|
|
Reflective Overview
other sections
teaching |
scholarship
service |
mentoring
welcome page: table of contents
other pages
CV | improvement cycle
this page
scholarship | teaching
| service
internationalizing the campus |
career
transition
I have been teaching at colleges and universities for thirty years, the past twenty-three at Medaille. I expect to teach for another fifteen or twenty: full-time as long as the College will have me and part-time after that as long as I am physically able. I can't imagine a job I would like more or to which I am better suited.
|
Academe is a buyers' market because so many people can write articles and books, can teach undergraduates, and can adequately serve on committees. Tenure is increasingly rare, a treasure, but it's wasted unless tenured faculty members use the opportunity of autonomy to further their own learning and to share that learning with students with the purpose of, in turn, promoting the students' learning and autonomy.
|
|
I spend my day reading and writing, making things, learning new ideas and techniques. I don't consider myself to have a discipline in the sense of the common university departments. My scholarship ranges widely, to the profit of the interdisciplinary courses that I have taught in Medaille's writing, MBA, and general education programs.
Looking back over my twenty-three years at Medaille, I have been a model life-long learner and I have shared that learning with students in original and creative ways. I have also tried to share it with other faculty, but the opportunities of tenure cut both ways. My opportunity to do something is others' opportunity not to do it. Tenured scholarship is appealing to a certain type of personality, as administrators find to often great frustration. Scholars tend to be loners, mavericks, gadflies, and evangelists. We are very different from corporate team players, and would probably not thrive in that world. Some of us are also trailblazers, innovators, and I count myself among them.
|
|
Thanks for Medaille for providing me with the small classes of adult learners and, for several years, laptops for students and Internet-enabled classrooms. I am sorry to have to return to "smart" classrooms, which often are neither functional nor arranged so that students can see the screen, and to traditional classrooms in which students sit passively waiting to be instructed. We are not serving those students well.
When I took literature courses as an undergraduate, it dismayed me how the teacher could ruin a perfectly good story by turning it into a palimpsest for a "reading" of the text that went in whatever direction the teacher wanted it to. That didn't make sense to me, and I wasn't able to write a very good essay about literature because I either tried to think and write what the teacher wanted, and failed, or wrote what made sense to me, and failed because it wasn't what the teacher wanted.
Not until I was marketing my novel First and Ten in the early 1990's was I finally able to articulate my problem. During interviews and at signings, people, usually aspiring writers, were always, constantly asking of me the question that their literature teachers had taught them to ask: what does it mean? For example, First and Ten's main character's nickname is Santa. I named him that "because he came with all the gifts: soft hands, burning speed, a nose for the ball." A couple dozen (sic) readers and interviewers asked me whether that was a reference to Satan, and what did it mean?
|
|
For those occasions, I turned aside the question by quoting Sam Goldwyn, "If I want to send a message, I'll use Western Union" or one of my favorite painters, Barnett Newman, "Aesthetics is for artists like ornithology is for the birds." Privately, I found the question offensive. I worked very hard while writing First and Ten to say what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell a story. I told a story. The question "What does it mean?" assumes that I didn't succeed with my words, or that I withheld something accessible only to the adept, or that I was playing peek-a-boo god games. I finally decided that it said more about the sorry state of our educational system.
It should come as no surprise that I have never taught a literature course. I don't mind what those teachers do. The search for meaning is rooted in millennia of people asking questions of sacred texts. Close reading helps students learn to think. But it makes no sense to me to sacrifice a story on the altar of meaning.
