Cross-listing Courses and Interdisciplinarity, part 1
This is actually one of those few times where I'm posting about something of particular relevance to something happening at SLAC, even though I'm sure that y'all have all dealt with such things before. One of the reasons I'm posting is because I told a colleague I would, and would share with hir the comments that are left. So zie is sworn to silence about this blog. And cannot share it with anybody else. Otherwise, I might not be able to continue blogging, if a ton of my colleagues start reading this. And that would be a shame, since I'm up to judge the Cliopatria Awards this year. Dunno which category yet, but watch this space for more on that.
Anyhoo ... cross-listing. Last week, a colleague asked me whether zie could cross-list a course as a history course. As department chair, it's my call. This ended up opening up a few cans of worms, not the least of which is a conversation about interdisciplinarity. One of the other cans was how different my own ideas about cross-listing seem to conflict with what seems to have been the norm at SLAC. The feeling I've got from speaking to more senior colleagues is that cross-listing has often been treated as a sort of unofficial barter system based on the way FTEs have been counted: a faculty member wants to teach a course in a special topic, but the course won't make unless it's cross-listed with another department, because students don't have a lot of electives to spare. So the course gets cross-listed, the faculty member gets to teach the cool class because there are enough students, and the department that allows the cross-listing gets credit for additional FTEs that accrue into the departmental total.
To be honest, I've never seen anything like this before, but then, most of my teaching experience is at state schools. My response to the request was in line with what I've seen done elsewhere -- I asked for a syllabus and typical assignments, and said that, in order for a course to be listed in my discipline, it needed to clearly address and fulfill my department's outcomes and assess them in ways consistent with what my departmental colleagues and I have agreed are acceptable for courses at that level, and are consistent with what we actually do. My initial rationale for this was pretty basic -- our accreditors require that we show that we do the things we say we do, so if a course is listed as history, it has to do those things, and I have to be able to work the assessment data into my annual assessment report, which means comparing apples to apples. Period.
There are other ramifications that have come to light here that I want to talk about, because they touch on things like gatekeeping, interdisciplinarity, and our own definitions of our fields. And my own personal pet peeve, which I sort of worry plays into it: the idea that anybody can teach history. But before I go there, I'd like to put out a call for input especially on how your campus goes about cross-listing courses. If you could comment below, I'd really appreciate it. I checked with the institution where I taught for the longest time pre-SLAC, and it was even more complicated than I remembered. First, a faculty member would approach the cross-listing department or program with a syllabus in hand. That syllabus would have to reflect the outcomes of the cross-listing department and assessments for those outcomes. Next, once verbal agreement was reached, the faculty member would fill out a course proposal form and get sign-off from both department chairs and the dean. Then, the proposal would go through the regular curriculum committee process, which could take up to several months, and the course would be approved for the next academic year.
Now, one problem with this particular approach at SLAC is that, if in a case like mine, it's a special topics course being cross-listed as a special topics course, then that would mean that all courses taught in both departments under the special topics numbers would be forever linked. That's just a bad idea. But we have a rule that we can't add new courses permanently until they've been taught twice successfully as special topics. Be that as it may, my own impression is that most institutions handle cross-listing more as former college does. Or am I wrong? How does it work at your place?
Hello, readers. I'm looking for a gender-neutral way of getting across the sentiments incorporated in the phrase, "to man up." You see, I really like those sentiments, but I don't like the phrase, because it's anything but gender-neutral. Actually, I don't really like the sentiment that is embodied in the "this is a manly quality, even when applied to women," part of it. Um ... does that make sense?
Disclaimer: I'm not talking about the whole 'working smarter' thing in this post, because at the moment, I need to be working a little harder in order to even contemplate working smarter. I'm behind on writing, but am incredibly happy that it looks like the K'zoo panel I'm chairing is going to rock in a serious way. Still haven't made the right contacts for Leeds, and don't have a topic for a paper. Anybody need a respondent or chair? Part of this is sort of deliberate -- Superdean wants me to focus on getting some of my stuff that I've already given into the publishing queue, rather than giving new papers I don't have time to turn into articles. And the book is way behind schedule. But I hope to go to Leeds either way.
Anyway ...
This semester, I am already suffering from serious student ass-kicking. That is, my students are kicking my ass. I'm starting to think there are two sorts of teaching-tired. There's the, "OMG, these people are not doing their work and I am just terribly drained from having to carry this class!" tired. And then there's the, "Oh Noes! The students are doing the work and liking it and making me think!" tired.
With the former, part of the exhaustion comes from the emotional drain of having to keep up energy levels, and having a bunch of people waiting to suck you dry. I had a couple of vampire classes like this last year. Exhausting. But mentally, not all that much work, because at some point, I found myself moving from my usual discussion/active learning classroom mode to content delivery. Content delivery takes so much less work. It takes less prep, especially when you know that the most students are going to ask for is a clarification of spelling. But honestly, I find it soul-destroying.
On the other hand, when classes are doing all the work, and asking good questions, I find myself scrambling, especially when it's after a bad semester. I find myself wanting to live up to the students' expectations, to be worthy of standing in front of them every day. I also feel like beating myself up if I'm not as prepped as I'd like, because dammit, they did the reading! They're participating! I need them to like my class and come back! I need them to become History majors and never stop taking my classes! Um ... I am sounding like a vampire myself, aren't I? Except that, when I have good classes, I feel rejuvenated, or at least tired in a good way, when I'm done. Speaking of which, I've got some marking to do.
Still, if I'm going to have students kicking my ass, I know which way I'd like it to happen.
In the meantime, is anybody else having hir ass kicked (yeah, I'm liking that phrase too much this evening) so far this semester?
I know I defended Outcomes and Assessments in my last substantive post. But since then, I've run across a huge exception to that.
Actually, it's not an exception. I think OA is great in theory and can be done well, in a way that enhances our teaching. For that, it has to be faculty driven.
This is different. I am currently in the position of having to change my syllabi to say that I teach things that I find entirely inappropriate to my courses. Because I believe the syllabus is a sort of contract, I will therefore teach those things. Why? because if I don't, our secondary ed students will have to add another mandatory course to their already very heavy load. The alternative? The Ed. School loses accreditation.
So basically, NCLB and the state K-12 wonks are able to drive what is taught in the universities. And that is wrong. THAT is a case of non-experts telling us what we can and can't do. And one of the best parts? they are getting the curriculum in part from outdated textbooks, which makes it almost impossible for us to correct many of the things that current research rejects, i.e., we are forced to perpetuate bad history, just so we can teach students that the people we taught to teach them in K-12 were wrong.
As you might remember, the August Carnivalesque was pre-empted by a break-in and the theft of a brand new Macbook. But Carin Ruff at Ruff Notes has put together a wonderful back to school edition, packed with good reading and excellent advice for students and professors alike!
Somehow, I think people might expect me to say a little bit more, given my lengthy comments elsewhere. So here are some reasons I think OA is not necessarily the Borg:
As I just said, OA done well can be as simple as sitting down and thinking about what you are doing, what you want to be doing, articulating those things, assessing for the evidence of those things, documenting how your expectations fit what the students are doing, then going back and tweaking your teaching and/or your expectations the next time around, documenting that, and so on. It's about documenting process and goals. Having said that, there are people who want to use 'bad numbers' to beat us over the head. Those are the people we need to fight, not the idea. Self-reflection is not a bad thing, whether on a personal, departmental, or institutional level.
Outcomes at the course level are good pedagogy. Too often we find ourselves building new preps in a hurry, and many new faculty who have not taught before, as well as some of their more senior colleagues, are wont to build the class based on coverage -- Look! a textbook that has the same number of chapters as the semester has weeks! we'll do a chapter a week, and then ... This is not a good way to plan a class, unless your idea of history is to teach a narrative via lectures, and then get the students to paraphrase your narrative on essay exams. I don't think that's what a good history class should be, even at the survey level. A university history class, IMO, should be teaching the discipline of history, as well as a (or several) narratives. So I'm all for thinking about what I want students to get out of my classes, and it's not a difficult step for me to translate that to course outcomes.
