertise into small bites digestible by the general public or schoolchildren. This is a talent unto itself, and—speaking as a former museum educator and exhibition developer—it's not easy to develop because informal learning diverges so spectacularly from what we're all taught is supposed to happen in formal educational settings.

The conflation of a combination of sharing, digital resource connoisseurship, and online teaching and learning with a form of curation not only devalues the actual practice of curation—and by extension the time, effort, and passion it takes to develop sufficient expertise to become a curator—but also obscures the skills we hone as we navigate sharing on the social web.

We need a new term for folks who are developing (or who have already developed) the depth of expertise that marks curatorial work, but who also practice the distinctive forms of teaching and learning engendered by the social web. It's not exactly edupunk, and it's not museopunk.

In my mind, the people—and particularly academics—who occupy this space practice Keats's "negative capability": they are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." By this I mean they get the tension—apparent to anyone who has planned a college course or an exhibition—between helping students or visitors develop content expertise and giving them opportunities to think critically and creatively. Doing both of these things simultaneously—cultivating expertise and promoting real intellectual development and discernment—is incredibly difficult to do from a lectern or via exhibition label. The social web, like a provocatively interactive museum exhibition, offers new possibilities for this kind of participation in, and service to, the world.

California Academy of Sciences botanical curator Alice Eastwood standing on the scarp of the San Andreas Fault, 1906. Eastwood was both a curator and an educator.

What we call that exciting—and dare I say disruptive?— role is open to discussion and debate. Kindly leave your witty neologisms in the comments.

Update: Just saw this article on the new curators in the New York Times, which in some ways undermines my argument and in other ways reinforces that curating is its own special skill set. An excerpt:

It is also a group plugged in to all areas of museum life. They don’t simply organize exhibitions, they also have a hand in fund-raising and public relations, catalog production and installation. “The old-fashioned notion of a curator was that of a connoisseur who made discoveries and attributions,” said Scott Rothkopf, 33, who is the latest full-time curator to join the Whitney Museum of American Art’s team. “A lot of that work has already been done. The younger generation is trained to think differently, to think more about ideas.”

What Happens in Class Stays in Class?

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

Today, I began my Seminar on College Teaching by having the grad students and postdocs enrolled in it draw a picture that served as a metaphor for higher education today.  Images of violence figured prominently in a few doodles.  My students depicted the research university as a guillotine, a hunting lodge filled with trophy heads, and--perhaps most graphically--as a meat grinder into which students are fed like cheap steak destined to be hamburger.

Should I be telling you this story?  Did I just violate my students' trust?  What might they say if they read this blog post?  Does it matter that I didn't provide students' names or identifying details?

Profgrrrrl recently considered issues of trust and confidentiality in the classroom.  "When I teach," she writes,

I feel a sense of intimacy with my students. I tell them stories that are meant for their ears, not stories that will be broadcast for all the world to hear. (Obviously I don’t tell them things I couldn’t stand for all the world to hear, but there’s a sense of context here; I tell them things that I wouldn’t stand up and shout out to passersby at the student union.) We have a negotiated relationship that is affected by topic, time, and space as well as a host of other contextual issues.

She feels uncomfortable, therefore, when students discuss other professors' classes or assignments in front of her.  She explains,

I never start these conversations, and I do my best to be minimally participative unless the student needs advice about how to best approach another professor. I don’t want to be in a position to pass judgment on a colleague, even if I don’t agree with things that the colleague is doing. However, I overhear an awful lot (students talking during break about other classes, things posted to Facebook and Twitter* about other classes, students coming to me directly to discuss other classes — and I always know who they’re talking about even if they don’t name names). The whole experience is both awkward and fascinating. I feel kind of like a voyeur, like I know things I should not know. Most unfortunately, it is the not-so-good things that are overheard in this way.

Her post raises questions about confidentiality, privacy, and student-faculty friendships.  Should we talk about our students with our faculty colleagues?  Should we friend our students on Facebook?  Should we let them follow us on Twitter?  Should students comment on faculty members' personal or professional blogs?

