Negotiating the Paradox: Adjuncts & Writing

• Adjuncts and Grading Writing

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  30 Mar 2010 /  adjuncts, grading, teaching, time management
  One of the factors defining academic writing, and distinguishing it from writing in the rest of the world, is that it is graded. Grading is an area of ongoing debate in academia, especially grading writing. Do a search on grading and you’ll find discussions of methods, criteria, standards—as well as a steady string of anti-plagiarism screeds and the occasional wincing humorous (or is it “humorous”?) essay on student bloopers and accidental self-exposure. Grading is time-consuming, exhausting, and marked by student resistance in particularly vivid ways.

  One of the more complicated and under-examined aspects of the swamp that is grading is how it is changing as adjuncts make up an increasingly larger percentage of academics. This change shows up in multiple areas.

  I teach for more than one school, and each school wants to serve its students well. However, what “well” means varies according to context. What’s more, several of the schools also want to help their adjuncts teach well, and several of them want uniformity across the curriculum. In practice, this means providing things like rubrics to help adjuncts grade.

  That’s all well and good, but it is another place where good intentions lead…well, let’s just say elsewhere. I’ll focus on rubrics as an example. Each school that I teach for that provides rubrics provides two things: flawed rubrics and standards I don’t completely believe in. Both are understandable. It’s hard to imagine a perfect grading rubric, and it’s equally unlikely that your basic cranky and opinionated composition instructor (me) would agree fully with anyone else’s standards. However…there’s also a third factor in place, and a fourth, and a fifth, and maybe more.

  The third factor is that the rubrics I’m using aren’t just imperfect (that’s the nature of reality). They are someone else’s imperfection, to the point where there are items on the grading scale I don’t understand. My rule of thumb is, if I don’t understand it, my students likely don’t understand it.

  The fourth factor is that these rubrics come from different sources at the different schools, and those sources are often a) collective, b) unknown, and c) likely to change over time. In practice, this means that there is no one to ask if I don’t understand a rubric I’ve been given in most instances, because those handing it on don’t know how it was produced, or know who wrote it but that person is gone, etc.

  The fifth factor is that only one of the schools I teach for (Baker College) has been willing to pay for the time needed for the adjuncts to grade as a group and achieve some degree of uniformity. That means that in practice, even clearly articulated rubrics that I think I understand vary wildly in application. (For example, I’ve been told to fail students for 1 plagiarized line and to not deduct points for anything below 16 percent plagiarism…by administrators in the same school. I’ve also had another administrator tell me that an A in spelling and mechanics meant a paper was excellent, and a B meant it was good, C average and so on…but when I quantified that, I was told that 40 spelling errors wouldn’t lower the grade below A in that category. )

  Taken together, the result is grading writing that is inorganic to the instructor and more time-consuming than allowing adjuncts to generate their own rubrics. It creates the side effects of control (fear of failure, a sense of being watched) without any of the raised quality or uniformity it is intended to produce. It is also, quite frankly, a model of wretched scholarship. These rubrics are written by…someone. Somewhere. They appear and are to be applied, like Wikipedia entries, but with the power to distort your GPA.

  Don’t get me wrong. I had tenured faculty do a wretched job of grading my writing on both the undergraduate and graduate level. Some of those experiences are legendary. But those standards and experiences were not institutionally imposed. They were the result of quirky faculty members.

  This new structure of writing grading creates a kind of weary and bureaucratic hypocrisy for the adjuncts who grade writing.

  Tags: Baker College, grading, Greg Beatty, writing

• Two Writers, One Adjunct, Two Lessons, One Lesson?

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  23 Mar 2010 /  time management
  I received a brief and surprising email today. The first surprise was that the email arrived at all. You see, I’d emailed Elizabeth Strout, whose complex and often lovely novel in stories Olive Kitteridge. (If you haven’t read Olive Kitteridge, I highly suggest it. There’s a reason it won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.) I’d contacted her to see if she was interested in being interviewed for this blog, since she had published a number of short stories while teaching as an adjunct at Manhattan Community College (and being a wife and mother).

