Resources

I found this very illuminating… and depressing. I haven’t even published yet, and this is a comic for grad students. But I’m getting there.

Go read the whole archive at PhD Comics.

Berkeley has a new study that shows that “the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.”

“Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,” said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.”

Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”

The Washington Post has an interesting article on whether or not people should ignore poverty’s impact. Or at least that’s what the title says.

Should teachers ignore poverty and teach and be held responsible if the students don’t learn? Or should teachers teach and know that poverty is going to have an impact on their students?

One writer said:

Of course, there are teachers who give up far too easily and make excuses. I think of myself as a reasonably hard worker and someone who gives every child my best effort.

But there are fantastic doctors who have patients that die. Is it always the doctor’s fault? Certainly there are patients who will not survive despite a great doctor’s heroic efforts.

Another agrees with that idea, but has a different metaphor:

Imagine a football coach who designs his plays with no regard to the talents of his players, half of whom are on crutches, deaf or blind. And even if they are not so handicapped, if they have no ability to catch or throw a ball, running a pass-oriented West Coast style offense will not work.

Someone else had a very different view:

Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors; it simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.

I think that there can be a middle ground. Don’t give up just because they are in poverty. Those students can learn. But don’t hold the teachers responsible for teaching them everything their parents should have been teaching them for the first six years of their lives either.

Question:
Is it possible that the issue of the brain isn’t poverty so much as it is low stimulation?

I would like to see the study replicated and split the poverty kids into two groups. Have one group where the parents are attending college or clearly doing something to move themselves out of poverty. In the other group they can have whomever. Does that change the picture?

Could it be that the damage is not poverty but the lack of intellectual involvement?

Just a thought.

It comes from the fact that my family was desperately poor when I was younger. Until I was about 10 we often went to bed hungry. But I doubt sincerely that my brain shows any dysfunctions.

For the last year, my college has been offering adjunct certification courses. They are hybrid classes, requiring eight hours of face-to-face time and, supposedly, twenty-four hours online. The adjuncts who take the course receive $500. There is no other institutional incentive to take the class, and a similar class offered two years ago under a different name disappeared into the halls of academia without a lot of fanfare.

Inside Higher Ed had an article in May which discussed a program where adjuncts who completed sixty hours of professional development had their pay per hour go up $33. (That’s almost what I make.) With an additional sixty hours, their rank goes up to “associate faculty.” That would be worth taking the course for! When I am applying for a job, I hear a lot that “adjuncts aren’t good.” (But that’s another post.)

These are thoughts from Joe, a college art teacher for the last fifty years. (Yes, that is 5-0.) All of the thoughts, the words, the wisdom are his and are a reflection of his thinking on our adjunct certification program.

Professional Development- ACP: Summing Up (or I Am What I am)

When the ACP sessions started, the first question was: “Why do you teach?” and since that moment I have turned it inward (not for this program’s ultimate use but for my own). “Why do I teach” is the underlying drive that has made this a worthwhile pursuit and useful tool.

The four sessions were helpful:
A. Creating a Positive Learning Environment, where I wrote essays on: Change Can Be Scary, Effective Teacher, Student Expectations, and The Psychological Environment;
B. Planning for Learning, essays on: Assessment Roles in a Course, Textbook Selection, Core Planning in Consideration, and Significant Learning;
C. Instruction for Learning- Assessment and Evaluation, essays on: Assessment Strategy, Exams, Positive Evaluation Experiences, and Assessments as Motivators; and
D. Instruction for Learning-Teaching Strategies, essays on: Critical Thinking, Techniques to Engage Students, Effective Learning, Active Learning, and The Project That Went Awry.

What was wonderful was the communication and discussions from many points of view from the other members of the program. Probably, though, what was the most helpful to my own teaching was a dialogue with a small selection of the members and my internal dialogue where I replied to myself for myself.

A Beginning:
“May the beauty we love be what we do.” Jumalillal Rumi, 13th century Islamic Mystic poet

To sum up the program, let me divide the program differently than the syllabus, from a personal, internal perspective. I will start with quotes and comments (made upon my observations as they have been saved) on each section that we were asked to comment by the facilitator.

Determined Commitment:
“A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step,” Chinese Proverb.

I begin with a statement: I never get into anything to waste my time. If it is not what I need, I make it so and work my butt off to improve myself and what is done in the venture. I have never said, “That is not in my job description.” My job description is written inside of me, not on a signed contract. Also I do not believe in getting out of a commitment just because it does not fit all that I expected it to be. I make what I expected it to be.

