Blogging about work-related topics always requires delicacy, and blogging about the adventures of teaching in higher education brings with it an extra and specialised collection of dilemmas. That’s why I regretfully abstain from this kind of blogging myself; although teaching is in many ways the most interesting and absorbing thing going on in my life, I don’t need the nightmarish scenarios that could so easily arise out of a lurking student reader mistakenly interpreting some blanket remark of mine as a direct slur on his or her performance in class at some point. For instance, having recently marked a lot of essays closely related to my thesis topic, I have at the moment got a very clear idea of what the toughest concepts are for a novice in that area, and why. But if I thought aloud about that online, and some individual who felt she’d made a hash of it in her assignment read me as singling her out and putting her work down in public, well, that would be a total disaster, humanly and professionally, no two ways about it.
Of course the vastness of the American higher-ed world makes it much easier to maintain pseudonymity - if what you want to do is just talk about the behaviour of your students and colleagues and not about teaching issues related to your field of study, which I’d have thought defeated the purpose, but anyway - yet among the ‘out’ academic bloggers there’s still a massive amount to read and enjoy and steal ideas from.
The embarrassment of riches to be gleaned from the burgeoning Nth American academic blogosphere makes me sort of sad we don’t do more of it in this country. After all, our teaching methods and system and culture are so different from theirs, and a lot of what’s true for them is unheard of here, and vice versa. Which brings me to the real reason for this post - I want to encourage any bloggers who teach in Australian higher education to consider contributing to the next Teaching Carnival, which will be hosted by Scrivenings on November 15.
Putting your post in for the carnival couldn’t be easier - users of Technorati and del.icio.us will find tagging instructions here. I was the only Australian in the last round and I felt a bit lonely - the internet is transnational all right, but at the same time it still does tend to break down (by default?) into the old familiar regionalisms.
Nice post, Laura.
Three quick reflections:
1. I was a bit taken aback when one of my third year students mentioned to me he’d discovered the blog! Via google - by chance, because blogs with lots of hits often end up near the top of google searches (as in the perennial question of Missy Higgins’ sexuality). He actually said he really liked it - but my initial reaction probably reflected the unexpected conjunction of two parts of my life that I (unconsciously?) saw as being compartmentalised.
2. I think the North American blogosphere is a very different beast from ours - and not just in terms of size. It’s very true I think that cultural differences are reflected on the net and notions that it’s a space without culture are fantasies in large degree - just as ideas that there are no hierarchies and power relations have proved to be. This post provides some commentary on and a link to a classic example of intercultural misunderstanding that was exacerbated by the assumption (made by Americans) that controversies in the US ’sphere would automatically be known here.
3. It’s eminently possible that US academics have more time to blog than their overworked Australian counterparts! It might also have something to do with the age profile of the full time academic workforce in Australia - a large number of 50+ academics I’ve worked with have been pretty clueless about the net - though that’s not universally true.
On your point 3, Mark, it’s also because postgraduates and postdoctoral folk in the US are likely to be provided with the internet and offices in which to work. Unlike in Australia.
True, Liam. (Beret tip to the scholar of the Point 2!).
Point two: there is no point two.
…
Laura, that’s a good post, I’ll be interested to see what comes out of it. I’ve done a bit of university tutoring in my Department, and I lived in fear of students looking me up.
To be fair, Liam, it’s part of the price you pay for your prestige sandstone Ph.D. - same as at UQ. QUT offers reasonable facilities and funding to postgrads and often $5000 annual scholarship top ups (I had one) because it wants to build its research reputation by attracting postgrads who might otherwise choose a sandstone.
Laura, your point about methods and structures of teaching between the US and here is an interesting one. What do you think they are?
When I was tutoring I had quite a few American exchange students, out here for the surf and parties and beer, and found them universally pleasant and clever but also wierdly subordinate. They had very odd assumptions about what students were allowed to ask, found arguments in class totally bewildering and a few even called me things like ‘Professor’ and ’sir’. Quite a difference to the smart-arse stoushy Australians.
Yes, I found much the same when I had lots of American exchange students at UQ, Liam. It also seemed to me that the standard of analytical work required of American undergrads was lower.
A quick hypothesis - American Universities are modelled on the German research universities which placed a premium on passive learning for undergrads and colloquia for postgrads while Australian Universities descend from Oxbridge models which emphasised undergrad teaching (first UK PhDs weren’t awarded til the 20s) and interaction through the tutorial system.
Yep, being addressed as “Professor Carroll” on a research trip there caused me first to snort bad drip filter coffee then laugh in the person’s face. Not scholarly!
The student/teacher relationship does appear to be much more formal and distant, in most cases. I discovered from a casual chat in somebody’s comments thread that they would generally regard it as crossing the line to hold a consultation with a student with the office door closed, let alone making any kind of physical contact, allowing students to address you by your first name, having lunch with students….drinking in the bar at the end of semester with students….it looks trivial, but I think it goes deep actually. Sitting still and respectfully listening is one model for learning, arguing with the teacher is another, they’re both perfectly valid. It might be better for us actually if we had more of the former mixed in with tutorial stoushes.
In terms of English, one enormous difference between us & them is that English departments there teach something called Composition as well as literary / cultural studies. The composition classes seem to be taken by people doing all kinds of degrees, and are taught around themes which the instructors, generally postgrads, choose themselves and vary often. This must send the message, however subliminally, that reading and writing well is the primary goal and the material that’s read and written about is only grist for the mill. It’s clearly different in literary studies, but there must be some overlap, I’d have thought.
We could certainly do with composition classes here for undergrads, I very often think.