  The second surprise was that Ms. Strout managed to turn down my request for an interview graciously: she expressed gratitude for being asked, but indicated that her work schedule was “too strict” to take part in such an interview at present. 

  In between classes today, I visited a number of humor sites, for a much needed break. I also visited a blog for freelance writers, the Renegade Writer blog. There I read a post from Linda Formichelli, a nonfiction writer who is a bit of a name as a professional nonfiction writer. She’s published half a dozen books, and regularly writes for magazines such as Wired and Family Circle.

  Today’s post discussed Ms. Formichelli’s recently commitment to cutting back her writing time while maintaining her income, so that she could spend more time with her young (one-year-old) son. She did this in part through stopping her visits to an online writers’ forum (which she found too addictive), as well as stopping her visits to…some of the online humor sites I’d visited today. Hmm.

  To be fair, eliminating her Web habits weren’t the only changes she made. Formichelli also recruited help in changing her habits and increasing her level of focus (from her husband and a writing buddy). However, the synchronicity of the two writers made for a message even I couldn’t miss, dense though I may be.

  Having young children—as Formichelli does, and Strout did—is one of the more universally acknowledged ways to disrupt both your focus and control over your time. New York, where Strout lives—is a city seemingly designed to seduce one away from plans with its explosion of temptation, and I can’t imagine living there on adjunct wages. (Ye gods!). That said, Strout managed to make major strides towards being a writer who would win top prizes in American literature while still an adjunct, while Formichelli managed to cut her work week back markedly while maintaining her income…at a time when the magazine publishing world is imploding.

  I therefore thank Elizabeth Strout for turning down my request. I’d rather have another page written on her next book than an interview with her—and her lesson for adjuncts is as clear as any one could want. Adjuncts can write. Adjuncts can write great things—if they take control of their schedule. And though she’s a freelancer rather than an adjunct, Linda Formichelli would agree.

  Tags: adjunct, Elizabeth Strout, freelance, Greg Beatty, Linda Formichelli, Manhattan Community College, Olive Kitteridge, Renegade Writer, time use, writing

• Instead of Tenure…?

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  02 Mar 2010 /  adjuncts, tenure, writing
  In between these actual posts about writing and adjuncts, the subject is always simmering in the back of my mind. What is the relationship? What should the relationship be? How does one affect the other? What is the place of tenure in this equation?

  Some gloriously impractical ideas for posts bubble up, pop, and, thankfully (trust me on this one) evaporate, leaving only the faint scent of l’eau de brainstorm behind. However, some leave traces that might be useful; I’ll offer them up and we’ll see.

  The stated purpose of tenure is protection of academic freedom: professors who have proven their worth as scholars and/or teachers have shown earn job security. As a result, they are free to pursue their research wherever their training, conscience, and creativity may lead them. The image this ideal evokes is of the solitary thinker, standing up for what he or she thinks is right, speaking out and speaking up, despite the overt disapproval of the administration, whose hands are tied, and even of the surrounding community. This vision of tenure fits with the best elements of the ivory tower: protected and above it all, in order to see more clearly.

  Tenure can also be viewed as a form of cultural capital, a stamp of social approval that is given to some but not all. This imprimatur amplifies the individual’s voice, giving his or her positions greater weight, silencing some critics and making others at least listen to one’s positions. In this tenure enables your writing more efficacy. Finally, tenure gives stability. It requires a time investment from the faculty, and, once acquired, tends to anchor faculty in place. This is fraught with potential negatives, but it has the benefit of creating a fairly stable identity for the school.

  Adjuncts lack these (closely related) qualities. Not only are controversial opinions not protected, they are actively at risk. The most recent adjunct contract I signed indicated that the school in question “reserves the right to withdraw or cancel any course for any reason that it, at its sole discretion, deems appropriate.”

  So…instead of tenure, what options would protect academic freedom? What could be done to give adjuncts’ writing more weight and power? (We’ll leave aside the issue of a school’s stable identity for now. It interests me greatly, but isn’t really the subject of this blog.)

