October 2009

Elves in Anglo-Saxon England by Alaric Hall.

I am trying to decide whether to 1-click it or ask for it for Christmas.

I’ve mentioned before that adjuncts are in the position women were in forty years ago. We have to be twice as good to get half the credit.

…the idea that if someone hasn’t made it into the full-time ranks it must be because there is something wrong with him or her. “We are not part of the actual family here,” he says. “It is like we are servants.”

Feeling unimportant, says Mr. Knapp, comes with a price. “There is no incentive to give 100 percent,” he says. “Mediocrity is built into the system.”

from the Chronicle article on adjuncts at Oakton

Adjuncts feel disconnected at many, perhaps most, colleges. My article for the FORUM is on that topic. And today there is an article in the Chronicle on that very topic.

The school sounds very similar to CC1, with 3x as many adjuncts as full-time faculty. We have 300+ adjuncts to 110 full-timers, though, so there are fewer of us. And we have 2 offices available to us instead of 25.

Their lack of connection to full-time faculty members and to what goes on at the college outside the classroom poses a crucial problem, they say, not just for them but for the institution and its 10,766 students.
…
“There is a whole social and professional interaction that goes on in the faculty world that ignores adjuncts,” says Lawrence E. Marks, who has been a part-time teacher of psychology and global studies at Oakton for seven years. “I don’t have any chance to struggle with the faculty over what’s right or wrong in the classroom. The ultimate benefit of that is for the students.”
…
Adjuncts are paid to teach, and many work at several institutions, which leaves them little time or inclination to get very involved at any of them. But that poses an increasing problem as part-time adjuncts now make up about 50 percent of the professoriate nationwide. That means that half of the nation’s college instructors may not feel much of a connection to the campuses where they teach.

There are things that can be done about this. One of my campuses works hard to make the adjunct faculty feel like they are a part of the faculty there. It depends on the full-time faculty more than anything else. And I would guess that when you are outnumbered 3 to 1, you just don’t have the time to get to know the part-timers.

At a recent conference, I told someone I was an adjunct and watched her physically lean back in her seat. She didn’t leave the table—I was sitting with her friends—but she certainly disengaged from any part in my conversation.

When I later mentioned to a colleague sitting beside her that I have a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University, she said, “Oh really?” in a bright and happy voice and leaned toward me, putting her elbows on the table to propel her body forward.

She didn’t ask me any other questions, so the change in attitude didn’t seem to have been about Purdue or their program, but rather about my legitimacy. She apparently thought I couldn’t be a serious scholar as an adjunct.

She may be right about that. Scholarship is difficult, when teaching is the primary focus of work and an overload must be carried simply to achieve financial independence.

Teaching Business Writing as a business was an idea I used back in 1991 when I was first teaching the course on my own. But I just saw an article at Questia which very much talks about the kinds of things I covered.

The following questions will be addressed: (a) What are the advantages of using a business structure in the classroom? (b) What are the purposes of discussing ethics in the classroom? (c) What is an effective design for a classroom business? (d) What methodology can be used to implement the activity? (e) Why is it necessary to assess outcomes? (f) What are results of the exercise?

Baylor has “Teaching Business Ethics: A Faculty Seminar Model” online.

A survey of AACSB member schools found that “teaching of business ethics is indiscriminate, unorganized, and undisciplined in most North American schools of business,” according to Solberg, Strong, and McGuire (1995); the authors argue for a practical, discovery-based approach to ethics coverage in business schools. Using an example of this approach, McQueeney (2006) employs ethical dilemmas that balance ethical imperatives with the drive for profit. Some academicians hold that failing to teach ethics tells students that ethics is not important enough to be included (Etzioni, 1989; Piper, 1993; Parks, 1993; Fulmer, 2005). The inference is that the “head in the sand” approach will result not in a neutral message, but in a negative message, concerning the place in ethics training in business school curricula and programs.

For future reference…

Discriminations has an excellent post on the correlation between academic performance and race.