But that's not really what we're talking about -- this is more department- and program-level outcomes. Well, honestly, I can't find any reason that my department shouldn't have a common set of ideas about what somebody graduating with a degree in history should know, and know how to do, when they finish. Since my department has a capstone course, something that, by the way, seems to make a lot of accrediting agencies very happy, if it's done well, it only makes sense that we sit down together and decide how to make sure that the students are given the chance to learn the skills for the capstone no matter whose classes they take. It also makes sense that people teaching the same course should agree on how they are going to measure the students' performance, rather than having one History 101 prof giving weekly quizzes, two midterms, a paper, and a final, and another giving a research paper and a final and a power-point presentation for the same course. And generally speaking, the students should be learning the same material, although obviously different people will focus more on their strengths and interests. But if there is such a thing as canon, then it should be taught in each section of a course taught by several people. It's only fair to the students.
Speaking of departments, one of the things that Historiann and others have said repeatedly is that we are all professionals, and we already examine our teaching, and do the kind of self-reflection that OA is supposed to encourage. In a perfect world, yes, that's true. In the one where I teach? Not so much. I've never taught at a place where there was not at least one truly dysfunctional department, and usually a couple of faculty colleagues who weren't professional, weren't at all self-reflective, and were the pedagogical equivalents of a night on bad tequila -- the students can't help but vomit, and they can't bear the thought of getting near the subject again for years. Now, these colleagues are not going to go away, and these departments are not going to get functional, but the process at least allows the faculty who do want to teach in a solid program, and do want to serve the students who want to learn to work together more efficiently, document when their unprofessional colleagues are not playing nicely with other children to the detriment of the program and to its students, and let the students know what is expected of them.
Students. They are not customers. But they do pay money to be allowed to study with us. Is it a bad thing to work together to make it clear to the students why we do things the way we do? to give them clearly articulated expectations and then demonstrate that we grade according to the expectations we say we're going to grade by? Is there anything worse than the perception that a faculty member is unfair (well, other than the things that are really worse, obviously)? But seriously, is it a bad thing to have an outcome that says that students will learn to differentiate primary from secondary sources, and use them to create a well-supported narrative or analysis? And then to say, "this is what we mean by well-supported"? Let me tell you, I've been in meetings where my very professional colleagues cannot give examples of these things, or even the characteristics of them, instead relying on the, "I have a PhD and know it when I see it," argument.
This is the one that annoys me the most, I think. The idea that we are somehow above explaining what it is we do. There is an intrinsic beauty in history and its study, I think. And I don't really buy the idea that we should have to justify our disciplines to non-experts. But at the same time, we really don't live in a world where people think that way. And we are employees of universities and colleges. If they are public, well ... when does, "trust me, I'm the expert," work for us academics? Moreover, we have a glut on the market in the humanities these days. If you can't explain what it is you do, and how you grade to your own colleagues, then there are people who can do your job just as well who can and will.
That last bit kind of brings me to my second-to-last point for right now. I'm a little freaked out by how authoritarian I sound. Because honestly, I'm all about good faculty governance, good contracts, and the tenure system (with regular post-tenure reviews). But I also see myself as an employee of my institution. There are things I am required to do as part of my job -- I have to provide receipts for reimbursement, I have to turn in grades on an A-F scale no later than the semester deadline, I teach history, and not English or Religion, I teach the students the university admits, whether or not I think they should be there, and I go to godawful meetings when I am supposed to. Sometimes I even teach a class at a time I'd rather not, because that's what the Dean has asked me to do. In exchange, I get to teach my subjects pretty much in the way I like, I get to teach courses I like, more or less -- as long as they serve the students and the university, I get support to travel and research (to some degree -- and lots of moral support!), and a paycheck.
Having said that, I can't imagine the sort of top-down approach to OA that a lot of people are complaining about. The places where I've encountered something even in that realm are places where either the administration didn't take assessment seriously and are therefore cacking themselves because they have to try to come up with masses of data all at once, or where there was never a clear explanation to the faculty of why they needed to drive the faculty part of OA -- or where faculty are just so disaffected that they refused, and are now facing something that is not at all what they expected. No matter the reason, Clio N's experiences sound pretty abysmal, and I can see why she doesn't want to do it.
Last point ... institutional assessment. I'd like to think that it worked. I'd like to think that Student Services, Admissions, Computing, the Registrar, Campus Life, Facilities, etc., were really assessing themselves the way good faculty do. Even if they aren't? I think that OA can help to support some faculty concerns, because my guess is that this is one of the places where number crunching can give a fairly accurate idea of what's going on.
Yesterday, as I processed in borrowed regalia, a junior colleague (in the sense of still a probationer, rather than age or time at SLAC -- there are several people who have been here as long or longer than I, but haven't gone up yet) said, "Ah, ADM, it must be a wonderful feeling!" "What?" "You have tenure (or its equivalent)! You have no more worries!" "You know? It's not like that."
I can't blame hir for thinking this, though. We're trained to think that we are simply jumpng a series of hoops, with tenure as the brass ring* -- oh, it will be great after coursework! No, it will be great after comps! No, it will be great after the thesis is done! Oh noes, everything will be fantastic as soon as I get a job! Oops! Maybe it will all be perfect when I have tenure and promotion!
Somewhere along the line -- I think about halfway into my probationary period, it occurred to me that the brass ring, didn't really exist. Instead, each hoop is a gate, or door, that grants us access to another set of possibilities, for success AND for failure. Before you think I'm going to get all self-help-y, don't -- I'm not about to start saying that we need to look upon stress as an opportunity for growth, or any of that crap. But anyway, back to the wonderful feeling.
It's not like that. I mean, it's good to know that, unless I truly screw up, I now pretty much have a job for as long as I want it. And it's nice to have the decision made and the reassurance of the new contract. perhaps it's not really sunk in -- or maybe it's just that I haven't worried much about my employability for a very long time. Mostly, though, there's also the knowledge that I am now at Associate level based on a book contract and one accepted article (scholarship-wise), and that I am less marketable if I want to change jobs than I was last year.
That sounds a little ungrateful, doesn't it? I don't mean it to. But I'm looking at a backlog of work, and some projects that I really want to get on with, and no sabbatical in sight. So for me, the promotion, etc., doesn't feel any more than a confirmation that I am an actual working academic. My responsibilities haven't changed, and now I am qualified to be on more and harder committees! Honestly, though, I feel under more pressure to produce and to be good at my job now than I did before. It's a different kind of pressure, but pressure all the same.
A year ago, or even two, I felt like I had to show I was good enough so that I could keep my job. That's stressful, I admit. As I write this, though, I have remembered that the President commented in our 'welcome to the fold' meeting that one of the things zie appreciated about me was that I have always contributed and spoken my mind, even when zie didn't agree with me. And that is true. The junior colleague does not speak up, and frequently gets others to speak for hir, because they are 'better' at it or they are senior. I have an idea that zie thinks this will all change, once zie is in my position. Perhaps it will make a difference for hir, but it didn't for me.
When I told the colleague I felt under more pressure, though, zie boggled. The thing is, I feel that I have to live up to being senior faculty. I feel that I have to set an example for why tenure and permanent contracts are not bad things. I feel that I have to get the damned book done and get on with the next, and in the meanwhile send 10th Medieval the article abstract I just realized was due yesterday, and then I need to write the bastard thing! And I have to keep working on my teaching, and try the things I want to try to make the courses better. There are new projects, speakers to arrange, freshmen to advise, piles of journals to get through ...
