Lee Skallerup Bessette – Page 7 – College Ready Writing 1.0

The Academic Essay: Twitter has ruined me

I finished the article I was working on, the one I had put aside because I had missed the deadline. Turns out I was able to submit the paper late. So I’ve been trying to drag the article out of my brain, kicking and screaming for the past four days. I’ve been thinking and reading and researching and outlining the paper for a few months now, but the writing this time around has been the most difficult part. Much more difficult than I am used to. And part of the reason is Twitter.

Part of the reason I had so much trouble is because I could expand, in fact my brain actively resisted and rebelled against expanding, a fairly simply concept (history has been unkind and unfair to Black women) into 2-5 pages of theoretical whatever that I know I need to have to make it an acceptable academic essay. It was so hard. Why, my brain kept insisting, do we have to do this? Why? Is anyone really going to argue with you on this point? I didn’t realize that was my problem until I tweeted that I was having a problem. I thought it was because I was having trouble dealing with the non-linear structure of the narrative. Nope, I was able to tweet out exactly what each part should be and in what order. The problem was I was more comfortable tweeting it out in 140 characters than expanding it to 20-25 pages.

I’m pretty sure Mark Bauerlein would point to this and say “I told you so,” along with a number of other luddites (my husband included). But I have to ask the question, is this really a bad thing? I mean, sure, it’s terrible for my career because you don’t get tenure based on tweets. But looking at the larger picture, is this not an example of thinking differently about how we share our research? Why is the research paper the gold standard? Reducing years of research to a handful of tweets might be a bit extreme, but I really wish sometimes that there were other outlets for my research that were recognized by academia. Outlets that were more accessible and more reasonable in their demands.

I think, however, that Bauerlein might agree with me that the explosion of research publications has made it almost impossible to “keep up” and write a reasonable five pages as an intro or theoretical grounding for your essay. It has lead to the use of a small handful of theorists in everyone’s work, lest we appear we know what we’re talking about (I’m writing on postcolonialism, I quote Spivak). Part of my difficulty also came from the fact that I was completely unsure I had done enough “research” for the opening section, but I knew I knew enough for Twitter. I couldn’t get into the writing because I could give up on the researching and reading.

We keep putting more and research out there and keep demanding more and more research still. It’s beginning to get inhuman. Maybe at the end of the day, that’s what my brain was railing against.

On Deadlines: I’m as bad as my students

I had a deadline yesterday. It was a call for submissions that I came across a few months ago, on otherness and historical fiction. I immediately thought of The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson. It is a book that has following me around for a while now, and this would be the perfect opportunity to finally try and figure out what is going on. I was thinking about how Hopkinson was re-writing or re-inserting the histories of Black women into History. It was due yesterday.

And, I didn’t get it done. I debated asking for an extension, but at the end of the day (actually, it was half-way through the day) I realized that taking the weekend wouldn’t even help this paper be as good as it needed to be. I had almost ten pages and was barely a third of the way through what I wanted to say. The ideas and analysis were finally starting to come together, but it wouldn’t get done on time. So, I gave up, went grocery shopping, and decided that I would take the few days before leaving for Montreal to finish it up.

I’m almost always like this when it comes to submitting papers and answering CFPs: last possible minute, and usually asking for an extension. I’ve talked about deadlines before when it comes to undergraduates, and we know all about how desperately undergraduates plead with us for extensions. Why can’t our students get organized and get their work in on time, we lament. Well, why can’t most of the academics I know do the same?

One of the biggest differences between when our students ask for more time and when we as academics ask for more time is that academics tend to actually use the time to make the paper better. One of the other differences, of course, are the stakes. Most of the time, academics are submitting their work voluntarily; we choose where and what we want to submit, apply for, or participate in. Undergrads choose to come to school, but they don’t choose their deadlines and assignments. One might argue about the stakes as well: which of the two groups face the higher stakes? Undergrads fear failure, lower GPAs, and everything that comes with it. Academics face not meeting tenure requirements. I don’t, but that’s a different story.

