The competing frames of higher education

This semester, I've been looking at responses to crises in higher education, and it seems like whenever I turn around, a news or op-ed piece has echoes of the reading I've done this semester.

Yesterday, I ran across this article, which was linked by a colleague and friend on Facebook: "A Good Professor Is an Exhausted Professor: A North Carolina education bill would be a disaster for research and pedagogy" by Rebecca Schuman. While I think Schuman's writing had a tendency toward snarkiness that sometimes undercuts her argument, I generally respect her pieces as they are fairly interesting to read, and I appreciate that she links so extensively to other sources.  This article about North Carolina Senate Bill 593, “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System," sponsored by Republican state Sen. Tom McInnis made me aware of the latest shenanigans from North Carolina's legislature. Sen. McInnis wants to require all faculty in public universities to teach more courses. The bill states that

The Board of Governors shall adopt a policy applicable to all the constituent institutions that requires all professors teach a minimum of eight class courses per academic year. The salary of any professor who teaches less than the required number of classes shall be reduced on a pro rata basis, but may be supplemented with the proceeds of the constituent institution's endowment fund. The policy shall also require an annual independent audit 15 of each constituent institution to determine compliance.

It occurred to me as I read Schuman's that the stories underlying this pending legislation directly relate to the discussion I led last week on Linda Adler-Kassner's The Activist WPA: Changing Stories About Writers and Writing. What I see in this attempt to legislate faculty workloads is a case of competing frames.

For McInnis, this is an attempt to put more experienced professors in front of undergraduate students rather than having adjunct or graduate student faculty teach introductory courses. According to a Daily Tar Heel story by Hallie Dean,

McInnis contends that professors’ primary role is course instruction, saying in a statement that university students should actually be taught by professors, not student teaching assistants...  “There is no substitute for a professor in the classroom to bring out the best in our students,” McInnis said. “I look forward to the debate that will be generated by this important legislation.”

Dean's story also notes that "UNC-system faculty" teach an average of 3.7 course per semester and tenured faculty teach 2.5 courses per semester. At research universities, like UNC-Chapel Hill, teaching a 2/2 course load is more common because the expectation is that faculty are engaged in research in their field. Tenure decisions for 4-year university faculty weigh such research quite heavily, especially at top-tier research institutions. I've been told that one of the common questions asked of prospective new-minted PhD faculty at similar institutions is "when will your first book be published?"

Colleges like UNC want the story to be about research, and Schuman's piece clearly presents the consequences to the university and the wider community if that research story becomes drowned out by McInnis' course instruction frame: The Research Triangle "would quickly lose two of its prongs—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University."

The cynic in me sees another motive: money. Dean's news piece also quotes Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the conservative Pope Center on Higher Education Policy, who talks of the "salary costs for the UNC system."

"Obviously, if teachers are more productive, the schools will need fewer teachers to teach the same number of students,” said Schalin in an email.

So, really, the story here isn't as much about teacher quality as it is about productivity. That is to say, those lazy damned professors should spend their time professing and not wasting our tax money on their silly research and learning.

But isn't the role of a professor to be the lead learner in the class? If the lead learner isn't learning, can we really say we value learning?

Response to Bruce Horner's Materialist Critique and texts in conversation

Last week, I talked about being able to see how the readings in the course of my semester-long special topics class mesh together to create a real conversation about crises in higher education. Last week, Margaret Marshall's work gave me a way of understanding the cycles that perpetuate the rhetorics of crises and the deprofessionalization of teaching.

One of the problems Marshall identifies is the way that composition has been identified with the material conditions of labor. I feel like I need to spend more time with her work because I was so blown away with the repeating cycles of crises in education that I couldn't really attend to that part of her argument. That's unfortunate because it's quite clear to me that this week's reading, Terms of Work in Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner, is meant to be in conversation with Mitchell.

Horner points out that there is a distinction within the academy between intellectual labor and the material conditions that produce that labor. For academics, that means the product is valued, but the work that goes into making it is not. Research is valued and individual; teaching is not and is owned by the institution. For our students, the sanctioned writing of the academy and whether they can demonstrate that they can conform to those sanctioned forms is valued and their personal lives and the other factors that go into their student lives are not.