And no, it's not to keep my job anymore. It's not (much) about thinking towards the next promotion. It's not (much) about keeping myself marketable, because I might want the option -- or need it, depending on my personal life -- to be able to move to a different job (with luck with a *slightly* lighter teaching load). It *is* to some extent about getting myself in a good position to apply for fellowships, especially for my sabbatical in 4? years (or a really good one that allows me to take a semester leave before then!).
But really, it's about knowing that there are no more hoops, or doors, and that it's pretty much all down to me about whether I am the sort of grown-up academic I want to be, and gaining -- and keeping -- the respect of my friends in academia, as a person AND as an academic. It's not about getting the job, or keeping the job anymore: it's about doing the job and being the person that is, in the end, the real brass ring.
Or at least that's how it strikes me at the moment :-)
*does anybody else remember brass rings (and I know that they don't fit the metaphor of hoops, except that one finds both at carnivals/fairs)? Do they have them outside the US? When I was a kid, we would sometimes go to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz and ride the carousel (the one in Sudden Impact, as it happens). If you sat on one of the moving animals on the outside, you could reach out at a certain point and grab a little ring out of a track that fed the rings to just within arms' reach. Most of the rings were grimy steel, but there was an occasional one made of brass. If you got that, you kept it and gave it to the guy who ran the carousel, and got a free ride.
So it's that time of year -- almost new year's for me. Like many others, my years tend to start at different times. The important new year for my mind is the beginning of the academic year. My intellectual clock tends to run with that. My emotional and physical clocks have been moving away from my intellectual clock as I've got older, though. For those parts of me, the year begins about a week after the Winter Solstice, and I don't feel myself till about halfway to the Vernal Equinox. Yep. I am a person who reacts to the sun, but also to the dark. So I am happiest around the equinoctes, and sort of non-productive and disgruntled around the solstices. Too little light at one, too much (and not enough sleep) at the other. But it's new year.
Usually, I look forward to the beginning of the academic year. This year, I have mixed feelings. I've never been so secure in a job before, and I think I have some of that post-tenure ennui going on. I have a TON of projects, some unfinished, and some new. I've fortunately been given permission and encouragement to work on them as much as possible -- a good thing, as my publisher likely hates me at the moment. Good thing I talked up the project at Leeds, because now I have more pressure to get the bloody thing finished.
And yet ... I'm trying to find my feet as 'senior' faculty. Nothing's really changed -- I have always been outspoken, so it's not like I'm suddenly going to find my voice. And yet I'm feeling a little lost. Part of this is because I'm finding myself comparing myself to colleagues more and more. This isn't me. At least, I don't think it is. For most of my academic life, I've assumed that people who got good things deserved them, because they were hard-working and smart, and whatever. And I think that's for the most part true. This year, and maybe even since last semester, I've been going through a lot of 'why not me?'
I think I'm going through an identity crisis. Leeds was hard for me in many ways, because (as my friend at 10th Medieval and Magistra can tell you, as they put up with a LOT of whingeing) I was going through major imposter syndrome. Over here, I've never really felt part of any group of medievalists except those I met through blogging and sort of socially. Berks helped with that, and the early medieval dinner a couple of years ago gave me the chance to hang out with a bunch of early medievalist women, but there's a weirdness to being one of the token early people in most circumstances. I'd met a few of the other Carolingianists out there, but since I didn't work with a Carolingian specialist, I never really got included (or the chance to be included) in what seems to be a growing group of us over here. I never did Leeds, so I missed out on that group, too. So at conferences, I tended to hang more with the people I knew through my DV and Legal Historian -- the Late Antique folk and the Anglo-Normanists.
This summer, I've met a lot more people in the field, but still often feel that I don't quite fit in with the Americans, and won't really fit in with the Europeans (including the UK folk) till I get a couple more papers and at least one publication in my field under my belt.
At least, that's how I feel today. Coming home from the Leeds dance, I'd have said otherwise.
I think part of the crisis is the normal part of switching from research mode to teaching mode. One of the things I have yet to learn is how to balance teaching and administration/service duties and writing. Yes, it's hard with a 4-3 load. But people do it. I need to learn how. Unfortunately, part of that is finding the part of me that knows how to make myself a priority in a productive way. It's the part of me that needs to learn how to say 'no'. But one of the things, and I think I alluded to this a bit in my last post about service, is that at places like SLAC, it's very easy to fall into a mentality that sees research as being selfish, and it can -- at least for someone like me -- go the way of getting to the gym: it gets pushed aside because there are umpteen other things that need doing, that no one else seems to be willing to do. So here I am, in my head thinking about research, and writing, and scared to death to even work on my syllabi (and yeah, I need to get those done!) because I worry about getting sucked into teaching and losing the research.
And that's sort of silly. Or at least, it seems silly till I look around me. One of the things that I've noticed about SLACs and even Rural Us is that there can often be a culture of comparison. There's a lot of questioning as to why one person gets one thing and another doesn't. As I said above, I have generally thought it was usually down to people actually deserving things -- and I was perfectly satisfied that I couldn't know everything that all my colleagues did. I've found part of that to be even more true since being department chair, because you find out on a different level that there are things that happen on campuses that most people don't know about, because there are things that can't be spoken about publicly, because laws like FERPA prohibit it -- and yet people have things to deal with.
Also, I've always felt that I had no reason to complain. From my undergrad years on, I have been taken care of. I have had wonderful mentors, and patronage, to some extent. I know I've said before that I never realised how lucky I was, that I was pretty clueless about how much was given to me -- or in come cases that I earned, but basically, it's hard to see just doing what I do naturally as earning things. I do wish sometimes that people had told me, or maybe told me more clearly, that not everybody got the things I was getting, and I might have done better to appreciate them more. But it didn't really occur to me to think I'd done well when I got a big fellowship (or more...). It's weird -- when I didn't get things, I assumed it was because I'd failed in some way, which was only natural. When I was awarded something, I don't think I ever thought once about me deserving it more than anyone else, because it honestly never occurred to me that I was competing with anyone else. Seriously - how clueless was I?? I never really got that particular idea till I was on the job market, but even then, I had a hard time seeing myself as competing against anybody. What -- like I'm going to try to fix the odds against somebody? Nope. I can only do what I do, and try to make myself the best candidate. But you know? I know people who have been hired for jobs I applied for, and honestly? Can't argue with the choices.
So what does all this navel-gazing have to do with identity crises, etc.? I think it has to do with the fact that I'm now in a position where the real luxury commodity is time for research. Just as I'm finding my feet in terms of who I want to be as an academic, I'm in a situation where there's also a shortage of that commodity. I'm not the only one -- nor is SLAC the only place it happens. At least one other friend who has got tenure in the past couple of years has said the same thing -- as soon as one is associate, there are all sorts of new duties for which one is qualified. For the first time in my academic life, I feel that I am competing with colleagues for something. In this case, it's the freedom to have a personal life and to do research and write -- not in that order. Ok, inasmuch as the gym counts as personal, yeah. But I digress slightly.
The competition -- or maybe just competitiveness. On the one hand, it's trying to justify yourself to others. As someone who studies Europe, and especially medieval Europe, I've always had friends and colleagues react to my research trips in a variety of ways, but it's generally a form of, "gee, must be nice to *have* to go to Europe," or "I don't know why you're complaining, you just spent a month in a place I never get to go to," or "How did you manage to pay for that? Must be nice!" Yeah. Well, remember back when you were an undergrad and decided to be an Americanist/other field-ist because you didn't want to learn languages/wanted to make more money? I learned the languages, buried my nose in German historiography, and now work an extra job in the summer to pay for the trip. I earn it, and in exchange, I don't get to take those fun little weekend getaways, or trips to Bali in the summer, or buy a season pass for the local ski lifts. There are trade-offs. But still, sometimes you feel it, the competition. It shows up in other places. There's the weirdness of having colleagues who haven't gone up yet acting as though my success has somehow prevented theirs -- even when they are not yet done with probation. There's the sniping one hears about who has time to do research, and what they aren't doing in order to get their writing done -- they must be cutting corners, right? My guess is that yes, people do cut corners. But not the same ones. Some cut their personal lives, or give up TV, or the gym. And some others really do avoid doing anything they don't have to, or focus on courting the 'right' people.