I guess, for me, I don’t have the pressure on me. I’m not being graded, I’m not up for tenure, and I know that even though I’ve missed this deadline, I can finish the essay and submit it elsewhere. Now, if this was a book manuscript, it would be entirely different; I was late once with my book manuscript and then had to wait three extra years for its publication. In this case, the stakes are higher if only because other people are dependent on my ability to complete my work on time. That not only makes their jobs more difficult if I’m late, but also could impact my ability to get published in the future (do publishers talk amongst themselves about academics who are incapable of meeting deadlines, naming names?).

But I am also all to aware of all of the pressures academics face, all of the demands on their time, each one professing that it is THE most important deadlines. Between students who expect their work handed back to them instantaneously and administrators who keep coming up with new and bizarre reports and measures that need to be filed and reported yesterday, the pit-falls for professors on the tenure-track are perilous. Even off the tenure-track, I find myself pushing my writing down the list of priorities because other “more important” deadlines keep popping up.

But, I am also a procrastinator par excellence. This isn’t to say that I’m not working; on the contrary, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to write before finally sitting down to write it. But I wait until the last possible minute to start actually writing. Actually, I find that I am starting to write a few seconds past the last possible minute now. I am still learning how it takes me to write something now. You’d think that after an MA and a PhD, a long(ish) list of articles, a book, and a number of book reviews, I’d know how long it takes me to write. But, apparently, I don’t.

As I said in the title, I’m as bad as my students.

Who Speaks for Rural Education?

On Fridays this summer, I’m going to be reposting my writing that has appeared elsewhere on the web. This post originally appeared on So Educated.

In my upper division writing classes, we are talking about the current debates surrounding education reform, as well as dissecting the rhetoric curretly being used in the popular media to shape these debates. In class, we watched trailers for the documentaries Waiting for Superman (see below), Race to Nowhere, and Schooling the World. My students, while interested, saw little of themselves in the situations described by the first two trailers. The third, dealing with the exporting of Western schooling internationally, particularly in poor, rural areas, resonated with them in a way they didn’t really understand.

waitingforsuperman.com

I teach English and writing at a rural state university where the majority of the students come from even smaller surrounding communities. The economy (when there was one) is largely based on argriculture and coal mining. I am in a heart of the Bible Belt as well. My students have come to university with the goal of providing a better life for themselves and their families, to hopefully break the cycle of poverty. These are not students who are over-scheduled and suffering from the pressure of raised expectations. Nor are their failing schools the product of inner-city poverty or unsafe learning environments. Many of my students are caught between two worlds: the traditional one they come from, where hard physical labor, strong family ties, and God are valued above all else, and the more contemporary one they are confronted with when they arrive at university.

This is, admittedly, an entirely new experience for me. It in no way resembles my own experience growing up (middle-class, professional), nor have I taught students with this kind of background before. My experience with non-traditional students has been of the more traditional variety: first-generation, minority students who almost all come from an urban environment. I am, however, committed to helping these students achieve their goals, get an education, and hopefully make a better life for themselves. Hearing about their experiences in high school, however, leaves me wondering if some of them even have a chance.

When politicians and pundits speak about raising standards and educating everyone, they rarely mention those significant parts of the population that do not have access to quality schools because of their isolation and relative poverty. The need is there; Teach for America is hoping to place over 500 teachers in the Mississippi Delta alone. But if you look at the TFA map, the majority of their placements are in urban areas. The best and the brightest are, apparently, not interested in moving to rural, isolated communities. Or, perhaps, the communities are not interested in having them come to teach in their schools.

teachforamerica.org

My university trains and educates the majority of the teachers in our region. Our library, however, has two to three times as many books on issues and challenges in urban and minority K-12 education as they do on rural education. None of the education faculty seem to specialize in issues concerning rural education, either. How are we shaping the future teachers who will be educating the children in the rural areas? What are the challenges unique to rural areas in the United States? Should we be looking beyond our borders to see how other countries have either failed or succeeded at rural education?

I am, as I said before, not an expert. But I hope to learn and share my journey with you. I want to find those voices that I know must exist who speak for rural education. I want to help make those voices heard. I want to educate myself, my students, and the more general public. At the end of the day, I want my students, and subsequently their children, to succeed. My work and writings here on SoEducated.com is one of the ways I am working towards that goal.

