Amy Clampitt meets Cal Academy

I went to the California Academy of Sciences a couple nights ago, and as I was downloading the photos from the visit I was picking through The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt. The two streams began to merge for me, and I excerpted these fragments from the very long poem. They're discontinuous, but, I think, on a similar theme. (Click to embiggen.)

RIP Rocky Mountain News

Fang is in the newspaper industry, and he's already lost about a third of his income thanks to one publisher outsourcing part of his job to someone who can work less expensively. Because we met while both working for The Grunion Gazette, we have a soft spot for newspapers. Therefore, we're especially sensitive when we see newspapers closing. This video from the Rocky Mountain News, which published its last issue today, really hit home.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Or you can skip the heart-rending video and just read Fang's to-the-point explanation of how all these changes will affect us.

New possibilities

I love my job. I adore my colleagues. And I very much like the town I live in--and the fresh year-round produce that comes from living in this part of the country.

But.

There's definitely a lack of opportunities for me to move onward here. The directorships of the campus units I'd like to lead are typically reserved for Senate (tenure-track) faculty members who rotate through the positions in 3-year terms.

Right now I'm classified as a staff member, even though I teach.

I figure I have a few years left in my position, as there's still plenty more I can do in it before the job feels less than challenging.

But a job possibility came to me in the form of an invitation to apply for the directorship of a new teaching center at a public SLAC. The director position is 50%, and it comes with a 50% tenure-track faculty position in the discipline most relevant to the director's Ph.D. and research.

It's also a college where I know some people who are doing awesome work inside the classroom and with technology. (I interact w/them via Twitter and blogs, and I have met them at conferences and even presented with one of them.) It's also a school to which I have a little bit of a personal connection because I was a student there for a semester.

SLAC + teaching center work + position in an American studies/history department + possibility of continuing to teach museum studies + living and working in a town 50 miles from what may be my favorite city = my ideal job.

So of course I applied.

And I was invited to do a phone interview. I had the phone interview yesterday and I think it went really, really well.

It will be two weeks before I find out if I'll be invited to campus for another interview.

I'm crossing my fingers and toes. . .

A new identity for teachers: from pitchers to catchers

OK, yes, yes, I know that blog post title has more than one meaning. Let's get our giggles out of the way before we begin reading, shall we?

I came to this post by way of Martha Burtis's meditations on lifelong learning and Dean Shareski's musings on what he should call himself (if not "teacher"). I'm also thinking about Martha's post about Barbara Ganley's 2007 Faculty Academy talk and pretty much anything Barbara herself has ever written on her blog about taking risks.

I found myself casting about for professions where people teach and nurture but where risk is involved. And when I re-read Dean's description of what he does--"I teach, I lead, I share, I encourage, I critique, I monitor, I connect, I care, I model"--I realized that the metaphor that for me best describes teaching is midwifery.

(photo credit: Voxphoto, used under a Creative Commons license)

During my entire pregnancy, my contact with medical doctors was limited to about 20 minutes. With the exception of one sonogram, one morning where we thought I might have preeclampsia, and one moment in the delivery room where an obstetrician popped her head in the room and asked "Is that baby going to come out of there?", my care during my pregnancy with Lucas was provided entirely by midwives. But the midwives were always there, rotating through my office appointments and my labor, reassuring with their calmness and cheer and expertise, answering all my questions on my prenatal visits and during birthing class.

While I'm sure I'm not the first to equate teaching with midwifery (especially regarding helping students to "birth" ideas), I wonder how many of us have examined this metaphor in all of its richness and utility. What I like most about it is that it reverses completely the metaphor of students as vessels to be filled. We're bringing something dynamic and lively out of students rather than simply pouring in static content. Again: We're no longer pitchers in the sense that we, too, are vessels that pour content into students. We are, like midwives, catchers.

How are the best teachers like midwives?

• We have specialized knowledge, but we understand that we're not in the business of passing on all that specialized knowledge to our students. To extend the metaphor: using our knowledge and experience, we coach people through the birthing experience; we're not teaching them to be midwives.
  
• We prepare students for the learning experience: here's what you can expect, here's what will likely happen, here's our goal.
  
• We honor, as much as possible, the students' perception of what a learning experience should be. Many women go into labor with a birth plan--for example, no drugs, no "medical interventions" like forceps--but end up having an entirely different, and not necessarily less satisfying, experience.
• We monitor progress using multiple tools, some conventional and some not so much. We encourage students to reflect on these modes of assessment and evaluation.
• Drawing on my own experience in the delivery room: Midwives wean us off the pain meds if we're not pushing hard enough to make progress. The best teachers aren't afraid to make students uncomfortable as long as the learning is productive and takes place in a safe atmosphere.
• We know when to intervene and when to let students labor.
• We acknowledge that there are multiple people involved in the learning experience, that the student need not "go it alone" even if she is doing the bulk of the physical or intellectual work on a particular project.
• We follow up with the student shortly after the learning experience to be sure she doesn't feel overwhelmed and that she's retaining the intellectual skills she needs to nurture her own newborn critical and creative thinking skills.
• We encourage students to tell stories about their learning and to share their experience with others. We help them document the experience as appropriate.
  

