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. :)

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.”

Murders, head injuries, and assorted violence -- Is it time to cancel high school football?

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

Last night, 16-year-old Melody Ross, an honors student and track and field athlete, was shot to death at the football game between rival Wilson High School and Long Beach Poly High School in Long Beach, California. The shooting took place at Wilson High School, which you may be slightly familiar with if you saw the Freedom Writers movie or read Erin Gruwell's The Freedom Writers Diary. The school serves some of Long Beach's most upscale neighborhoods, but is no stranger to violence by students and even, unfortunately, by a teacher or two. Poly High School, the oldest high school in the district and the alma mater of both Snoop Dogg and, well, me, serves the "inner city" neighborhoods. Poly High has also had its share of violence; my senior year, I was responsible, for example, for the yearbook's obituary page--and that was 16 years ago.

It's not yet known if the shooters who fired into the post-game crowd were students. One of Long Beach's newspapers, the Press-Telegram, reported that parents complained about the lack of Long Beach Police Department presence at the game. The security for the event, according to the Press-Telegram, included three Long Beach Unified School District safety officers, 19 campus security officers from schools across the district, 10 administrators, and 15 teachers.

Here's a thought: Any high school that needs 37 security personnel plus city police department support at its football games knows it has a problem with violence. Any high school that has more than three dozen security personnel and still ends up with three young people with gunshot wounds--two men were also wounded--needs to reconsider having football games at all.

Parents know the district has a problem. In addition to complaining about the absence of LBPD officers, parents worry about violence in Long Beach schools. The Press-Telegram cited a parent's observation that families have actually moved out of the city to keep their kids out of Long Beach's high schools.

Folks, it's long past time to call off high school football games in Long Beach and in other violent school districts.

In calling for the cancellation of football games at high schools with a recognized pattern of violence, I have undoubtedly raised some readers' hackles. Some of you will argue, as does Sue Cooley, that football is actually an antidote to violence:

For example, an individual who is involved in the football program at school is less likely to be involved with alcohol and drugs, as this would have a negative effect on one's performance. In the same respect, an individual who is involved in such a program would have less time to become involved in such activities that may lead to violence. The athlete is not left unsupervised after school, as he or she is required to practice and compete on a daily basis. This results in less time to become involved with such negative situations.

In other words, I see high school football as a positive alternative to violence. It offers participants a means of channeling their energy into something positive. Contact sports are not examples of violence. Violence does not occur as a result of competition and hard work.

But I didn't say that we should cancel football--just the games, or at least evening games where it's more difficult to monitor the crowds milling around in the dark outside the stadium. If football fans get violent, or if games are magnets for violence by non-participants--if high school students (or anyone) is dying, then the games need to go. The latest incident is not an isolated one; there have been multiple reports of violence at football games, including a brawl at a Los Angeles-area high school that involved 100 students. The fact is that while schools are getting safer overall, incidents of violence at football games are increasing.

Because let's be honest: Football is violent in multiple ways. As it is coached and played today, football promotes physical violence on the field that transcends the game play. Increasingly, football is coming under scrutiny for the long-term head injuries that collisons engender--and not just in NFL and college football, but also in high school games, as NPR reported yesterday. Indeed, Malcolm Gladwell equates football's violence with that of dogfighting. In an online chat following the publication of that article, Gladwell had this to say to a high school football coach:

Both you as a coach—and, as importantly, people like me, who are die-hard football fans—need to consider the possibility that the game is irretrievably harmful. It’s way too early to decide that yet. But I think we have to commit to following what the science tell us—even if it means walking away from a game we love.

In addition, high school football players and wrestlers are far more likely than non-athletes to get into violent altercations.

There are countless school-sponsored extracurricular activities in which teen participants and fans do not die and that do not result in violence. Schools need to consider new revenue models that will allow them to both bring in the funds that football games have been generating (but only at significant risk of student health and safety) and pay for additional productive and creative activities, including sports that do not promote violence on the field and off.