 Essentially, Horner argues that we have to "abandon such distinctions, in effect making it our work to articulate the interpenetration of all these as constitutive of our work" (29). He suggests that composition instructors need to join students to investigate the material and social conditions in which we labor and the roles we inhabit in the communities of the academy. Many of the distinctions he makes bend my brain a bit.

Part of this is the dense prose he writes. I see echoes of 1990s academic writing style and that throws me back to my masters work. It was a tad DIY in terms of my concentration, so struggling with this text was a bit of a throwback for me.

Part of it is that I'm not entirely sure how to enact what he proposes--what does it look like "to use the course as an occasion to teach the culture of composition...[and] investigate that being students, in composition courses, has on their writing" (243). I see some potential in Horner's description of his practice of having assignments structured so that "students revisit and revise the positions they have taken in earlier papers, explicitly experiment with different positions and discourse conventions, and reflect on the significance of these experiments" (246). On the other hand, when I see Horner talking about student work in "essay 10," which is a revision of essay 7, I imagine the intersection of 125 students and 10+ essays as something like this

photo by Shehan Peruma, used under CC2.0 nc-nd

Talk about material conditions...

 Part of my bendy brain comes from Horner making me pay attention to the conditions that have been glossed over in higher education and how I might have been complicit in creating the perceptions of my own work as labor, and therefore less worthy of status. Which also brings up the issue of adjunct versus full time labor in higher education.

As a high school teacher, doing adjunct work at the college was a welcome infusion of money that I spent on travel to conferences to further my own education. It was higher education almost as hobby. I don't admit that proudly, especially when I think that there are professional adjuncts and graduate students out there who can't scrape together a living wage but are entrusted with the introductory coursework that forms the basis of so many undergraduate's educations. The material conditions they encounter (lack of office space, lack of status, lack of health care) are often dismissed--"if they don't like being exploited, they should just get another job."

I can't so easily dismiss these professional colleagues, though. They do the same job as I do, and many have more experience teaching at the college level than I. Their labor, though, is somehow valued less than mine only because I made it through a hiring process.

 I can't help wondering what effect the proposed America's College Promise plan would have on the labor of teaching. Will there be more adjuncts? Will introductory composition be largely abandoned by 4-year universities, further marginalizing it as the labor to be done before the intellectual work of high education begins?

 It seems that the more I know, the less I am certain.

Beginner's mind, indeed.

PhD and the fire hose

I love to learn. It makes sense then that I started a PhD program. It's no secret that I am a bit of an education addict, and I've talked about getting into this program before.

 Now that I'm in my second year of my program, I'm a little bit less overwhelmed. But studying in my program is still quite a bit like drinking out of a fire hose. I am reminded of the more dots meme related to World of Warcraft except that I can't stop the dots.

 This week, I read the significant portion of Margaret Mitchell's book Response to Reform. I quipped on Facebook that the only thing that kept me from throwing the book across the Metro train where I did a significant portion of my reading was that it was crowded and it was rush hour.

That's not to say that I didn't like Mitchell book, or even agree with her arguments. The problem is that I did agree with her arguments. Mitchell gave me language to talk about the patterns that I had intuitively guessed were part of the rhetoric of educational reform, but did not have the knowledge or the historical background to put name to.

I could really spend a couple of weeks talking about Mitchell, but I won't. Because firehose. I can see the logic in the course. I can see the progression in the readings. But, I want to stop and savor. I want to talk about these ideas with my colleagues.

 I'm leaving tomorrow to go to College Conference on Composition and Communication, the annual conference for writing and rhetoric. It's my first national conference at the college level, and I will probably meet some of the scholars whose work I have been reading.

That access is one of the things that I really like about these conferences. If I put myself out there and go to conferences, I meet the most thoughtful individuals in the field. I've have attended NCTE's K-college annual conference every year except one since 2009. The experience is absolutely wonderful, and the innovative, smart people I have met through online and through these national conferences have changed the way I think about teaching and learning. It is through these types of forum where scholars and practitioners of education come together is that there is tremendous potential.

I am perpetually amazed how few of my education colleagues take advantage of these professional development opportunities. When we come together to create knowledge, to share our experiences, and discuss the professional and political horses that move us push, we define and redefine our field.

