I was sitting quietly in our department’s faculty meeting, trying to surreptitiously catch up on some reading while appearing politely attentive. This is academic medicine’s equivalent of “just walking down the street, minding my own business”—when the equivalent of “.and then some dude shot me” jolted me back to the meeting; it was the distantly heard phrase “mandatory training.”
The rest...
The rest...
That is a really well-written article. Out of my discipline, but right on the money.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Even the online trainings about things I strongly support (e.g. preventing sexual harassment) that I've taken have been ridiculously disordered jumbles, jumping from subject to subject, with no clear audience (because they're trying to reach people in a variety of situations) and the sutures where the subcontractor pasted in the institution-specific material glaringly apparent. The built-in assessments also range from the juvenile (various sorts of point-and-click games) to the pretty decent (case studies with 3 or 4 possible characterizations of the situation and/or possible courses of action, and the possibility that more than one of the answers may be right). I'd learn far more by reading a single well-organized document, but I guess it's harder to prove that people read something than that they clicked through somewhere between 250 and 300 slides.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as with having my students take a plagiarism test and present me with a certificate, I'm very aware that part of the purpose of the whole exercise is to make me responsible for acting on all the jumbled facts and admonitions with which the tutorial presented me. The main thing I took away is that, despite the fact that my students are almost all adults, I'm probably closer to being a mandated reporter than I thought I was, at least when it comes to any sort of sexual harassment of a student (no real surprise there) *or* domestic violence against a student (even if the perpetrator isn't also a student, which is a bit more of a surprise. I don't think I've failed to report anything I should have (the only time I came close was when a student said -- well, wrote -- something that might have been taken to mean that she was afraid her father would get violent if she didn't pass the class -- though it also could have been a figure of speech, and/or hyperbole, and/or an attempt to manipulate me -- and I did tell her that I couldn't tell how seriously to take what she'd said, but that if she felt she was in danger, she should make plans to get to safety, and suggested some community resources. Whether I should have taken it further, I'm not sure, even now.)
I've also been less than impressed by the online trainings on how to teach online that I've viewed (in part because I have simply viewed them; our distance education office's definition of "interactive" seems to mean clicking from slide to slide and occasionally taking a quiz; I though it would mean interacting, albeit asynchronously, with the instructor and fellow students, as happens in my own online classes. Silly me.)
Well, that rambled a bit, didn't it? Can you tell I should be working on my last syllabus, and am pretty tired of the whole thing by now? (and classes haven't even started. argh.)
Funny piece, and I agree with CC that the best training modules I've done included case studies with "choose your own ending" responses. The year we had to do the sexual harassment training, I was glad because our two senior male proffies often said inappropriate things to female students and young faculty, and one is a hugger who still gossips about the one woman who said no to hugs -- years after she moved on to a (presumably less chilly) new employer.
ReplyDeleteBut the men just joked about the training, which was indeed lame. If they saw any relevance to their own behavior, they didn't let on. And I was too cowardly (and too junior) to say, "Your behavior, including this joking, is the problem."
That's the fundamental problem with the training. Most guys won't knowingly sexually harass a woman... but the training is so obtuse and obvious: even most of the lunkheads know it's wrong to grab.. but they cant' see their jokes as falling into the gray zone. The training has to be both really interesting AND really good to get at that stuff.. and it almost never does.
DeleteAt least one of the case studies in our training covered jokes (including an ongoing exchange of "practical jokes"), but I suspect perceptions of what constitutes a "consistent pattern" or a "pervasive" element of the office/professional atmosphere might vary considerably.
DeleteOh I left out the kicker! Professor Hugs teaches *Human Sexuality* which features a unit on consent, and another on harassment and abuse.
ReplyDelete"Those who can't do..."
DeleteSorry, too easy.
I have the same problem with social scientists who don't understand the validity problems of student evaluation surveys.
The cobbler's children wear no shoes.
DeleteFriday we were shown a training video about what to do in an "active shooter" situation on campus. My wife had to watch the very same video, at almost the exact same time, at her workplace (government, not academic).
ReplyDelete