When teens are threatened by gang violence, parents, police, school administrators, clergy, and others step in to change the contexts in which teens live. Why aren't we doing the same with the culture of violence perpetuated by football players themselves, by fans at games, and by people outside of the games? It's time to reconsider our priorities and values.

Your thoughts?

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?

Lucas has a camera

Last night Lucas was playing with an old, broken digital camera of mine, enjoying setting off the flash. So today Mr. Trillwing took Lucas to Ritz Camera and picked up a $29 3.1 megapixel camera. The boy is crazy about it, and he's already becoming quite the autoethnographer. We have photos of Mommy, Daddy, the potty, the toilet, and many blurry photos of the dog.

Here are two favorites:

In which I use my Ph.D. a teeny tiny bit

If you're interested in museums--and hey, who isn't?--check out my latest, ridiculously link-rich post at Blogher: Mega-Museums in Abu Dhabi -- cultural imperialism in reverse?

First thoughts: the n-word, "redneck," and "queer"

I've been brewing in my mind a post or two on the N-word discussion on The View. In case you haven't seen the clip, here it is:



But I have been beat to the punch by two very thoughtful posts over at BlogHer: Nordette Adams's post "The Season of Our Discontent or Life with the "N" Word" and Laina Dawes's post "The Latest Dust-up on The View and Hipster Racism at it's Worst."

I wrote a long comment in response to Nordette's post, and I wanted to share it here because I know my readers will have plenty to say--either to set me straight or provide more nuance to what was a rather hastily written comment. Here it is:

Thank you so much for this excellent post. I think a lot of well-meaning white Americans' struggle with trying to find the "right" words--I'm thinking here of your example of someone who was afraid to use the word "black"--is that the language of race is slippery. Appropriate terms come and go--Negro, Afro-American, African-American--or linger a bit and then fade.

But there's one term that hangs around, despite its never having been appropriate for white people to use: N.

I appreciate your comparison of N to "redneck," but I'm having a hard time seeing the similarity in terms of intent. N is a far, far stronger word, one with a much more sinister history. "Redneck" refers, yes, pretty much solely to white people, but it also implies a class standing that--as tough as it might be--a "redneck" could aspire to overcome through education or increased income.

The same is not true of N. One cannot hope (and should not have to hope) to change one's race or ethnicity.

I would have no problem with you using the term "redneck" among an all-black or mixed-race group of friends on a Saturday night. I would have a huge problem if a white person used the N-word in front of me, regardless of who else was in the room. "Redneck" brushes aside people of a certain race and class as being hopelessly out of touch with the mainstream, which is sad. N does far worse--it dehumanizes people.

As you yourself point out, "redneck" has become a subculture within comedy. White comics--who might never have been called "redneck" themselves but who are willing to play rednecks on TV--are "reclaiming" the term as one of affection for wayward cousins. But by playing rednecks on TV, these comics also are marking themselves as not redneck. They know what a redneck is, and while they pretend to embrace their, er, neckedness, they actually are setting themselves apart from "real" rednecks by drawing borders around what makes someone a redneck, by defining what that person looks like and how he acts. And rule #1: A real redneck is not savvy enough to land a contract for a comedy series on national television.

There is one word that I don't think anyone has raised thus far in this conversation (at least in this post and its comments): queer. Queer was a term of denigration, but it was reclaimed by queer people as a mark of pride.

In similar ways, as I believe Whoopi Goldberg pointed out (but it may have been Sherri Shepherd--I can't remember who brought it up because it's been several days since I watched the video), N has been reclaimed by African Americans--but in a very different way. It's not a public reclaiming, except maybe in some rap music and comedy like Richard Pryor's. It will never--thank God--become a politically correct term like "queer" has become. It's such a loaded term that we're not even spelling it out in this space.

I can't tie this comment up neatly, but I just wanted to reflect a bit on redneck vs. queer vs. N, and how these words, all of which denigrate to different degrees, have taken very different paths to acceptance in different communities.

Thanks again for a great post, Nordette.

I encourage you to continue the conversation over at Nordette's post, where there is already a good discussion going on.