teaching

You are currently browsing articles tagged teaching.

Academia: Potential Career Vs. Expensive Hobby

November 30, 2013 in Academia | 11 comments

I’ve been thinking recently about where my time and energy get spent, and what I get out of these expenditures. I’m fortunate in that I have a partner who supports me while I’m in my third year on the job market and my second year adjuncting, so I really am in a position of getting to teach because I love it, not because I need to do it to support my household. And yet… there is some cognitive dissonance surrounding this issue.

In a guest post at Conditionally Accepted, I wrote about the difference between valuing my experiences adjunct teaching based on internal vs. external criteria. I find myself returning to that dilemma now, but from a slightly different angle.

Basically, if I’m teaching because I love it, and if I’m uncertain that I’ll ever get hired to do it full-time, does that make it a hobby? Or if I continue to have the mindset that I developed in (hell, before) grad school that working hard enough will eventually net me a job, does my adjuncting become a stepping stone to a full-time career? What are the consequences of either mind-set, for me personally, and for my investment in these options?

Looking at the way I’ve been approaching adjuncting (in the hopes of it turning into a full-time career), it’s difficult not to liken my lived experience of it to a hobby. A very, very expensive hobby. Even if I’m only going to two or three conferences a year, assuming that they’ll be out of state and hence in the $1K-ish range each, that’s still a big chunk of the paycheck that already isn’t enough to support me. Factor in the cost of materials for research, even if it’s mostly books and stuff, and gas money to get to the library, and print articles, and such… and academia – the really involved kind, with publishing and presenting in addition to teaching – can cost a lot of money and time.

For comparison’s sake, I also spend a lot of money and time on my dancing. That one’s also somewhere between a hobby and a career, as I can sometimes swing paying gigs as a teacher and performer. But maybe because I didn’t go into dancing with the expectation of being able to make it a career it doesn’t bother me as much. It’s not like my dance teachers from Day 1 primed me to expect a career in the field if I would just work hard, be persistent, and be very good at what I do.

I wonder if I should be looking at my time in academia more along the lines of the way I look at dancing: something I enjoy doing, something that helps me connect with others, something that lets me teach and help along students while also expressing myself. I really do feel that my dancing contributes something to my community, if only by example (by conveying positive messages about body image, about making art accessible to everyone, stuff like that). I don’t expect to support myself solely by dancing; maybe I would feel less stressed and icky about academia if I didn’t expect to support myself doing it. That’ll no doubt require some more mental work on my end, though, as I definitely went into academia with the intention to make it a full-time career.

I could write more, but I’ll wrap this up. It’s a busy time of year, and if I spend more time thinking about where my energy’s going than actually going out and doing things with that energy, then I’ve likely got something wrong.

Tags: ,

Teaching Relevance

August 31, 2013 in Education, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

The first week of classes has passed, and I find myself excited that my students are excited. And I think I figured out one major reason they’re excited – I spent a lot of time in the first day of both my classes emphasizing the relevance of what we’d be learning this semester.

In my folklore class, I made sure to talk about preconceptions about folklore, which people tend to associate with quaint, old-timey things. Of course I gave my students some updated definitions of folklore (folklore as expressive culture, as artistic communication in small groups, as creativity in everyday life), and in our discussion, they seemed intrigued by the fact that we’d be studying contemporary communities alongside the historical dimensions of folklore in the Midwest (which is the topic of the course).

In my gender studies class, I spoke about how our culture gives people crummy and/or incomplete models for understanding, communicating about, and analyzing relationships. You can blame Hollywood (I do, in part) or other areas of the media, or the patriarchy, or any number of the things, but the fact remains: we don’t learn good relationship communication skills. And part of the reason I’m teaching this class on monogamous and non-monogamous relationships is to fix that. Yes, we’ll study things that seem exotic by some counts (marriage in other cultures, same-sex relationships, polyamory and swinging, sex work, etc.) but the point is to start a dialogue about the diversity of human relationships as scholars … and maybe also get some take-home pointers about communication and consent and all that good stuff.

The other factor here, in my humble opinion, is that I was really excited on the first day of both classes too. I think that came through when I spoke to my students, and asked their opinions, and got them involved in discussions. I care about the topics I’m teaching, which must help in some fashion… but I think relevance is a major factor as well. I think a good teacher can and should make any topic relevant to the lives of her students. Some topics might require a greater stretch than others, sure, but relevance has been on my mind lately, and since I was pleased to find it a positive force in both my classes, I thought I would mention it here while also scrambling to come up with a good topic for my 2nd post of the month before the month trickles away from me.