 Which brings me back to Mitchell because isn't this type of self-directed professional development  vital. Isn't this what is means to profess??

(Apologies to anyone who read this when it was mess. The iPad and Blogger don't get on as well as they should.)

Writing as conversation and as process

For the past two days, my five sections of composition have been at the library for instruction. Each class has had 75 minutes with our instructional librarian, who has created a lecture and hands-on activites to get them involved in a research process that will eventually (by mid March), help them produce a draft of a researched essay.

The students have a tremendous amount of choice in their project topics, regardless of 111 or 112. They don't get to choose the product format, which is admittedly "academic" in an attempt to meet some of the learning outcomes of the courses. But at this stage of the game, they are just starting to figure out their topics and what they might do to learn about these interests. What's been most interesting to me has been to watch what happens when they are encouraged not to fixate on the target of the final paper that uses a minimum of 5 sources, but to explore the resources available to them to learn about their topic. 

Since the 112 students have wide open topics (I've used the Vlog Brothers concept of "world suck" as a frame for a problem-solution type essay, which I'll model after solutions journalism writing), we dialed back to concept mapping before we even let them into the databases. Some students were stumped by te idea of being able to write down any word they might associate with their topic. Yet, when I asked them questions like "where does that happen?" or "who does that affect?", they were able to ome up with more words. This makes me wonder what we can do to encourage better questions and makes me think that I might have to finally (in my copious spare time), go back and explore things like The Right Question Institute's work.

Kevin explained to both 111 and 112 students about how databases work and that computers are stupid. Most of them don't really understand how searches work, conceptually, and Kevin has a couple of really interesting anaolgies that help them see that computers don't really think about what a record means.

We also worked out a guided practice that forces them to look at a couple of different databases, record the process of searching, and pay attention to what the resources have to offer to help facilitate better results. Even still, many of them get so fixated on the search results that they don't see anything in the frame around the database. For example, one of the questions asked students to find the 7th source that comes up in their sarch of any database. One of the questions asks the students to write down the MLA citation for that source. Some databases, like Ebsco's, have a "Cite" link in the tools menu on the right have portion of the screen. But, since it wasn't in the center with the article, some students couldn't find this helpful resources. Another question asked students to identify the type of source the 7th record was. Some couldn't do that, despite the database's identifcation of the source as "academic journal" or "news article" in the list of results or from the title listed in the source field of the record.

All of this makes me question what we mean when we say that a student didn't pass a composition course. Is it that the student didn't have the information literacy skills to help them ask and answer questions? Is it that the student didn't have the academic literacy to write in a way that looked like it was "scholarly" or "school-like"? Is it that the student didn't have the motivation to engage in or sustain a research process? Is it that the student couldn't process the reading well enough to write about or in response to it? Or maybe is it that the student's material conditions (work, family life, transportation, etc.) came into conflict with the demands of the course?

I wonder how much of this gets unpacked when we talk about "failing students" or "failing schools"? 

Open enrollment and the urban college

Last week's reading for my graduate class was a selection from James Traub's 1994 book City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College. Traub's discussion of "the underclass" had been roundly criticized by Mary Soliday's 2002 The Politics of Remediation, which we read the week before. Soliday argues that the idea of "underclass," which she presents as a designation that indicates cultural barriers, is often substituted for "working class" to suggest that somehow the urban experience is responsible for lack of achievement. In Soliday's view, the underclass is a compelling image for "neoliberal intellectuals" because it allows failures in remediation to be cast as resistance to assimilation and highlight student need rather than the institutional structures that might need to be addressed. By giving agency to students in their own failures in City College, Traub implies that "college is affordable for everyone, but not attainable for cultural reasons" (Soliday 131).

So, I went into Traub expecting to see an indictment of open admissions, and I did see that. But, what I didn't expect was the ways that Traub echoed current educational debates 20 years later and relied on almost caricatured narratives of underprepared high school graduates and the frustrated, unprepared academics unfortunate enough to teach them.  Honestly, there were parts of the book describing Charles Frye's remedial class that could have been swiped from Welcome Back, Kotter, and strained belief.