Honestly, I don't want to be one of those people who are trying to game the system. Even more, I don't want to be seen, or even give reason for people to think, that I'm one of those people. And yet, when I see people who are good at it, there's a part of me that wonders if it's a skill I should learn. Because sometimes, those people seem to have more time, the commodity for which we all compete. So that's part of the identity crisis, too. What if the competition is part of a game I *should* be playing, and just don't know? I have turned into the sort of person who thinks through the internal and external politics of a situation more and more, but the idea of actively trying to work the politics? Do not want.
And yet ...
So yeah. The identity crisis -- no longer just one of whether I'm a teacher, scholar, or goddess of service. Now it's about whether I'm missing out by not wanting to be something I don't respect and pretty much detest in others.
Put that way, it sounds way lamer than it did in my head before I started writing. Carry on, people. Nothing to see here.
Well, so all of a sudden I realised that I had crunched all of our assessment numbers, but hadn't actually entered them into the computer to be stored forever into our accreditation records. Interesting thing. Turns out the numbers I crunched don't match up to what we say we're tracking. So ... I'm guessing I have one more task to add to my increasing OMG, the semester hasn't started and I haven't worked on the book, I now need to write an article draft by the end of the year, I owe a book review that is so late it may have been forgotten, helping organize a panel for K'zoo and an abstract for Leeds, and syllabi?????
OY.
It does not help that I've been going through that 'oh, wait, I am now senior faculty, wth?' thing since I got back.
so yeah, assessment.
Still, one of my goals this year, along with getting to the gym and getting that personal life that Superdean suggested I might want? is to blog a little more thoughtfully, and a little more often. Wish me luck!
And this shit is being stirred up by people paid to report and comment on news. Instead, they are creating it, and then denying responsibility. I'm looking at you, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O'Reilly, you cowardly assholes.
And btw, Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow? Shame on you for playing a similar, yet non-violent version of the fact-distortion game. You aren't helping. Really.
I've been thinking about my book project, which keeps getting pushed around for things like conference papers and now possibly an abstract for an extended version of my Leeds paper to see if it can be published. In many ways, this project, the paper/article, and the next project are all pretty closely linked, which is a good thing. Even better is that they don't overlap too much, so I won't be covering lots of the same ground over and over, and citing myself ad nauseam.
But I'm having to do a fairly heavy-duty re-think about the projects, largely because a knowledgeable manuscript person offered me tons of advice, but also some very public questions, about why I was wasting my time with an edited collection from the 19th C., and one that has its failings, when the larger cartulary from which this collection and another are drawn. Because, you see, apparently there are now facsimile mss available. And of course this sort of freaks me out, because I'm supposed to be a medievalist and all, and I am now senior faculty (although a junior member of senior faculty!), and I have never dealt with real manuscripts because ... everybody uses this edition. It's been pretty standard for lots of us for a very long time. And I have a sort of contract to work specifically with that bunch of documents. I think that will not be so much of a problem, in that I can add caveats about the documents and their edited version to the final product, and then people can go and check the mss in the cartulary if they choose.
But there is another issue. Much of what I work on depends on witness lists as much as anything else in the charters. I'm not, nor have I ever claimed to be, an expert in charters -- just someone very familiar with this particular collection. And I've done a fair bit of reading in Personennamenkunde and Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte, where witness lists are generally used as evidence. If I could (or better, if one of you could) remember, I could even cite a couple of places where I've read that witness lists are important, and that the order that the names appear is also important. Even without that, I'm pretty sure that's something people agree on. But one of the things I didn't know is that witness lists were often added at times and places other than where documents were drawn up. That's awkward. But I'm also not sure how important it is. That is, even if the names were added later, the names were added for a reason, and so we can use the evidence for either what was true, or to show what someone intended, and maybe even what people were thought to have been important to a particular case. And this is one of the cases where going to the original (for values of original) ms and checking to see if the witness list was part of the original document makes a lot of sense.
A second question is whether or not people signed themselves or whether they made a mark next to their names, or whether their names were just listed by the scribe or notary. Again, at this remove, I'm not sure how important it is. I'd have to look at a charter with a witness list made up of signatures to see if they are all in different hands -- but would I be able to tell? Also, is the lack of actual signatures evidence of anything other than local custom and/or a population that may not have written very much? Again, I'm not sure.
My final question is probably the toughest: my colleague claimed that in later versions of many cartularies, and probably mine, the compilers often discarded the witness lists on purpose. This may even have been especially true when the names of women appeared in the witness lists. Hmmm. First, I have a big bunch of charters, many of which have witness lists, and I have no way of knowing whether or not these documents ever had such an element. I think Wendy Davies said in her presentation (or someone at Leeds did) that often donations by people who weren't all that important didn't warren witness lists, because the stakes were pretty low and the power to prove a document was often weighed in favour of the receiving ecclesiastical institution. Now, many of these charters are definitely short and don't have witness lists, and don't list much in the way of donations. So I expect that we can make a reasonable assumption, other things being equal, that the donors were probably not all that important in the world of Carolingian politics.
Here's the real clicker, though. If something doesn't exist in many cases, does the lack of existence prove that documents were deliberately edited to remove the lists, or does it merely prove that there is a probably lack of evidence? And if we know that there is evidence missing, does it negate our ability to use the evidence we *do* have, as long as we use accepted forms of caveats to frame our conclusions? And where do things like notitia, when there are no supporting documents, fit in?
I'm just asking because these seem to be questions that are really important, and yet I am not sure they are so vital that we should all stop using specific source collections just because they are problematic, rather than false.
Oh. this was going to be longer, but I seem to have fallen asleep while writing. Carry on. I'll be back to re-read this and edit later!
As the semester crawls ever nearer, I'm starting to get into the usual panic of not having accomplished enough with my summer and worrying about not being able to get any writing done during the academic year. It would probably not surprise any of you that one of the things that I see as getting in my way is service.
Like many small colleges and universities, SLAC counts service in a big way. Although this is changing, many 'teaching' colleges and universities often used to count service and teaching as important -- or even more important -- than research and scholarly publication. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, to a point. After all, I have colleagues at SLAC, and know people who have taught at similar institutions, not to mention friends at community colleges, who were hired to teach 5-5 loads (that is, 15 lecture/seminar hours a week). Often that includes 2-4 different preps. It's a lot of work. Add to that service, and really there's not time for anything else.
That was then.
Now, faculty are increasingly expected to carry a somewhat balanced load of teaching, research, and service. That is true at all institutions, I think, at least according to my colleagues at research universities. I have a friend who can tell stories of merit increases denied to faculty who didn't do all three things. It's just that at research universities, there are generally larger numbers of faculty to share the work (maybe), and the teaching load is considerably lighter. At any rate, I'm going to try to focus on the smaller institutions, the ones that are in the process of redefining themselves, taking advantage of the glut of PhDs who still want to do research to boost their own prestige as they grow.
What is service? There's service to the profession and service to the university, right? The service that counts most is usually service to the university. But what does that mean? Well, for some of my colleagues, especially the older ones, and the ones at more isolated universities, service includes community service -- establishing strong connections between town and gown. LDW once told me that he was talking to a young colleague who taught at a very small SLAC in the deep South who was allowed to count coaching one of the town's little league teams toward his service. I think that that sort of thing is going by the wayside, although I know that we at SLAC are encouraged to join local service organizations and get on the boards of various non-profits, etc., but it no longer counts towards tenure and promotion... just some sort of nebulous good will. And that works for me.