Hmmm. I’m an Aussie. I’ve had plenty of experience as a student and some as a teacher in the higher ed system here (both as a tutor and occasional lecturer at UQ). Now I’m living in the US completing research for my PhD. I’m based at an institute within a university which certainly is alot richer than what we have at home, but yet the academics seem to work much more efficiently here than they do at home. Academics here certainly have a much higher publication rate than those at home. The direct bureaucracy within departments is much less in the US (it took me less than 24 hours to organise a placement which includes an office, desk and computer), the academics are incredibly willing to share ideas and encourage debate amongst their students and colleagues, and are constantly organising opportunities to facilitate debate and the sharing of ideas. Finally, there seems to be a much greater diversity of opinions and ideas amongst academic staff in the US as opposed to Australia, where if you confess to being politically anywhere to the right of Marx, you will get your hands cut off.
Perhaps that’s why there is a greater amount of academic blogging here.
oh yeah, and I think it’s safe to assume that if a person’s blog can be found via google then students have found it…..
Oh, and I completely agree that their blog ecology is entirely different to ours. It just surprised me a bit when I first began to understand that even the academic blogworld has distinctive national quirks and characteristics, because you’d expect that the important things scholars share would overrule anything of the kind.
It also seemed to me that the standard of analytical work required of American undergrads was lower.
Interesting because as a student, seeing what friends in the US study, makes me feel as though I am intellectually inward and lacking in critical and analytical skills.
Maybe it is just my university and my particular course.
E:), ooh, I’m jealous! Your institution sounds excellent. I imagine there are lots of reasons why US academics blog more than Australian academics seem to do - I’m just wondering why those academic bloggers from here that I know about don’t discuss teaching more - especially since in Humanities especially we tend to have pretty high teaching loads.
Elizajoey, I get that feeling too. Not just with American friends but with just about anybody studying anything similar to what I’m doing.
I like the idea of composition classes, Laura. I’ve had a fair bit to do with graduates in the past few years and most of them have been highly intelligent and verbally articulate. However, their writing skills have generally been somewhere between woeful and lamentable - to the point that they really fail to do themselves credit.
Quite agree with this:
I’d be all in favour of composition classes, but disagree totally with Rob’s agreement on the blockquote.
However, from what I’ve read, there’s quite a lot of angst in the ranks of English PhDs as junior scholars often end up in non-tenurable and sometimes semester limited contractual positions (sound familiar?) teaching Composition with heavy loads, and unable to progress their careers with their research (sound familiar?).
Though the elite American universities are incredibly well funded, the mail I have from colleagues who’ve worked in or visited the States is that they’re very status conscious and hierarchical and it’s no bed of roses for many - particularly junior faculty and PhDs. Obviously there would be exceptions, just as there are in Oz. Also, the state university systems are often underfunded and liberal arts colleges (where the great majority of jobs are) allow little space for research. So when we look at the States, there could be a large element of “the grass is greener” going on.
If you are trained to write well, you can write well about anything. This serves you in good stead no matter where your post-uni career path takes you.
I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t be trained to write well, just that writing without regard to context is also taking things too far.
And in many organisational settings now, writing well is a positive disadvantage when most written expression is jargon laden with terms like “deliverables”, “learnings” etc. Sadly.
Yes, that’s quite true, Mark. Managerial-speak is one of the great curses of the modern world. Hopefully it will pass before too long. The odd thing is that even most (well, many) of the people who use it realise how awful it is.
I want to stress that I’m interested in comparing American teaching practices with ours rather than criticising them. Everyone’s welcome to their own views of course.
And my lame sentence that supplied blockquote material is a perfect example of how *not* to write clearly and unambiguously.
That’s interesting about the composition classes, a few things of my limited teaching experience make sense now. I found when marking essays that the Americans wrote far more creatively and intuitively, with not too much eye for for evidence and a cavalier attitude to source material, while the Australians and Europeans wrote dull, specific essays with a fierce precision when it came to footnotes.
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Rob, just because someone writes well doesn’t mean the content of the writing is worthwhile or trustworthy. An eye for reading between the lines and pulling out context is something every intelligent person should have, as a propaganda-spotting mechanism as much as anything. Beauty ‚↠truth.
Sure, liam, but I think Laura was talking about a class specifically on Composition as part of an English course. There are compositional techniques that can be applied to any piece of writing. Of course content is important, and presumably is studied elsewhere in the course, but in the context purely of composition it doesn’t really matter all that much.
My experience of Americans is much the same as yours and others here. I’ve found them to be generally much better writers than Australians.
One of the things I notice is the degree of writing that American students appear to do.
They seem to have something to write and hand in every week. Maybe it is because I am a Humanities student or maybe it is just my uni but we don’t have that amount of writing. I may have two essays/writing tasks and an oral presentation for each unit I do but when I see what friends in the US do, they seem to have responses to hand in about readings etc each week. Maybe I just haven’t met someone with that teaching style yet.
I think it is a good method to get into - you get involved within the material but you also are writing in the suitable discourse which develops your writing skills.
Just poking my head in here as an American academic to say that I think it’s extremely difficult to generalize about higher education in the US, especially about such issues as relationships between academics and students. These things vary by discipline, by institution, by region, and of course by individual. I have been places where my students won’t call me by anything other than my title, where personal contact is discouraged, etc. But then, as a student I also went to my professors’ houses for dinner all the time. When I was an undergrad, one of my history profs held office hours at one of the bars next to campus and would buy a pitcher and sit and drink with us. I have invited my students at times to come to my house for dinner, and been friendly with them. I do think physical contact with students can be a little dangerous here–there’s just so much awareness of sexual harrassment (and of lawsuits regarding such), but even that varies by person I am sure.
And in response to that first comment up there, I’d venture to guess that it is a universal trait of academics everywhere that we are seriously overworked. I do not think there are too many American academics with reams of free-time on their hands.