Being a More Efficient, Productive Academic II: Thinking About References

I talked in a recent post about adapting our writing for not just different audiences, but different modes and mediums of communicating our research and thinking. What this means, however, is that we as academics need to start re-evaluating how and what we use as sources. In other words, what is acceptable to use as sources and how do we integrate them into our work?

As I was working on adapting some of my blog posts into a longer piece of a more “formal” publication. In my blog posts, I link to other blog posts (written by experts), press releases (from legitimate faculty organizations in higher education), and news stories. I started feeling nervous once I actually started to transfer links into footnotes. Are these sources good enough? Should I be hitting the databases or Google Scholar to essentially pad my essay with more legitimate sources?

Truth be told, I don’t have time. Between my “actual” research and writing, my blogging, my teaching, and my life (yes, I have one of those, too; my family insists on it), I just don’t have time to become a true “expert” in all of the fields that I write about. Again, this is the danger and argued shortcoming of being a “generalist” but I wonder if that’s really fair. I never claimed to be an expert, and through careful online research, I’m able to find what I need to inform my arguments and make my point.

I’m not saying that this essay (if published) should necessarily count towards tenure (not that I’m on the tenure-track), but it does show that I’m engaging in larger discussion about the field and the profession. But, again, as we change how we share our research and thinking, we are going to be forced to really figure out how to integrate these new sources into our own work. And so on and so forth. I keep thinking back to a student’s essay that linked to a number of digital recordings of old blues songs that informed her argument about the book we read. It only worked if I could click on the links she provided. She conceived her paper to be read while listening to the pieces. Except I required that it be handed in as a hard copy.

These are questions I am starting to ask myself as I conceive not only my own research and writing, but assignments for my students. We still prioritize the journal article and the research monograph, but for my students, that isn’t the case. And, really, am I any different? I read journal articles because I believe that is where the best thinking is. I don’t necessarily think that this is going to be true for much longer. If we teach our students to think critically and more broadly about what they use, then why do we necessarily always lead our students to the conclusion that peer-reviewed journal articles are best?

I’m interested in knowing what readers thing: where are “references” going in the future?

Being a More Efficient, Productive Academic while Thinking Differently About What We Produce

There has been a lot of discussion, as we gear up for conference season and meeting our summer research/writing goals, about how to be more efficient or productive. Digiwonk asks if it is, indeed, ok to reuse and recycle your work in higher education. In response, Jo Van Every writes that recycling is, in fact, a wonderful thing, especially if you keep your audience in mind (hmmm…that sounds suspiciously like advice I’ve given my undergrads…). Digiwonk continues with her great advice by showing how much you can accomplish with just 30 minutes of (really focused) time.

But much of the focus on adapting or recycling is based off of more traditional means of communicating our research: changing the conference presentation into an article, public lecture, book chapter, etc… This, unfortunately, doesn’t help me very much, as I no longer write my conference presentation. Yes, that’s right, I don’t try to cram everything I have to say into 8-10 pages for a 20 minutes presentation. I have an idea of what I want to say, some speaking notes, a few important quotes written down, and that’s it. While these presentations are intended to eventually become an article, it’s not as easy to convert a few notes and quotes as it is a more polished conference presentation. But this again has to do with audience; I’m thinking of them sitting through my presentation, not of me later trying to hack out an article.

But I also think that focusing on primarily adapting our conference presentations (or seminar papers or carving up our dissertations or Master’s thesis for articles) doesn’t encompass the rich and varied nature of what many academics produce and write today. For example, I just adapted some of my blog posts for a call for submissions on the state of higher education today. The tone clearly called for a style that was less formal and more conversational, making it an easy (or easier) transition. Again, this may work against me and reflect my (destructive) generalist tendencies, but I’ve worked hard on these blog posts and I’m still old-school, so I get a kick out of seeing my writing in print.

But it goes beyond that. Failed grant applications become the basis for the next grant application which becomes a book proposal. Abstracts that weren’t accepted become the basis for the next project or a place to hold ideas. Today I submitted a book proposal for that project. It was remarkably similar to the “research narrative” I submitted to earn my summer research fellowship. But again, this isn’t old news. And it still relies on old/traditional means of sharing our work and research.