  One suggestion put forth for high school teachers is simply getting rid of tenure all together (and paying more money) This works to make the system less stable (in good ways—it can get rid of bad teachers), but to be frank, won’t help most adjuncts at all. It would ask schools to spontaneously pay them more…with no reason. We already work for cheap.

  Another option is writing under a pen name. The practice has a long history, and an honorable one. It’s already pretty common in academia, where folks like Thomas H. Benton write for publications as influential and mainstream as The Chronicle of Higher Education under pen names. Doing so takes care of protection and the academic freedom, and even adds the allure of being a secret rebel, but removes the power of the tenured pen.

  A third option is simply to ignore the administration/school. The people who might get mad about your writing are waaay too busy to keep tabs on you. Write whatever the heck you want. They won’t know unless someone brings it to their attention. And then you’re one screwed adjunct. This works for an unfortunately undefined time, which will be much longer if you’re working in non-controversial areas. It also works only for the academic freedom element of tenure, and does nothing to provide cultural capital.

  A fourth option requires political involvement/some negotiation. To be more specific, adjuncts can push for colleges to spell out the reasons they might be discharged (rather than making contracts at will), push for full year contracts, push for monetary compensation for all publications, and so on. Doing so may blow away the remnants of collegiality from the working relationships and expose it for the labor situation it is, but hey. It’s rarely comfortable to analyze things too close to home, but it is useful, and any gains won here would protect academic freedom for adjuncts far more than it is protected now.

  I find this avenue of thought useful, and I hope you do too; I’ll be returning to it in future posts, with more possibilities.

  Tags: adjuncts, alternatives, Greg Beatty, tenure, The Chronicle of Higher Education, writing

• More Than One Way to Skin a Cat…

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  23 Feb 2010 /  adjuncts, publishing, writing
  A lot of us laboring in the academic salt mines of adjunctdom tend to just keep grinding on, either content with our lot or hoping things will improve on their own. The identity of teacher/professor can be almost hermetically sealed, or close enough that we forget there are options, even options that will allow us to a) stay intimately involved with higher education, b) write, and c) get paid better than we do now (and maybe even gain a bit more control).

  This week I’m talking with someone who has found one of those alternatives. John Soares was kind enough to answer a few questions for me on the topics of adjunct faculty and writing. John was an adjunct faculty member for several years, then left it for a career writing textbook supplements.

  GB: Do you still teach anywhere as an adjunct?

  John Soares: I last taught college in the summer of 1994—two sections of American government for Butte College in Chico, California.

  If not, may I ask why?

  There are many reasons. The two most important are freedom and money. Once I stopped teaching college and became a full-time freelancer, I had a lot more freedom to set my schedule and go where I wanted. Teaching tied me to Chico most of the time.

  I also make much more money on an hourly basis writing college textbook supplements (instructor’s manuals, study guides, test questions, lecture outlines, etc) than I did teaching, especially when you factor in all the lecture prep, grading, and traveling to and from the college that teaching requires.

  I also like having my livelihood directly under my own control and determined by my own efforts and talents. While I personally had relatively few problems getting the classes I wanted at Butte College (and Shasta College in Redding), I saw that many other adjuncts had difficulties. Also, when I began teaching at the college level, my goal was a full-time community college teaching position. But the longer I taught, the more I realized that was unlikely to happen.

  If not, do you miss it?

  I definitely miss it. I truly enjoyed being in the classroom and helping young people understand the world better and hone their critical thinking skills. To me, teaching is an intellectual challenge that also requires strong interpersonal skills, and I miss that mix, that interaction.

  How long did it take you to build your career as a writer of college textbook supplements?

  In 1992 I got my first supplement assignment, a 1600-question test bank for a new American government textbook that paid $4000. (By comparison, I was getting $1500 to teach a three-unit poli-sci course.) I was already making some money from the first hiking guide I wrote, and also from some outdoors and travel pieces for magazines and newspapers.

  By 1994 I felt I could make more money if I focused all my energy on writing. I did make more money for the first couple of years, but I hit a couple of slow patches in the latter part of the 1990s after I moved to Kauai in Hawaii. Initially I only worked on political science projects, primarily American government, but also some international relations and comparative politics. Given the nature of college textbook publishing cycles, there are definitely times when there is little or no work.

