Writing Maternity

I'm slowly

working my way up to more regularly and reflective blogging again.  In the mean time, several things came through my inbox this morning that I thought I'd pass along ...

... From CHE, news of a study done at U of Georgia that the writing section of the new SAT is more predictive of student performance in the first year than the rest of the test ...
My feelings about this are pretty intense and pretty mixed.  I'm delighted to hear that there's evidence that writing ability is fairly predictive of academic performance in college (and they controlled for parental education level and the like, it seems); not only does that ratify what folks in my field both at the higher ed. level and at the K-12 level have been saying for years, but it also suggests -- woo-hoo! -- that college students are being expected to write.  But the SAT writing test itself is pretty deeply flawed, in my view, and I worry that it's further entrenching a culture of descriptive exposition, rather than analytic, interpretive argument.

... From the College Board itself, the announcement that students can now choose which set of scores will be sent to the colleges they apply to, rather than having all the scores from every time they've taken the test sent ...
There's nothing mixed about this at all: it lets rich kids cherry pick their scores without anyone being the wiser, which gives them a further advantage with schools that look at these scores, and that's terrible.  There's a bit of control when the schools can at least see that Joey Rich Boy took the SAT eight times, whereas Charlie Ordinary only took at once; if we take that away, it becomes even harder to parse what the scores mean, and what an applicant's score owes to test-prep courses and test-taking practice.

... Over at CompPile, they're experimenting with CommentPress to launch a roundtable discussion at this week WPA conference early -- and, we hope, keep it going longer.
The topic of the roundtable is "How Can We Better Document, Preserve, Protect, and Share our Learning?" and you can currently see the original proposal for the roundtable, as well as statements from each of the participants (Glenn Blalock, Janis Haswell, Rich Haswell, Michael Palmquist, and Steve Wilhoit).

ignorant certainty

From Derek Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton UP, 2006):

[I]nvestigators have found that many entering freshman arrive at college in a condition of "ignorant certainty," believing that most or all problems have definite answers, that ignorance may keep them from knowing the answer, but that the truth can be found by consulting the right expert.  During the college years, most students do make significant progress (from "ignorant certainty" to "intelligent confusion"), but large majorities remain in a naive relativist state, persuaded that many problems have no single correct answer and that none of the possible answers is necessarily better than the others.  Only a small minority of seniors emerge convinced that ill-structured problems are susceptible to reasoned arguments based on evidence and that some answers are sounder than others.

So that's our task, folks.  How do we do it, though?

(Bok is drawing on the work of Patricia M. King and Karen S. Kitchener in Developing Reflective Judgment (1994) and Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students, Vol. 2 (2005).  The utterly phenomenal quoted phrases are from Barry M. Kroll, Teaching Hearts and Minds (1992).

wonder

Kurt Spellmeyer, Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (2003):

We should not dismiss a remark once made by William James, echoing Plato -- that all knowledge begins and ends in wonder.  For many humanists today, the experience of wonder if certainly important, but only as a personal consequence of an impersonal enterprise.  Yet wonder is never simply a happy accident; it is the motive force behind the making of knowledge itself, and without it, knowledge soon becomes dead and deadening.  The distinctive purpose of the humanities is to make wonder possible by insisting, over and over again, on both the openness of our experience and the coherence of the world we encounter through it.  (21-22)

goals of higher education

In a months-long conversation last year that resulted in a radical overhaul of the curriculum, my department kept returning to the question of what we wanted students to be able to know and do when they graduated from our school with an English major.  Historically, I think, English departments at highly selective schools have tended to want their major to prepare students for graduate school.  There are several of us at my current institution who feel strongly that this shouldn't be our mission -- and, hence, that it shouldn't be our major.