The answers to these questions vary, of course, with context, depending on institutional culture, the discipline (in my experience, humanities classrooms tend to be more touchy-feely), the nature or topic of the course, and the individual faculty and students involved.

I know of one course on AIDS where students would discuss sexuality, and because their classmates might reveal their own sexual orientation or health, students were required to sign a confidentiality agreement.  And in this human rights course at Franklin & Marshall College, students were required to sign a confidentiality agreement by an organization working with the class.

Blogging—by faculty or students outside of class—raises another set of issues.  Recall the case in 2008, for example, of a professor who was fired for naming on the (public) class blog six students who committed plagiarism.  Or Anonymous Professor's 2006 post "I hate my students," which provoked this reaction from Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass:

AP is using his anonymity as a screen to protect him from precisely the sorts of repercussions that his post about hating students would bring if he blogged under his own name. But this is short-sighted and self-defeating. In other words, AP knows very well that his posting style is unprofessional and self-discrediting, and that's why he won't put his name to his blog. But if AP--and other anonymous academic bloggers like him--respect themselves and their profession, and if they want the respect of others, they won't yield to the temptation to put up posts such as this one. At a moment when academics are under fire for not doing enough teaching and for putting politics and personal convenience ahead of expertise and hard work, personae such as the Anonymous Professor only make the professoriate look worse to the general public than it already does.

Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor also reminds pseudonymous academic bloggers that even if they're disguising certain details, there still may be repercussions:

Blogging about students, colleagues, and administrators raises further questions; I suspect,  for example, that we are all familiar with non-anonymous bloggers who purportedly "anonymize" their colleagues, even though their actual blog posts make it painfully easy to identify who is who.

Clio Bluestocking offers some thoughts on when it's appropriate to blog about students.  She writes that it's not okay to write about students to blow off steam, but that such blogging might be useful in another scenario:

[...] to try to understand what they are thinking and why they are behaving the way that they do. I don't mean the second rhetorically. Ultimately, I see many of my frustrations with students as stemming from our differences in ages, backgrounds, and positions in relation to one another and the institution. I want to understand and minimize or utilize those differences. The focus has to be on the interaction and on my process, not on the individuals on the other end.

Definitely click through to read her thoughts about professorial prerogatives and power when it comes to blogging about students.

What do you think?  Should the classroom be considered a relatively private space?  Should students be encouraged to sign confidentiality agreements in courses on sensitive subjects?  What has been your experience?

In which I warm up for Tuesday's job interview by writing about rabbits

Dear academic job interview committee,

So. . . I've been cramming preparing for my 45-minute videoconference with you tomorrow. There's a giant pile of public history books next to me on the dining room table--the end of which has become over the past year an extension of my desk, which itself sits in a corner of my dining room. See, I need the table--which is ridiculously large, really--because my ideas are so big that I need to spread them out across many square feet of horizontal space. It's a bit messy, but what can I say? I'm a visual thinker. (Ask me about different learning styles--ooh, and disabilities---and how I plan for them in the classroom!) Also on the table: books on museums, women in science, history of medicine, and the optimistically titled (at the bottom of an unwieldy stack) Unclutter Your Life in One Week!! Those two exclamation points bother me, but I include them because they are in the original source. (Ask me about how I'm really a historian! Ask me about teaching writing!)

Why I'm writing to you tonight, really, is to point out that, if I'm to believe what I read on the interwebs, the list of questions-I-should-be-prepared-to-answer is very long. And many of the questions are not really that interesting. Do you really want to know what text I'd use to anchor an introduction to public history course? Oh, let's say Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J. B. Jackson because it's already on my shelf, it's interesting to me, accessible (and perhaps even engaging) to undergraduates, and it has photos, great photos, like the one on page 230 of a rabbit drive in southern Idaho, circa 1900. The jackrabbits are blurry and headed in every which direction, but they are bounded by fences. As I prepare for a job interview that crosses many fields, I'm feeling that way right now. I don't want to know what happened to the rabbits, which, the book tells me, "migrated irrespective of property boundaries." The book also tells me that "at such moments [as a rabbit drive], farmers often behaved less as individualists and more as communitarians as they banded together to confront the biota that threatened their collective landscape."