Relevance. I dig it. More thoughts on this later, perhaps.

Tags:

Everyone Knows About Folklore! (except for when you don’t)

March 31, 2013 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

As promised, here’s my second post of the month. Hopefully I can continue to publish two posts per month, and perhaps even increase the number as time goes on.

Since I’ve spent the last few days revising a chapter of my dissertation into an article to submit for publication – which involved changing all the citations from MLA to Chicago style, and multiple other tedious rearrangements – I’m going to just write this pots in prose. No citations. Feel free to ask for them in comments if you’re curious.

While I was having a fabulous time at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, I noticed a trend: people tend to discuss folklore (the topic) as though they know as much about it as someone who has academic training in folklore (the discipline). One of the most obvious manifestations of this was people who mixed up the names of folk narrative genres, like legend and fairy tale and myth, without regard to how they’re used in our discipline. And trust me, we use them quite precisely, distinguishing between their content, contexts, forms, and functions (among other characteristics).

I get that some of these genre terms have entered English vernacular with various meanings (“myth” being one of the most pernicious examples of this phenomenon), but I’d expect scholars to do a bit more research, and use their terminology with more intention and precision. And I get that folkloristics is a small, less-known discipline, so people don’t immediately think to look up our scholarship as examples of how to use genre terms with utmost precision. These are all factors, to be sure.

However, I think there’s something else going on too: I think that we folklorists, in our efforts to reach out to students and colleagues and the general public, have mistakenly placed an emphasis on how folklore is for everyone. If we all know folklore – which we all do, even if we don’t think of it in those terms – then we’re all, in some sense, folklore experts. We’re all the folk after all, right? (to quote my beloved mentor, Alan Dundes) So if we’re all the folk, we all know about folklore, and we all have the right to talk and write about it, right?

Sorta.

On the one hand, I’ve found emphasizing that everyone knows and performs folklore to be an incredibly useful strategy while  teaching folklore classes. Once my students know that folklore encompasses all the expressive culture and artistic communication of a given group, and that it’s not just myths and fairy tales, they respond enthusiastically to my in-class discussion prompts. They can rattle off jokes, folkspeech/slang, holiday customs, family stories, personal narratives, folk medicine, and more. All of which is wonderful to witness.

But on the other hand, perhaps we as professional folklorists are mistakenly giving the impression that once a person can identify folklore in her life, she automatically knows enough about it to present or publish about it. Perhaps this is related to the ethnographic impulse in our discipline, where we urge people to describe texts of folklore and  relate them to their life and cultural contexts. That’s definitely part of what we want out of folklore scholarship, and if laypeople can get that far, that’s worthwhile, right? But there’s a line between description and analysis, and perhaps that line is getting muddled somewhere.

I’m not sure how we can rectify this misunderstanding, and I suspect that there are deeper cultural forces at work here (such as the dichotomous relationship between orality and literacy and attendant values). I don’t know whether I’m willing to give up the powerful teaching tool that “everyone knows folklore!” has turned out to be, though I’m thoroughly annoyed by every instance where someone (whether a layperson or academic) doesn’t bother to look up our field’s research when referring to our field’s topics.

Suggestions or comments welcome, from folklorists as well as everyone else.

(for what it’s worth, I don’t intend this post to send a negative message to scholars who don’t have a folklore background but are actively interested in working on folklore topics… please just keep in mind that our discipline has a long history – the American Folklore Society was founded before the American Anthropological Association, for instance – and if you really want to do a good job of working with folklore materials, your research must include folkloristic approaches to the topic… and feel free to ask your local folklorist for research suggestions, most of us are happy to help!)

Tags: , ,

Digital Humanities Lecture in India

January 12, 2012 in Digital Humanities | 2 comments

The details are yet to be finalized, but I am supposed to give a lecture on the digital humanities at a university in India next month. I am excited and frantically trying to figure out how to organize said lecture–where to start and where to go?

First, as far as I can tell, the digital humanities (DH from here out) haven’t made much of an impact in India. This could be an infrastructure issue, or a scholarly communication issue; I’m not sure yet. The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) has a Ph.D. program in Exact Humanities, which seems to encompass DH. There’s a conference on Digital Libraries. The Centre for Internet & Society has brought in a DH lecturer at least once. The technology to make DH a scholarly reality certainly exists, as seen in this Chronicle report on a high-tech plan to cheat on entrance exams.