But then what is?*

In some ways, the difficulty of the conversation is that it forces us to try to define what we think is the unique contribution of English studies to the liberal arts.  And if you don't want to be content- and canon-based, and you also don't want to go Arnoldian and think about sweetness and light, it gets difficult.  I spent some solid days in January writing a presentation that will hopefully this spring become an article about the role of both writing and English in the liberal arts, and these meditations emerge partly out of that.  They also emerge, however, out of this IHE piece that reports on a survey of employers about how well-prepared they find college graduates.

I was particularly struck by one of the suggestions:

46 percent said it would be very effective and 70 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to have students complete an advanced project as seniors, demonstrating knowledge in the major and in problem-solving, writing, and analytic skills. And 69 percent said it would be very effective and 83 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to see an evaluation of a supervised internship where students apply college learning in a “real-world setting.”

It's no surprise that employers like the real-world setting assignment, and I'm actually not convinced that that's one of the pieces of advice we (all) need to take.  To come back to the problem in English: what's a "real-world setting" for someone to write about literature?  Should I ask students to imagine themselves journalists or critics?  Or should I have them imagine themselves teachers?  But what about all the English majors who use their close reading skills in law school and as lawyers, teasing apart the complexities of statutes and briefs?  Very few of those fit particularly well into a course on Victorian literature, and I'm not convinced that the education my students would receive would be better if I made room for it.

The first suggestion, however, struck me as interestingly identifying the place where the goals (writ large) of the liberal arts and the goals (writ large) of the people employing our graduates intersect.  But I think that we often think of those final assignments more in terms of content (mastering knowledge) than in terms of skills in critical, discipline-based, written inquiry. 

Higher education shouldn't be simply or crudely instrumental, and I don't mean to suggest that it should.  But I think that we miss an opportunity to re-examine our curricular and pedagogical goals when we dismiss considerations of what our students face when they leave our campuses.

* We actually came up with a beautifully flexible major that I'm quite pleased with, although I have fairly significant concerns about the challenges of implementing and administering it.  We're riding that wave now.

so are they reading or not?

In an article about the series of panels on "The Humanities at Work in the World" at MLA, Richard Byrne mentions that "[i]n November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released yet another doleful report on the decline in American literacy (The Chronicle, November 19, 2007). "Most alarming," wrote Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, in the report's preface, 'both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates.'"

Meanwhile, in The Wired Campus, Hurley Goodall reports that "The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Sunday that says Generation Y—18-to-30-year-olds, in particular—is more likely to turn to libraries to ferret out information than their older counterparts are."

It actually doesn't surprise me that a generation of web-searchers would find the library a natural leap.  I was raised with numerous reference books in the house, but I certainly look more things up on the internets than I ever saw my parents looking up in the encyclopedia.

intellectual community

The Chronicle today includes an excerpt from a book that's just come out that's the product of a Carnegie Foundation study (in collaboration with several doctoral departments in chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and neuroscience).  Their findings that the best and most important way to improve doctoral education is by creating a greater sense of intellectual community is one that I find deeply moving.  Most of their recommendations are ones that I think could be usefully translated into the SLAC environment, as well.

I'm going to need an "assessment" category soon

This from today's IHE:

[A]t a session Thursday of the American Anthropological Association, there was nary a mention of the federal panel that framed the debate on learning outcomes and value added during its run last year. Instead, there was plenty of griping about the university power structure, much skepticism about the assessment process and a consensus that faculty must take ownership when evaluation takes place.

Panelists noted that many college faculty members — themselves often included — view assessment as a threat. The threat comes not from federal agencies, they said, but from accrediting groups and administrators. College leaders pressure professors to measure the quality of their courses using quantifiable methods. Curricular committees form, a report is produced and everyone goes on their merry way. It’s a top-down process with little faculty buy-in and no meaningful outcome, the time-tested complaint goes.

While articulating the above concerns, the anthropology professors who gathered for the session said it’s time for a change. Peter N. Peregrine, a professor of anthropology at Lawrence University, said assessment works best when faculty members are involved and it’s not a top-down mandate. They need to be the ones asking questions of themselves, each other and their own students. It could be about the utility of an assignment, he noted, or broader questions about a program. Either way, the assessment questions thought up by professors are almost always different from the ones asked by administrators.

