Tag Archives: pfps2012

Being Faculty

Posted on April 30, 2012 | 2 comments

So the first week of the semester in PFP, we had to quickly write down what we thought it meant to be a faculty member.  Looking back at it, I must have really been in a bad mood:

A faculty member at a college or university is a person who wears many hats.  Through the course of your day, you are a teacher, an advisor, a committee member, a researcher… just to name a few.  A faculty member is someone who better have a pretty strong ability to balance multiple projects at once.  It is not a 9-5 job—some days you work from sun-up to sundown.  Summers aren’t “Free Time” like so many non-academics believe.  Every vacation ends up involving your research at some point.  Being a faculty member means not seeing your family from Thanksgiving to Christmas, even if you’re actually home every night.  It’s constant, lifelong learning.  It’s never quite growing up—you’re always around young people, and your job still involves going to school every day (and being excited about snow days, in spite of what you may tell your students).  It’s fighting with the administration for your students, knowing that gaining opportunities, funding, and time for your own students may end up being detrimental to other departments (and feeling incredibly guilty about that—usually).  It is fighting with sports for the “real” reason students should be at college.  Spring isn’t March Madness—it’s job talks and committee meetings.

After that, I ran out of time to type.

First off, wow, this is pretentious and horrible.  I swear I haven’t doctored it in any way (clearly–look how bad it is!).

But there are some points in there I still believe are true, even after this semester.  As faculty, we really are people who have to “switch gears” constantly, balancing home life and work life; teaching and researching; faculty committee member and student mentor.  Through all of these switches, we have to stay up-to-date on our fields.  We can only emulate the importance of lifelong learning to our students if we ourselves remain active learners.

I think I was probably a little on the administration in my initial write-up.  Many things happen at the higher admin levels that as individual faculty, staff, and students have no concept of.  We have talked a lot this semester about ethics and standards, and faculty members should always stand up for what they think is right.  As Dean DePauw reminded us all spring, it is important to know where your ethical lines are before you enter a situation with a student, fellow faculty member, and even the administration.

My “being faculty” statement is not as comprehensive as I would like, but I think that’s OK.  If I knew everything there was to know about “being faculty” at 26, having not yet officially been a member of any faculty… well, that would be pretty ridiculous.

PS:  I still get excited about snow days…

Advertisement

2 Comments

Posted in gedivts12, pfps2012

Tagged , ,

The Price of Academic Writing

Posted on April 19, 2012 | 1 comment

In NMFSS yesterday, Gail made this excellent point regarding scholarly articles:  “We pay you a little bit to write your article and then we pay a *lot* to the publisher to get it back!”

She’s absolutely right.  Our colleges and universities (assuming you’re in academia of course) pay us our wages.  And those wages cover our teaching, research, and service.  So yeah, she’s right, at the end of the day, a little bit of those wages go toward writing that article.  We are not paid by the journal for these submissions, nor do I necessarily think we should be.

This article is then published in an expensive journal, which the library has to buy either in paper copy, or in digital copy, or in both!  Without a library account you cannot access this material.  Anyone can walk into the library and use it, to be fair, but not everyone has digital access.

I know for a fact that the cost of these journals is problematic for many university libraries, especially in light of state-level budget cuts (for state schools).  At a former institution, we were sent a list of journals to be cut one year, and unless we made an incredibly strong case for a particular journal, they were cut at the end of the year.

Why are we limiting information to only those who can afford it?  How much farther and faster would knowledge advance if we didn’t exclude people simply because they cannot afford 35 bucks to read an article?

1 Comment

Posted in gedivts12, pfps2012, vtnmfss12

Tagged , , ,

Expectations for Graduate Education

Posted on March 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Did you know there was entire page devoted to “Expectations for Graduate Education” at VT?  Until PFP last night, I had no idea.

“At a Glance,” the expectations are on four main parties:  Grad Students, Faculty, Program/Department, and the Graduate School.  Many of these responsibilities involve clear explanation of intentions and requirements, ethical behavior, the providing of information and support, and above all a hands-on approach to education.  The onus isn’t put completely on the student to just “figure it out”; all members are accountable in this system.

