Quebec Alternative

Last night, I attended the vernissage for Quebec Alternative. The exhibit shows off some of the materials in Marc Raboy’s collection of alternative publications, which he dutifully stockpiled — eventually renting a storage locker until he was able to donate them to the McGill Library. For last night’s event, many key figures in Quebec’s alternative print media culture of the 1970s turned out, and a few spoke. I was struck how every local “of a certain age” I met at the event either played a role in one of the publications or said something along the lines of “I remember picking up one of these” and pointing at something in a case. One librarian told me the university archivist in the 1970s would go around campus each week and pick up all the publications he could — they are probably still somewhere in the archives.

So much of this kind of left wing history is lost, because the publications are treated as ephemera and nobody bothered collecting or curating them (except, of course, for the RCMP during the October Revolution, but they were confiscating, not collecting), and institutions like McGill have only just begun the long process of documenting this radical history. Many of these publications were tied to movements or organization that helped to define modern Quebec as a secular, progressive society.

There are other histories, I’m sure, but the home team (ie, Marc) published a book in 1983 called Movements and Messages (the English translation appeared in 1984) that documents a good deal of the history in the exhibition. It’s also an interesting example of 1980s Marxist communications scholarship.

As I stood at the event, I wondered a bit about the future history of radical online publications. On the one hand, they are considerably more available to their readerships so long as someone keeps a server active and the code is up to date enough to run with current browsers. On the other, many more of them will not outlive the infrastructure that sustains them. And blogs, well, the personal is always more ephemeral than the collective.

More on Coverage

There are some excellent comments in the thread for my post on lecturing and retention. The question seems to be: is coverage more important in fields with strong canons, and what’s the alternative?

My sense is this:

Physics has as strong a “canon” as any humanities field, so the issues of core curriculum seem as relevant there as anywhere for an intro-level course. I think it’s a balancing act. Students ought to be exposed to key authors and ideas in whatever field, and it’s not a matter of simply reducing us all to “critical thinking”; but I do believe each field, in addition to its particular texts and theories, offers students training in a way of thinking about the questions it poses. To me, that’s the jackpot. It’s a standard conceit of liberal arts education that our goal is to create free thinkers; that may be our goal, but it can only be accomplished through training people to think in a disciplined fashion. To use an analogy of musical improvisation: the best improvisers know their instruments inside and out and have mastered basic techniques, harmony, etc.

That said, most intro survey courses in the humanities are like smorgasbords, and I tend to think that the sampling is the thing here. They don’t have to remember or know everything (and you can’t control what they’ll remember), but my hope is that each student will leave with exposure to lots of ideas and having engaged seriously with a select few. So I simply try and include ideas worth remembering or thinking about.

How to Read a Book in Less than an Hour

Chris Kelty’s advice. I haven’t tried his method though I have my own “plowing” methods which I may detail at a later date if I decide there’s something original in it. I tend to real slowly and obsessively when I teach.

Leaving aside dull and moralistic arguments about how much effort should be expended in an encounter with a book (though I had a good laugh over Elephant’s entry), the one potentially fatal flaw in this method is the index. Indexing is itself a black art; authors are rarely good indexers when they finish their first book (I know from experience) and professional indexers often don’t “get” the real stakes in the book.

Still, it’s a way LESS imperfect pedagogical method than, say, not giving the students any idea of how to slog through a massive pile of reading in a week and then acting like a big shot. Not that profs ever do that in grad seminars.

I look forward to Kelty’s other promised pedagogical tips, including

how I teach the students to grade their own papers. I can’t even remember the last time I read a student’s paper

and then there’s my method for teaching them to reason by avoiding valid inference of any kind and my method for picking a research topic by using the LOC Wheel of Fortune, and my method for reading by running an automatic co-occurence algorithm on a text and talking only about the top five results.