Did you see on my CV that I'm both an English major and have a Master's in writing poetry? So you can see this metaphor coming, yes? Because I've been reading a report about the crisis in liberal arts at your university (sorry about the Phi Beta Kappa application rejection!), and I'm realizing maybe the liberal arts disciplines--and here I'm talking about everywhere they're in crisis, not just at your institution--need to stop acting like cornered jackrabbits and more like communitarian farmers.

Let me explain. When you're talking about the importance of interdisciplinarity in this report-on-the-crisis, you seem to really be talking about multidisciplinarity, about housing disciplines side-by-side so that faculty can, well, talk to each other. That's like letting all the herb farmers plant their crops in adjacent plots. Those plots are still going to be savaged by rabbits. (I'll let you imagine who the rabbits might be, but here's an example--increased funding for science labs at the expense of, oh, the language lab.) Adjacent herb farming is multidisciplinary. After all, everyone needs herbs, but in small amounts. They're kind of a boutique thing, an afterthought consumers pick up at the farmer's market.

What you really want is interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is when you plant marigolds, garlic, and onions among the herbs. I know--maybe you don't want my marigolds (cultural studies) in your lemon basil (military history), and maybe I'm not that crazy about lemon basil, either. But who knows what wonderful, beneficial insects the combination of basil and marigolds might attract? What cross-pollination might occur that we wouldn't get if we had only rows of lemon basil, lime basil, Thai basil, African blue basil. . .ad nauseum with the basil. So let's invite the soybean farmers and the mushroom cultivators and the wheat growers and the cashew guys and the tomato folks. And when it comes time to harvest--what salads! What terrific pasta dishes! What great Thai food! (Do you have Thai food in your city? Because we have five Thai restaurants in my tiny downtown, and I find I need at least three to be fully myself.) And yes, I know the cashew guys are scientists, but to be truly interdisciplinary, we'll need them because science is essential to a liberal arts education.

But back to those questions: Have I answered the book question satisfactorily? Does it matter which book I choose, or are you more interested in what I say about it? Is it a litmus test or an opportunity to share some teaching philosophy? If the latter, why not just ask about my teaching philosophy? Because hoo boy, I could go on about that. And you would be mightily entertained and say to yourselves, lo, after reading CVs until our eyes crossed, we have at last found a wise and convivial colleague.

Oh, my dissertation? Yawn. That's like so three years ago. It's practically a book now. Let me tell you about it. There are no photos of rabbits, but part of one chapter features the woman who ran the San Diego Zoo for many years, and another showcases the professional savvy of Alice Eastwood, who was curator of botany for several decades at the California Academy of Sciences (yes, that Eastwood, the one who climbed six stories of iron banister to save the Academy's botanical type specimens in the hours between the earthquake and fire in 1906. The Eastwood whose account of said escapade I read in her own handwriting in a letter in the Smithsonian Institution archives, just as any real historian would!).

Maybe you'll wonder if I'm an historian of science, then, not really a public historian or a women's historian. Guess what? I'm all of the above. I know--isn't it great?

Here's where I explain how you're getting a great package deal when you hire me. You want a gender person. You want a U.S. history person. You want a public history person. My research into U.S. women scientists' lives and work led me to some really quite profound (IMHO) understandings of what it means to create knowledge and how that knowledge comes to be valued--or, too frequently, not valued, by various publics. I understand what play of forces allows for certain thinking and speaking subjects to emerge. I know how Eastwood's success required as much the adoration of the Bay Area flower enthusiasts as the respect of male botanists. Eastwood succeeded--many of the women scientists succeeded--because she was a public botanist, a public scientist. She democratized knowledge, and it paid off for her. Big time.

Are you seeing the parallels with public history? Networks of amateur historians/botanists, connected through complex webs to professional historians/botanists, all of whom value one another's knowledge as they collaborate on projects that neither group could complete on their own? I'm ready to propose public history collaborations--or maybe even digital humanities projects--with your local museums, cultural centers, and historical societies, which of course I can name because I'm just that terrific with the background research. (Ask me about their exhibition spaces' square footage!)