  By 1997 I expanded into new academic disciplines, including history and geography and the sciences. I also improved my marketing and communication skills, which, along with the expansion of disciplines, brought me to a middle-class income by 1999.

  I know you do other writing, especially on hiking and outdoor activities. How does that fit with the supplement writing?

  Although I do some blogging and marketing to keep the modest royalties coming from my two hiking guides (and to keep them in print), my main focus now is creating information products. My first was the e-book Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market. And I just completed my second information product: Maximum Productivity for Freelance Writers: Manage Your Time, Make More Money, and Get More Enjoyment from Life. I’m currently working on an audio book for Maximum Productivity for Freelance Writers, and in the spring I’ll begin teaching workshops on the same topic. I also have several other information products I’ll be creating in the coming months, most centered around the launch of what will become my flagship website:

  I still do some textbook supplement projects. I’m currently working on test questions for study materials created by a nonprofit with a government grant, and I continue to do projects for Prentice Hall/Pearson Education and Cengage Learning.

  Any advice for adjuncts about writing?

  Freelance writing can be a very good way for an adjunct to pay the bills. As we all know, adjuncts typically don’t make much money, at least compared to what full-time instructors make.

  Writing textbook supplements and ancillaries is the easiest field for most adjuncts to enter since they already have the background knowledge for the work. The pay, however, can vary substantially. With one exception, I haven’t made less than $50 per hour since 2000, and I often make in the $100 per-hour range. However, I’m a fast and experienced writer, and I’m good at negotiating pay rates. Some textbook supplement projects will pay far less than that.

  Whether you write textbook supplements or enter another field, you must specialize if you want to be paid well. Look for companies or industries that need specific types of writing and approach them with your services.

  Some generalists do make decent money, but most don’t.

  John Soares has written over 200 college textbook supplements since 1992. He is the author of Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market and Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers: Manage Your Time, Make More Money, and Get More Enjoyment from Life. He also writes the “Writing College Textbook Supplements” blog and the “Intelligent Productivity For Freelance Writers” blog.

  Tags: freelance writing, Greg Beatty, John Soares, textbook supplements

• Be the Voice of the Irritated Edge!

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  27 Jan 2010 /  writing
  In his recent (2009) book Designing the Smart Organization author Roland Deiser primarily focuses on learning in the corporate environment. In fact, one of his starting points is the claim that traditional models of education (such as those that happen in classrooms) are too limited in both scope and definition. He overstates his case a bit—he seems to be working with a slightly aged straw man at times, and not looking at the numerous educational initiatives focusing on team work, new technologies, applications in the world, etc.—but his book is still quite useful in several ways.

  First, it looks at how education can be reconceived to address numerous arenas that are indeed too often shorted, such as ethical action and incorporating learning into corporate growth and strategies. These are useful, and the attempts made by institutions as different as the U. S. Army and Novartis to learn in more functional ways are exciting in themselves. For the most part, however, they aren’t directly applicable to the work of adjunct faculty (though they are to those who hire and manage them); we are too loosely connected to our institutions, too far from the strategic core, and work with a population who will by definition be moving on.

  However, Deiser made several points about the shifting nature of learning that do apply to adjuncts, and that will apply in an even more focused fashion as higher education becomes more corporate. First, he points out that businesses function less in isolation and more as part of a supply network that is often international. This applies to higher education on the literal level: more students are attending more than one institution than ever before. It can also apply to the adjunct writer. We can use this in our pedagogy and our politics: we can use students as sources of information about other institutions, which empowers them and teaches us. We can also use this in our scholarship. We have in our classrooms every day students new to college and well-versed, students new to online and cyber veterans, and students home grown in our institutions, transferring in, and just visiting. This provides raw material for any number of essays and studies, and could be extended to analyses of how different institutions use resources they share (such as Turnitin.com, which is used very differently by different schools).

  Second, Deiser details ways in which standardized learning is falling short. Adjuncts could build on this in to ways: by documenting how increasing standardized curriculum falls fails to serve higher education’s corporate masters (ahem), and by writing pedagogical articles on the dubious challenge of working with standardized curriculums.

