Month: December 2018

Higher Education

New Beginnings

Missy Alexander

One of the best things about the way we’ve organized education is the distinct starts and stops that allow us to begin anew.  In the K-12 world, there is that excitement that focuses on those first days after summer.  Back packs are filled with pens, paper, and expectation.  In higher education, we do this at least twice a year, organizing around semesters, with new texts, challenges, and new chances to get things right.

As a student, I recall the many times I committed to being better at taking notes. Each new semester, I dreamed of perfect, efficient records of my classes.  I never succeeded. Entropy or confusion would set in and eventually the neat outlines became less orderly and more grasping for the point.  My notes were a record of the class of course, and it was more accurate, I think, than the dreamed for perfect outlines. It showed my struggles to understand, my doodles of disconnection, and an occasional “aha”! I had learned something and that was enough.

So here we are on the eve of 2019, and I am pondering the joy of some fresh blank pages.  What will they be filled with this time?

Cleaning

I know there will be some of the usual tasks.  As provost, I spend a good deal of time trying to make order out of processes so that faculty, staff, and students can easily understand how things work.  Each of the rules and guidelines by which we operate was created to support reasonable academic standards and paths to success (graduation, tenure, etc.).  Yet, when combined, that list of rules and policies is sometimes confusing and contradictory.  I try to see it as a whole and work to reduce confusion and contradiction.  This is the ongoing and usual project I set for myself.  My efforts generally start out nice and orderly, like my course outlines, and as they wind their way through various reconciliations, tend to become less so.  Still, the effort toward clarity seems worth it, so I persist in the task.

Growing

Then there are the opportunities for new initiatives.  As an academic leader I am bombarded with pitches for new technologies, data on student success initiatives, and demands for better outcomes.  I wade through these ideas and efforts, dismissing most as just too much clutter without enough benefit. But, there is room for improvement in any organization, so I am likely to find one or two ideas that could help WCSU.  These potential initiatives must be evaluated and pursued in ways that do not overwhelm everyone involved.

Improving

Finally, there are those areas in which I feel I need to improve.  I reflect on what I have and haven’t accomplished in the last year.  Did older initiatives pay off? Should I stop doing some of them? Should I change a strategy?  Have I gathered enough information, listened closely enough to my colleagues and students, to make my efforts productive?

This process of reflection an renewal feels right to me.  It gives me the opportunity to re-imagine my efforts and my role on a regular basis.  Like my life as as student, I know I’ll face entropy and confusion and some inertia as I dive into the next semester, but that is as it should be. It is the process of renewal and goal setting, part of the very DNA of higher education, that is so valuable.

So here’s to new notebooks, laptops, and ideas.  May all your resolutions be useful.

Happy New Year.

Dialogue, Higher Education, Inclusion

From Tolerance to Understanding

Missy Alexander

It’s Christmas Eve and all is quiet on the WCSU campus.  Grades have been entered for the fall semester, students and faculty have departed to celebrate and relax with family and friends. A few of us remain to address any last-minute questions, problems, or queries, but we will join our families later today.  Whatever we celebrate, we have reached an ending and a pause. It is a blessing to have our lives organized around these moments of closure.  It makes way for reflection and reinvention.

As I think about some of the themes emerging in this blog, I realize that I have been wrestling with education’s role in supporting a diverse society.  I am struggling to find ways to support the conversations that can help develop our understandings of diverse perspectives.  I am reaching for opportunities to build foundations that will support collaborative responses to the problems our graduates will face in the years to come.  At this intersection of religious and cultural holidays from all corners of the world, I am pausing to wonder, are we doing enough to foster dialogue about faith?

This is probably a surprising question coming from a person who was raised without religion and who champions the first amendment argument for government to just stay out of it.  Working at a public university, I am committed to secular education, leaving faith to the personal lives or all who work and study here.  That is a position I have always embraced.  But I think it is a position that may be leaving important gaps in a well-rounded education that prepares students for a diverse society.

When I was growing up, the language used to urge openness to different cultural, religious, and political values was “tolerance.”  In its moment, that word was progressive.  It was urging us not to dismiss the views of others, but to try to co-exist in peaceful ways. In the path from ethnocentricity to an understanding that not everyone sees or experiences the world in the same way, it was a good start.