Then there is service to the profession. For example, I have a couple of colleagues who serve on the editorial boards of journals, another who is the main review editor. I'm on the council of a professional organization. None of us get course release time for these duties, although I think that the people who run major journals do -- in part because they are at research universities that have a system for such things. Anyway, this doesn't count for us as service on our load evaluation, but it does count towards promotion. And it's appreciated by our administrators.
But really for me, service = university governance. I believe strongly in faculty governance. Without faculty participation, faculty governance cannot work. There are lots of things that can get in the way, but that's a basic necessity. Faculty senate committees, task forces, search committees -- they have to be driven by faculty. That's true even in places where the administration regularly overturns or ignores faculty input - and that can and does happen in many places. Still, if faculty don't serve, and serve well, they can't complain if things are taken out of their hands. The problem is, there is a different kind of university service, too. Running institutes, putting on conferences, setting up programs that make the university look good ... these are all important, and they take time, but they can also be self-serving. Say a person gets course releases or even release from all other service to run an institute or conference in their field. No one is denying that it's work, nor that it's good for the university in a very general sense. But the only faculty who receive a direct benefit are the ones directly involved. In many cases, faculty turn their personal hobby horses into a service boondoggle, making sure their service also ties directly into their research. In many ways, I say, "good for them." But not in others.
I have mixed feelings about this sort of service because other faculty end up carrying more of the governance work. That work can impinge upon their own ability to get research done, and thus have a negative impact long-term. There's a certain unfairness in that, I think, although not as much as there is with people who do their best not to do a damned thing. There are those as well, the colleagues who just can't be bothered. Moreover, at all of the institutions where I have worked, and according to many of my colleagues this is true for their institutions as well, big or small, what ends up happening is that a small core of people end up serving over and over again -- and often on a disproportionate number of service assignments at a time. Good department chairs and deans will try to keep people from being overloaded, but even they will start to go to the same people over and over ....
It's a situation that pisses me off for a number of reasons, one of which, I freely admit, is that I am one of the people who often gets chosen or nominated to committees, often by people who are serving on no committees because they are doing 'important work.' More importantly, though, is that I think it breeds resentment among faculty and helps to create situations where talent can be overlooked. Faculty who feel overburdened start to resent the people who seem not to be carrying their own weight. Some of the people who aren't performing service, or who think what they are doing is a valid substitute, feel the resentment and withdraw because they are uncomfortable. Some may even start phoning it in even more than they were before. And, because we always think we know more than we do, we start to respect some of our colleagues less.
It goes beyond losing respect for our colleagues and the ways that that affects our work environment, and perhaps even our students. It also tends to make some of the people carrying the load start to think that they have to be involved in everything, and they voluntarily take on additional service, because after all, nobody else will do it, right? Or because the committee looks interesting or important, they want to be on it because they deserve it to make up for all the crap committee work they already have. Meanwhile, there's still the issue of people who aren't serving. Or those who haven't yet had a chance to serve. And yet, sometimes when members of the former group get put on the right committee, they get sucked in. And they do good work, sometimes becoming the experts on whatever that committee does. But the resentment against them for years of non-participation is hard to get over. The only way to change it is for people to actively point out that Colleague X is really good at thing Y -- which is annoying and patronizing in its own way (and I'm not even going to get into whether or not people get into these messes themselves or deserve the resentment -- it's not productive, and shouldn't be the point). For the latter, the new faculty, especially the really junior people, it's hard not to get sucked into the dynamic when you're just trying to keep afloat with the transition from grad student to faculty member. After all, you want to emulate the people who seem to be 'in' on how the university works.
I haven't got any bright ideas on how to fix these things, by the way. I've only just started to recognize them myself, and then only because I have been thinking about where I want to start to focus my own service work in a very general way, because now that I have tenure (or values thereof), I want to work a little harder at carving a niche for myself, and putting my service talents where they can do the most good. I mentioned this to a friend, specifically pointing to a new project that is very much in line with things I have done in the past, and which is something I've always been interested in. And the friend, already spread thin, and in charge of a couple of fairy large initiatives, said that they really needed to make sure they were also involved in the steering of this project. And I thought, "wait. This is somewhere where I have expertise and you don't. Why exactly do you feel you should be taking a leading role on top of everything else?" And I realised that this is the environment I have seen so often before. And I felt as though my competency were in question, even though I know it wasn't, and that this colleague would consider me a member of the people who shoulder a heavy service load very well. In fact the colleague often comes to me for advice. But it's symptomatic of this whole cycle, and I wonder, if I can feel that way knowing that it's not meant to belittle my skills, how the newbies or the people who are somewhat marginalized (sometimes because of their own inaction) feel.
Well, it's International Blog Against Racism Week, and I only found out on Wednesday. So I don't have a particularly long or well-thought out post and am instead linking to some things that maybe you would like to see.
The first are from a site called Racebending. The site grew in reaction to the casting for a movie version of Nickelodeon's show, Avatar: the Last Airbender. The world of the show is clearly built with East Asian and Inuit cultural elements. Where the problem is ... well, look at the characters from the show:
Look at the casting:
The film is M. Night Shyamalan's latest attempt at a blockbuster, and the trailer looks pretty damned cool. I certainly thought it looked like I might want to see it, but not now. In fact, I'm going to be boycotting it, and encouraging my friends to do likewise.
It's not the first time this has happened, and it seems to happen a lot with sf/fantasy -- does Hollywood think that, because those genres are still somewhat marginalized, the fans are too few to notice and be annoyed?
If you remember, this sort of thing also happened with the adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin was not pleased with the result. It also regularly happens on bookcovers, where the main characters are depicted as white, even when the text makes it clear that they aren't.
Racebending also points to the video below. It's almost 10 minutes long, but worth watching.
It's interesting that this week is also seeing the winding-down of the furore following the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his own home. There's been a lot of coverage of that on the web, on TV, and pretty much everywhere. HNN has had a lot of coverage, including this column on President Obama's tendency to not confront issues of race very directly. My own opinion is that the arrest was probably fine within the letter of the law, but the circumstances were probably loaded with a lot of racial baggage. Would Gates have been as upset had he not been a black man who has achieved a pretty notable position in the scholarly, and even talking-head, community -- and yet every day has to deal with a society where there are still many forms of institutional racism, and knows very well that people of color are frequently treated differently by the legal system and its representatives than whites? Would Sgt. Crowley have reacted as he did had Gates been white? or even (and my own totally unfounded guess is that this might have had something to do with it) had Crowley not been someone who was supposed to be especially well-versed in issues of racism, and was perhaps even more upset by Gates' alleged abusive language because he thought of himself as an ally?
I am not sure. What I am sure of is that race is still a very real issue in most of the societies in which I and my readers live. There's a poll on Facebook at the moment asking whether Michael Vick should be allowed to return to a career in the NFL after his conviction for participating in a dog-fighting ring. I do sometimes wonder if professional athletes would be held to higher standards if the demographics of professional sports in the US had not changed so dramatically over the last 30 or so years. Along with our, "anyone can make it if they just work hard enough," mythos, we have also developed one where sports save the young black men from a sure future of life in the inner-city, probably dealing drugs, fathering welfare babies, and otherwise caught, inevitably, in a vicious cycle of crime and punishment. So if professional athletes act like criminals, well, what do we expect? There's a subtext of "we know that's what they are" in a lot of the media coverage of the lives of professional athletes.
Um ... no. There are lots of reasons why people commit crimes, but I'm pretty damned sure that race is not a cause, although there are correlations between some of the effects of institutionalized racism, e.g., poverty, poorer education and fewer opportunities for better education, surroundings where people are more exposed to crime, disproportionate incarceration of juvenile offenders, etc., and whether or not a person becomes a criminal.
I don't really have much else to say on the matter. I just thought I should say something, because, well, it's something we should be aware of, and now's a good time to remember that.
Anyway, I figure it was time for a change, and I think this might be a bit easier to read? This is only the 4th layout in seven years, soooo ... Happy almost blogiversary!
