For 20 years I have been a sessional, teaching first year classes for the English department at the University of Saskatchewan.I am currently alarmed by changes proposed for the college of arts and science. The administration has set a deadline of 2014 for the fine arts and humanities unit to draft a plan to increase the level of faculty research by 20 per cent by 2016. At the same time, sessional lecturers who now teach first year classes will be let go.
In order for faculty members to meet their goal while teaching more, the college wants graduate students and senior undergraduates to help teach first-year students.
Graduate and undergraduate students are hardworking and motivated but they are trying to finish their own degrees. Taking responsibility for the education of first year students would be, to say the least, burdensome.
The rest.
PS: Sessional = adjunct.
link sent in by Lucy, Countess of Bedford
Okay, what bothers me about the push for "flipped classrooms" et al. is the sneaking suspicion that the main motivation of the pushers is budgetary rather than pedagogical.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I've seen enough bad work from grad students I've hired as markers that I wouldn't trust them (or even senior UGs) with *more* responsibility.
I was part of an undergrad teaching assistant program. We mostly held review sessions or gave feedback on essays. Students in my department occasionally marked lab assignments.
DeleteHonestly, I wouldn't have trusted my classmates, or myself, with the responsibility of actually teaching freshmen in place of the professors.
As far as I can tell, they're trying to mix and match totally unrelated (and, quite possibly, diametrically opposed) educational reforms in order to achieve a goal which the reforms were not originally intended to accomplish (but seems to be the only ones that most legislators and many trustees/administrative types can think about these days): cutting costs. As I understand it, the idea of the "flipped classroom," at least on the college level, is to transform a relatively cheap but often not very pedagogically effective approach -- the huge lecture -- into a somewhat more pedagogically effective one, by making it more interactive. Students watch the lectures on video, and class time is spent in practicing skills and applying concepts, probably in small groups, with some help from the professor (necessarily limited by the fact that you've still got one person trying to teach dozens of other people at once). Adding some TAs to the mix would be helpful; subtracting the professor would not (and supplementing the lecture with small discussion sections/practicums led by TAs -- the usual form for a big lecture class at the schools I attended -- would probably be even better, but also more expensive).
ReplyDeleteAnother thing those who want to transfer lectures to some sort of recorded format need to keep in mind: students have very high standards for recorded presentations, much higher than for face to face ones. In the early '90s, I served as an adjunct section leader for an interdisciplinary humanities course that was experimenting with videotaped lectures, to be played in class, followed by discussion. It turned out to be very, very hard to turn the students' attention away from the production values (which weren't bad -- they were taped in the school's own studio -- but the professors looked and acted like professors, not televised talking heads) and to the content. One measure of how badly the approach bombed is that I returned for the second semester to find that I had one section rather than the three I had been promised (and no one had told me -- a huge shock in that, my second semester of adjunct teaching -- in fact, I burst into tears; I am considerably more cynical and hence shock-proof now).
So, I'm guessing that producing recordings that students will actually watch for the content (rather than as production critics) will be pretty time-consuming, and involve training professors to perform in ways they never expected. And if professors want to make the content at all topical/relevant (as, I believe, they should; pretty much every field has practical applications, and references to the role those applications are playing in current news stories, etc., are useful), or responsive to the work the students are doing (which they really should be doing), then they're going to have to be constantly re-recording. Otherwise, the "flipped" approach will make the yellowed-lecture-notes stereotype of the tenured professor, which only rarely, in my experience, matches reality (in fact, it's possible to give quite a lively lecture from recycled notes -- or, to update, powerpoint slides -- as long as the notes are only an outline), into a settled reality.
Also -- if there are fewer professorial jobs to be had, why do they think they will have grad students to use as underpaid labor? I admit that they're taking longer to catch on than one would think, but the disappearance of the few remaining TT faculty into the ether just might do it.