As an 18-year-old college student, I would not have stayed at
Medaille. It has too few students, meager athletic and other facilities, and
faculty who get to know the students personally. I thrived among the University
of Texas' fifty thousands students, world-class facilities, especially the
libraries and gyms, and faculty who were too busy with their research to offer
more than textbook/lecture/test courses to small auditoriums of students. At the
time, I had no intention of making college teaching a career, but looking back,
I can see that I was a scholar all along: a self-directed, highly motivated,
voracious reader.
|
As a college teacher, I would not be able to stay at a research university like UT. I would certainly get paid more, and I could certainly churn out books and articles, but I would be engaged in the original distance learning: the lecture hall with the teacher waaaay down there. With that many students, what choice would I have except textbook/lecture/test? That is more entertainment than education, and I don't have the song and dance skills. Nor can I compete with the fast-cut throbbing media saturating our lives unless the College provided a production staff. One teacher alone on a stage in front of several hundred students needs the skills of a Robin Williams, and I don't have them.
What would have repelled me from Medaille as a student attracts me as a teacher. I rarely have more than twenty students with me in one room. My professional teaching career has been a process of experimentation, trial and error. I am well-versed in what not to do. I am always trying new ways of structuring class time and making assignments more valuable.
However, over the years, I have developed some strategies and techniques that have served me well by constraining the experimentation. I am firmly in the constructivist camp, as I explain in the teaching section of this portfolio.
Not all students are comfortable with this pedagogy. Most either embrace it or come around to it. Those who resist often have excellent skills in note taking, test taking, and teacher pleasing. By asking them to actively generate information rather than passively receive it, I play different games that are not their academic strengths. In most of my courses, I ask students to take a learning styles inventory. A student's scores on the active <--> reflective scale and the visual <--> verbal scale are a good predictor of their comfort. Those closer to active and visual adapt better than those closer to reflective and verbal. Fortunately, almost all my students (and, I believe, people in general), score closer to active and visual.
|
|
See the teaching section of this portfolio for further discussion.
Former faculty member
Bruce Bailey (now at
Otterbein) team-taught MBA 604 with me in Spring 1998. He commented that I was
different from other teachers because I was more interested in being the
kingmaker than in being the king. He meant that I was more interested in student
learning than in my own professing, that I was always backing out of the way,
especially during class, to keep the focus on the students.
I pointed out that in actual air time, I end up doing a lot of talking in class. Bruce countered that I was proving his point. By playing the kingmaker, I put the emphasis where it belongs. I am still the dominant voice without always being in the dominant position. When all my students had laptops, they sat in a semi-circle around the projected computer screen and I was often standing behind them. The emphasis was on the ideas and images on the screen, often student work. Standing behind the camera, I videotaped their presentations and debates. The emphasis was on their communication skills.
Now that I am forced into fixed-seat computer classrooms built around the teacher as high priest or foreman, I am going to have to find other ways [link to 2007 self-eval when available] to emphasize my kingmaking.
I understand and can accept the rules and regulations for privacy in education. If I don't want my family or employer to know that I am taking courses, I should not be hindered by the College from keeping that private. Grades, of course, can't stand the light of reason shone on them, so they are best kept private, if only to spare tradition from embarrassment.
|
|
Information, however, is another matter altogether. Information wants to be free in both senses: money and free speech.
One of the memorable days of my professional life was when MIT announced its OpenCourseWare project in 2001. I felt it was a vindication to those who said Ricci Street was dangerous and perhaps unethical. If the Medaille faculty had taken me up on using Ricci Street, we could have been ahead of even MIT. Instead, our faculty for the most part opts for keeping knowledge locked up on paper. Or they use the expensive proprietary software (Jenzabar, Blackboard, WebCT) that keeps documents meant to be printed locked up behind passwords. Putting up barriers around knowledge strikes me as dangerous and perhaps unethical, but I'll leave it at that.
To the dismay of my family, I have always had an attraction to
the new and different. As computers got more powerful and easier to use, I began
embracing them. My M.F.A. thesis in 1982 was the first in the history of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst to be written on a word
processor, as opposed to a typewriter. (The quality checker told me it was also
the first with no white-outs painted on the pages.) I first sent and received email in 1987. I knew
about hypertext, but when I first saw Apple's Hypercard
(screen shot below) in action at a writing
teacher's conference in 1989, I "got" it immediately. I started an AOL
account in 1990 and began checking my email daily in 1991.