But here we are in a post-911 world that has shaken our commitement to tolerance.  There is a pronounced fear of “others,” a fear that sometimes progresses to hatred and violence.  This fear and hostility is easily tapped into via the stereotypes in the mainstream media and the open bigotry that is so often promoted online. The tactics that have undermined tolerance are easily mapped to the strategies of persuasion described by the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays, and even more hauntingly, the propaganda techniques outlined by Jacques Ellul. Our tolerance is no match for fear mongering.

So what does this reveal? Tolerance is not enough.  Tolerance allows us to stay in our separate corners without truly probing underlying beliefs.  We “accept” that others organize their cultures differently from us, but tolerance doesn’t urge us to develop an understanding of those differences. Indeed, it inadvertently gives us permission to disengage and adopt a live and let live attitude.  But disengagement leaves all kinds of room for us to slide back into hard categories of “other” that are the breeding ground for racism and intolerance.

At a secular public university, we might have a few conversations about history and cultural traditions, but we mostly avoid faith traditions.  There are comparative religion courses in our philosophy departments, but we don’t generally require students to take them.  We don’t want to be seen as promoting any particular religious view, so we avoid all of them.  Yet, so many of our cultural traditions and distinctions arise from our connections to religion.  The avoidance of the topic leaves a gaping hole in our narratives.

So, today I am reflecting on this gap in our expectations for public higher education.  At WCSU, our general education curriculum includes something we are calling “intercultural competency.” Courses that count for this competency are those that address learning a language other than English, history courses that do not focus on European and American histories, and a couple of applied courses in nursing and social work.  These are good options, but if we are to truly consider our graduates capable of seeing the world through multiple cultural lenses, I think we need to do more.  Instead of avoiding the religion question, perhaps we need to face it directly, and include it in the intercultural repertoire as a requirement.

Maybe it is at the secular university that we have the greatest opportunity to look directly at the different understandings of our purposes and obligations as human beings. Without the need to serve a particular religion, we might be well-equipped to truly compare and discuss the differences in the many faith traditions on our campuses. Perhaps we can start in the classroom and then move to the student organizations. Instead of separating into Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and Atheist groups, we might create a place for real interfaith dialogue.

It’s complicated, to be sure, mostly because it is hard for any one person to represent the perspective of multiple faiths fairly.  But, I think we are failing our students by not engaging the conversation.  We have to go beyond simple symbols and festivals, and explore the deeply held convictions about what is true.  We need to deal with the complexity of our faith traditions.  Only then will we have the tools to develop understanding, instead of mere tolerance. Only then will we be preparing our graduates for the possibilities that a diverse society might bring.  And only then will we have any chance of preparing them to resist the appeals of the insensitive and often hateful stereotypes that keep us from seeing each other as connected human beings.

Peace to you all.

 

 

 

Evaluation, Higher Education, Inclusion

Unfair Measures

Missy Alexander

Last week I attended the joint meeting of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) and the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE).  At this gathering there are K-12 educators and higher education administrators, and most of our sessions were separate.  One that was not was a plenary session featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates.  In front of a standing room only crowd, he reflected on his life as a writer, the taking down of statues linked to our ugliest of histories, the complicity of the Ivy League universities in those ugly histories, and most of all, the unbearable inequities in access to education.

Much of the conversation focused on K-12, but we in higher education are not unfamiliar with the main points of his argument.  To sum up, it is unreasonable to measure a teacher’s or school district’s success by a simple test score, when many teachers are serving  as educators, social workers, therapists, and security officers.  Measuring the test scores in a district where the students are hungry, living in unsafe neighborhoods, and lacking in access to basic educational supports (books at home, paper at home, parents who are able to support homework), as if those scores can be in any way similar to the test scores in Greenwich, CT is beyond destructive.  The conditions created by this notion that tests are objective measures of anything almost inevitably lead to environments with high turnover, low morale, and predictable desperate measures.