A friend of mine once quoted Kinsey (about the retention of employees): “High performers are like frogs in a wheelbarrow- they can jump out at any time.” That is not my way (although I know in the business world, it is true). I expect myself to be a high performer but not one who jumps out of the wheelbarrow of a program or a job. Hide and Seek is not my favorite game: Sardines is (where if we hide, it is all together). As Rodney King once said, “Can’t we just get along?”

Collect Stuff (Data Gathering):
“Knowledge management is the art of creating value by using the organization’s intellectual capital,” John Lewiston.

The initial commitment was to begin a journal that would encase all the ideas of my own self and the best of others with images that provoke further exploration and comment. The journal became more than a notebook. It was a passion “to find” and “explore”. It became a symbol for the program, and in time it became a model which was to be placed in the library for my students and others to view. What I found though is this truism: “Ability will never catch up with the demand for it,” Malcolm Forbes. The more that I worked on it, wrote essays for it, collected the thoughts of others; the more that it demanded that I find and portray. Therefore, it also became a symbol for teaching: IT NEVER ENDS.

Incubation (Time to Allow the Material to Rattle Around the Corners of the Mind):
“When in trouble, circle the wagons; when in question, search out all answers,” is one of my mantras for working.

Therefore if the facilitator asked me to write three entries, I wrote more; and if she asked for two replies, I wrote until I answered myself (through others). One of my working rules in creative exploration is: “If they give me lined paper, I will write since they asked for it; but I will write across the lines.”

Ah Ha (or Enlightenment):
“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face-to-face with another problem,” Martin Luther King.

What is surprising about this process is that once it was started, it is like rowing with the current. Things just jump into one’s mind and the assembly of images helps to create more ideas that should not go together but do. The latter essays for this ACP program became more than fulfilling any basic minimum; it became an exploration of years of teaching, questioning all the small things that were successful but had not been examined or accessed for years, and arriving at some conclusions that even surprised this teacher of Art Appreciation (the one course where I am free to be flexible while still preparing students to think critically and creatively in any endeavor).

Formulation (Solving Problems and Creating New Ones):
“I am only in competition with that person I know that I can become,” Martha Graham.

The journal was completed by adding forty more pages than the book was originally formatted to hold. The Media Center at the college will laminate each page (so that it lasts viewing over the years to come), rebind it, and place it at the Reserve Desk in Lone Star College-Kingwood’s Library. That same Media Center has created two power point presentations for my students on new material (at least in places new formatting) which were made to my specifications and using my selection of images and my writing. One of the images deals with a subject that a teacher of Russian origin recaptured an idea that became an essay. It was about money. We both agreed that you need it as a vehicle for movement but it is not critical once you have “enough.” The problem with many people is determining “what is enough?”

“Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings,” Carl Sandburg.

Also I formulated that I would confront my students in Art Appreciation early with their choice of my class. When they signed up, they gave us a little of their freedom of choice but still retained their personal freedom to choose the works of art that touched their lives, the way that they expressed their critical thinking, and their own opinions about art (after expressing what society had determined was basic). In the research paper, they were free to find what I had asked them to find in any part of Houston. In the last two papers, they were free to choose the location and how to express what they had learned in the course.

“The right to be left alone- the most comprehensive of rights and the most valued by civilized men,” Louis Brandeis.

Of course, the system is not perfect.
“If only it weren’t for the people always tangled up with the machinery…earth would be an engineer’s paradise,” Kurt Vonnegat.

Mostly, in this ACP Professional Development session, I (we) learned that all the rules, all the suggested systems for working at the profession of education, teaching, that is, must in the end be a personal decision. The ways of teaching from the past must fit the personality of the teacher in the present. The means of stimulating critical thinking and encouraging creative solutions must fit the owner of those tools. If it does not fit, do not wear it. Professional development comes down to an old song lyric:

“Life’s not worth a damn until you can shout, ‘I am what I am!’”

WHEN A TEACHER CAN HONESTLY SHOUT THAT (IN A QUIET VOICE INSIDE TO HIM OR HER SELF) TO THE WORLD, HE OR SHE CAN TAKE ON THE MANTLE OF “PANACHE”.

The ultimate teacher for any human being is him or her self! That is one of the most important lessons for any teacher to teach to his or her students.

An Old Lesson Renewed:
“Old dogs can learn new tricks.”

As I end this program in professional development for teaching and learning, I also come upon a truism that I knew but was fighting against until the pure logic of it made me come face-to-face with its eventuality. At the beginning of this session, I used the image of rowing with the current as the way that a teacher should work. What I missed was: What if I wish to go against the current? To use the critical side of my mind, I must come up with: “Give up the row boat and get a power boat which can easily transverse the waters upstream.” In other words, there are times when a teacher should embrace technology. I knew that. I have been working with that in my own creative, professional work as an artist, but I have been slow to realize and acknowledge that side of my work when I move to teaching. Like money, technology is a vehicle to get from one place to another (as long as you know where you are going). I do drive to the college to teach!

