Negotiating the Paradox: Adjuncts & Writing

• Guilty!

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  31 May 2010 /  awards, research, writing
  My recent posts have ranged over publications and interviews; it seems time to bring this back to me for an embarrassing confession: the common criticisms of adjunct faculty are becoming true about me.

  That is to say, I’ve heard it said/seen it written that adjuncts don’t stay current in their field the way that tenure track faculty do. If we’re playing blame the adjunct, the reasons are a lack of initiative, other interests, a lack of discipline, or just a failure to really be a true scholar. If we’re looking at institutional and structural reasons, we might point to lack of time, lack of institutional support (money, time again, interest), etc. Whatever the causes, I recently realized that I’m guilty.

   

  In graduate school, my scholarship was idiosyncratic at times, as I followed my interests down whatever path seemed appropriate. However, my standards were very high, even exhaustive. I thought little of reading 100 examples of something to make sure my points about it were well-grounded. I also sought out new faculty members with the conscious intent of making sure I knew where my field was going, what the latest research was, and what new theories or methods had emerged. A sense of excitement, even zest, accompanied this scholarship, and at peak times I felt a growing sense of mastery.

   

  Now, my scholarship is exceedingly pragmatic. I research, and regularly, but for functional reasons. When I’m publishing, it is to find something that does what I need for a biography, a review, a study guide. I find what I need, and I stop. I have to, because I have to move on to the next thing, which is often unrelated to the thing I was just on. This rarely feels like my choice, as I’m researching whatever the next course preparation I’ve been given is, or whatever freelance assignment I’ve taken on. As I think about it, I probably do more research than I did in graduate school, and encounter more that’s new— but I do so in a more haphazard fashion. Rather than excitement, I most often feel anxiety, which translates into words as something like “I’ve gotta find this, and now, okay, on to the next.”

   

  My research used to be intrinsic. Now it is, dare I say it, alienated at times? In a round about way, I suspect this makes me a better teacher. This is, after all, how most of my students experience research: as a series of tasks imposed from the outside, tasks that aren’t connected to one another.

  But if you asked me what was new in my field/fields, I wouldn’t know how to answer you. And if I were a department looking to hire a cutting edge scholar, I wouldn’t hire me.

  Can the rest of you adjuncts do so? If so, can you share a few ideas about how you keep your writing focused on that new edge of scholarship?

  Thanks.
  Greg

  Tags: cutting edge, research, scholarship

• 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

• 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

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