No Experts at Home

It seems awfully unfair, and certainly frustrating. They just won't let you be an expert at home. Sometimes environments won't accept expertise that is too close to the problem.

In an academic environment, everybody is an expert. Everybody. At something. That's how we got here. But there are some kinds of light that just has to be used very carefully. And that is the expertise about how to do our jobs - as guides for our students, as professional educators, and as scholars and artists.

The university academic environment is so different from other educational worlds - the K-12 world and the corporate training world, for example. Those results-focused employments are constructed for maximum effectiveness. That educational structure is fed by intensive research on obtaining clear goals and measurable outcomes. Expertise is drawn from wherever it may be found, within and outside the unit.

The university environment is different. It is not so very far conceptually from 11th-Century Bologna when a collection of individual law teachers formed a guild so they could share resources and expertise. The teachers employed the administrators. (Let me repeat: the teachers employed the administrators.) The autonomy of scholars today descends from that tradition of independent experts and scholars collaborating voluntarily on matters of common - and unique - interest.

The key here is "independent experts." Today's academic department is a collaboration of independent scholars, who are in fact expected to advance their scholarship and scholarly production through their own focused interests. And they are selected for employment by the way that their work fits in with those who would employ them. Today, the faculty do not hire the administrators, but neither are administrators "the boss." And the faculty do select their colleagues in most cases.

So everybody is an expert, and there is no structured hierarchy of experts. Academic departments are flat organizations with a single, often elected, member to assume the organizational responsibilities of leadership. While he or she may make decisions regarding the distribution of resources, rarely are they "the boss." Advancement has only two or three levels and is colleagially awarded. Everything else is broad-based and incremental. In general. Some environments do find ways to encourage and reward focused activity for interested scholars, and it can engender some collegial unhappiness if not carefully managed. There are some variations and exceptions, but at the core, the individual faculty member is employed as an independent expert collaborating with other independent experts.

What happens then, when one needs expert advice on the work of the department or the faculty? Experts are brought in. From where? From similar departments elsewhere. One expert here will go there, and perhaps one from there eventually will go here to evaluate and advise on the work of the faculty and their collective efforts.

Some advice may be found locally outside of the department, advice being more welcome from the neighbors, and from resource centers. But advice from an expert on the work of faculty may be welcome at home among departmental colleagues only when solicited. And only as much as solicited. They do know that you know something and will ask you for it when it would be welcome. The complicated academic relationship with authority so complicates our working and personal relationships. But I wouldn't trade it.

College standards - again

The heat is on again regarding college study requirements. Another study has been done showing that college students are not studying, reading and writing as much as they used to, and they are getting better grades. Among the debates was an interesting discussion on Tom Ashbrook's On Point last week or so. Responses attributed the result to the standard grade inflation argument, the use of student evaluations for faculty promotion and tenure, and the suggestion that the push before college was more intense than college itself .

I don't know what to think. The humanities faculty have been saying this as long as I've been associated with higher education, and that's been a couple of generations now. About the only thing I can see that is real about it is that the expectation is B level for average now. It doesn't give you much room to reward excellence. I know that's true in my courses. If a student is consistently at C level I pay closer attention to him or her. Usually, for students below that level life just gets in the way - illness, family deaths, family conflicts, commutes, work requirements, transportation issues. I make offers to help or accommodate them, rarely with any takers. Sometimes students really don't want to do any more work than to pass. But it's kind of been that way for quite a while. I do know that I'm getting better writing from more students, so the push in the schools for that seems to be working. But that's really the only change I see.

My approach to education was formed in the ed classes I took in the early 1970s. It was a world of examining what you do TO students in educating them, and their right to utter freedom from the oppression of forced learning practice. What I learned was to put it out there, help students understand why it was important to learn it, but leave it entirely up to them. No hard feelings. Forty years later, the paradigm is actively interventionist, and we're attacked if students aren't learning whether they want to or not.

So it's possible I can appear not to care if my students learn. I don't have an authoritarian classroom, but I tend to rely on some pretty traditional techniques - lecture, presentations, readings, discussion, a little group discussion, lots of projects, and a couple of traditional mostly essay exams. The work itself isn't difficult - you just have to do it. Students have complete access to everything in the class -and more- on Blackboard, but mostly only the best students take advantage of it. But I do care - I just want to treat them like adults: here it is. The choices are yours. I'm here to help, but it's really up to you.

What I fail to understand is that I can hand out the exam and discuss the answers in the class before, and still get miserable and inadequate responses. It's frustrating, and when I started teaching I took it personally, but I know better now. They're measuring their trade-offs and accepting the result. In the larger scale of life, that particular lapse really won't matter much.

I really can't say much. I'll admit that I had to start college twice to get it right. After a required stint in the military, I learned to treat study as a job to be done, and it really was pretty easy at the undergraduate level with that attitude, even if I was working a paying job nearly full-time. Since I now have several degrees, I obviously got the system down. I think the good students do get the system down. I think the less good students may be working the system. But that's okay at the undergrad level. It's their choice and their money. It's just life.

Scenemaker
February 11, 2011

Back in the swing

The pressure ramps up a bit now. In the face of classes, committees, and incomplete projects, the drawings have to be ready for a build by Friday. Oh, and the shop wants the paint, too. I just learned about some new furniture requirements that came out of a rehearsal. When I went without a design assignment last semester, why did I feel left out?

The creative process of developing and working through a design is gratifying. It has its frustrations, its moments when no idea seems to rise to art. Two full days of looking at pictures and sketching and reading and more sketching is not uncommon. I joke about whether "this is the time when they find out what a fraud I really am." But if it doesn't take that time, I don't trust it. And, if the answer is crisp and apt and a little surprising, it always seems to merit a response of "well, of course." I've hit the mark. Although I won't really know until I've introduced it to the director. A good director always has much to say, which prompts many changes and I return to the worktable. But the nugget is there, and the dialogue strengthens it and makes it all integral.

The struggle with my current project was to integrate the backgrounds of various scenes and two different shows into one construction. In this case, I have to drive the aesthetic. Normally, I prefer not to design for student productions, but when they can't identify a student designer that can even begin to handle the project, I feel I must take it on. Where I work, almost all students want to be stars, and that's what attracted them to program. I can't find a great deal of fault with that. I, too, started that way. I studied acting and directing and taught it for several years before finding my way into design when I had to design for my own productions. The day came when I found I could get more gratifying results from my design efforts than from my directing. And then I worked with some excellent directors. I discovered that the work of being an outstanding director required an investment and a skill set that I was less interested in developing than the satisfactions of doing good design and lighting. So I returned to school for my third degree.

As my professional life has grown in length, I have found rich satisfactions from the range of experiences. I try to pass on to students an excitement for their future and the many paths that can open before them. I'm often glad that I don't teach in a graduate program where I might have more students with more concentration and ability, but where I probably would find my own activities to be too focused.

Scenemaker
February 8, 2011