  Third, Deiser points out that, “Learning requires irritation, so the major task is to provide the right irritation…” and that in the contemporary environment, institutional growth and innovation is most likely to happen at the periphery. This is where adjuncts live: on the irritated edge of higher education. On a visceral level, we know what changes are pushing up against higher education. Long before our administrators do, we know about new sources of plagiarism, new trends in student-student communication, new writing habits born of video games and chat rooms. We know about the inappropriate irritations, in which students can’t register for this or can’t get an answer for that because of the institution’s rules. We know what new sources need to be evaluated as credible or not.

  We already respond to these trends as teachers. We need to do so as writers as well. Write for Wikipedia. (I’ve got a great short lesson I use in my composition classes about how the Wikipedia entry on me is flawed and shouldn’t be used as a source that I use in composition classes.) Write for students, to legislatures. Design research assignments writing proposals to change the things that irritate them, have them submit those proposals, and document the changes. Help them analyze how Microsoft’s grammar checker works—and write articles about it. Work with a content mill, write academic articles about the process, and so on.

  Tags: Greg Beatty, research, Roland Deiser, Turnitin.com, writing

• Writing and Time

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  19 Jan 2010 /  publishing, time management, writing
  If you’re an adjunct, scrambling to make ends meet, how do you find time to write? Well, if you look Jill Carroll’s advice on time management for adjuncts in The Chronicle from 2001 , you’ll see all kinds of solid tips…and no mention of writing. Well, that’s not quite true: the word “writing” shows up in the biographical note on Carroll at the bottom. Since Carroll is an adjunct who manages to publish, this suggests that time management tips may free up time to write.

  This is no surprise. In fact, that’s old news…to writers, anyway. Anyone who wants to freelance, or to write creatively, must either let the grass go uncut, get good at time management, or both, in order to find time. For many of us, though, the time isn’t enough. Unlike, say, someone working in an office or with a set schedule, adjuncts find their schedules shifting around. I know one of my biggest frustrations is with the X factors in grading. I’m thinking in particular here of the student or project that blows up: plagiarism, combined with grade appeals, pleas over X (visas, illness, etc.), that leads to more time spent on one problem student than the entire rest of the class. It’s easy enough to plan what to do, but some institutions have requirements that fight time management. As one easy example, the institutions for which I teach require that all student emails be answered within 24 hours. One student sent 96 lengthy emails over grades, plagiarism, and emotional distress. I could group some of my answers, but that’s still quite a number, and hard to schedule.

  Again, this too is no surprise, either in academia or outside of it. In Born Digital, their recent study of the recent generation who grew up online, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser note that one of the defining characteristics of our age is “information overload.” They argue that previous generations suffered from an information deficit, and were continually seeking more information to enable them to make better decisions. We, on the other hand, need new skills: we must learn to sort, or even triage, the flood of data washing over us every day. This is producing new techniques for time management. David Allen touts his Getting Things Done system as designed for these new challenges.

  Some people are generating alternatives. I’ve tried workshops by life coaches (with limited success), and others are now doing online writing coaching specifically for academics. What’s striking about this pitch for the Academic Writing Club is how it blends the tone of an infomercial with extreme rationalization: The cost per day is spelled out.

  If hiring someone to keep you writing and help you get the tools you need to do so seems too strange, consider the tactics suggested by Palfrey and Gasser—use filters, as often as possible—or by Dan Poynter, an longtime freelance writing teacher: use a clock or timer. Break your project into component parts, estimate how long each will take, set the clock and force yourself to work. Other freelance writers I know take more severe versions of these steps, such as blocking themselves from addictive websites until a writing project is done.

  Though the focus was different, this discussion reminds me of a book by one of my professors when I was an undergraduate, Evan Watkins’ Work Time. I’m also struck again by how much things have changed related to writing, even in my brief time in academia. Throughout graduate school, the message was strongly communicated that taking one’s time on writing was a good thing—acceptable, even desirable. There was a sense that good scholarship took time.