Let's talk interdisciplinary liberal arts pedagogy. In addition to developing my own graduate and undergraduate courses in five disciplines (literature, writing, American studies, museum studies, and education), I've spent the past three years assisting faculty from across the disciplines (yes, even in the sciences, because I'm just that open-minded) be more thoughtful about teaching. And even about teaching with technology. (Did you note those tech-in-teaching/teaching-in-tech conference presentations--nay, cross-institutional collaborations--on my CV?) If you want anecdotes, you're going to have to ask for them at the interview, but let's just say I have a really fantastic example from my classroom that in a single project considers digital archives, curatorship, material culture, museum exhibits, diverse publics, September 11, Muslim Americans, and a London Tube stop.

I'm interdisciplinary, an experienced researcher, and enthusiastic about teaching; I write well and consider teaching writing a core part of any course; and (because you may ask me about my greatest flaw) I've been criticized for being "democratic (small d) to the core." What more do you want in a colleague who does U.S. public history?

But wait--if you act now, you'll also get my thoughts and expertise on first-year seminars; my experience advising faculty on student learning outcomes and assessment at the course, departmental, and institutional level; and an insane willingness to serve on committees. (Again, check out that CV.)

Oh, and if you want to slyly let me know that you've been doing some sleuthing and have read this blog, simply work into your questions the phrase "Tell me about the rabbits." (Only this time, I promise a happy ending; I'll bring the marigolds.)



Yours in interdisciplinary collegiality and mixed metaphor,

Leslie M-B

A job interview walks into a bar. . .

Just as I've been ready to throw in the tenure-track towel, a search committee has decided to give me a chance. I have a videoconference interview in a little over a week.

And it's in a history department.

Let me repeat that: a history department.

The competition for history jobs is, even in this cutthroat market, exceptionally insane. Over my three years of academic job searching, because my CV doesn't bear a Ph.D. in history, I suspect many copies of it have met recycling bins tout de suite.

Which renders this opportunity particularly extraordinary. I'm trying to walk the line between getting my hopes up too high and being self-defeating. For me, that's a very fine line.

But let's be optimistic for a moment, shall we? The position is tenure-track, and it is in public history and gender history. The institution offers a really distinctive M.A. that overlaps with museum studies—which is just about perfect, both in terms of what I do and where I want to go with my teaching, research, and practice.

The department seems to really value teaching, too, which is fabulous.

Of course, as is always the case in an academic job search, there's the matter of where. It's in a state where I may have camped once as a child, but beyond that I've never visited, and it's definitely a place that, while beautiful, many people would consider flyover territory. But so is my beloved Iowa, so color me intrigued. Politically, it's a staunchly red state, with Republicans holding every major office at state and federal levels, with the exception of one Democratic congressperson in the district where the hiring institution sits. (But that same district voted 69% for GWB in 2004.) The politics wouldn't be a deal-killer, actually--I learned a few years back while living in the Young Women's Christian Home in D.C. that I very much enjoy talking to, and learning from, people who hold beliefs very different from mine.

But I get ahead of myself. For the present I have a stack of a dozen books about public history next to me because while I certainly understand the issues facing museums of history and culture and I am familiar with the kinds of natural and social history interpretation that happen at, say, national parks, and while I have kept abreast of developments in digital history, the finer points of, for example, historical reenactment, genealogy, corporate histories, battlefields, and video games/simulations may be lost on me.

I also have a smaller stack of books relating to the subfield of gender history into which I've been wanting to dive headfirst, but into which I have instead been wading very slowly. I need to outline my next project, even as I must refocus on revising and shopping around my diss.

And of course I have a dissertation to reread. A dissertation elevator speech to revise. Answers to draft to typical first-round job search questions. Syllabi to dream up. Nervous breakdowns to experience.

And the biggie: I need to articulate why a Ph.D. in cultural studies—or maybe especially my degree in cultural studies—prepares me to "do" history and to prepare grad students for jobs in public history.

Any tips you want to give on interviewing via videoconference, or references to books, articles, and other resources I absolutely must not miss on teaching public or gender history, etc. would be most appreciated.