In higher education, the parallel experience comes in the rankings of schools. Blunt measures of retention and graduation rates tell us very little, when not placed in the context of the students we serve.  Increasingly, universities like mine, serve students who have graduated from the most challenging K-12 districts.  Our students are doing their best to make the leap to higher education, without having had enough support in their prior education to develop some of the skills necessary for success in college.  They are also burdened with the need to work too many hours, are often food insecure, and on occasion, homeless.

At WCSU, we serve these students in the same classrooms as those who did have adequate preparation and support. This is our mission and we are committed to it.  But you can see where there may be challenges.  As we work to meet the needs of all of our students, adopting new pedagogies, developing robust support systems, and always searching for more funding for our neediest students, we are consistently aware that we are being judged by measurements that do not tell our story.  We strive for equity and equity doesn’t live on a four-year, primarily residential campus.  We should strive to do better, but our attention is squarely on the students in the room, not on those blunt measures. If we attended to those other measures too closely, we would have to change who we are designed to serve.

I took the opportunity to ask Mr. Coates for advice and he issued a very specific challenge.  He turned to the room full of educators and said we had to become active in advocating not just for education, but for the supporting systems whose absences are at the root of the social inequities we are then tasked with curing.  It was an aha moment for me.

Or  perhaps I should say,  it was a duh moment for me. Mr. Coates is so right.  Education has long been seen as this country’s equalizer.  It is meant to provide access to the social mobility at the heart of what we think being an American means. This is a heavy burden. It is no accident that we have had to continuously fight to make education a true equalizer, fighting to allow everyone to pursue it.  We have a horrible history of denying access, to be sure, but access has grown none-the-less.  We continue to segregate, by laws and by funds, the quality of education available to the many, and we battle to cure those inequities in fits and starts, but battle we do. Through it all, we continue to look to education as a cure for all society’s ills. It continues to be what Henry Perkinson called an “imperfect panacea.”

But here, in higher education, perhaps we do need to broaden our advocacy.  We need to change national formulas created by Title IV funding guidelines, to be sure, and fight for better measures of the diversity of colleges and universities, not just the elite schools. But what about the rest of it? We know that college would be better if students didn’t arrive under-prepared.  But the conditions in K-12 are not always conducive to that preparation. So, I’m starting my advocacy to-do list: 1. We need universal pre-K.  2. All schools should have free breakfast and lunch. 3. All education funding formulas need to be re-imagined to balance the inequities that arise from de facto segregation. 4. We need sane housing policies that undermine that segregation and put an end to homelessness.

This list is just a start, but taking these steps has the potential to change the higher education environment significantly. By addressing root causes of the uneven preparation of our students, we might be able to really focus on measures that reflect learning instead of just socio-economic contexts.  This would be real access to education, instead of the band-aid system we now have in place.

Dialogue, Higher Education, Inclusion

Diversity by the Numbers

Missy Alexander

C.J. Cregg changed my life.  For those of you who don’t know, Cregg (played by Allison Janney) was the press secretary on The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant political drama that ran from 1999-2006.  I’ve always been a sucker for a good political drama, but the inclusion of a powerful woman, keeping up with and sometimes outwitting the men around her, was both inspirational and life affirming.  I finally had that fictional role model I never knew I missed.

And there it was.  I understood in an instant the importance of providing that affirmation of the value and strength of all groups in our media and in the education we provide. All of the arguments about literary canons, affirmative action, and political correctness disappeared.  In this one case the answer is clear:  We must deliberately review all that we offer to ensure that we are representing the cultures of all of our students and faculty in a truly life affirming way.  Unlike all other attempts to build an inclusive society, we can take immediate and decisive action to achieve this end.

Here is the path as I see it. In the last U.S. Census the following gender and racial/ethnic distributions were reported:

  • Women:  50.8 % of the US population
  • Black or African American: 13.4% of the US population
  • American Indian and Alaska Native: 1.3% of the US population
  • Asian: 5.8% of the US population
  • Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander: 0.2% of the US population
  • Hispanic or Latino: 18.1% of the US population
  • Two or more races:  2.7% of the US population
  • White, not Hispanic or Latino: 60.7% of the US population

(https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI525217)

Let’s just try to achieve these proportions in everything we do.