Lecturing and Killing the “Coverage” idea

I don’t think I’ve written about this, but I am obsessed with large lecture pedagogy. Although a sizeable number of students in my intro class seem to really like it (although liking isn’t the point necessarily) and I get good ratings, I have always been interested in how to be a better teacher. The thing is that a great deal of academic pedagogical theory has been written as if we all teach small classes. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Happily, some people at McGill have realized this and started occasionally having lectures and events that discuss large lecture pedagogy.

Today was one such an event, a lecture by Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard, who used to lecture but doesn’t anymore. Instead, he will start a class off with a few brief notes, then post a multiple choice question. Students would be given a clicker and with some software, they could see the aggregate answers for the question. Then, they would have to convince their neighbor of their answer, and the whole class would then answer the question again. Basically, class would be a series of these exercises. Mazur’s theory is that the students who know what they’re doing convince the students who don’t, and his data suggest that students wind up with better comprehension of the material (as opposed to the regurgitation of information they’ve gleaned). I haven’ explained his method well but you can visit his site to learn more.

But there were a couple things I left thinking about (I left “early” — an hour into the presentation, as the room was so stuffy I thought I might faint). First, while this is clearly translatable to the humanities, there are issues about the weight of ideology, and whether rational arguments will win out as often when students are first exposed to the material before they’ve had it explained (if, for instance, they don’t understand the language in “Encoding/Decoding” it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to argue about it. So perhaps some information transmission is good.

The other thing that was striking was Mazur’s finding that retention of material from introductory courses is very low. A year after the class, sometimes only two months later, students who passed an introductory large lecture course in physics will likely “remember nothing but the pain and the grade.” With his method, retention is somewhat higher though not that high. Which leads me to conclude what I’ve always suspected: the very idea of “coverage” is somewhat bogus, because students don’t hold onto the material. It’s better to teach them a way of thinking or simply introduce skepticism, and hope that they retain a few of the ideas you throw at them over the course of the term. That doesn’t mean one should teach narrow courses, only that we shouldn’t try to live up to an impossible idea of comprehensiveness that turns out not to matter.

Interview Season

Over at Sivacracy Siva Vaidhyanathan has dispensed some very useful advice to those people who have campus interviews coming. But there are a couple places where I’d add and one where I’d heartily disagree. It’s a little awkward to make this post since there’s a big round of interviews coming up at McGill, and I’d hate to be looking like I’d be giving instructions to our interviewees (or interviewees in the other departments where I might be showing up for cross-appointments and the like) but here goes:

Siva says:

They are never fun. Never.

This is where I completely and totally disagree. For me, they have almost always been fun and learning experiences. The best interviewing advice I ever got from a mentor was to have fun on the interview. Partly it’s because, as Siva says, if they’re interviewing you they want to know if they like you. If you have fun and they have fun, there’s a better chance of them wanting to hire you. But there are other reasons to have fun. First, however gruelling the interview is, it is a special opportunity and a special occasion. Interviews are hard to get. Regardless of the internal politics of the department (some are very political, some are very collegial; don’t trust the rumor mill too much), it’s a tremendous acheievement and you should enjoy it. Sure, you’re trying to get the jobs, but the institution is trying to woo you. Let them do it. Enjoy the fact that they’re taking you to a nice restaurant and making you the center of attention for the day (okay, that may be easier for me to enjoy than some people, but still). Last, but not least, interviews are a chance to make friends and connections regardless of whether you get the job. You’re going to spend quality time with people who find your work interesting. By making friends, you may pick up some great colleagues whether or not you get or take the job. All of that is easier to do is you loosen up and have a little fun. Plus, you’re supposed to love doing the research you do. That should come through when you present it.

That said, Siva is abolutely right that the whole interview is an interview whether or not you want it to be. The job talk doesn’t end when the Q&A begins — sometimes that’s the most important part. It is an exhausting process, and there is a lot of stress involved.

Okay. With that out of the way. A couple footnotes.

Siva says:

They will be hunting around for hints about your family/relationship situation. They are not allowed to ask you outright. But they want to know whether your partner is an academic, which would mean major headaches trying to generate another job. So if you see an opportunity and feel comfortable about it, talk about him/her and what he/she wants to do for a living. They should be relieved.