Second, how do I introduce DH to an audience (graduate students in a folklore/anthropology program) that probably hasn’t heard much about it yet? I’m open to suggestions, but so far I’m planning on starting with a bit of the field’s history, such as Father Busa’s founding role, and other historical tidbits from A Companion to Digital Humanities. I’d like to cover some of the main tools used in DH, as well as some of the main topics DHers tend to be concerned with. It’s hard to narrow down (especially as these topics overlap) but so far I know I’ll be covering:

  • Text analysis – starting with concordances, lists, simple statistics; I met Aditi Muralidharan at DH 2011 and was really impressed with Wordseer, so I’ll probably mention the “beautiful” in Shakespeare example (relevant to my own research on beauty in fairy tales)
  • Network analysis – I’m abjectly grateful for Scott Weingart’s Demystifying Networks! I am not a very math-y person except when it comes to pattern recognition, so I generally need these sorts of things broken down in plain language, which Scott does quite well; I might also mention the work of Franco Moretti and Elijah Meeks (I think Moretti’s Shakespeare examples from the Stanford Literary Lab’s pamphlets are clear enough to mention briefly in a lecture, and I like Meeks’s defense of visualizations as “self-contained arguments about the structure and makeup of particular objects” plus the TV Tropes examples are pure fun)
  • Visualizations – some of the network discussion will bleed into the visualization discussion; as another example, I just discovered Wordle and think it would be great for making visualizations of narrative folklore texts
  • Mapping & spatial technologies – I’ll mention some GIS stuff, and probably go into details about Tim Tangherlini‘s mapping work in folklore and literature, such as his map of Ibsen’s travels (I’m more interested in his Danish folktale stuff, but can’t get full access to the maps, which I could’ve sworn were online last year)
  • Archives – online archives are an exciting possibility for those of us whose work has ethnographic and historical dimensions, but they also come with consent and ethical issues (as well as bureaucratic ones depending on your country’s or institution’s policy on research involving human subjects); I’m still trying to decide which example to use in my talk, but I’ll be sure to mention accessibility and usability issues (such as user-interface, graphics display, and so on)
  • Museums – here I’ll discuss some of the work of Jason Baird Jackson from IU (my home institution), such as the online Ethnology project of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
  • Digital publishing – one of the formats DHers are struggling to get recognized for tenure and promotion requirements; digital publishing is also being touted as a novel way to convey material, such as David Shorter‘s “web cuaderno” documenting Yoeme culture
  • Open access – obviously a big issue in DH and politics at large; who owns our ideas, our software, our journals? Who gets access (for what price) to not only our books and articles, but also our research methods, teaching materials, and other “gray matter”? I will mention some OA journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, though my audience for this talk may be more interested in the Indian Folklore Research Journal and Folklore and Folkloristics
  • Collaboration – another hot topic in DH due to the multidiscplinarity that prevails; it might be interesting to discuss different models for collaboration (such as the lab set-up vs. a handful of individuals who decide to work together without infrastructure)

I will cover the first three (text analysis, network analysis, & visualizations) more extensively in a later lecture on my dissertation research on gender and the body in West European fairy tales, as I made use of all these methods to supplement traditional folkloristic analysis. I’m aware of some gaps in the list too; for example, my knowledge of programming is weak, thus I don’t have a lot to say about it yet, other than “find someone to collaborate with who has the skills you lack.” I’m totally open to ideas, though, should someone  take pity on me.

Some of the resources I plan on drawing on, and referring my audience to, include:

Finally, I’m really concerned not only about accessibility issues (mentioned above), but also relevance. Many of my audience members study indigenous populations of India and the world, hence things like Google Ngrams (super-exciting to English lit types) might not thrill them. By using Western examples since they’re largely what I’m familiar with, am I participating in a kind of scholarly colonialism? How can I address my lecture to the needs of the “institutionally subaltern” as Matthew K. Gold puts it in his Whose Revolution? Towards a More Equitable Digital Humanities? How can I conscientiously talk about how great THATCamps and the NEH Summer Institutes are to people who may never get funding to make it to one? (heck, I’d like to make it to those too someday!)

These issues appear pretty daunting to manage in just one lecture, especially given that I only recently got into DH. But I love teaching, and my background in folkloristics means I’m pretty good at getting a grasp on narratives (including disciplinary narratives) as well as the worldview of a population.

I already ran my lecture ideas by my friend and colleague Scott Weingart, but I’d love feedback from other DHers.

Tags: ,

Newer entries »