Praying Mantis

This photo may be blurry (damn iPhone camera), but it's the only proof I have that last weekend I was the cool mom at the playground in the park, doing a little entomological interpretation for the kiddies. I was moving the mantis from the play equipment, where it was in danger of being stepped on, to a bush. It was pretty cooperative critter, and I was thrilled that a tiny little girl was the most eager to hold it.

Most of the mantids I see around here are light green, so it was fun to find a brown one.

On the current situation at work

I've been trying to be careful not to write too much about work, lest my position suddenly be Raptured by the University of California gods. But today I commented on a couple of posts and wrote one e-mail that, taken together, nicely reflect my thinking (and frustration) about working for the UC in an era of lean budgets. Here, then, are my comments; you'll see they revisit themes in my earlier post "Cloudy with a Chance of Layoffs."

I. The freshman seminar teach-for-free controversy

My comment on Tenured Radical's incisive post "And If You Give Us A Full Book Of Green Stamps, You Can Teach Macroeconomics", which responded to this article in the UC Davis student newspaper, which in turn reported that our vice provost of undergraduate studies, along with the director of the Teaching Resources Center, invited freshman seminar faculty to return their stipends to the program:

Oy. I work for the UC Davis Teaching Resources Center as a teaching consultant and programs coordinator, so you might imagine I have some thoughts about this issue.

First, please note: My comments here are mine alone, and are not intended to represent my employer's stance on any issues.

I didn't know about this letter, or the budget info mentioned in the article (that first-year seminars will be the last program cut from the unit), until I read the student newspaper this morning.

I have very mixed feelings about the vice provost's request. I don't work directly with this program, so my comments aren't as well-informed as I'd like them to be, but probably better-informed than those of people outside the unit. :)

On the one hand, the program does attract a lot of senior professors from the sciences who are excited about the opportunity to actually teach a small class that requires very high student participation--as opposed to lecture courses whose enrollment has ballooned to 900 students in at least one case (a subject for another blog post).

If the participating faculty really enjoy teaching in the program and aren't hurting for research funds, then I have no problem with them returning stipends to the program. It is a VERY lean budget year, and honestly, I'm scared the center won't be around much longer if we have further cuts--but I haven't seen the latest budget numbers, so unfortunately I can't speak with any certainty. I do know that unless we find grants to pay his salary, I'll be losing one incredibly talented and thoughtful colleague at the end of the academic year.

On the other hand, I suspect there are also lecturers and humanists (I'm one of them) who use the program as you describe--to have access to research funds they might otherwise not get, and it's not fair to apply any pressure on them, and sending out a blanket letter does, I think, pressure these faculty. For that reason, had I been asked about it, I would have advised they send the letter first to only full professors.

As it offers approximately 200 classes enrolling ~15 students each during the academic year, the program itself represents a very inexpensive way for the campus to lower its overall faculty : student ratio, so from a labor standpoint, any outrage might be better focused there.

I will say that it is an incredibly strong program, with very high quality classes taught by faculty who are passionate about teaching (too rare at any research university)--or who become passionate through the experience of engaging with first- and second-year undergraduates. The program holds faculty to rigorous pedagogical standards. For more information about it, see the first-year seminar faculty toolkit (PDF).

It's sad to see the teaching center connected with this controversy, as the Teaching Resources Center really is a fabulous resource and increasingly an intellectual hub on campus--and we run it on a shoestring budget. (We're small but mighty.) The office staff and graduate student researcher who coordinate and evaluate the first-year seminar program also do really terrific work, so it must be especially frustrating for them to see its administration depicted in an unflattering light.

II. Again with the freshman seminar controversy, but also in response to commenters' calls for reductions in administrative pay:

And then, on Eric Rauchway's post at The Edge of the American West:

Remember one of the reasons the first-year seminars are there in the first place: they provide a very inexpensive way for the university to lower its instructor : student ratio–even more cheaply than having grad students teach might.

I get a little bit antsy when people start talking about reducing “administrator” salaries, both because my own salary may or may not fall under that category and because after three years in the staff trenches, I’m keenly aware of the faculty-staff caste system.