For the student, how is course-based learning like the birthing experience?

• You must be open to the possibility that things will not go as planned.
• You should try to have at least one friend in the room.
• You must trust the midwife.
• It is only the beginning of a journey marked alternately by great joy and great difficulty.
  

Practicing this form of teaching is risky. There's the possibility that you won't "cover" all the "content" you believe the students should know. And it's a real fear: every week I talk with faculty who ask me about coverage, who see themselves as pitchers more than catchers. Some argue outright with me about cutting back on coverage in favor of furthering critical and creative thinking. But increasingly--and maybe it's just that I've practiced my spiel enough--I'm finding faculty open to new ways of thinking about teaching, about letting students labor on more than just multiple-choice tests.

How are you making yourself less of a pitcher and more of a catcher? (Or do you think I'm totally off-base?)

For Lucas's inevitable family oral history projects...

As seen at New Kid's:

Where I was when....

1.) Challenger space shuttle exploded (1986): At my grandmother's house, waiting for her to drive me to school that morning. Unlike many young kids, my fifth-grade class hadn't been following the Challenger mission, so I don't think I quite understood the gravity of what had happened. I remember being the first in the classroom that day and telling my teacher, who was writing on the board, that the space shuttle had exploded. "Is this some kind of sick joke?" she asked me, her eyes wide and face contorted.

2.) Berlin Wall falls down (1989): Saw it on my parents' TV set in their bedroom. (It was the only TV we had.) Again, I was maybe 14 years old, so I didn't really grasp the significance of it all.

3.) Oklahoma City federal building bombing (1995): In a British Lit II survey course. At the end of class, the professor said, "It sounds like something bad just happened in Oklahoma City. If you have family there, you should call them."

4.) OJ Verdict (1995): Walking down the loggia along the north campus dorms at my college. The dorm lounges, which were on the first floor and whose windows opened to the loggia, were packed with students. I remember hearing the howls of protest and disbelief when he was acquitted.

5.) Princess Diana dies (1997): I had graduated from college earlier than year, and I was living with my parents. We had just finished watching a movie on their TV set, and when we turned off the movie, there was a reporter talking about a horrible crash involving Princess Diana. Of all the events mentioned so far, this one felt the most surreal to me.

6.) Columbine massacre (1999): In the newsroom at the newspaper company where Mr. Trillwing and I met. (It was his birthday, and crazy shit always happens on his birthday or the day before, since both April 19 and April 20 have special significance to crazy people--and no, I'm not talking about potheads ("4/20, Dude!").

7.) JFK Jr. Plane crash (1999): Mr. Trillwing and I were on our first date--though I don't think he recognized it as such. I was moving to Iowa about a week later, so I was anxious to figure out whether whatever it was between us was going to work out and be longer term. But Mr. Trillwing would not. shut. up. about JFK Jr. As of that evening, I don't think they had yet found the plane, or they were hoping he might still be alive or something like that.

8.) Bush/Gore crazy election (2000): Working at the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, surreptitiously checking the recount stats by refreshing my web browser every few minutes. Surreptitiously, that is, until the executive director asked me if I knew about the recount, and I showed him my screen. He then checked in with me a bit too regularly during the day. :)

9.) September 11 (2001): Mr. Trillwing and I had just moved to our current location two days earlier, and we didn't yet have cable or Internet hooked up. So Mr. T, who is a total cable news addict, had to do with fuzzy reception from rabbit ears and dialing into the Earthlink modem pool to get his news. He was going batshit crazy. And he said, the moment the first tower fell, "This country is about to take a sharp turn to the right." Truer words were never spoken.

10.) Space ship Columbia disintegrates (2003): I don't remember where I was, unfortunately, but I will say that you definitely should check out Edward Tufte's Cognitive Style of PowerPoint to see why (a) a PowerPoint presentation contributed to the death of the astronauts and (b) why you should never, ever teach with PowerPoint.

11.) Hurricane Katrina hits (2005): I was a few days from delivering Lucas, and indeed began labor in the immediate aftermath of the storm. I remember watching the news in the days immediately after Lucas's birth and just bawling. I was sad, and I would normally have been angry, too, but the raging hormones made sure I only did sadness that week.