The Much Longer Document (22 pages) defines a graduate student, which is interesting to me, because I don’t know that I would have ever thought to define who we are:

Graduate students are individuals seeking advanced degrees or certificates, either full- or part-time, at any of the campuses or programs of Virginia Tech. They are in the process of advancing from receiving knowledge to creating, enhancing, and taking ownership of new knowledge. Graduate students have various backgrounds, life experiences, and goals. Graduate students have diverse needs related to their multiple roles at Virginia Tech, such as student, researcher, educator, mentor, emerging and advancing professional, engaged scholar, and responsible citizen. (Page 4)

I (mostly) like it.  The one thing I find missing is that we aren’t just Tech-oriented.  We, like all people, have roles outside of the university.  To be sure, it does say that we have “various backgrounds, life experiences, and goals,” but given how often the work-life balance is decimated in graduate school, a nod to the need for such a balance would be a welcome addition in my mind.

Many portions of the longer document talk about the relationship between students and their faculty/department/Grad School with regard to mentoring.  As that is an upcoming topic in PFP, I look forward to exploring this more

Leave a comment

Posted in gedivts12, pfps2012

Tagged ,

Experiential Learning

Posted on March 8, 2012 | 3 comments

I’m a big fan of experiential (or performative, whatever you want to call it) learning.  I was pretty involved with the Reacting to the Past program at UGA (a curriculum created by Barnard College.  I was involved in the Athens game), which I think is one of the best ways to learn history out there.  I’ve seen it work both in “regular” and “honors” courses, bringing students out of their fear-shells and encouraging them to learn both in the classroom and on their own.

But what I really want to talk about today are the Model International Organizations programs, such as Model UN, Model NATO, and Model Arab League (MAL) (there are tons of others; these are just the ones I’ve done).  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard my former adviser at Converse College drop soundbites about the pedagogical merits of these programs.  And I would smile and nod, proud of how well he “spun” what we did, when it really just felt at the time like hanging out with other smart, politically minded people and an excuse to go on fun off-campus trips.

He was absolutely right, by the way.  It’s the best way to teach I’ve ever encountered.

It took getting out of the program as a student and working as a judge and on-site adviser to really see how valuable these programs are.  Not familiar with them?  Let’s use MAL as an example.

Students create a team of between 7-16 students (partners are allowed) who become experts on a particular League country they’ve been assigned (there are 21 of them at the moment–Syria’s been suspended).  Each student is assigned a committee with predetermined topics, which they research in preparation for writing legislation along with other countries at the conference.  Students spend the conference in committee meetings, split between formal and informal debate (governed by a modified form of Robert’s Rules) working on this legislation, which is then passed as a body of the committees at a Summit meeting.

Sounds pretty boring when I explain it, huh?  But it’s not, I swear.  Especially with a strong leader as chair, committees go from groups of shy (well, not everyone’s shy…) students who by the end of the conference are boldly demanding whatever is in their country’s interest.  Students go from hesitantly reading from sources to fully owning the knowledge, speaking extemporaneously from their own expertise.  All students can thrive in this model, from the most gregarious, outgoing speechmaker to the quiet, behind-the-scenes caucuser.  And no one type of student wins awards (yes, there are individual and team awards).

I started out in this program fairly timid.  As a freshman, I knew relatively little about the Middle East.  My first country assignment at a national conference, given to me day-of (there were some last-minute changes, and I was needed in a spot I had not prepared for), was a country I had never even heard of!  The conversation went a little something like this:

Adviser from Northeastern University:  OK, so I hear you need help with Eritrea.

Me:  What’s that?

Adviser:  I believe the proper question would be “Where’s that?”  We have a lot of work to do…

Me:  *beet red*

Because of the strength of this program, and a group of lovely students and advisers who stepped in to help me, I was able to (pretty badly) represent Eritrea in two separate committees, as well as present an Arab Court of Justice (think ICJ but regional… and made up) case representing Eritrea v. the League.  Was I stellar?  Absolutely not.  Did I learn a lot about how quickly I could research, learn, and represent material?  Absolutely.  Am I still friends with the adviser from Northeastern?  Yup!  That’s another great part about this program:  you meet people from all over the country and world that you will be friends and colleagues with for the rest of your life.

So, why am I talking about this?  In 2004, I first served as a student delegate at the Southeast Regional MAL (SERMAL) representing Jordan (Yes, Holly Jordan the delegate from Jordan.  My committee thought it was pretty funny too…  Libby Long, the delegate from Libya was also on my team.  My adviser wouldn’t let us switch.) in the Economic Affairs committee.  I was scared out of my mind.  I had only recently joined the team, and even my fellow freshmen had a few more weeks experience than I did.  In my ill-fitting suits, I stood up, knees knocking, and presented Jordanian thoughts on economic issues.  I had no idea what was going on.