Websites and blogs become incubators and collective spaces for working through problems and ideas. As I work through my Dany Laferrière project, I record my progress and process on my (other) blog. I’m not sure what it will turn into, but I know that it allows me to record my thoughts, observations, and stray ideas as they happen, but it also serves as a way to share not just my research, but the process behind the production of my final project. Maybe it stems from my dissertation research, dealing not only with archival research, but the creative process and collaborative forces participating therein that I am aware of how mysterious the process of creating a piece of work appears to be. But I am also aware of how enriched the process becomes the more people who are involved.

Why not have a blog that reflects our process, our progress, and our questions as it relates to our academic work? Why must we keep thinking in terms of the seminary/presentation/paper/monograph? Check out Sample Reality’s post examining the same ideas: It’s about sharing.

Memories: Old-School Social Media

I was just in Sherbrooke where I did my undergraduate and Master’s degree. I started (wait for it) 15 years ago this fall.

Shudder.

When I started at Sherbrooke, I moved into residence and two important improvements had been made over the summer: networked telephones and high-speed internet access in each room. Previously, if you wanted a phone or internet in your room, you had to pay to get a phone line put in and pay for dial-up access. But our university was known for its engineering and computer programming degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level, and many of the students lived in res. It just made sense.

Keep in mind that at this point, no one owned a cell phone or had high-speed internet access at home. Few people had email addresses, and the internet was in its infancy. My father, in an attempt to entice my brother and I to spend more time at his place, had had dial-up internet access (through AOL) for a few years. He found these things called BBS‘s. I didn’t understand any of it, but he totally geeked out over them.

When I arrived in Sherbrooke, I was assigned an email address (at first, my student ID number – so much for privacy). My friends back home, as well as my mom, all had email addresses through school or work. It was amazing. We could “talk” with one another almost instantaneously. We forwarded endless joke messages to each other and just generally kept in touch with what was going on in our lives. Most of us remember the sound our computer made when we would get email; the university gave us Eudora. Da-da-dum-da-dum.

And then, we discovered ICQ.

The little green flower in the bottom right-hand toolbar that would squeal “Ah-Oh!” when you got a new message and flashed yellow. You knew instantly when one of your friends was online and you could talk to them in real time. Eventually, everyone moved to Windows Messenger (why? Why did we do that? Oh, right, because we all got hotmail accounts), but I won’t ever forget the excitement I felt when I heard the two noises indicating that someone had wanted to “talk” to me through the miracle of the internet.

The network phone (you called one number and each room had its own extension) was coupled with the drastic drop in long distance costs. By my second year, we paid $20 a month for unlimited long distance within Canada. And our phones had a little red light that flashed when you had a message. It didn’t matter what time I came home (and in what condition I was in), I would check for that red light, then check my email and ICQ to see who had said what.

During my degree, I took a course in basic web design, worked on an government intranet newsletter, wrote for a blog before it was called blogging (it started as a listserv newsletter), and had a professor who tried to integrate online discussion boards into his graduate course on Canadian drama. I learned how to first use physical indexes, then CD-ROMs, then online databases to do my research. While I didn’t have the most technical education when it came to social media and learning about how to use the internet, but I was exposed, and exposed myself, to many of the early social media tools.

I was reminded of all this when I stayed in residence while in Sherbrooke this past year. The phones were still there, although probably used much less now that everyone has a cell phone (although you still have things like roaming and long-distance in Canada). Strangely enough, even though there was wireless internet access all over campus, we were limited to a hard line connection in residence. I had brought an iPad, meaning I couldn’t access the internet once I got to my room.

It was actually kinda nice. After spending five years in a res room tethered to my computer (a massive black tower and monitor, then a seemingly 10 pound ThinkPad with a 10 minute battery life), I liked that once I got to my room, it was time to either read a book or go to sleep. I guess I’m just getting old.

Too-Late Advice to Students: Take Pride in Your Work

I was having a conversation on Twitter the other day with a fellow prof who was elbow-deep in grading. She posted: “Oh yes! be proud of what you turned in! Sounds so easy…”

Indeed it does. This is something I tell my students early and often about their work. Yes, we talk about ethos, about the students taking the time they need to write well, how important it is to follow directions, and how they should focus on working smarter, not harder. But if none of these lessons stick, then I have one more way to try and try to get them to take their work seriously: appealing to their sense of pride.