  Now, I not only find myself pressing in the opposite direction—what can I get done as fast as possible—but also continually calculate the expense of an action. In that I am no different from the folks at the Academic Writing Club (I sound like I’m about to say, in the best infomercial fashion, “I’m not only the president, I’m also a client!”). In that I must state the obvious: being an adjunct has taken all the liberal arts out of being an English teacher. It’s made it rational, goal oriented, and time bound. The core idea there—that liberal arts are freeing—seems to have been reversed. As an adjunct, time is my master, and my writing its…victim? Monster?

  Tags: Born Digital, Dan Poynter, David Allen, Getting Things Done, Greg Beatty, Jill Carroll, The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Ch-ch-changes…

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  12 Jan 2010 /  publishing, time management, writing
  Recently I had two experiences that made me realize how much I’d changed, and how much things have changed. (Stay with me—this really is about adjuncts and writing.)

  Both of these experiences came when interacting with one of the schools for whom I’m an adjunct.

  Experience #1 came when working on a course design for the school, which provides standardized course materials for its online courses. I agreed to revise a literature course for them, only to learn that I had to work with their newly established Course Development Process, which included required two hour “teleconferences” (phone calls).

  I was baffled as to exactly what these conferences were for. It turned out to be a multi-person reviewing process, in which everyone had to follow along as the person running the meeting reviewed my course materials, made a few minor comments, and then signed off on them. Let me be clear: a few small areas of the course were improved. Let me be clearer still: that was not the primary purpose of the call, which was CYA, as everyone ritually agreed to the work. And let me clearest yet: we had different agendas. All of the other people on the call were on salary, and so if the phone call took an hour (which it did, thankfully), or two, they were paid the same. As an adjunct, though, and a freelancer, an extra hour spent farting around in a meeting was an hour I wasn’t getting paid for work somewhere else.

  When I first started writing academic works, I did so to learn, and for the joy of it. Now, after so long as an adjunct and freelancer, those seem…insufficient. As does that word.

  Experience #2 came from the same school. I was invited to write articles on my area of expertise that would be shared with the whole school. These articles were intended both to build community and to help raise the level of professional discourse. I did such things when I was first working as an adjunct. I wrote up handouts, contributed to lists, etc. Now, though, I felt vaguely like I was being scammed.

  I don’t think that traditional academics in tenured positions feel this, though I’ve known any number who felt too busy, or like it wasn’t the best use of their time. However, it wasn’t the unpaid nature of the writing they objected to, it was the specific focus: they thought their time was better spent writing formal articles in their discipline than articles for the general community.

  I did not set out to change my attitude toward writing and the academic community. I set out to pay the rent. But change happened, all the same…

  Tags: academic writing, course development, Greg Beatty, time management

• Dipping in to the Research

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  04 Jan 2010 /  adjuncts, research, teaching
  One of the things that struck me when I started working on this blog was how little research had been done into the great sea change of academic labor that is using adjuncts instead of tenure-track faculty. However, little research is not no research, and this week I went looking for studies related to adjuncts and writing.

  I was fortunate enough to locate papers by Jeffrey Klausman, who has been Writing Program Administrator at Whatcom Community College  since 2007. Klausman had presented a paper on the role of adjunct faculty in writing programs at the 2009 TYCA-PNW and another on the same topic at CCCCs. An article on the subject is scheduled for publication in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Klausman and was gracious enough to both share a copy of the paper with me and to answer a few questions about his research.

  As is often the case with discussions of pedagogy, Klausman starts his study with a brief contextualizing narrative. Interestingly, this account includes a mention that when he began his research, Klausman found “almost nothing” on how depending on adjunct faculty affects writing programs.

  To address this, and to give himself tools for his new position as administrator of a writing program (at a community college depending heavily on adjuncts), Klausman began his own research on the subject. He developed a survey (using Survey Monkey) to review adjunct attitudes on their relationship to writing programs. The survey covered a fairly wide range of factors, such as how much voice adjuncts should have on curriculum and if the administrator of their writing program valued adjuncts.