These programs changed my life.  I went on to national leadership roles within this organization, sponsored by the National Council on US-Arab Relations and grew far more as a student and learner than I ever anticipated as an entering college freshman.  And the program itself has evolved so much since I started.  We’ve gone from murdering half the rain forest each year to nearly paperless conferences, with resolutions being projected on SMARTBoards and edited as a group in real time.  The 300 pages of CIA World Factbook info on each of the member nations of the League (which I did print and put in a binder I still have…) is now available as an Android app.

So now, 8 years later, I have the opportunity to lead a team from Virginia Tech.  Serving as Head Delegate, we will take a delegation, representing Mauritania, to SERMAL.  I am so very excited to help facilitate this opportunity for Tech students.  I’ve been pretty obnoxious about my excitement with them.  I hope they will get why I’m so spastic after we return home.  I promise to post pictures and reactions to how awesome it was!

3 Comments

Posted in gedivts12, pfps2012, vtnmfss12

Tagged , , , ,

Blogging as Subversion

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 2 comments

In all three classes I have to blog for, people are either enthusiastic towards or terrified of having to blog (with very few in between).  In part, I do think some of the terror might come from a person’s definition of a blog.

So often, blogs are described as online journals, which I think is completely unfair to them (and us).  The first blogging platform I ever used was LiveJournal (there was also InsaneJournal and GreatestJournal to pick from back in the day–IJ is still around), so the naming of it didn’t help.  But by equating a blog to an online journal, we’re already limiting its potential use.  I think a lot of people then go into blogs thinking it’s just a written version of your super-personal thoughts.  Of course that would be terrifying!

But that’s the brilliant part about blogs:  they really can be whatever you want them to be.  Some of the catchiest online presences around have nothing to do with presenting the person as they actually are.  @feministhulk on Twitter is one of my favorite personas.  Yes, I’m sure whoever runs that account is probably a feminist.  But I somehow doubt they walk around talking in Lou Ferrigno voice (which is disappointing…) spouting feminist agendas all day long.  Twitter is their vehicle to have fun and say something they want to say in a unique and reative way.

Dr. Fowler did get me thinking about this all of last night–why are people reticent to blogging?  What is so problematic about it?  If you see a blog as only an online place to dump your padlocked-secret-Lisa-Frank-journal thoughts, then yeah, that is terrifying.  But if it’s a way to have fun with something your interested in, even if it’s not particularly unique (your way of saying it is probably way more unique then you could ever realize), a blog becomes a very special outlet for your creativity and imagination.

I called this post “blogging as subversion” because right now, that’s how I’m seeing them.  We’ve been talking so much in Dean DePauw’s class about tenure, promotion, and the all-important difference between assistant, associate, and full professorships. The hoops one has to jump through include publishing peer-reviewed journal articles and books through university press  publishing are daunting.  In my mind, we’re automatically limiting who receives this information by picking these expensive, subscription-required (or access to a university library in some cases) media.  Glossies and mass media publications are bad.  Because, G-d forbid, we might actually be sharing knowledge with the masses.

Blogs are powerful and, yes, subversive.  I can write anything I want here.  It’s terrifying and dangerous.  It’s wonderful and awe-inspiring.  I can come up with new ideas here and get feedback from all of the world.  And yes, someone might then steal my idea and write about it, but it’s still my idea.  And I can go publish something too, because the idea will be in my own words and will be said differently by me than anyone else can.

Do I want people to read a book I might write someday?  Absolutely.  And yes, the selfish “I Need Validation For My Hard Work!!!!! Look at meeee!!!” reasons are there, jumping around somewhere in my Id.  But honestly, books are a medium, like so many, that hits everyone in a different way.  I’d rather have a book I write mean something to one person then to sit on a shelf in a university library (because their the only one’s who can afford it) doing nothing.  How often have you been the first person to check out a book since the 1950s at the library?  It’s sad, isn’t it?  What’s the point of all this school and learning if we can’t share what we’ve learned with people outside of this crazy academia bubble we live in?

Blogging might be an answer to this situation.  Why not go into it thinking that maybe we can change the world with our words?  That sounds ridiculous and trite as I write it, but why not dream big?  I’d rather dream the impossimprobable (neologisms are fun!) then not even try.  If blogging isn’t working for you, figure out why.  Make up a character.  Blog about something you actually despise just to see if you can.  Have fun.  Be subversive.

2 Comments

Posted in gedivts12, pfps2012, vtnmfss12

Tagged , , ,