Experimentation: "The Two Trees"

William Butler Yeats's poem "The Two Trees" is among my favorites. Tonight I was playing around in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, and I decided to try a little experiment. The results are below. This very brief project represents my first time using iMovie for anything but capturing video from the built-in camera on my laptop. I used GarageBand to record the voiceover, which comprises the first four lines of Yeats's poem.

It's rough, but now I've taught myself the first steps in one form of digital storytelling. Yay!

Eleventh hour

As I write this from my outpost on the Left Coast, less than one hour remains in the final full day of the Bush administration. I am excited about tomorrow's inauguration but also melancholy that while collectively we as Americans started a movement to elect a progressive new President, we also let the past eight years happen--with protest, yes, but what an ugly eight years.

During those eight years Mr. Trillwing and I married. Lucas was born. I finished my Ph.D.

They've been good years for us as a family. But I can't help but think Lucas has been born under a bad star, some ill alignment of the planets, that will inflect the rest of his life.

And so, to borrow a phrase from the Friends, tonight I am holding President-Elect Obama in the light. Those of you who know me well know that I am not a believer in any traditional conception of god, but that there's something about the silent meetings and reflective practice of Quakers that I find very attractive. But I know that President Obama is a believer, so I want to hold him in the light in the hopes that he retains the strength to restore justice, peace, and prosperity to all the American people.

Accordingly, I offer to the President-Elect and to the country, these tidbits of testimony and wisdom from Friends and others.

On patience with the new President:

"We need to be willing to be led into the dark as well as through green pastures and by still waters." (Gordon Matthews, 1987, cited in Plain Living by Catherine Whitmire)

On community as Americans, and on the power of the individual:

"A culture of isolated individualism produces mass conformity because people who think they must bear life all alone are too fearful to take the risks of self-hood. But people who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be." (Parker Palmer, 2000, cited in Whitmire)

On international conflict (and partisan politics):

"The best definition I've ever heard for forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt someone for the hurt they've done to you." (Joyce Sams, 1994, cited in Whitmire)

On work as spiritual calling:

"When [Susan B.] Anthony was once asked, "Do you pray?" she responded, "I pray every second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me." (Hugh Barbour et. al, 1995, cited in Whitmire)

On taking action:

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

(from section XII of Seamus Heaney's Station Island)

Let us all take off from here.

Are University Centers for Teaching and Learning Necessary?

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

Last summer, Historiann wrote a post that has been nagging me all these intervening months. In it, she asks if the centers for teaching and learning that have been popping up on college and university campuses over the past four decades really are necessary. As someone who works as a teaching consultant and program coordinator at just such a center, it's probably not surprising that I can say, unequivocally, yes, they are essential.

Now, are they essential for every instructor, as the article she cites seems to suggest? No. But what Historiann doesn't address in her post is the difference in experience between scientists and humanists in graduate school, and the way those differences play out in scholars' first tenure-track teaching jobs.

Here's what I (and others I work with) have noticed: While there certainly are plenty of people in the humanities who struggle with teaching, most humanities faculty hit the ground running because they had plenty of experience to teach--as teaching assistants and frequently as instructors--during grad school. In fact, teaching is the way that most humanities graduate students (attempt to) make ends meet during graduate school. On the other hand, the "most successful" graduate students in science are rewarded with research jobs in labs or in the field. In the view of many of these junior scientists, teaching is something to be avoided at all costs, as it interferes with the research and publication that will determine whether or not they get plum university jobs.

When large universities hire science faculty, they're almost exclusively looking for researchers who have a proven track record in, well, research rather than teaching. As liberal arts colleges place more emphasis on faculty research, increasing numbers of scientists who lack all but the most rudimentary teaching experience are getting jobs that require them to teach. And in very short time, these faculty find themselves teaching what may be very large courses, and they run into a wall. They tend to turn to lecturing as a solution, which isn't surprising, since they themselves likely learned much from lectures as undergraduates. After all, these are the people who were successful in a system that doesn't value or encourage (in the sciences in particular) good teaching. They have succeeded despite the widespread dearth of quality teaching because they were motivated learners.

So while at my university's teaching center we do consult with a fair share of humanities and social science faculty who are looking to enliven their teaching or who have received disappointing evaluations from students (and possibly a nudge from their department chairs), much of the work we do is aimed at science faculty who are navigating the waters of undergraduate teaching and learning for the first time. (I don't mean to paint science faculty with too broad a brush; after all, there are faculty across the disciplines, but in physics in particular, who are very plugged in to what it takes to get students to actually learn both the material and to think creatively and critically.)

Our workshops--which are infrequent but usually at least half a day long, and as long as a week during the summer--are very well-received by faculty from across the disciplines. A huge part of this success can be chalked up to the work of faculty who are willing to volunteer their time to share their successes and even mentor one another, both within and across disciplines. Our teaching center facilitates these connections as well as makes grants available to faculty who want to push the pedagogical envelope.