Working on two posts, one about drinking the kool-aid and all that entails when it comes to the professoriate, the other about service and the range of approaches to it, from 'cant be arsed' to 'can't bear not to have a finger in every pie.'
Back soon, I promise.
Also, I need to report on conferences.
Also, Thursday is my 7th blogiversary, and I may be changing the look!
So I've been in England. And mostly not blogging, because I've been busy, busy, busy. I started my trip with my annual appearance at a BSFA meeting, where I saw an interview with Ian Whates, and then went out to dinner with some fen, so that I could spend a little time with some people I know. All much fun.
Then, the next morning, off to the BL. There, I saw someone I hadn't planned on seeing at all, and spent much of the next 10 days or so working in companionable silence, with breaks for coffee and lunch. The BL was fantastic, as always -- not only did I get a chance to work on my Leeds paper, but also to visit with Extremely Cool Colleague and Susan, and had a quick chance to say hello to Dame Eleanor Hull.
Much time in between spent with friends and family, including a trip to Folkstone to see friends (one of whom is up for several very important awards this month -- crossing my fingers for him at WorldCon!) who have new Maine Coon kittens, the usual walks in Regents' Park and Golder's Hill Park with the family, and LOTS of Halo 3!!! Yes, one of the highlights of my summer is playing Halo with my nephew and X's brother and playing video games, while being told, "Aunt ADM, you're CRAP at this, aren't you?" I was, this year too. I think I never got above about 6 kills in a game. Last year, I rocked and managed to do serious damage to BiL's ego. This time, they kept changing up the games and the maps on me ...
I also managed to get killed by Zombies several times.
In the meanwhile, I listened to my niece play guitar (she's very good, and playing a lot of Renaissance stuff), chatted with SiL, and tried to chill as much as possible.
I blogged my first conference already, and am now watching the people start to queue for the buses to our flight from Heathrow, T5.
And also, a walking tour! The second day of the conference was even better than the first, if that's possible. I talked a little about the papers last time, but after the papers, we went for a lovely walking tour of the town -- fortunately a short one, since I was in a skirt, and it got sort of chilly. But the tour was interesting and fun, and some of my favourite bits were when our guide, a colleague who is frighteningly knowledgeable on many subjects, dismissed lots of things as being too late to care about! No offense to you folks who work past the millenium, because there are fantastic things in your periods, but it's nice to not feel like my period is the one being dissed!
Anyway, here's a picture, at the risk of my anonymity (just remember, people, if you know me, I don't use my real name here on a matter of principle!):
And now, back to work and on to Yorkshire in the am, to meet with many other medievalists, and some of the same ones again!
So today I was at a conference on monasticism. This is the first time where I've been at a conference where at least half the people have a clue about my sources, and lots know way more about how to use them. There are some hella smart people here.
Why yes, I am feeling depressingly not so smart. Not the best thing before giving a paper next week.
Having said that, can I just say that this is an incredibly nice conference, and that the postgrads who organized and are running it are doing a fantastic job?? The papers today were all very good, I thought, although I was having a hard time keeping up with the rapid-fire Irish names rolling trippingly off Irish tongues. There was a wonderful paper on the vita Sadalbergae, and a paper by a colleague I really admire that was just so well constructed and argued... and another by someone I'd wanted to meet for a long time, because he helped me out a while back -- he's as nice in person as in e-mail, and also gave a really interesting paper.
Several people have been very kind with advice that makes me feel like my own paper might not be hopeless, and I've had a chance to talk to some other really interesting people. At the moment, I'm sort of digesting it all, but I think I'll eventually have some really good ideas, after I get used to having been in a room of people who speak my sources.
Nota Bene: this may not be ideal; rather, it represents what my brain starts doing after about 20 of the things...
In Jesus/God's name Donors! Blah blah blah reason for donation! Blah blah blah recipient! Blah blah blah stuff donated! Blah blah blah curses on you if you try to take this stuff away from those nice monks! Blah blah date blah pathetic monk who wrote this down! Witness list.
ETA: translation? me? Seriously, though -- just ran into one where the blah blah reason is 'ob metum gehennae aeternae et premium vitae aeternae seu pro remedio animae nostrae aut remissione paccatorum nostrorum' and then a lot more blah blah fear blah blah reward blah. Not exactly the normal formula.
Apparently, my paper is going to be a lot more about gender than I thought. Because data searches are better for finding things that stick out rather than supporting normativity.
Does anyone know/can anyone think of a situation in which we might see the phrase "per manum" for a male donor of property? (for the MA, preferably)
At the moment, I'm thinking it's pretty much used for female donors...
Update: I've just found an interesting variation in my own sources -- CDF 613, "signum Ruotgeres qui hanc traditionem potestiva manu quatuor supra memoratorum germanorum rogatu fecit."
hmmmmm ....
ideas? because this isn't the same as "trado per manum X", which you see mostly with widows or spouses ...
The latest edition of Carnivalesque is now up at Medievalist, food history person, and sf/f writer Gillian Polack's Food History Blog. It's got a cool organizational theme, and the Food History blog has all sorts of other interesting posts as well.
Sorry for the lack of blog visiting and blogging. I am away earning quick money with a marking gig at BaaRamU and trying ot get writing done. But apropos of these posts at Tenured Radical and Historiann, and my comment at TR's, I had a thought.
It might not be a particularly good one, but here goes.
I looked at it again, and noted that one of the fields that is supposedly in decline is economic history. And again, I was struck by how us early folk are pretty much written off, invisible, unimportant to the generalizations of what history is and what it's good for. Because, well, Chris Wickham's prize-winning Framing the Early Middle Ages sure as hell seemed to be largely economic history to me. But then I thought, "ah, but Wickham's a Marxist historian, isn't he? and that is also that narsty non-traditional stuff."
Except, well, Marxist historiography is certainly nothing new.
Anyway, even if that's a crap argument (I've had 4 hours' sleep and travelled all day), here's my thought:
Where is this absence of traditional fields when you look at us pre-Modern types?
It doesn't exist.
Medievalists (and I'm including the Late Antique folks here) are still doing economic history, diplomatic history, military history, legal and constitutional history ... all of those things and more. And doing a booming business.
Now, I ws thinking that part of why this never seems to be the case is that most of us have to use whatever tools are in our bags to get the job done, and most of us can move around a bit, because we've had to.
But here's my other thought: to others -- including our colleagues in history, who dammit should know better -- we are medievalists. To the outside world, we don't get to classify ourselves by subfield (except for period, pretty much). Is Steve White a legal historian? Nope, he's a medievalist. Is Charlie Bowlus a military historian? Nope, he's a medievalist. Judith Bennett a social historian? Nope. She's a medievalist, too.
MA in Archaeology by Research - Fee Waiver Visualising Late Antiquity: Everyday Life AD 300-650 Centre for Late Antique Archaeology, University of Kent
The School of European Culture and Languages is able to offer two MA fee waivers at Home /EU rate for the academic year 2009-2010, to support guided research into the Visualisation of Everyday Life in Late Antiquity. This degree will be taught through tutorials and guided research, although it will also be necessary to attend lectures and seminars on late antique archaeology in the first term. Assessment will be based on a 40,000 word dissertation, though students will be asked to write preparatory essays in the first term, connected to their subject. The theme of the dissertation will be set by their supervisor and may include topics such as the architecture, furniture and material culture in late antiquity.
Programme Duration: Full-time 12 months Start date: September 2009
Entry Requirements: Applicants are generally expected to have obtained an upper second-class honours degree, or the international equivalent, in archaeology or a related field. Applicants whose first language is not English are expected to have obtained IELTS 6.5 or TOEFL 570. Candidates should have an established interest in late antiquity and its architecture or material culture, and intend to progress to a PhD at Kent on this theme, if the opportunity presented itself. Excavation experience and organisational skills are desirable, as students will be expected to participate for one month in the Ostia Excavation Project, and offer some administrative assistance to the Centre for Late Antique Archaeology during the year. Knowledge of one or more modern European languages (French, German and Italian) would be an advantage, as would experience of Mediterranean archaeology.