When I saw hyptertext in action for the first time in 1989, I immediately
realized its potential.
I could open my office file drawer, stuffed to bulging with xeroxed articles to
hand out to students, I could stick a sewing needle through every idea that
related to any other idea, and I could pass the thread along to the next idea. Then I
could give students the end of one of these threads and let them follow it from idea to
idea. And here's the trick -- they could switch from any one thread to another
thread at any time. They could do it from home. They could make as many copies
as they wanted to. It was all instantly searchable. Wowzers!
However, Apple's Hypercard wasn't quite there yet. It wasn't until I downloaded the
Mosaic browser (screen shot below) in early 1994 and saw a Web page crawl across my screen that I
saw my entry point. From then, I started eliminating paper from my courses and
from my life.
The first thing I noticed by using email and discussion forums was that I had a
lot more contact and richer relationships with students who also had email and
used discussion forums. That alone sold me. As they got browsers and started
downloading (and printing!?!) my laughably rudimentary web pages circa 1995, I
noticed a virtuous cycle -- the more engaged students were more techno-literate,
which brought them more resources that engaged them further.
Some of that early flush of enthusiasm in the mid-1990's came from the novelty of the online experience. The last decade, bringing to college students who have never known life without the Internet, has increased the gap for many students between school and real life. I have done my part not to widen that gap further.
|
By the summer of 1995, there were almost twenty thousand web sites worldwide, and I was panicking that the College was going to miss the boat. My courses were largely paperless by 1996 and completely so by 1998. I haven't owned a printer since then and my life, especially my professional life, has very little paper in it. I do everything I can on a computer network.
For many years, I was the only faculty member so engaged by the Web. It was hard for me to describe the Web to someone who hadn't used it, but to me the advantages for my pedagogy were enormous. Scale that to the whole curriculum, I thought, and the College could gain great competitive advantage. This message was not well received by my colleagues informally, so I took it upon myself to offer a series of oral presentations and to write a series of reports that circulated among administration and faculty.
While the oral presentations are lost, the paper reports are still available upon request. Here, I will summarize these efforts to introduce the Internet to the College and especially to the curriculum.
I proposed that the College make a resource commitment to
computers and new media in order to keep up with the times if not keep up with
the high schools, where our incoming students would have had resources better
than ours.
The proposal involved more commitment than the College was prepared to make. However, the current New Media Institute and its budget lines came out of that effort. While the College is still does not have the computer (or athletic and art) resources that most high schools in our catchment area do, the New Media Institute, I am proud to say, is still the cutting edge at Medaille.
From time to time during my two decades at Medaille, the Humanities Department has developed a curriculum that was designed to attract career-oriented majors yet still be humanities.
For example, in the early 1980's, the current Media Communications Department was developed as an applied humanities degree. It has gone on to become an important program.
In the mid-1990's, when I was still in the Humanities Department, we developed a curriculum around the latest computer technologies viewed as communications tools. There was a lot of tension between faculty who wanted to plunge ahead into the new technologies and those who wanted the new degree to be as much like a traditional English literature degree as possible. How could you learn to make a Web page if you didn't have a firm grounding in Shakespeare?
Without more support from the Humanities faculty, this effort did not get much further than my report. Parts of it were later revived for the current Visual and Digital Arts curriculum.
When the Education Department put together their original
masters degree curriculum, they asked me to be the technology expert. I
researched and wrote computer and Internet learning objectives that were added
to every course. In addition, I wrote and later taught a two-course branch (ECI
675 and ECI 685) based on the earlier courses' technology objectives.
As it turned out, the Ed faculty did not have the technology knowledge and skills to teach or evaluate the technology objectives written into their courses. Nor did they have time for the in-service training I offered. Thus, the other courses did not cover those objectives and few students signed up for the technology branch because they were all attracted to the branches taught by the other faculty. To a person, the other faculty saw technology as a threat, at best a nuisance, and not an opportunity. The few students who did take the technology branch were not prepared for it. I spent all the time catching them up with the neglected objectives from the earlier courses.