Start at the course level.  Can we achieve this proportion of voices in the readings we assign? Let’s examine the founders of our disciplines and then look a little further to see who else was there and try to include them.  In most great discoveries, there are other players, usual mentioned in footnotes, that represent a great diversity of contributors to the field.  Feature them. And let’s look at our other course materials (slides, videos, special guests, etc.) and deliberately revise them to reflect the proportions above.

Next,  we should meet with our colleagues and look at the design of our majors.  Are there gaps in the offerings that may have the cumulative effect of ignoring significant contributions to the discipline from the many cultures our country represents?  It isn’t just literature, folks. There are scientists in India, economists in China, philosophers in Brazil.  Let’s dig in and work together to fill that gap.

Look at the overall catalog of our offerings.  If we imagine our students specifically looking for courses that might celebrate their varied cultural histories, would they easily find them? If we know things are in the syllabi, but not in course titles and descriptions, then we should fix that. These options must be visible. If courses don’t exist at all, we must find ways to add them.

Now look at the guests invited to campus.  What does that tell us about who is celebrated?  If it isn’t balanced, we should be more intentional about it.  Perhaps we need a committee to review the schedule of performances, speakers, and events, to insure some balance. If we do, let’s make it so.

Finally, we must look at the images we chose  to represent our universities.  Do they reflect the proportions listed in the census?  If not, let’s fix it.

I am sure some of you are now thinking that I’ve reduced complex arguments about curriculum to a simplistic quota system.  You are correct, I have.  Here’s why. The people we habitually select in our curricula and events may be tremendously talented, but they are still reflections of social inequities and access to power.  We need a systematic plan to disrupt these habits.  Establishing new habits generally takes a deliberate set of steps that can be easily followed and measured.  This method provides those easily followed steps.

In every discipline there are the others who were in the labs, on the battlefields, creating art and music and theater, and negotiating peace treaties.  They were the “hidden figures,” eclipsed by our bias toward those in power.  These people are ready to be  layered into our habitual go-to examples.  Their routine inclusion will bring them to the forefront.  Regularly including the many contributors to our stories and discoveries will help us avoid the tokenism of the single example (generally perceived as an exception), in favor of the routine recognition of the greatness that lives in all groups.

This is not a small job, but is entirely achievable.  As I think  back to that moment when I met C.J. Cregg, I recall my excitement, and shockingly to me, the tears I shed as I felt a hole in my list of role models suddenly fill.  Hollywood has been moving  forward in its efforts toward inclusion (slowly, but surely),  but I fear education is not keeping up.  (Check out John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons for a particularly insightful example of why this matters.) We get bogged down in debates over how to be inclusive, and they are important debates.  But, some things are just obvious.  Examples exist, so let’s use them. We can help fill the gaps in the narratives that our students are experiencing.  They may not even know they are missing these examples, but I suspect their inclusion will be life-affirming to all of us.

 

 

 

 

Dialogue, Evaluation, Higher Education

Evaluating Teaching

Missy Alexander

Last week many of my friends and colleagues were discussing Nancy Bunge’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which she addressed student evaluations of teaching. Bunge argues that these evaluations are biased (they are), damaging to the relationship between faculty and student (perhaps), and most damming to me, that “Administrators, who are well paid for supposedly assuring that students get good educations, apparently have never heard of grade inflation or bothered to read the studies questioning the value of evaluations, since they routinely turn the job of ranking the faculty over to the people the instructors grade.”  I can’t help but respond.

I was a faculty member for many years, and during that time student evaluations (student opinion surveys, as they are called at WCSU) were a regular part of the mix of how I was evaluated.  At my former university, my average scores were not just reported to me and the dean, they were also placed in a context of a) other sections of my course, b) other courses in my department, and c) similar courses across the university.  These reports also included average grades earned in these courses, so that I would be keenly aware of potential grade inflation. I confess that this practice was a bit overwhelming at first, but ultimately, I learned a lot from it.

Despite the apparent weight given to them, it is important to note that student evaluations were in no way the only measure of my effectiveness.  Over the years toward tenure, I was observed by the dean and my colleagues in the communication department annually, and by faculty outside of my department during my tenure year. The feedback I received from those observations was invaluable.  They were gentle with me when expressing suggestions for improvement, but even the smallest observations were helpful.  Add to this, my decision to have coffee with colleagues at least once a semester, so we could discuss teaching strategies in similar courses, and I really felt engaged in good practices. I had developed a habit of self-evaluation.