I encourage you to poke around the websites of teaching and learning centers (often called "centers for excellence in teaching and learning") to see what resources they have to offer, especially regarding alternatives to lecturing, the effective use of technologies beyond course management systems, new thinking on assessment and evaluation. (There's a partial list of such centers at Shifting from Teaching to Learning.)

Historiann isn't alone writing about these centers. Other bloggers have chimed in, too. Here are a few:

The Religion in American History blog serves up some skepticism about workshops and assessment initiatives.

Instructional designer Christina Hains explains what an instructional designer does in the context of a teaching and learning center.

At the Tomorrow's Professor Blog, Michael Reder points out that "good teaching does not happen naturally":

. . .and when I say good teaching I mean effective teaching: the types of intentional pedagogical practices that lead to significant and deep student learning. In the past decade or so, higher education as a whole has spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about student learning and, in the case of the ever-growing pressure for accountability, how to measure the effect of the education we offer our students. Most of the recent movements in higher education are centered on improving student learning: the use of technology inside and outside of the classroom, experiential learning, information fluency, learner-centered teaching, community learning. The Association of American College and Universities' focus on liberal learning outcomes, civic learning, diversity, global education, residential learning, general education, and critical thinking echo this current trend of concentrating on student learning.

Microbiologist Sandra Porter explains why scientists tend to be unfamiliar with the literature on science education.

Constance Ewing and Mary Deane Sorcinelli explain the value of a teaching center.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

Teaching with hoaxes

I'm working on the next Electronic Envelope for the teaching center where I work, and I'm including a brief article on the Edward Owens hoax perpetuated by Mills Kelly's class at George Mason University. I'm including the short piece here not so much for the text--which you may or may not find useful--but for the little pirate lemming I Photoshopped together. I'm just so amused with myself. . .

(photo credits: lemming • pirate hat)

Late this fall, Jane Browning created a blog about her senior research project on Edward Owens, purportedly the last American pirate. The site includes information about Owens, images of his last will and testament as well as a partial transcription of it, video interviews with history professors, a video of Jane exploring the area immediately around Owens's house, and a link to a Wikipedia entry that Browning created that passed review by the online encyclopedia's volunteer editors.

In December it was revealed that Jane Browning does not exist, and that the site was a hoax perpetuated by the students in a history seminar at George Mason University. The purpose of the hoax, according to an explanation on the project site, "was to spend time thinking about how easily information takes on a life of its own online, ethics in the historical profession, and the role of digital media in popular culture." The course syllabus (PDF) explains Professor Mills Kelly's learning goals for the course:

I do have some specific learning goals for this course. I hope that you’ll improve your research and analytical skills and that you’ll become a much better consumer of historical information. I hope you’ll become more skeptical without becoming too skeptical for your own good. I hope you’ll learn some new skills in the digital realm that can translate to other courses you take or to your eventual career. And, I hope you’ll be at least a little sneakier than you were before you started the course.

Do not miss Mills Kelly's post on the topic, and especially the comments section, in which some smart folks who were taken in by the hoax weigh in on the project.

This strategy--teaching about hoaxes, or better yet by perpetuating a hoax--has implications far beyond historiography and historical research. My colleague Mikaela Huntzinger immediately pointed out its potential in crafting a course in ecology, for example. I agree. I recall one of the harder exam questions from my undergraduate years, from the final of an interdisciplinary special topics course on animal locomotion, was something like, "You're standing in line at the supermarket and you see a tabloid that claims scientists have discovered an amazing creature" with certain characteristics--limb and spine length, range of motion, and so on. The professor wanted us to argue whether or not such a creature could exist based on what we had learned in class. In other words, we were to synthesize what we had learned in class to determine whether or not the tabloid article was a hoax.

It all reminds me of a larger, more complex, and much more fun version of the game Balderdash, in which players try to convince one another that their made-up definition of a real but arcane word is the actual one. Imagine a class on Romantic poets in which the professor asks students to determine which samples of blank verse actually are by Wordsworth--and in which the students get extra points if they submit, and other students fall for, their own faux Wordsworthian blank verse. (Hint: incorporate the word "gleam." Throws me every time.)

Have you taught with hoaxes? Have you fallen for any? (Sokal hoax or lemming suicides, anyone?) And how do you teach your students not to be so gullible?

Update on potty training bootcamp

Fang provides the latest.

Tips from the trenches are much appreciated.

My interactions with Lucas are a bit more intellectual. Here he is selecting bedtime reading from my poetry collection.


Lucas: I want this one. And this one.

Me, taking the books from him: Sylvia Plath and Hart Crane? Excellent choices. Try not to have nightmares.