Why is it so scary to blog and share what we do, as faculty?
Because our job is usually private.
This may sound odd, because we teach in classrooms full of people. But usually it isn’t full of colleagues watching us teach in our disciplines. That tends to happen only during faculty evaluation, and that makes many of us totally nervous. I hate having other faculty “sit in” on my class. What if something goes wrong? That’s the only chance, that one hour, and then they will make their judgement, and that could affect my job, and thus my whole life.
Part of the problem is exactly that — it’s the only chance. If these colleagues were there every day, it wouldn’t be so bad. They’d see the body of my work, the good days and the bad days.
But college teaching is also private for a reason. I am supposed to have academic freedom, the right to teach the subject the way I want to, using my own methods. That’s why I became a college instructor instead of a high school teacher. It is hard to develop innovative teaching methods with narrow-minded people watching my every move and breathing down my neck. I want to try things, experiment, have me and the students working together.
And when I am evaluated, even that’s in private. Yesterday I received a copy of my evaluation packet from last year. It was sealed in an inter-campus envelope with a “Confidential” label stamped across it. My evaluation meeting was conducted in a small room with four other people: my dean, my department chair, one historian, and one faculty colleague of my choice. I did a little show for them, took them through my packet, then I left the room. They talked, in private. They wrote my evaluation, privately. It is so private it is kept in a locked file and I had to go over to the Instruction Office to sign my evaluation. Email isn’t private enough.
Now, I consider myself a public servant, since I work at a public community college. But would I want my evaluation to be public? Perhaps the public wouldn’t understand. There is a pretty anti-intellectual movement going on right now in the public. They think I don’t earn my pay, which is the highest of all the community colleges in the state. They think I take summers off and loaf, talk for a living, produce nothing of importance, and don’t do my job when students don’t get high scores and a degree they can translate into a six figure income. Couple that with administrators whose main purpose seems to be to catch me out not doing my job, not following the rules. Why on earth should I share anything I do?
Here’s why.
I’m a professional. Professionals work in peer communities. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and scientists engage in ongoing education in a discipline controlled by their peer network. Their work is published and peer-reviewed. It is public, but not necessarily evaluated in its worth by the public, and there is an understanding that the profession advances society over time, regardless of the vagaries of public fashion. If I leave the evaluation of my work to my students and my bosses, I am not acting like a professional.
And thus I am not treated as one. Adjunct instructors are treated like migrant labor at many places, disposable and expendable. Corporations and publishers are trying to take over the teaching of our subjects through canned online classes and for-profit “colleges” that can hire anyone to “teach” (or, rather, manage the grading of) our classes. This is not OK with me.
As with any other profession, some practitioners put their heart into what they do, and some don’t. Some want the glory of publication and don’t care about twisting the scientific method or their own morals. Some just want to cash the paycheck and have a beer. Some want to teach online so they can ignore their students, run a canned course someone else wrote because it’s easier, get away with not doing a good job. And as the system gets tweaked to try to prevent these abuses, it gets more closed, more private, more restrictive, and less professional.
If I keep my work in private, with private evaluations subject to the whims of student surveys, hour-long cursory class visits, and administrative traditionalism, my work as a teacher may stay safe and protected, but it can’t grow. Over time I will be unable to articulate the goals of my methods, or develop new ones.
BUT if I put it all out there, I can communicate better with my peers than in a closed system. I can see what others are doing and share my ideas. I can engage in my profession, not just in my discipline (other historians are of somewhat limited help when it comes to teaching issues) but in my calling as a teacher.
We have a right to be treated like professionals, with our approaches and methods respected, debated and analyzed by our peers. I have been teaching as a professor for 23 years. A few years ago, I started to open everything up, until now I put my evaluations online (that “Confidential” seal was truly silly in my case) and publish as much of my work as possible on the web. I am creating a body of work, which my peers can evaluate and comment on. Rising above the private system has enable me not only to grow as a professional, but to insist I be treated as one.
Not so long ago, the internet was the Wild West. Those of us teaching on it when it was new, long before technology plans and wireless hotspots, may not have had a lot of spiffy technologies but we had pretty much total freedom. Over the years, the wild horses have been corralled and tamed by Learning Management Systems, the swift emergence of central IT, and the even swifter development of graduate degrees in educational technology and distance learning.
People like to be recognized for their contribution. In a large social network, a big class or a community, folks who work hard contributing a lot don’t necessarily do it for the recognition — they do it to share and help. But anonymity can be lonely, like being alone in a crowd or doing a good job at work and having nobody notice.
Perhaps it’s my fascination with medieval manuscripts, and the image of those translators in Spain working on the Arabic texts which annotated and expanded the Greek scientific classics. Or perhaps it’s all those scholars who created works like the Talmud, its commentary on the commentaries, but I find annotation very intriguing.
The other collection of posts was a continuation of 
As I noted in 
I am still thinking about the 
expert. Only those who can afford it, those who at least think they have discriminating taste even if they don’t, would visit. At an open access community college, however, I get a much broader spectrum of clientele. I do not mean this in a socio-economic sense, but rather in an intellectual sense. I have students who are there to get into a good university and already come to me with intellectual skills, ready to hone them into historical skills during my class. They ask what’s fresh today, order on my recommendation, use their napkin, and tip properly. But I also have those who casually made it through high school, and who think this is “high school with ashtrays”, and who are very much enjoying the fact that unlike in the cafeteria of secondary education, where they had to sit at a certain table for 45 minutes, they can now refuse to eat at all. A number are there only to stay on daddy’s health insurance, and will happily take a D. They clean their nails at the table, order too many drinks, and make fun of the French names on the menu. They expect a TV chef, that I’ll juggle knives or get all choked up if the judges don’t like me.