How many of your students, when it comes time to hand in their papers, do so quickly, with averted eyes, often shoving their paper in the middle of the pile as if to hide it, and then quickly retreat to their seats, never daring to engage you? Of course, this is before electronic submissions, but one could imagine the students throwing their hands up and simply pressing send/submit/upload, seconds before the deadline. How many of them hope and pray that their efforts will earn them whatever grade they “need” rather than feeling confident in the work they have submitted?

Pride. Take pride in the work that you do. Come to class to hand in your paper feeling proud of the effort and the results. Know that this was really, truly the best you could do, rather than the best under the often self-inflicted circumstances? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to look your professor in the eyes when you place your paper confidently on the top of the stack? Maybe even throw in a little, “I hope you enjoy it” for good measure? How much more pleasant would your college/educational experience be if every assignment wasn’t fraught with anxiety, doubt, and despair?

This also works with students who have had to face legitimate obstacles during the semester. You might not have earned the A, but you passed, and there is a certain degree of pride you can take from just getting to the finish line. Looking at the stats from my institution, this is no small feat. And before I am accused of indulging in my students’ snow-flakery, I think that students who managed to pass my courses even thought their house burned down, they were arrested, their mother died in a house fire, or their father going into rehab (all documented) deserve to take some solace from the fact that they didn’t flake out. We all have times in our lives where we simply go through the motions because other things have taken over. It’s life, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

It’s something I’m also trying to remember myself this summer as I try to grind out research articles and hopefully the solid beginnings of a book. When I press send on the email submitting my work, I want to know that it was the best I can do, and that I feel good about it, regardless of if it’s accepted or not. Makes resubmitting it elsewhere that much easier, too.

New CRW Summer Feature: Bad Female Academic

Finally.

I have been thinking about this post and summer series for a while now. It fits in well with what I write about both here and for the University of Venus. I was planning on doing these posts on Friday, but it looks like Mondays it is. Makes more sense, as I will have the weekend to write them. Although, over the summer, every day looks a lot the same (take care of kids in the AM, write and research in the PM, rinse, repeat).

What is this weekly feature? Every week, I will look at all the ways I am a Bad Female Academic. Some weeks, it will be about why am I a bad academic more generally, sometimes about how I am a bad female. Other weeks, it will be why I am a bad combination of the two. I specifically want to deal with the ways in which our communities (large and small) try to limit who I am and how I am allowed to view and understand myself. The pressures academia places on me are well-knows, as are larger societal messages about who I am supposed to be as a woman, mother, and wife. When these two worlds collide…

I am inspired by two people in particular: Her Bad Mother and Worst Professor Ever. But unlike Worst Prof (and more like Bad Mother), I tired to leave academia and found myself pulled back in (OK, so once you have kids, you’re pretty much stuck with them, but you get the analogy, right?). In my mind, the work of breaking the stereotypes of what it is to be a “good” mother and a “good” academic (which, in my mind, sounds an awful lot like being a “good girl” – actually, go and listen to the Barenaked Ladies song, you’ll see what I mean). They are chains hanging around our necks and I want to really take a long, hard look at them.

But mostly I’m just tired of all the things I should or shouldn’t be doing, worrying about what everyone else thinks, and just be who I am, which is, apparently, a Bad Female Academic.

Innovative Education for Me, But Not for Thee

Whenever I read Cathy Davidson, I am find myself moving from being inspired and invigorated to very, very depressed. Take her latest, for example, “Going Interactive in a Big Way: How Can We Transform the Lecture Class?” I read it and thought, yes, this is what I want to try and do in my classes! This is, indeed, the future of education! We should be asking our students to think critically about the Internet and electronic medium(s)! Why can’t students take responsibility for their education in my class? Onward and upward over the summer in order to reimagine (yet again) my classes!

And then doubt starts creeping in. I remember all of the requirements and limitations that are imposed on my because I’m teaching general education courses. I remember that I don’t have tenure, nor am I on the tenure-track, so I am in a vulnerable position, making it that much riskier to be daring in how I teach my (supposedly) standard and increasingly standardized courses. I also fear letting go of control of my class, allowing my students more input and control. I fear giving up lecturing, the only way I really know how to teach, after all. And, above all, I fear failing.