The Title III grant I wrote in 1992 was adventurous and cutting edge in its commitment to computer technology, but by 1997 was hopelessly inadequate. So this 1997 report to the academic dean set out a program of continuous professional development for faculty to keep up with what was going on online.
I proposed that the College make the commitment to get the faculty up to speed and keep them there. I organized and conducted the semester-long program on the left (with $0 budget and no administrative support). The administration chose another route to the same goal, but unfortunately, ten years on, most faculty members are still not using the tools available to them.
Looking back over my career, I have always had one or more passions that a tenured position has let me pursue: writing fiction, directing plays, building the MBA program, making webs and videos. The next one may be internationalizing the College.
In the early 1970's, I lived for a year in Italy and England,
where I worked on the stage crew at the Her Majesty's Theatre (photo on right) for the musical
Applause with Lauren Bacall. In
the mid-70's, I supported myself as a free-lance French-to-English translator of
technical reports (mostly petroleum geology) accredited by the American
Translators Association
, and I traveled in South America.
In the mid-1980's, I wrote an unpublished novel set largely in Liberia, about which I did an enormous amount of research.
By the mid-1990's, the Internet opened the floodgates for me to sources of worldwide information. I have always brought that wider awareness to my courses, and I rank foreign-born applicants extra high when I serve on search committees. Recently, two of those searches resulted in foreign-born faculty joining the Business Department. New tools/toys like Google Earth are endlessly fascinating. I'd rather play with it and the Wikipedia than go to the movies and sit passively.
In the past few years, faculty with significant international experience have joined the faculty. As of 2007, a little more than a tenth of the faculty are either foreign born or have lived in foreign countries. I make it a point to get to know each of them and to express interest about their backgrounds. As I did that, I kept feeling uneasy, that something needed to be done. In summer of 2005, I got an email that lit my fire.
The email came from Michael Hughes, a former MBA student who was
serving in the U.S. Army, stationed in the Kurdish section of Iraq a
s an economic
development advisor. This email exchange developed into an invitation for me to
visit the University of Dohuk, Iraq,
(entrance in photo on left) to help the faculty and local government
officials learn how to better use the Internet for attracting foreign direct
investment. That project grew and contracted and got postponed and finally got
canceled because of the difficulties of scheduling and budgeting. We were trying
to do something as an ad hoc initiative that, under the hostile circumstances in
Kurdistan these days, is best done between established organizations. I regret
having to pull the plug on that process.
Meanwhile, a group of faculty started an email discussion that led to a meeting that led to a unanimous vote at a full faculty meeting to authorize an ad-hoc committee to discuss internationalization. Our report is titled Islands in the Stream.
That initiative, which involved a now-inactive blog (see header image below) and discussion forum, led the undergraduate academic dean to chair a committee of faculty (and one administrator) this school year. By March 2007, we produced a draft of an outcomes statement. Then we circulated it for feedback and re-drafting. We noted that "internationalizing the campus" was one of the challenges enumerated in the College's recent presidential application materials.
As the draft statement stands now, the major implications of further internationalization will be 1) increased incidence and awareness of an international component to course readings and assignments and 2) more Medaille students with courses and internships in foreign countries. A third might be more language courses or even a language requirement for some majors.
President Jurasek began attending our meetings over the summer and asked us to expand the internationalization initiative into a triad:
|
international |
environmental |
multi-cultural |
I have continued working with this group as we develop outcomes statements for all three areas. We can see how this effort would dovetail with a re-vamped general education curriculum. The president feels as though he can sell this triad to both the public and grants agencies. [link to 2007 self-eval when available]
While I support this effort, my personal interest remains in the international area.
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: October 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/personal/index.html
nted, “professors
usually can be dismissed only for serious misconduct or incompetence".