Fee Waiver: the successful candidates will be offered a fee waiver of 3,670 GBP to cover one year of postgraduate fees at home / EU rate. No maintenance fee would be offered. Fees could be repayable in whole orpart if the degree was abandoned without completion, or if efforts made were deemed to fall below the acceptable minimum standard for MA work.
Application Process To be eligible for these studentships, candidates must send to Dr Luke Lavan (via email) a CV and a letter explaining why they would like to be considered for the University of Kent studentship, accompanied by a piece of written work. The deadline for submissions is 16th June 2009. Selection will be based on written submissions, with the option of interview by telephone / email.
Contact: Dr Luke Lavan, Email: l.a.lavan AT kent.ac.uk Tel: 01227769665 School of European Culture and Languages, Cornwallis North West, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/classics/staff/LukeLavan/ www.lateantiquearchaeology.com
When I started this academic gig, I pretty much figured I knew the basics of the job: academics, no matter where we are employed, are engaged in some combination of teaching, service, and scholarship. The priorities and proportions may shift depending on where we are, but it's pretty much that, right? I also am one of the last people to subscribe to the idea that a college or university is a business, at least in the sense that the student is the customer and the customer is always right. No. Really, no. The student pays to have the chance to learn or not learn, as she chooses. Paying tuition gets a student in the door. What they do after that point is largely up to them. But in another way, institutions of higher education are businesses. It's not just that people are paying for the opportunity to learn, but they are also paying, especially at SLAC's like mine, for a particular sort of experience, a certain ratio of faculty to students, and to feel that they are being given the best possible chance at success -- and that's not even counting things like decent dorms, edible food, nice gym facilities, and ... oh yeah, quality teaching.
So what is quality teaching? How do you measure it? Can you measure it?
These are not trick questions.
For some of us, we measure our teaching by how much students learn. More or less. Obviously, if students are crap, or unable to do the work, they won't be learning much, no matter how good we are as teachers. But in general, the only way I can think of to tell if I'm a good teacher is to see whether the students are learning. This means that I need to think about what it is I want them to take away from my teaching, and in some way, measure it. I guess. The traditional way of measuring learning is through exams. And you know, I'm good with that in a general sense. You spend a period teaching a subject, and at the end, you test the students to see if they've learnt it. But that's a pretty broad interpretation. When I was attending Beachy U, and in Grad School, I knew I was responsible for learning all the information delivered to me in lecture and in the readings, and synthesizing it (and to some extent, regurgetating it) on exams. That's how it was done. If you had asked my profs how they measured learning, it would likely have been expressed more or less as, "the student used historical information from a variety of sources in order to support arguments for a particular historical interpretation." Or something like that. And I agree that that's basically what we want students to do. But what does that mean?
There are lots of important factors in learning history. And even those students who received what are considered decent high school educations are often ill-equipped for such exercises. They don't know what they don't know, nor are they sure what they are supposed to know. So in order to figure out if they are learning, i.e., if I am teaching effectively, I have to ask myself this: What parts do I most want them to learn? Is it learning the narrative? Is it learning to read and analyze primary and secondary sources? Is it learning to argue a particular view of why something happened? Do I focus on content or skills? Those are all important things. For myself, I'd like some sort of balance between them all, but if I have to choose, I tend to fall towards the 'learning to be a historian' side of things, because I think that the sorts of thinking and the presentation of information and creation of narratives that we do are the things that transcend the narrative, and are the tools that allow people to create their own narratives, and to question the ones they are offered. I think this is because, to me, thinking that learning history means learning a narrative, and maybe some varying interpretations, is like thinking a degree in English is about learning all the important works well enough to recite the plots, and compare and contrast them, but not ever learning about how the works have been seen, interpreted, and fit into the contexts of genre, style, period, etc.
Admittedly, there is a disadvantage -- well, lots of them! -- to this approach. First, it means that I often rely on my students learning a narrative (not the narrative, but a narrative) and the general factual stuff on their own, so we can spend the majority of class time discussing primary source documents. Next, it's just hard, because it means going in to every class not knowing where the discussion might lead. Students in one class might pick up on one thing, but not the same thing that another class does. I'm not saying it's chaos, but it means being fairly flexible and sometimes taking what you thought was an obvious discussion of class and changing into a discussion of gender roles, for example. Finally, that flexibility means that you really have to keep in mind, and keep steering towards, the things you want the students to learn, even if it means getting there by a slightly different path.
Honestly, I'm also a bit leery about this approach, because I worry that the students aren't learning enough content, enough narrative. And I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be just as good to walk in and give topical lectures and ask the sort of questions that help the students tie it all together. But this is all in my Survey courses, and I think I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that there is no way to cover all the content for five continents and anywhere from 500 years to 5000 years, so concentrating on a few themes seems a good way to go. And you know, it's not too hard to assess whether students have learned -- the hard part is making sure I cover the stated outcomes for the Gen Ed the course is supposed to fulfill.
Well. For a minute I was worried I'd got off track, but maybe not.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, whatever I'm doing wrong or right, when I think of teaching, it's always connected to whether or not the students are learning. If they aren't learning, I look for other ways to teach so that they do. There are some things I can't do: the sort of teaching do requires that the students take a lot of responsibility for their own learning, and it really doesn't work if they don't prepare for class. But still, in my head, there the point of teaching is that students learn from it: I need to be able to tell if they are learning and, if they aren't, I need to think about whether how I am teaching is part of the problem. And again, I am a little worried that the what I am teaching seems to be getting short shrift, or maybe I'm expressing it badly? Or maybe it's because, even apart from the survey, I teach Ancient, two different Medieval courses (this is my one attempt at 'specialty' courses -- I do Late Antiquity to the end of the Carolingians, and the Central- and HMA as separate courses -- still pretty much surveys), Ren/Ref, East Asia, and am supposed to fit Britain, Contemporary Europe, and Historiography/Methods into my two-year course rotation. So honestly, I'm still working on refining preps, and focusing on how I can teach well given that I've only taught one of these preps twice seems my best option. Or maybe it's excuses?
Anyway, I think we've established that teaching and learning are absolutely connected in my mind.
But not everybody sees it that way. There is a school of thought that our expertise is what makes us good teachers, that teaching is an art itself, and can be judged separately from whether students learn. And, well ... I think that, without students, I couldn't teach. They're sort of the point of it for me. A university, no matter the size, exists because of the students. Now don't get me wrong -- I think that the faculty are the heart of the university. Without us, there's no reason for the university to exist, and I wish more administrators and staff would remember that (SLAC's top administrators are admirable in the amount of support they give faculty, but some of the others seem intent on creating a culture among their staffs that breeds contempt for faculty and not only treat us as nuisances, but will say out loud that we aren't to be trusted advising students on career paths, courses to take in our majors, etc.). Without faculty who can do their jobs, no one else would have a job. But without students to justify faculty, none of us would have jobs. Or that's my understanding of how this stuff works.