Yes, there are many administrators whose salaries seem inflated. But the line between “administrator” and, oh, “program coordinator” (ahem) can be a blurry one. Staff like me have already had our salaries frozen for years, even as we support faculty who have continued to receive merit increases. With the furloughs, I’m now making less than when I started working at UC Davis, and 14% less than I would have made had I received my merit increases. It’s incredibly demoralizing, especially since these slights are coming from the exact university that supposedly readied me for an academic career.

I sat in a meeting w/a top HR admin at UCOP a few weeks ago, and I asked him point-blank if there would be any relief for staff soon, or if things would continue to deteriorate. His response was that “faculty attract people and resources, while staff don’t”; ergo, staff are dispensable. His remark about resources is a gross generalization, of course–it assumes, for example, staff aren’t writing grants, raising funds, or otherwise helping to recruit, support, and retain faculty.

Today a Staff Assembly e-mail claimed it’s not fair to compare staff and faculty salaries, that it’s like comparing doctors’ pay with lawyers’. But when you have countless lecturers, postdocs, and staff with similar credentials to faculty (PhDs, research agenda, publications, etc.), I don’t think that’s a fair analogy.

III. The Staff Assembly madness

As if the freshman seminar controversy wasn't enough to deal with today, UC Davis staff also received--as I reference in my comment on Eric's post--a Staff Assembly e-mail that featured a link to this article.

Needless to say, I couldn't let that stand, so I sent an e-mail to the author:

While I appreciate your reminder to staff (at http://staff.ucdavis.edu/News/not-the-time-for-assumptions) that we keep our heads when all around us seem to be losing theirs, I must take issue with one of your claims: “Comparing staff compensation with faculty compensation maybe more like comparing a doctor’s compensation with a lawyer’s compensation. These are different fields with different expectations and skill sets.”

This is a terrible generalization, as there are many, many staff on campus who have the same credentials as faculty (PhDs, teaching experience, peer-reviewed publications) and the same expectations (teaching, research agendas, grant writing, committee service) and skill sets (writing, teaching, intellectual engagement with academics and the wider world), but who are paid half as much as faculty—or less. My colleagues and I in the Teaching Resources Center, for example, are expected to stay current with trends in pedagogy, research and publish, and teach--only we’re expected to do the same for far less, and to manage multiple programs and projects in addition to the responsibilities we share with faculty. I’m on at least eight committees on campus and systemwide, and I chair several of them.

A few weeks back, I was in a meeting at UCOP, and when I asked a top HR administrator if staff would continue to feel budgetary pain out of proportion to our faculty colleagues, he said, “Faculty attract people and resources, while staff don’t.” Ergo, staff are dispensable—even if we write grants and help to recruit, support, retain (and, in my and my colleagues’ case, train) faculty. To say that faculty deserve better compensation than staff because of different “expectations” is too easy; it’s a capitulation to the campus’s continued denigration of staff and contributes the UC’s erasure of the incredibly high-level work many staff are doing.

So yeah, that's about where I'm at right now. How about you?

National Academic Standards Draft Released (and Free-Market Ideology Unleashed)

Cross-posted at BlogHer

Earlier this week, a panel of experts charged by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers with crafting a set of national academic standards for English and mathematics skills released the first official draft of the standards. The draft outlines those skills students are expected to have developed prior to graduating from high school. The release of the standards marks the beginning of a 30-day comment period before the panel launches into writing standards for individual grade levels in K-12.

Bloggers from all points in the political spectrum are weighing in on the standards--or, more commonly, on the idea of national standards, especially when they come from the federal government (though, as The Washington Post points out, the federal government really is more of a bystander) or if the federal government will be offering money as an incentive to states that adopt these standards. So far 48 states--Alaska and Texas being the exceptions--have signed on to the initiative.

At the New York Times Room for Debate blog, experts were invited to submit brief comments on the standards. Their backgrounds are diverse--they range from a representative of the libertarian Cato Institute to a charter school founder to a professor of urban schooling--and their comments aren't really surprising. You've heard them before: from Neal McCluskey's tired lament that teachers are fully to blame for all the ills in public schools and that parents will always make the right decisions for their children to Ernest Morrell's similarly cliché (but alas, true) observation that our schools aren't going to improve if we can't provide enough books, better-trained and highly educated teachers, and reasonable class sizes, the comments are predictable.