I realize that it is a total failure of imagination at this point that I either can’t conceptualize how to make my writing classes more interactive, or I can’t imagine it being successful. Which is total crap because I know that it works. But there is a persistent message about the students that I teach, which is that they aren’t prepared to learn this way or that it doesn’t really benefit them (hence the increasing standardization of the curriculum). They don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t know what they need to know, so it is up to us to preach it to them. But in a writing class, where the goal is to improve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, won’t just about anything do?

Other challenges that I am trying to overcome are that a) the classes are lower-division and b) required. In my mind (and, again, this might be totally false), upper-division classes that the students willingly chose to take are easier to make interactive because the students are more experienced and there because they want to be. Convincing these students to be innovative would appear to be less work. A freshman who has no idea who I am, what college is about, or what to expect (or the wrong idea of what to expect) might not look to kindly on a teacher who walks into class and says, we need to learn how to write, how do you want to do it?

I feel like an old dog. Can I learn and teach these new tricks to my students? And why do I think that my freshmen/sophomore non-traditional/first generation students are any less capable than upper-division students at highly selective colleges? Why am I helping to perpetuate the myth that innovative teaching is only good for the best and the brightest? I want to be braver, and I am ashamed that I am not. I talk a big talk, but when it comes time to walk the walk, I falter. I pat myself for the (minimal) work that I have done, but when confronted with the reality that I am just simply repackaging the same old pedagogical framework, I am left unable to respond.

My students deserve an innovative and non-standardized education as much as anyone else, perhaps more. One of my projects for this summer is figuring out how I can combine the requirements that are imposed on me and my desire to do better for my students. I know it’s going to be a struggle, but I have to try.

Bad Female Academic: Loving Research AND Teaching

It’s no secret that I love to teach. This blog is a testament to how much I love teaching. This is a complex statement to make as a female academic; because of my mother-hen tendencies, I could/can be seen as being too maternal, and thus a less serious “academic” in the broad sense. A good female academic keeps her professional distance and teaches because she has to.

But.

I absolutely and positively adore my research. In fact, as my husband recently pointed out to me, I actually get more satisfaction from being a successful researcher (publications, awards, etc) than I do from being a successful teacher (excellent evaluations, etc). I am so excited to be spending my summer doing research and writing, even though I don’t have to because I am “just” an instructor and only required to teach. I put myself forward and won a summer research fellowship precisely because I have an excellent research portfolio to go along with my teaching success.

Good female academics, especially those off the tenure-track who also happen to be trailing spouses, don’t strive for research excellence; we should be grateful that we have a job with benefits. But good female academics, on or off the tenure track, need to be careful about how successful they are in their research when they teach at primarily undergraduate teaching colleges, like the one I teach at or the one that Dr. Crazy teaches at as well. She herself recently won…something (it’s not entirely clear) that celebrated her research excellence and was (initially) ignored. You can read about it here and here.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the culture in my department, but there is something disturbing about this attitude towards research excellence:

But that doesn’t change the culture of my department. The culture of my department is one in which mediocrity is celebrated, because it’s not threatening, and excellence is downplayed, because it might make people “feel bad.” The culture of my department is such that when you do something great, people act like you did a violence to them, like you’re a “braggart” or that you’re somehow “less than” they are. The prevailing attitude is something along the lines of, “I’m a great teacher because I’m shitty at research. I don’t publish because I’m committed to my students. I don’t have a reputation in my field because I’m so committed to our university.”

There is an assumed conflict between being a good researcher and being a good teacher. Now, Dr. Crazy doesn’t mention this, but one can imagine that it becomes doubly threatening when the young female academic is outpacing her senior male colleagues. Good female academics know their place.

I am not a good female academic. I value my research as much as my teaching, and I’m pretty good at both. I’ll probably never win a national research or teaching award, but I have been recognized as providing good work in my field(s). I am unapologetic in my quest for recognition and the money that goes with it. Politically, this is probably a terrible move, but I think (hope) that it will help my career in the long run.

Because, as I will examine in my next Bad Female Academic post, I am also ambitious.