When I used to run an art museum as a director, a good friend who was an old hand at this business told me: “There are at least four ways to cope with a situation that is a disaster:
1) solve it the next time and fix it up this time,
2) give it to an assistant to take from the disaster stage to success (a feather in another’s hat),
3) work your butt off to transform the whole situation and if it remains a disaster
4) walk away and forget it ever happened (except that you make a report to yourself to file away in some obscure filing case, just if you are tempted to do it again).”

When I retired from the museum business in 2001 (have not retired from a 50-year career teaching), I walked away and forgot most of it (although I have extensive files). Therefore there are some courses I do not teach (although I have the credentials to teach them). I find that the system of teaching them and the academic system that supports the teaching of them is an anathma to my best teaching self. Even if superfacially they appear as successes, I know deep down that for me they are “disasters”. Those are the ones that I walk away from and forget. The files are for others who might pick up the work from where I left off.

I now teach one course (at least two sections) that I am more than good at, Art Appreciation, no more, no less. Could I teach others? Yes, but don’t! I totally understand Suzette’s walking away from one course that does not fit her idea of “exceptional teaching.” I love now being an “adjunct professor”; I was a “full” one for years. It is like Donna Brazile being an “adjunct” at Georgetown University while she is also involved in Democratic politics and a commentator for CNN. As an adjunct, you are free to choose.

I also do not stand on a railroad track when a “disaster” train is coming.

This is from the adjunct certification course and is one of Joe’s comments.

James Evans in Science’s abstract

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

That last statement, with my bolding, is the one that I think is especially interesting. Do we reach consensus more quickly because we can quickly skim through work? Or have we always looked at past and present scholarship to found our opinions and not to change them?

I think it is quite likely that last.

I have been working on a topic that I have only recently overcome the emotional impact associated with it. As I have begun to look on the net for where my conversation might be placed, I tend to ignore those which go in a different direction. I think that was true when I first began studying the topic in print as well.

If they don’t match my direction, I leave them out. However, it is easier now to find those works which clearly lead into my topic. That may be why people do less citation.

Alltop.com’s education category has dozens of good blogs on multiple topics within education. I’ve been reading there for a couple of weeks and this blog has been added there this week.

If you are interested in reading in education, Alltop is a good place to get information. They even let you customize the page according to your interests. If you aren’t interested in reading a particular feed, you can hit “hide” and the next time you come back, it won’t show up in your queue to read.

I am not quite sure what I am going to do about blogs I already subscribe too. I don’t want to read through them on Alltop, but unless they are big blogs, I don’t want to hide them either.

I have found a lot of interesting information there.

Full-time college teaching has become an undervalued resource in the United States.

Cost to Students
A new study shows that first year students are more likely to drop out if they are taught by adjuncts.

That is not just a cost to the students; it is also a cost to the colleges in terms of retention, which is a rate that they are judged on. Apparently, though, it is not sufficiently an issue to begin to hire more full-timers.

Those at community colleges who don’t drop out are less likely to transfer to a four-year school.

Since this is not something that community colleges typically track, it doesn’t matter to their bottom line. If they did track it, or someone did, it would matter more.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, students were much more likely to drop out if the high stakes courses (like freshman English, in which an A is required for nursing) were taught by adjuncts.

If we want an educated populace, then it seems that we ought to hire full-time teachers who are teachers first to educate and care for the students in the gatekeeper courses.

The Journal of Higher Education looked specifically at community colleges and found that those with high percentages of adjuncts had lower percentages of students completing school.

Possible future cost to colleges:

Again, since they don’t track this, it is not an issue for community colleges. If USA Today or US News & World Report published this information, disseminating it to the public, then it would become an issue.

Regression analysis indicates that graduation rates for public community colleges in the United States are adversely affected when institutions rely heavily upon part-time faculty instruction. Negative effects may be partially offset if the use of part-time faculty increases the net faculty resource available per student. However, the evidence suggests that this offset is insufficient to reverse negative effects upon graduation rates.

I wonder if the community colleges have someone who keeps up with this kind of information. It seems like if this became more known, people would stop going to community colleges until they hired more full-time faculty. Of course, for those to whom price is the biggest issue, this is not true.

Over the past three decades, one of the most significant changes in the delivery of postsecondary education involves the dramatic increase in the use of contingent or part-time faculty. The pattern is particularly pronounced at community colleges, where part-time faculty provide virtually half of all instruction.