What's interesting to me is the way people--and here I refer to the NYT's invited respondents as well as bloggers elsewhere--are making the same claims about competing agendas. For example, at the NYT, Robert Siegler claims that variations in state standards "hinder learning, especially among children whose parents move often" and make it difficult to evaluate the learning taking place in different states. Yet McCluskey argues that it's the presence of uniform standards, rather than their absence, that slows learning.

There's probably truth in both statements, and honestly, I haven't done enough research to know which end of this standards continuum is drawing on better evidence regarding student achievement. I will say this: the standards themselves are fairly tame and--aside from a provision asking high school English teachers to teach students how to read texts from other disciplines as well as the traditional literary works--will likely not prove controversial in this draft. (Expect the dust to kick up once grade-specific standards are released.)

I do resent folks who are using this opportunity (as does McCluskey) to argue that we should unleash the forces of the free market on the education system, letting parent-consumers decide what's best and closing those schools that don't receive sufficient parental support. God forbid people who went to school for 5 to 10 (or more) years to study learning theory and practice, who have made it their life's calling and profession, have some say in what students learn. (But hey, I'm biased: I went to school through grade 24, so clearly you can count me among the anti-parent elitists.)

I'm hearing the free-market argument not only in K-12 education but also in discussions of what should be funded (or, rather, cut) in cash-strapped universities. By one measure, if undergraduate engineering majors go on to earn higher salaries than, say, English majors, then engineering is a more valuable major and should be better funded than English, even if equal numbers of students on campus are interested in each major. Similarly, some are arguing that if corporations are giving more money to science professors and researchers than they are to humanities and arts faculty, then the state university should invest its resources similarly because the markets have spoken. Of course, I hear this argument most often from the mouths of science faculty (and, interestingly, mostly white male science faculty).

So what happens if we let "the market" choose what K-16 students will learn? Taken to one (I'm afraid believable) extreme, we see a narrowing of the curriculum, with high school English teachers transformed into drones teaching students to interpret technical texts and universities cutting (as we're already seeing them do) foreign languages, literature, history, arts, and the humanities more generally. As state universities emphasize the lucrative fields of science, technology, engineering, and medicine, the last bastions of a real liberal arts education (by which I mean an education incorporating both breadth and depth across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences) will be those few elite four-year colleges that can afford, by dint of their endowments or their ability to attract top students, to continue to offer what may come to be seen as an outdated (or maybe "classic") education. But these institutions tend to be pricey, so such education may even further become a privilege of the elite--by which I mean either wealthy families or families that are savvy and well-connected enough to know which schools offer the best financial aid in addition to opportunities to expand students' horizons.

And now for a round-up of what folks are saying in the blogosphere:

Think Tank West addresses some myths--and, it ends up, not-myths--about the interplay of No Child Left Behind, federal and state control and funding of education, and national standards.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers makes a tentative case for national standards.

Writing a few months back at The American Prospect, Dana Goldstein recounted a roundtable debate among Weingarten, New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and D.C. schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee. Goldstein sums up the conversation:

So there you have it: Three of the most influential education leaders in the country, all supporters of national standards, but all raising their eyebrows at the current state and testing-industry-led effort to get there.

Melanie Smollin asks, among other questions,

How will teachers know how to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment with these new standards in ways effective enough to enable all students to have a shot at reaching them?

Chester Finn, writing at the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog, laments the Byzantine mess states have made of standards:

Yes, those who abhor the thought of national education standards and tests for the United States will find all sorts of reasons to oppose them. I don’t know if the forthcoming product, once fully massaged, will be to my liking. But I do know that our present motley array of state-specific standards and assessments is obsolete and dysfunctional—as well as mediocre or worse in many states. (There are a few happy exceptions.)

For some good discussion on an earlier leaked draft of the national standards, see the comments section of Robert Pondiscio's post Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival at The Core Knowledge Blog.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about the standardization of curricula, either within state borders or across them?