Sorry Siva, this only works for straight people coupled with non-academics who have the kind of job where it will be easy to find work in the area of the school [exhale]. There are lots of schools that now have a system in place where it is possible to accommodate academic couples. There are lots of schools where faculty are hip to people in same-sex relationships. There are also lots of schools where this is not the case. Many schools are located in places where it may be difficult for partners in certain fields to find jobs. Tread carefully here.

Siva says

They think that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.

This is actually true. It’s very true for faculty members who already have jobs, and you never know when a candidate will get multiple offers. So yes, you are interviewing them a little, so you’re going to have to think about what you really want to know about the school. If it’s of a different size, style or scale from a school at which you’ve worked, you should ask about everyday life at the institution for professors. You’ll get a different picture from different people.

One other thing, especially for grad students: faculty want to see you as a colleague, not as a grad student. It’s hard to know how to pull that off if you’re never been a faculty member before, but think about it for a moment. Faculty are solidly middle class. Some have kids, some own property. If either of these things interest you, it’s fair game to ask about buying a place or what the schools are like. Keep in mind they may or may not be research active if you’re interviewing at a teaching school, and that there are different ways of leading a fulfilling life as a scholar. At the same time, it’s important not to be too presumptuous. A common mistake is to assume that what you’ve learned about “how the field works” or “how the university works” at your doctoral institution or even later at a postdoc will translate to the new institution. For instance, in my graduate program, my teachers in Comm Studies seemed to think the main division in the field was the split between political economy and cultural studies. At Pittsburgh, the debate was about media vs. rhetoric. At McGill, neither of these splits seem to interest anyone as points of discussion or debate, and at the many schools I’ve visited these issues rarely come up in the same way. Similarly, university bureaucracies and procedures can work very differently from place to place.

Also, there are a number of places where Siva sounds like he is suggesting that one go along to get along. “Order steak at the restaurant” (I’m a vegetarian and would never advise someone to be fake about this kind of thing; OTOH, if you love steak, you’re probably going somewhere where you’ll get a good one). He talks about fake smiles. I would be very, very reticent to suggest anyone be fake on an interview for one simple reason. If they hire you but they think they’re hiring someone other than who you really are, you are going to have a difficult time there. Possibly a very difficult time. Obviously, you want to be polite, you want to make friends, you want to impress them, and you want to get the job, but don’t let these things turn you into someone you’re not, as you’ll then have to occupy that position for quite awhile. I realize it’s harder if everyone there is white and you’re not, or they’re all men and you’re a woman, or they’re all straight and you’re queer, or they’re all “able” and you’re disabled, but those kinds of differences can be overcome in the workplace (indeed, they ought to be) if people are comfortable talking about them, all the better. i’m not telling people to come out or self-disclose indiscriminately, I just think that too much going along to get along hurts the candidate more than the committee if he or she actually lands the job.

That said, being a professor is a job that our occupational ideology says is a vocation. Obviously, I’ve bought into that one. But at some schools, it is more like a job, either because you don’t fit in with your colleauges (not every dept is a community, and something you’ll have a bunch of people in their late 50s hiring a 20something, which may mean some distance — though I find age differences matter less and less in this business) or because everyone in the department punches in and punches out. It may come to that, if you are looking for something else, an interview is not a time to try to be someone else.

Short of personal injury, harassment, or other trauma, there is no such thing as an interview disaster. You go in without the job, you leave without the job. Your worst case scenario is that you won’t have the job, which means you’ll be the same person you were before you got the interview. I recently spoke with a student who was worried because he might get hostile questions on the interview or the job talk. There’s nothing to worry about. If they’re good critiques of your work, you learned something. If they’re lame, the criticisms probably aren’t about you. They’re probably about something going on at the school. This is why I say you can and should enjoy the event. The bad stuff if usually stuff you can’t control (well, you should buy some comfortable dress clothes and practice your jobtalk), and there’s a lot of good stuff that comes out of the process whether or not you land the job.

Finally, there’s more on interviewing at http://sterneworks.org/Academe/