  When I asked him why he started with the attitudes, rather than other places (such as, for example, affects on student learning, Klausman indicated it was to deal with specific issues he’d faced, namely difficulty implementing changes in his own program due to resistance from the adjuncts. (This resonates well with my experience as an adjunct.)

  His initial findings were useful but not overly surprising: adjuncts wanted an equal voice in developing programs, wanted to be respected, and enjoyed their work, but found the conditions under which they worked to be the main obstacles to improving that work. More interesting were the results of the follow up interviews Klausman did to address seemingly contradictory responses to one area of the initial survey: that adjuncts reported feeling respected but undervalued at the same time. These interviews exposed that adjuncts often have little or no say in the writing programs they teach for, and little or no loyalty as a result—but that those who do feel loyal and respected.

  This seems to arise not from agreement or disagreement with the program’s actual decisions or from clashes with individual administrators, but rather from institutional structures and attitudes: adjuncts who were invited to play full roles in programs often did so, while adjuncts who were treated as disposable labor…felt like it.

  While the survey and interviews focused on adjunct writing faculty, and on their relations to writing programs, in this case, I have to suspect the results would apply to other disciplines as well. Is there, I have to ask, anything specific about adjuncts teaching writing—or do working conditions trump all? I’ll keep looking.

  In the meantime, thank you, Dr. Klausman. I’ll be looking for your future work.

  Tags: CCCCs, Greg Beatty, Jeffrey Klausman, research, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Whatcom Community College

• A First Look at Lore and Bits

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  21 Dec 2009 /  professional development, teaching
  Part of what I’ve been doing in this blog is noodling around the questions of how adjunct writers’ circumstances affect their writing (and writing teaching), and, by implication, to what extend adjuncts are working in special circumstances.

  Well, here’s one answer to that last question: Bedford /St. Martin’s thinks that adjuncts work in different circumstances. At least, that’s the implication in their online publication Lore. Interestingly, Lore is “a journal for adjunct and graduate student teachers of writing” but it is “edited by TAs, adjuncts, and assistant professors.” I’m tempted to hare off down the “What, no senior faculty need help teaching writing?” trail, but truth be told, comparatively few of them teach writing courses that this is probably simple realism on Bedford St. Martin’s part. So, start with what this dedication implies: graduate students and adjuncts are classed together. It suggests they may also need the most help, and perhaps that they’re the ones doing the composition instruction. (It’s certainly the case at all schools I’ve been associated with.)

  What, then, is Lore, why does it exist, and what does it do? The history of Lore can be found in A Journal Built Around Lore” by Nick Carbone. There Carbone reviewed Lore’s initial history in 2001-2004, as well as a 2009 special issue. Since then, Lorehas become part of Bedford St. Martin’s Bits, a multi-author blog providing advice on teaching composition. (That this new blog still acknowledges the role of the adjunct in composition can be seen in the fact that the blog includes Adjunct Advice from Gregory Zobel.)

  The idea behind Lore—creating a “journal built around lore”— is an intriguing one. On one hand, it represents a kind of theoretical and perhaps political breakthrough: scholarship focusing on pedagogy is undervalued, and so emphasizing it challenges that. The day-to-day elements of teaching that show up in lore is highly situated, and valorized personal experience: both of these depend on relatively recent theoretical structures to be considered worthy of academic writing. On the other hand, my cynical side suggests that Lore may simply have not been necessary until now—that it is a product of the fragmenting academic workplace. (It is definitely a sign of a changing academic workplace, both in the fact it is electronic and in being associated with a publisher.)

  My speculations aside, Lore is highly useful. Victoria Sandbrook, who is blog manager at Bedford St. Martin’s, indicated that the site’s getting a lot of traffic, and that folks are staying long enough to indicate that they’re reading, not just bouncing in and away. The publication’s being cited, and people are linking/referring to it.

  I’m going to take a simpler approach and claim that Lore and Bitsare both useful as personal testimony. I set out to simply sample the various blogs of Bits—and found myself taking notes for assignments and handouts. Some of the blogs won’t be useful for me, but others, including those I initially dismissed, will be. The best example is Barclay Barrios and his tips on teaching composition. I’ve been teaching writing for around 20 years now, and was highly skeptical that I’d learn anything.