To return to that idea of expertise, though, I have to ask: "what is the purpose of expertise?" And how do we judge it? Is it by the fact that our peers in the wider academic world respect us? Is it because we publish? I never really understood until I came to SLAC just how justified some people were in scoffing at the academics safely ensconced in their Ivory Towers. I'd met one or two in my career, but they were generally considered out-of-touch, oddballs. My undergrad days are far behind me, but even today, I can go to a conference in Anglo-Norman stuff, and when people ask me how I, the Carolingian person, can feel comfortable asking questions on Orderic Vitalis, for example (I wrote my senior thesis on his ideas of proper female behavior), I can say, "I did my undergrad work with X,Y, and Z at Beachy U", and S the scary A/N legal guy was on my PhD committee," and all is explained. Same when I go to the Late Antiquity panels -- what can I say? I studied with good people as an undergrad and grad student. Hell, I studied with people who are very well known in their fields. I have friends who are well known. So do a lot of us, I know. But my point is, none of these people, these well-known scholars, ever have ever given me the idea that there was a separation of teaching and learning, or that their expertise, especially the expertise attached to their rather extensive CVs, was enough to justify their continued employment or get them out of service or teaching or the exercise that is assessment. In fact, I just flashed on the fact that one of the best known of all of these folk was better-known on our campus for his teaching, which contained many of the best show-tunes-based historical filks I've ever heard. I'm sorry -- a song about Alfred the Great sung to the tune of "Mame"? How could you not remember bits of narrative when presented that way?
And yet, the more time I spend at SLAC, and the more I hear from friends at SLACs, that Ivory Tower phenomenon is not nearly as rare as I thought. Our brilliance is not something quantifiable, our lectures are well-prepared pearls cast largely to an audience of unappreciative swine, and any attempts to articulate our goals and whether or not we meet them is merely killing the program by reducing it to numbers and threatening our academic freedom. I used to think this was more to do with an older generation of faculty who didn't like all of that newfangled assessment stuff, and who hadn't been allowed any buy-in when it came to self-evaluation and the setting of assessment standards. After all, that's the message that we often get from news reports on the possibility of external agencies and the federal government imposing standards from above. But now, I'm wondering if it isn't something more to do with the culture of the Small (Private) Liberal Arts Colleague. Where there is a tradition of building a particular culture of 'we are special', are we more at risk for creating Special Snowflakes?
I leave you with a cautionary tale -- Here's what happens when people have elevated their quest to something that may exist only in legend, or at least when they can't articulate their quest very well!
I realize I haven't posted much of substance lately. Shoot, I haven't even commented much. There are reasons for this: Came home from the Zoo, graded, spent a week in training on critical subject #1; spent three days training in critical subject #2 (I know three ways of making podcasts now!); took last weekend off; spent two days this week on administrivia; spent today working on critical subject #1. Tomorrow, I have to do more on that and start on my Leeds paper.
So being busy is part of it. Also, I have a couple posts brewing, one on management style (I've realized mine has much in common with 'The Four Yorkshiremen'); and one on concepts of what it means to be an academic and to have academic freedom, especially in the context of assessment.
But honestly, I have to step back and gain a little objectivity for those.
In the meantime, I'm writing this on my iPod and it's a pain, so later, doors!!
It's up at Mercurius Politicus, and there are etchings to mark out each subject! Very cool. It's Early Modern this time, but number 51 will be Ancient/Medieval again, and will occur on or about the 20th of June at medievalist-sf/f author-food history maven Gillian Polack's Food History Blog. If you have suggestions, please send them to us -- you can leave a message here, or use the link to Carnivalesque at the right. Enjoy!
For those of you not on the list-serv circuit, JoAnn McNamara has died. I think most medieval historians are aware of her work, and I know that it has helped me to frame some of the questions I ask in teaching and in my current research. I met JoAnn only once, last year at the Berkshire Conference, and felt very privileged. She was very gracious to all of us junior scholars, and was funny and warm, and supportive. She was very much the person she seemed in her writing -- smart, vibrant, feminist -- and in fact, I was sort of shocked into accepting my own age when I met her and Natalie Davis. I'd always thought of them as just a tad older than me, even though intellectually I knew that they had to be around my mother's age (I have a young mother). They always felt like slightly older peers in my head. And that was how JoAnn felt to me in real life, during a dinner and a couple of conference panels. A slightly older peer, gently mentoring people like me, even while she did seem to carry the air of the grande dame of women's history that she was.
Her memorial will be at Hunter College in the fall.
x-posted
ETA: this discussion thread was posted on the LJ Medieval Studies community, and rather nice.
This Pinder bag in chocolate with the matching sleeve -- which I like, because it's big enough to carry stuff, and doesn't look too computer-case-y, but OTOH, I don't know how comfortable I'd find the straps, because I usually carry bags on my shoulder...
Now ... does anybody use Zotero and/or Scrivener? Can you use them together? I might as well start using new software for the new project and the new 'puter. Suggestions?
I know -- the semester is done and I am still busy. I've got training on new pedagogical techniques or some such this week. I am meanwhile thinking out a post on teaching. Not just about teaching the students we have, but teaching the students we have to be the students they need to be. But all of this thinking means that I need your help. I need a new bag for my new macbook. I remember Ancarett and New Kid and Tiruncula posting about such things lo, these many moons ago.
What I need:
Not too spendy, but I can live with reasonable
Small-ish. Big enough for the computer, cords, my wallet, and a makeup bag. I'm trying to lighten my load. Ok, and maybe a pad of paper, my moleskine, and a paperback to read on the Tube.
Something that doesn't shout, "LOOK!! I'M CARRYING A MACBOOK!! MUG ME!!!"
Something not Black or grey would be nice
Vera Bradley need not apply.
C'mon ... some of you are way better at shopping than I am. I HATE shopping. Even online.
Wow. That was a different Zoo. Really fun, but exhausting. And it definitely confirmed my theory that having papers entirely finished before the conference starts is really the best way of doing things. Still, the evil back-to-back panels went well (the panels were not evil, only the scheduling). Or so I'm told. A friend asked for a copy of my paper, so I am chuffed. The other papers on my panel were very good, and I especially liked the one with the number-crunching, because it was something we haven't seen much of in the past. The roundtable was also very good, and a couple people told me after that they had found it thought-provoking. Went to a couple of interesting medieval panels, where at least there was a Carolingian question, if no actual Carolingian papers. That needs to stop. Also went to a wonderful panel on antisemitism in the 12th C, where I heard three very good papers, one of which talked about revenants and mentioned vampires and zombies. I LOVED that paper. The rest of the panels were sort of blurry. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was still working on my paper and also dealing with lame SLAC business.
I also got to spend some, but again, not nearly enough, time with with my Beach U peeps. It was so very nice to see them, and again, to be reminded of just how very lucky I have been in my life. So many of the people I saw have somehow or other been instrumental in making me the person and the scholar I am, and having them in my life makes me want to keep up whatever good work I am doing, and fix the things I probably should. I also ran into other online friends, and missed some others. I never managed to see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen at the dance, and Scott Nokes was only there for a drive-by. Never did see Mike Drout. Many people asked where the hell Cranky Professor was, too.
I was also able to spend some time with a wonderful postgrad who convinced me to come to a conference at St Andrews this summer, and a dear friend with whom I always enjoy spending time. Plus, a bunch of us went out on Saturday night for dinner and talked slash and fanfic and sf/f for hours. Saw other colleagues I see only rarely, and one with whom I may try to plan a panel for next time. I should do it if only because he's an amazing dancer. In fact, at one point I was dancing with him and two other people who often work on things Carolingian, and two of them were really good and fun dancers. So basically, a very good conference.
And right now, I'm sitting in the lobby of the K'zoo Radisson, procrastinating on the marking. And just plain exhausted. Won't get home to Dabbaville till something like 1:00 in the morning. Ugh
Sorry for the late notice, all, but somehow I dropped this in the hustle and bustle of yesterday. Anyway ... a friend sent this to me to post, and I'm posting it!
If you're going to be in Kalamazoo this weekend, I'd like to invite you to the business meeting of the Lone Medievalists Society this Friday at 5:15, Valley II room 203, especially if you are the sole medievalist in your discipline and/or in your college or university. The Lone Medievalists Society is intended to provide support and a sense of community to any medievalist, particularly those who feel isolated at their institutions and would like to have a network of other scholars in medieval studies with whom to discuss research, pedagogy, and professional development. Though the society interacts largely digitally, we will schedule business meetings like this at conferences as often as possible to encourage face-to-face interaction.