On the other hand, Traub does get at the complexity of higher education, a complexity that troubles me.

City College lives at the intersection of these two principles. It cannot fully satisfy both. The only way to ensure that it flourishes as a fine professional and liberal arts institution, as it once did, is to recognize the limits of its social mission. City, and any other college that aspires to high academic standards, cannot be asked to educate large numbers of deeply disadvantaged students, as Ann Reynolds understands. It's not unreasonable to ask that students who complete high school without the academic credits detailed in the College Preparatory Initiative complete them elsewhere, presumably in a community college. Programs like SEEK, which permit students to enter without having satisfied admissions criteria, should stop functioning as entitlements and accept only those students who show special promise. And City cannot allow its commitment ot remedy disadvantage to lead to the sort of "social promotion" that has such a demoralizing impact on the high schools. City must accept students who have a decent chance of succeeding, ply them with help, and then insist that they satisfy not only high expectations by high standards (Traub 204-205).

As a former high school teacher and a new professor in a community college system, I've taught to see the students who are "without the academic credentials" they need to complete college. Four-year institutions raise admissions standards and reduce remediation. Those students who lack the academic credentials now, as in 1994, come to community colleges, and I think that's a perfectly logical and reasonable situation. But increasingly, those community colleges, too ,feel the same pressures that Traub describes here: educate all who come, but on a time-limit. Prepare them for college and careers, regardless of where they are when they start, within a certain timeframe. That's not entirely realistic.

Traub's recommendation to "ply them with help" seems to be the key. Northern Virginia Community College has 4 pathways programs designed to do just that for different populations within the college. In my limited experience here, the Pathways programs do seem to help students navigate the system. But they are likely not cheap to implement. If we're really determined to educate all, then these programs need to be the norm and not the exception. They need to carry students who need additional support into the community college system and beyond.

Do we have the societal commitment to do that?

The Politics of Remediation and Free Community College

As part of his "State of the Union" address, President Obama proposed a program that would grant students the equivalent of  two years of full-time tuition at community colleges. Obama pointed to a Tennessee program as a model for this national initiative, In a time where there's tremendous focus on the growing cost of college, this grand idea has drawn significant positive attention, and some equally vehement backlash.  The debate over the "America's Promise" plan for free community college for students who maintain a 2.5 GPA and have family adjusted gross incomes of less than $200,000 reveals some of the stratification and politics of access and representation that Mary Soliday explored in her 2002 The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education.

Part of the issue that some have is that Obama has chosen not to expand the Pell Grant, which can be used for tuition at 4-year colleges as well as community colleges. Many of those advocating expansion of the Pell instead of the President's plan have an interest in maintaining enrollment in 4-year universities, which have felt the pinch of budget cuts and the backlash against rising tuition rates caused by the withdrawal of government support for higher education. These articles tend to highlight research (or sometimes "research") that proves that 4-year colleges have better outcomes:

• "Only about 15 percent of students who start out at a community college earn a bachelor’s degree after six years. And, researchers have found that when students with similar test scores and grades attend community college or a four-year school, the latter are far more likely to earn a degree." --This claim privileges test scores and grades as indicators of higher education success, but ignores other factors that might help explain the differences. In some ways, it seems a bit circular to me. Students do better in higher education because 4-year institutions are better at education.  
• As it is, many community college students don't respect their education. Less than half of students who enter a community college graduate or transfer to a four-year college within six years, according to a report called "Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation's Future." If these community college students aren't serious when paying for their education, imagine how their perspective will deteriorate when it's free? And as a result, the graduation rate will continue to decline." --Steve Seibold.  This claim seems to be all about student agency. It's the students' fault that they don't graduate because community college students (read "the underclass") already don't share "our" values. SES and culture become conflated in a fatalistic"there's just some who we can't save from themselves" type of argument. Siebold conveniently ignores the GPA stipulations while simultaneously defending the stratification of higher education by reaffirming the gatekeeper role of the community college--those people go there because they can't cut it in higher tier institutions.

