The perils of being maverick-y

While I don't consider my teaching style or methods particularly radical, some features of my teaching are a bit maverick-y. I don't grade all my students' work. I require them to review one another's work. I let them develop questions for the final exam. I let them choose (some) course content.

But one of the perennial challenges of teaching in a conscientious and open-minded way is that students come to us with very fixed expectations about what college (or high school) are about, what learning is, and what the roles of instructor and student are supposed to be. And these expectations can be very tough to dislodge.

I was reminded of this by Maryellen Weimer's post about a sociology instructor who tried some unorthodox methods that students resisted. The methods themselves are only a little outside the box, but certainly not unheard of. The general idea was to have the course be more student directed,“a classroom environment focused on knowledge creation rather than the transmission of information where students felt part of an intellectual community that balanced support and control."

Academically Adrift part 6: Modelling the teaching culture on the research culture

The main structural explanation for the discouraging findings of Academically Adrift is the 'disengagement compact,' so eloquently described here previously by Becko. Students, faculty, administrators, parents, politicians, and the public have struck a bargain that, in light of the various incentives each of these constituencies is subject to, results in lowered expectations, diminished engagement, and of course, less learning. As Chris observes, with the possible exception of those rare learning-oriented students, none of these constituencies has much motivation to break this tacit compact.

And yet, to a last, we here at ISW have been bemoaning the disengagement compact and envisioning ways, at both the institutional and individual level, to resist or unravel the compact. (This strikes me as a theme throughout our AA reading group.) The fact that the teachers who post and comment here sense (and resent!) the presence of the compact tells us that, of these constituencies, faculty are most likely to find the disengagement compact a bitter bargain.

Busting Teachers Unions

I put the following on my facebook, but it seems germane to our on-going discussion, even if it is, at times, a bit polemical in format:

Seems there is a move on to bust teachers unions as a means to balance budgets and improve educational outcomes. I would suggest that a better means to improve educational outcomes would be for parents to 'team up' with teachers and have their children turn off electronic 'playthings,' require meaningful homework and make sure that it is done correctly and on-time, improve critical thinking skills, not to mention reading and writing skills, and actually take an active interest in the fundamental role that education should be playing in all our lives. We should stop treating education and learning as simply a means to an economic end and start treating it as an end in itself as a lifelong activity that enhances one's sense of self worth and personal identity.

Quality teaching: Just add seasoning?

This article from the Journal of Political Economy got my attention with its provocative conclusion about the relationship between instructor experience and student learning. The researchers, Scott Carrell and James West, studied calculus courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a nice controlled setting: All students have to take the course, and instructors use an identical syllabus and administer identical exams. They then considered how students fared in related courses over the long-term, comparing the subsequent academic performance of students taught by more credentialed instructors to those taught by those with less seasoning. Drum roll...

Would you take this oath?

An Australian expert on university management has proposed a pair of "Hippocratic oaths," one for university faculty, another for university administrators. Here's the text of the faculty oath:

Burke on tenure

Apropos our recent discussion of tenure, the estimable Timothy Burke captures a lot of my own views on the matter at Easily Distracted. Some select quotes:

Is this e-mail "hate speech"?

Some of you are probably following the case of Kenneth Howell, an adjunct religious instructor at the University of Illinois, who's been dismissed after he e-mailed his students an articulation (and defense) of Catholic natural law views of sexual morality.  A student complained that the e-mail amounted to hate speech (not a credible claim, in my opinion).

His case raises questions we've wrestled with in the past at ISW, including academic freedom and whether to advocate for one's own views in the classroom. I'm curious to know other people's take on the situation: Unsurprisingly, Howell is claiming that his academic freedom was violated. But as some commenters at Philosophy Smoker have noted, Howell's ability to represent objectively and accurately positions that are not his own is seriously questionable. In the e-mail, Howell unsympathetically characterizes utilitarianism, relies on a good many speculative assertions, and seems not to get the point of thinking about homosexuality in terms of moral sentimentalism. Add to that the e-mail's imperious and didactic tone, and I can well imagine that students find it difficult to interact with Howell. Whether his academic freedom was violated, I'd be reluctant to have Howell teaching ethics at my institution.

What is academic freedom in the classroom?

The most recent APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy has a provocative article by Lou Matz wherein he describes his denial of tenure at Xavier University. The basis of Matz' tenure denial was teaching-related: Matz taught material in an Introduction to Philosophy course that, in the judgment of his department colleagues, focused more on contemporary politics than on the core theoretical questions in ethics that his colleagues preferred. Matz then went through a series of appeals, claiming that his academic freedom was violated.


There's a great deal of detail in Matz' article, so I'd encourage everyone simply to read it. But I'd be interested in knowing people's thoughts about the central question here: What is academic freedom with respect to pedagogy? My sense is that academic freedom is conceptualized, first and foremost, in terms of research: what a faculty member may investigate, what methods are appropriate for investigation, how the findings are presented, etc. But what does academic freedom amount to in the classroom? Most discussions of pedagogical freedom seem mostly concerned with a professor's professional neutrality, which is really not about the professor's academic freedom, but students' academic freedom. Does academic freedom extend to instructors' choice of content or subject matter? Does it extend to instructors' pedagogical methods? Is Matz' contention that his academic freedom was violated credible?