Trust the anthropologists to see this kind of thing clearly.  Although, I'll note, it's the kind of thing that people in educational evaluation (as it was once called) and writing program administration have been saying for years.

job market advice, from wiser heads than mine

A couple of weeks ago (Nov. 13-15, to be precise), there was a long string on the WPA list about the academic job market, specifically offering late-in-the-game advice.*  It started when Sue McLeod posted a plea of sorts to female graduate students on the market and their advisors, as well as chairs of hiring committees and departments.  She begins by observing the gender inequities in higher education:

The gender differences in academe are well documented, and although we would like to not think so, this is true of our field (see Sally Barr-Ebest, "Gender differences in writing program administration" in Writing Program Administration 18.3 [1995] 53-73).  Women academics, including women WPAs, are paid less, publish less, and are less likely to get tenure than their male counterparts with similar training and background.

She continues,

There are many reasons for these inequities, but one clear reason is that women in our culture are not usually socialized to negotiate in job situations.  When I was a new English department chair, I
unwittingly contributed to the departmental salary inequity when I tendered an offer to a female candidate, knowing that there was a higher salary that the Dean was fully prepared to offer, only to have the overjoyed candidate  agree immediately to the first offer.

McLeod then exhorts advisors to "help your students (male and female) understand that the first offer is almost always negotiable, and that different things can be negotiated, depending on the school (at some state schools, for example, the salary is on a fixed scale but other things like teaching load and travel money may be negotiated)."  And she encourages graduate students to "rehearse negotiation techniques if you are not familiar with them--run practice negotiations as well as practice interviews.  Learn how to sound interested and yet not fully satisfied with the offer without sounding like you are whining; read up on the art of negotiation--there's lots of information out there."

It isn't really surprising that this sparked a long conversation.  It included horror stories from both sides of the fence, as well as substantive and useful warnings about the dangers of going into a negotiating situation ready to play hardball and thereby souring a relationship because hardball isn't a part of institutional culture.  I've tried to boil down the advice into the lists of do's and don't's below.  And, as I've implied but haven't stated, I don't get the credit for any of this wisdom; that goes to the savvy and generous members of the WPA list.

1. DO keep tone and rhetoric in mind at all times: the Dean  (or perhaps department chair) with whom you're negotiating will, you hope, be a part of your professional life for a long time.  You don't want to seem needlessly demanding or high maintenance, or do anything to otherwise jeopardize their pleasure at the prospect of hiring you.  (Remember, too, that many of the phases of the negotiation will be communicated to the department as a whole.)
2. DO keep the requests you're making for yourself separate from those you're making for your program -- e.g., a higher salary versus full-time (rather than half-time) administrative support.
   
3. DON'T simply ask (for more money, or various other things) because you want X or Y or Z: both rhetorically and substantively, you need to connect X to your desire to be at the U of Q and your desire to do your absolute best work while there.
4. DON'T overwhelm them with requests -- focus on the important things, and make it clear that they're important.
5. DON'T waste a school's time: if you aren't going to take the job, let them know.  It's only kindness to the institution and the next person in line for the position.  This includes going on campus visits if you're pretty damn sure that you'd never move to east bumfuck, but it also includes not lingering over the multiple-offer moment of triumph any more than necessary.  (May everyone have such success!)
6. DO do your due diligence: research salary information at institutions considering your candidacy.  Also research cost-of-living, including whatever factors (real estate, childcare, transportation) will be relevant for you.  Find out whether something like a reduced teaching load in your first year would be considered a reasonable request or a sign that you don't really care about teaching (for example).  (On the other hand, if it's a WPA job, DO make sure that the teaching load is reduced to a reasonable level: if they aren't willing to budge on that issue at the negotiating stage, you can bet you'll have difficulty getting the kinds of institutional support you need down the line.)
7. DO remember that some institutions have rigid starting salary ranges, but that even those institutions may be able to be more flexible on things like first-year teaching load, coming up early for sabbatical, start-up funds, or research budgets.
8. DO find out about things that may be relatively far in the future but will matter a lot when they come up: maternity or paternity leave; technology updates; and so on.