Do I think that community colleges are the answer? I'm not sure. Pell Grants should be expanded, but there are many families that identify as "middle class" that the Pell Grants don't help. Those families could benefit from this plan. But both expanding the Pell and enacting America's Promise require a level of societal commitment to education and to funding that education through government programs that I don't think we have the will to do, despite all of our claims about the value of an education.

Public and hidden transcripts in the NFL

In my reading for this semester's class, I've come across a concept that seems to be sticking in my head. Richard E. Miller's Writing at the End of the World uses the ideas of public transcripts and hidden transcripts from James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance. To be fair to Scott, Miller's piece is the first place that I've encountered Scott's work. Miller doesn't fully buy Scott's arguments about how performance of these two forces construe social action, but I can see some merit in them as a way to look at what might seem to be shocking outbursts.

Let me share a bit about the two terms, at least as I understand them from Miller's explanation. The public transcript is what "'serves as a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate'" (Scott qtd. in Miller 127). So, the public transcript is the one that gets valued and validated. It's the story that maintains the status quo. On the other hand, "the hidden transcript is, by contrast, a kind of discourse 'that takes place "offstage," beyond direct observation of the powerholders" (Scott qtd in Miller 128).

Thus, the hidden transcript provides an alternative view of what could be, whether that view is to parody the public transcript or a vision of a different world that is shared by those who are not in power. The subordinates don't really have the access to power to affect change, and often seem to comply with the public transcript because they "are attempting to avoid any 'explicit display of insubordination'...when in fact they have neither embraced this ideology nor resigned themselves to the fate this ideology has in store for them" (Scott, qtd in Miller 133, emphasis in Scott's original work).  

When the hidden transcript does get expressed publicly, it can be quite shocking. But, as Miller notes, "it is important to recognize that the shock arises not so much because the public revelation of the hidden transcript discloses unknown information, but rather because, in the act itself, the revelation threatens to 'tear the public face of the hegemony'" (Scott qtd. in Miller 133). This last piece resonated with me because as I was reading and discussing Miller's work, I kept hearing coverage of Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch's refusal to talk to the press during the mandatory media day event.

While an NFL player's refusal to answer the predictable questions that are supposed to produce the predictable responses about team work, team as family, and "giving 110%" doesn't rise to the severity or extreme situations that Scott purportedly describes in his book, the media reaction to the NFL star's almost 5-minute repetition of "I'm here so I won't get fined" was the type of shock Scott describes when hidden transcripts are made public.  The mixed reaction of his fellow players and fans seems to confirm that there are hidden transcripts at work here. 

Certainly, Lynch hasn't endeared himself to the media and repeatedly has brought the type of attention to the NFL that the league does not want, through over the top unsportsmanlike celebrations and three separate arrests during his NFL career. It would be tempting to write this off as just another egotistical display of a selfishly ungrateful superstar. But that's a bit simplistic to me, especially in light of some of the profiles of Lynch that portray him as a guy who loves to play, but doesn't love the limelight and fears both disappointing and being disappointed by others. 

Yes, being available to the media is part of the job, but it's probably not one that many players love. And Lynch's refusal to pretend that it is more than a job requirement threatens our narratives about what we expect from successful athletes.

We want to believe in our teams. We pay for our tickets and our jerseys. We buy coffee mugs and baby onesies to show our allegiance. Even if our team doesn't make the big game, we tune in, at least for the commercials. And we expect the two-week-long show to include the voices of the players. But how did we come to conflate athletic ability and being a good communicator?

We want to think that successful athletes owe something to us for their success, and should demonstrate their gratitude by being nice to us and being role models for good conduct. But that also ignores the pressure that constant scrutiny must place on an individual.

I suspect that why Lynch's refusal to play along with the media hype shocks people because it reminds us that not all of the stories we tell ourselves, and the media perpetuates, are true. Not all football players want the constant celebrity and attention that they get from being at the top of their game. Not all kids who make it out of rough circumstances are willing and able to be role models, even if their rise confirms what we want to believe about hard work. And guys who play professional sports don't actually have meaningful relationships with the fans or with the media who cover them.

So, is Lynch selfish? Is he an ass? Maybe. But maybe we're also a bit complicit because we're looking for stories that confirm the public transcript that plays out every January.

Work Cited
Miller, Richard E. Writing at the End of the World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2005. Print.