Now I am a provost.  I am the last person to review all faculty applications for reappointment, tenure, and promotion.  Prior to my review, peers, deans, and the tenure committee have read and commented on the materials.  My decisions and observations are influenced by all of that information.  The student evaluations/opinion surveys are the least of it.  They contribute a small piece of the story, which is then contextualized by everyone else so that I have a good understanding of how to read them.

So, what does this administrator actually look for.  In terms of student feedback, I look mostly for patterns of responses.  I well know that responses to the two o’clock section of  your course may differ from responses to the one at ten.  I am aware that challenging gateway courses to a major receive more criticism from students than some other introductory overviews.  I am certain that no one likes remedial math.  These things are all taken into consideration as I review student feedback.

However, if most students find your courses (not just one) and expectations unclear, I explore that question. I move to the observations of your peers.  They will tell me if I should pay attention to those student concerns.  I also look at your syllabi.  They will tell me if I should pay attention to those student concerns.  And most importantly, I look at your self-evaluation.

What I look for, above all, is for faculty who are constantly questioning their approaches to teaching.  Do they look at the results of their efforts and adjust their techniques to try to better engage students? Do they try new pedagogies and reflect on their successes or failures? Do they revise courses, infusing them with new materials when warranted?  Do they take an honest look at what students are saying, on opinion surveys or in their engagement with the material, and revise or clarify? And do they reflect on their efforts honestly, celebrating successes and re-imagining courses that didn’t go well.

It is my job to cultivate that attitude toward teaching.  When I meet with new faculty, I do my best to reassure them that not all classes will receive high praise from students. Indeed, I’d be worried if they did, because we should be trying new things, not all of which will work.  I celebrate faculty experimentation, through awards, announcements, and organizing an annual faculty panel on teaching.  I also distribute funds for faculty to attend conferences and workshops that explore new approaches to teaching.  This is my job and I love doing it.

So what of those student opinion surveys? I think they are helpful to a point, if used in the context I have described. They must be read with nuance, sorting through biases and making room for growth and experimentation.  I also think there are ways to do better in terms of how they are constructed, but they will always carry the attitudes that the culture carries toward various groups.  Anyone reading them must take that into account.

While I don’t fully agree with Bunge’s argument, there is a way in which this request for student feedback can cultivate a consumer mentality, particularly if it appears to be a top-down request. That is demeaning to the profession.  But to not ask for feedback can be demeaning to the student.  If students can’t provide feedback, we are devaluing their experience, and I suspect we would be reinforcing passive attitudes toward learning.

Perhaps we can improve the use of feedback from students by changing how we gather it. One way to start is to have multiple opportunities for feedback during the semester, instead of waiting until the last week of classes.  Thirds seems like a good approach to me: Let’s ask for feedback three times instead of one.

The first two opportunities for feedback should be collected by professors, helping them to clarify where necessary and change course if appropriate. This might start with three simple questions:

  1. What is going well in this course (please consider the texts, assignments, and the in-class experience)?
  2. What needs clarification?
  3.  Is there anything else I should know?

Faculty might read and respond right then, or perhaps in the next class, but they should respond.  Giving students opportunities to discuss the course during the semester can help cultivate trust and allow them to feel that they are part of creating the course.

Then a final response, collected by a student in the class at the end of the semester, should reflect the habit of feedback that has been cultivated.  It would grow out of a practice of open dialogue about the course, rather than a single opportunity to voice an opinion. These final questionnaires should probably be short, too, with some reference to the other opportunities for feedback.

This approach is less consumer oriented than the once-a-semester evaluation, and I think it would feel less punitive or risky for some faculty. In the best case, it could help students and faculty feel co-ownership of the course outcomes, which is a real win for everyone involved.

So, I don’t know what all administrators think about the role of student feedback in their evaluation of faculty, but I can say that this is how I see it.  I can also say that I don’t know any administrator who uses a single measure to evaluate faculty, and it should never be so.