  I was very wrong. The post from 11/6, on guiding students through paragraph organization through a formula, was immediately useful. I’ll tinker with it, but I’ll be applying it…within the week. What’s more, the idea behind the tip led me to consider if I could create similar heuristics for any other areas where students regularly face challenges.

  Some of the tips are pretty pedestrian, but they’d all be useful for the graduate student portion of the audience: new teachers need tips on even the basics. As to what might make this applicable to adjunct instructors primarily, or especially, it would have to be the brief tip format. These pedagogical nuggets can be read in a few minutes and applied immediately, anywhere in any course. You don’t have to have a lot of time to introduce a theoretical frame—you don’t even have to have control of your own course design. In that, Bitsis even more useful than Lore itself. Lore’sarticles and forums provide considerable useful perspective on being an adjunct, but they aren’t as immediately applicable as Bits. Taken together, though, very useful. Thanks, Bedford St. Martin’s.

  Tags: Bedford St. Martin's, Bits, Greg Beatty, Greg Zobel, Lore, Nick Carbone, teaching tips, Victoria Sandbrook

• Updates, Links, and Two Sour Grapes

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  14 Dec 2009 /  teaching, time management, writing
  Blogging is a lot like teaching. You start with one project, and then you add another and another, until you’re juggling one more topic than you can track, and you hope that whoever is watching is enjoying the show, or at least paying attention.

  Along those lines, some follow-ups on earlier topics. First, I’ve touched on adjuncts working in the law; those interested in this field might look into the Legal Writing Institute’s upcoming workshop for adjuncts on December 4, 2009 (in both Chicago and New York).

  Second, still no word about the results of the adjunct writing faculty survey. I’m expanding my net.

  Third, and more locally, the adjunct writing conference I reported on earlier continues to bear fruit: faculty are more involved in discussing curriculum at Baker College, and there’s more discussion related to how to improve writing than before. On a related note, other schools who use adjunct faculty extensively have been having such conferences for a longer time. Consider University of Maryland University College (UMUC), who regularly hires adjuncts for online, domestic, and overseas positions. They have had several years of annual summer conferences on writing. You can find a brochure here, and a discussion of the experience here. I’ll also note that this last discussion is found in UMUC’s DE Oracle, an ezine dedicated to instructional quality. Yes, lots of schools have them; this one seems more genuinely committed.

  And now, the grapes.

  Sour grape #1 is standard for academics for hundreds of years: This has been a hard week as far as the relationship between grading student writing and completing my own. This week I had to deal with a complaint from a student that her paper wasn’t that heavily plagiarized, and so shouldn’t get so low a grade, a complaint from a second student that she didn’t know what she was doing wrong…that let me know she couldn’t find my comments on her paper, and a complaint from a third that I had corrected too many grammar errors on his paper and not told him how he could make his writing clearer. (Oh, the irony.) All this came while my own writing projects sat untouched on the shelf…

  Sour grape #2, is standard for adjuncts right now, and a great example of the elephant in the corner. I’m serving on a committee for one of the schools I teach for. It’s a paid gig, which is good, and it allows me access to some of the planning discussions, which is useful if disturbing. In the most recent discussion, one issue that was raised was how to make our students better writers. Another was how to retain more students through the introductory course sequence.

  I was literally speechless at the time, because the school in question has been raising class sizes. The introductory course sequence used to be insulated from this, and so have fewer students in those classes. Not any more. What’s more, the course design process puts a cap on the maximum number of pages students are asked to write, and forces a specific design on assignments, often producing bad and confusing assignments. The school has also been pushing instructors to treat the first instances of plagiarism as accidental. Finally, the school has become more arbitrary in scheduling, making it harder for adjuncts to know if and when they’re teaching.

  I was left saying “Bad and rigid assignments…free passes on plagiarism…much larger classes…scared teachers entering classes with only a little notice…and you want to know what we can do to help students write?”

   

  Oh, the humanity.

  Tags: blogging, Greg Beatty, Legal Writing Institute, University of Maryland University College, workshops

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