I hate to break it to him, but part-time faculty at my college provide three-quarters of the… Okay, maybe not. Three-quarters of the faculty are adjuncts, but until two years ago, adjuncts were only allowed to teach five courses a year- which is half of what a full-timer can teach. However, two years ago, this was increased to three courses a semester. Now part-timers can teach nine a year while full-timers teach ten a year. Most part-timers teach seven a year. So with 3/4s of the faculty being part-timers and the ration of 7:10… Adjuncts teach 52% of the classes at CC1.

And the number of adjuncts has increased while the percentage of full-time faculty has dropped. In 1970 78% of faculty was full-time. In 2005, the percentage dropped to 52. That’s a 26% drop in 35 years. By the time I retire, if the trend keeps going, only 35% of the faculty will be full-time.

Why is this happening?

Why is full-time teaching decreasing while part-time is increasing?

The bottom line, of course, is cost. If my CC hired me full-time, I would be making $57K a year and they would be having to pay basically $114K for the privilege (with taxes and health care). Part-time, they pay me and another like me $22K. And they don’t have to pay health care for me. So their cost for a “full-time equivalent” is $33K. They can hire six adjuncts who teach more than three times as many classes, for the price of hiring me full-time.

But the cost wouldn’t matter if the public were not going to schools with high levels of adjuncts or if accrediting institutions considered the percentage of adjuncts.

Transparency coming?

New America reports that the government is considering requiring transparency in number of adjuncts at a college. The colleges, of course, are resisting this. It’s not that they don’t know how many they hire. They do. They just don’t want the general public to know.

As of now, accrediting institutions rarely require any sort of definition of part-time faculty, leaving that to the institution, and do not require that schools follow any rules about hiring, evaluating, or maintaining part-time faculty. It’s not an issue to the accrediting agencies, so it isn’t to the schools.

Tightly Wound has a true story of being asked to listen to a VP candidate speak on research. The candidate presented a timely discussion of how research ought to be handled in a poor economy. After his talk, through which many of the faculty slept, he was attacked by people for things he didn’t say. And one woman was upset by his use of the word “guys,” since that is clearly gendered language.

Digital Book: The Wild, Wild Wiki

Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom by two English teachers.

Wiki: Romantic Audience Project

Wiki: Romantic Audience Project 2

Using Wikis in the Classroom from Hamline University

For example, …a Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook (Barton, 2006) that share different aspects of learning to write in college: the composing process, writing different types of writing, editing, writing in different disciplinary areas, etc. These students were motivated to share their experiences with first-year college writing courses because they knew that future students would benefit from insights on how to grapple with the challenges of learning to write in college. And, given the challenge of college students deciding on courses to take, students at Brown University created a wiki for providing reviews of different course in a school or college, as did (caw.wikispaces.com).
…
To help students adopt a critical stance related to considering what or how to revise a wiki, you may model question-asking responses to a wiki text to determine necessary revisions:

- “What is the text trying to say or do?”

- “Who is the intended audience?”

- “What descriptions or concepts that are not clear?”

- “What revisions would serve to clarify these descriptions or concepts?”

- “What points are being made and is their sufficient evidence or support for those points?”

- “What additional information is needed to provide needed evidence or support?”
…
How Do I Set Up A Wiki For My Classroom?

How can you set up a wiki for your classroom? There are a lot of different wiki hosting sites available for you use (@ = Wiki hosting). Tim Stahmer (2006) describes three different options for setting up wikis that range from free, uncomplicated to more commercial, complicated options:

Free “wiki farms.” The first option consists of what are described as free wiki hosting sites or “wiki farms” that are easy to set up, although they may have advertising and have limited features, sites such as Wikicities (www.wikicities.com), WikiSpaces (www.wikispaces.com), PBWiki (http://pbwiki.com), JotSpot (jot.com), UseMod (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl), or WritingWiki, Wikispaces, Seekwiki, Project Forum (projectforum.com/pf/), EditMe, TikiWiki, (tikiwiki.org/), PMWiki.org, or WetPaint.

One of the most popular of these options is PBWiki given its ease of use, one reason we selected it to use for this book’s resource site.
…
Students could also reflect on the often-challenging process of engaging in collaborative work. Ferris & Wilder (2006) suggest some questions related to issues of ownership and authorship tied to traditional print based texts:
*How does it feel to have the part(s) of the story you worked on changed?
*Who “owns” the story?
*How do you make changes while respecting the efforts of your co-authors?
*How do you justify the changes you want over the changes your co-authors want?
*How do you negotiate final changes and/or disputes over how the story should be changed?

Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook could easily be used as a textbook if the class had access to computers immediately. And they could edit it as they went along, finding ideas that worked well and others that didn’t.

I edited it while I was looking at it. I thought I could add something useful to the discussion.