8/9/12

This morning I had to lead a three hour seminar on how to balance the teaching and research aspects of full-time, late-program graduate work. I had 20 nearly finished doctoral students from a variety of programs who will be teaching for the first time this fall as they complete their dissertations and formally enter their new fields. A basic issue at the university persists: super star researchers consider their teaching duties to be much lower priorities, sometimes to the point of sending TAs to teach in their stead. Faculty at higher levels rarely focus their energies on teaching– the reward structure of higher ed is tilted entirely toward research production. So these late-stage grad student researchers are becoming teachers now, and the question is what kind of teacher will they be.

An entirely different group here was asked to do this–to lead this thing– but at the last minute they realized they wouldn’t be able to pull it off. They didn’t have the right kind of experience to lead such a workshop, and this became clearer after their first session on Monday. All of the sudden it was offered to me to take over. Tuesday morning it began. I prepared the first session Monday night.

Although it was such short notice, I had a rough idea of how it could go because I have learned a few strategies over the last couple of years that have thus far worked pretty well. What I do is keep at least 2/3 of any program coming from the participants.  If that format is appropriate, I go for it. Participants are happier not having been lectured to for hours, and they do seem to get more out of discussion than reception. You know, “active learning”, etc.

Success in the discussion-based format of instruction is dependent on two things: the facilitator asking the right kinds of questions, and asking those questions at the right time in the discussion. If you can do that, then in my opinion you can really help almost anyone learn.

I opened with an innocent-sounding question that was actually pretty complicated. That is the best kind of opening question because everyone is quick and eager to jump in, and does so, and it is as they begin to articulate an answer that they realize there’s more to it than originally perceived. You can watch that process occur in real time– the deepening.  You can’t force them there, but if you create an opening for it they can get down to the good stuff on their own, and you’ll be down there already, waiting to take them on a tour ofThe Interesting.

The question I opened with was: “What is our impression of the relationship between “research” (and “the researcher”) and “teaching” (and “the teacher”)? Are they distinct from each other?

Everyone in the room had an answer, which for a first question is all you can hope for.

They concluded quickly that the two are completely mutually exclusive– the expert researcher is rarely the expert teacher. In their own experiences as students and as researchers, they see the two as distinct parts of the job and mostly unrelated. They recalled stories from their advisors about the tedious requirements of teaching that slowed research down, and as researchers themselves they could understand the frustration. They also shared what they had learned about the tenure process: that publication matters, and teaching basically does not count for much in the tenure process.

And it turns out their shared initial perceptions are very accurate. Research shows there to be no relationship between good, productive researchers and good teaching, and it also shows that expert researchers even tend to have characteristics that are contrary to those required of a expert educator, such as a certain objectivity towards the object of study that forces distance from it, contrasted to the important subjectivity and emotion-mediated quality of human-to-human interaction is critical for successful teaching. So the impression that the two are not correlated and that they might even be negatively correlated is correct.

But (obviously) the story doesn’t end there. The unknown or unconsidered extension of that story, the footpath that continues through the woods after the pavement stops, that’s where you’re trying to go.

“If expert researchers are rarely expert teachers, why does the university have them teach at all?”

The controversial nature of the question is important because you want their beliefs to surface, you want them taking risks and being open. The conversation exploded into a shared critiquing of the entire apparatus of “university”,  its constructs, and systems of power and movement. The summary of this 15 minute segway is that we were actively and vocally questioning some of the fundamentals of our own field. By building that atmosphere of safe and open questioning our assumptions and beliefs and concerns and our fears, you have the room read to make the leap you’re hoping for: questioning the fundamentals of the assumptions we have about our selves and our roles.

“So what is a researcher…what are you?

When you make this leap, don’t take answers quickly. Instead,  let the entire room, now a computer processing the question with 20 different cores working on it at once, let it process, and keep it silent.

If you say to anyone, “I am a researcher”, what do you even mean? Do you even know?

Let it process.

Eventually, when you feel that everyone has really considered the question, only then is it time to ask for thoughts.

So what are we? I don’t know. This isn’t a trick question or anything– shouldn’t we know what we are? What are we?

What the room didn’t know is that the night before I had done the same. And in processing this question,  I realized that the key to successfully bridging these two seemingly disparate and contradictory parts of their oncoming lives– that of being an expert researcher and a responsible teacher– is in scrutinizing what it is a researcher does at the most basic level.

One quick step back– why bridge this? What is the purpose of reconsidering their notions about the dual-life of the professional academic? Because higher education sucks right now, it’s been corporatized and teaching and learning has fallen away in favor of celebrity publishing, and it’s creating less capable and less developed student products after four years. But if this new group can bridge the divide and find a way to make teaching quality a personally mandated objective, they can run with this career and positively fuck shit up because they can unify all their powers and become the Superhuman Professor . UPA baby, Unified Power of Attack.

In short, what is a researcher? A person who identifies questions they can’t answer, and seeks answers, and either finds them or proposes (and tests) them.

Q: If we had to categorize a person who tries to learn the answer to something they don’t know, what would that category be?

A: That category is student.

Q: How does a researcher get answers?

A: By teaching themselves.

At the most basic level, a researcher is a teacher: a teacher of the self.  A researcher instructs inwardly, and a teacher instructs outwardly, but both are instructors of things and people, and both are learners of things. That is their relationship, they are not mutually exclusive, and our initial impressions were wrong.

We went slowly. Notes were scribbled. The AC hummed. It came from them, not from me. This is when you really have a room, when you’ve led a group to discover something surprising together, something in contradiction to their starting point.

By the time 12p rolled around I was pretty empty– 3 freakin’ hours is too long for a seminar or workshop of any kind, in my opinion. But the participants were happy and satisfied and I do think they walked away with at least slightly different perspectives on teaching than when they entered our shared space. The whole session was recorded and I hope it turned out well.

I wish them all the luck possible for having chosen to get into what they have– education is a tough field with very few rewards outside of the personal. They’ll be surrounded by materialist pussy weakling coward fucktards who live in so much fear that they spend all their time alive constructing a giant buffer against death by filling their lives with junk things, and junk people with no value outside of distraction from the Great Inevitable. These new educators be criticized for their choice, and even punished for it, by the zombie-controlled system we live in. And as the world continues to move in the darkest of directions, it’ll be increasingly difficult to pursue truth over comfort. Yet it must be done or the world will end tomorrow. Remember, if it doesn’t, it’s because of these guys.

I’m tired for the first time in a couple of weeks. Movie still to come. See you tomorrow.