CCTE is a great small conference. Last year there were around 100 people at the conference. There has traditionally been a high acceptance rate in literature and creative writing, with a lower acceptance rate in rhetoric. However, there was mention of expanding the rhetoric sections.

This year’s meeting will be in Beaumont, TX. I know it’s not a tourist area, but it is a nice little town.

If you’ve been wanting to get into conferences, here’s a good place to try your hand at a presentation.

CCTE welcomes scholarly papers, creative writing, and panel proposals in all areas of literature and language, including linguistics and language studies, as well as the teaching of these areas. Papers and panel proposals in teaching writing, ESL, developmental writing, and the virtual classroom are also welcome. CCTE accepts only submissions that have not been read or published elsewhere.

All submissions are due October 28, 2009. Please follow these guidelines for all conference submissions:

E-mail submissions only to the appropriate session chair (see list below)
Timed presentations only: 9-10 double-spaced pages (15-18 minute reading time)
Full conference paper preferred but 500-word abstract accepted for initial consideration
Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction: must be complete when submitted
Panel Proposals: must include a full abstract or paper from each panel member. Each abstract or paper will be accepted or rejected individually.
Presenters who do not pay dues by November 30 will be removed from the program.
All abstracts, papers, creative writing, and panel proposals MUST be submitted with two cover pages: one with the presenter’s name, academic affiliation (or independent scholar), mailing address, telephone, and email address; and a second with only the title of the presentation. That is, the actual abstract, paper, creative writing, or panel proposal should include its title but NO writer identification of any kind on any of its pages.
Consideration for an award (listed below) or for publication in CCTE Studies requires submission of completed paper to the appropriate chair by February 1, 2010.
Chairs:

Literature, Film, Popular Culture: Gwen Whitehead gwen.whitehead@lsco.edu

Rhetoric, Composition, Technical Writing, Language Studies: Kathleen Mollick kmollick@Tarleton.edu

Creative Writing, Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction: Arch Mayfield mayfield@wbu.edu

Gordon, A. (2005) Terrorism as an academic subject after 9/11: Searching the internet reveals a Stockholm Syndrome trend. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 28(1), 45-59. Retrieved October 3, 2009, from the PsycINFO database.

One of my students reported on this article for her annotation. From her annotation, “The general view of the context of this reaction creates the impression that the terrorists succeeded in creating the kind of behavior characterized as the Stockholm Syndrome.”

I haven’t read the study yet, but I find it fascinating.

What does it have to do with teaching English? I guess it is something interesting learned during WAC/WID classes.

Recently I have been to several conferences (big surprise to regular readers!) and have been asked for business cards. My last business cards were very much part of my homeschool ethos and not appropriate for an academic in higher education, so I do not hand them out.

But I realized I have a conference next week and the week after and wanted to have business cards made.

Then as an adjunct I had to decide what to put on them.

I ended up with
my name centered in the top 1/3 followed by ,PhD (My husband said since I was an adjunct he thought it was important to include that information.)
with the title Adjunct Professor (This is the actual title at one of my schools.)
English, Business, & Writing under that (areas of teaching)

Then I had the logos for the two schools at which I teach and my email for both of those schools, left and right, starting about 1/2 way down the card.

The final line is my cell phone number. I don’t have an office phone number and we are considering getting rid of our land line. Hopefully I won’t give my card to any crazy people. I don’t usually give my cell phone number out to people I don’t know well. Oy vay.

But, I think it is important to have business cards, even though many people don’t like them.

I have them and I am looking forward to handing them out.

One other idea: I was given a business card at a conference where the giver works at only one college, so it was easy to have extra space. She used the bottom third of the card to list her research interests. I think this is a great idea. It’s just I don’t want to have a list that looks like this:
political rhetoric
science fiction and fantasy
business writing
technology in the composition classroom
mental health
trauma in the composition classroom
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gulliver’s Travels
religion
vampires
Old English Judith
teaching pedagogy
literature introductions
…

I would need a whole sheet of 8×10 paper to list my research interests and it would just confuse people. So I left that off.

But if you have a single school and address and are looking for some useful information to add, I recommend research interests.

Business card thumbnail is from MattCutts.com.