Hats off to Sue McLeod (UCSB), Melissa Ianetta (Delaware), Patricia Donohue (Lafayette), Patricia Freitag Ericcson (Washington State), and Deirdre Pettipiece (USIP).  A much fuller version of all this is available at Comppile, including even more job market advice.

* I mean to post this then, but it got lost in the shuffle.  Besides, when better to write it all up than when I have a huge stack of thesis chapters to avoid?

a moment of being not thankful

Squiss's school is having a potluck lunch tomorrow to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Families are invited and, Squiss explained, it will start with all of the children standing around a big table in the two-year-olds' classroom saying what they're thankful for.  Thanksgiving and Passover are my favorite holidays.  Perhaps not incidentally, they are the only holidays for which the meal itself is the point, the purpose and substance of the celebration rather than just an important expression of it.  Both also explicitly thematize gratitude: at Thanksgiving, we go around and say what we're thankful for; in my family at least, at Passover we go around and think about how we want to use our freedom.

I may well post later in the week on that very subject.  It's been a crazy-strange fall, and so the fact that I can feel thankful for anything above and beyond mere survival is something worth marking publicly.  Today, however, all I have are news items that make me quite angry:

• via Laura, yet more evidence that the staffing crisis in higher education isn't striking nearly enough people as a crisis
• from IHE, news that the assessment craze is gaining momentum (I have a post in me on assessment, but that will have to wait until January when I'll be preparing a talk on it)
• and, again from IHE, information about Drexel's new English Alive program -- which I find interesting, although I'm not completely sold on certain aspects -- that presents a "typical first-year writing assignment [as] ask[ing], 'What themes do you want to cover?'" (The contentless writing class is worth a rant on its own, but that, too, will have to wait.)

accreditation politics

I don't have time to write today -- largely because I need to try to write today -- so here's a disturbing few paragraphs from the IHE article on the Higher Education Act currently under discussion:

Perhaps the most significant development, which occurred late Wednesday evening after the hearing room had partially cleared out, involved the contentious topic of how student learning outcomes should be assessed in the accreditation process. The bill proposed by committee Democrats last week would give colleges and universities themselves the authority to define how to measure “success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution’s mission.” That is in contrast to the Education Department’s push during last winter’s negotiated rule making session on accreditation to put that authority much more in the hands of the accrediting agencies. The original language in the House bill largely mirrored that in the Higher Education Act bill passed by the Senate this summer.

Wednesday evening, Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) — acting at the urging of regional and national accreditors, who reportedly felt that the bill’s language threatened to undermine their authority — introduced an amendment to strip the language that empowered each college to define student learning for itself. (Language in the Higher Education Act as it stands now is noncommittal about who has that authority.) With virtually no discussion, and a promise to bring forward replacement language in the coming days, Miller and the committee’s other leaders adopted Andrews’s amendment without dissent.

College leaders, who had fought the Education Department’s push, said they were blindsided by the Andrews amendment. They were furious, saying the shift would open the door to federal officials renewing their effort to compel to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students. The turnabout revealed anew a rift between accreditors and college leaders that surfaced during the accreditation negotiations.

“I’m shocked at the stupidity of the accreditors in opening up an issue that had been settled in a positive way,” said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Matt Owens, assistant director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities, said the change — should it stand — could be a deal breaker. “Removal of the provision seriously jeopardizes our ability to support the bill,” Owens said.

(Courtesy one of my institution's VPs, who has the unfortunate task of standing between the faculty and the accrediting agency, vilified and only partially understood by both sides on this issue.)

(And, while I'm on the subject, here's Dean Dad and Dr. Crazy on the assessment craze, administrative mandates, and faculty opportunities.)