Tag Archives: academic work

Centeredness

To be centered in an academic institution is a practice of self-awareness in relation to others. It is a practice of knowing what one is doing, and doing it well; a crucial dimension of that knowing is that my thoughts, emotions, body, and spirit are at once personal and social, and hence my actions and decisions happen in a world I share with others—whether one is a student or a member of the faculty or staff.

In a Faculty Teaching Fellows conversation last week, a comment by my friend and colleague Patricia brought me back to some of my past thinking about the practice of being centered. She mentioned one of my attempts years ago to speak to the work we call in academic institutions “service.” Reclaiming the value of service, I suggested, begins when we center our understanding of identity and purpose, ground that understanding in an institution, and use that awareness to contribute to the common good.

Patricia’s comment reminded me that I had written about the question of academic service in a 2017 blog post, Redefining Service, in which I suggested that our working definition of faculty service is less than useful. “Service is in part defined by the reward system for faculty that privileges scholarship over teaching and service,” I wrote. “And yet this reward system perpetuates an attitude toward service that renders this dimension of academic labor far less meaningful than it might be.” Too often, we internalize this professional system of rewards. More perniciously, we lose sight of faculty privilege in a hierarchy of faculty and staff labor. Our attitude toward service becomes less supple, and our opinion about service becomes, to borrow words from the poet William Blake, “like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” For, in the end, to choose not to serve devalues not only service but the labor someone else will do as a consequence of my choice.

It is also the case that as a life and a career develop in an institution faculty work will often take unexpected turns. We would do well to see these turns on a continuum of moving through personal and institutional phases of professional life. There is no one pathway or model. The difficulty is that different kinds of work will take priority as we make choices within the constraints the institution places on each of us—which are never the same, are often not equitable, and by definition situational. Our choices are always constrained by the relative freedom and privileges available to us.

The question of the opportunities is inseparable from personal, professional, and institutional complexities—the dimensions of academic life that we all experience differently. And each of our stories includes opportunities and successes, as well as the challenges, betrayals, resignations, and disillusionments of institutional life.

In 2017, in a series of essays written over a decade or more on the Staying Alive blog, I posted a list of definitions I wrote that was prompted by an invitation to speak about service to a cohort of new faculty at the College. One of my motivations for redefining service was to address the idea of service as a burden or as a less significant dimension of what members of faculty spend their time doing. I shared my observations of experienced faculty productively engaged in the activities we call service; and I spoke about my own experiences making meaningful choices about how I would contribute to my institution. I have included that blog post and the redefinition of service included there.

I’m grateful to Patricia. For in prompting me to connect what we call service to the value of being centered I may be approaching a broader recognition about the list of imperatives I used to redefine service. For the imperatives are focused on being more engaged, and more productive, essentially reversing the dismissive and self-defensive attitudes about this kind of work. For in the end, to be centered is the experience of responsive and creative activity in contrast to reactive and defensive behavior.

The broader recognition is perhaps the most obvious one: centeredness and well-being go hand in hand. For if I had any useful advice to offer to new faculty it was that we need not dismiss service as work that will not advance our professional careers, or to act as if it is less valuable and portable in the institutional marketplace of ideas on which many of us depend. For in dismissing this work, we become less engaged in the collective effort to enliven the fragile institutions that support our work. In chasing external rewards we are less situated. We are more divided. We are less centered.

*

Below is the 2017 blog post Redefining Service

In his most recent post, Mike Branch reminds us, “there will always be substantial parts of an academic career that are unpleasant. Those parts are the job, the part we do to earn a paycheck and not because it is inherently fulfilling.” Mike also makes an observation about the enormous privilege many of us have in academic institutions to pursue “the work—which Henry Thoreau called ‘morning work,’ John Muir called ‘natural work,’ and Gary Snyder calls ‘real work.’ This is the work that matters most,” Mike writes, “that speaks directly to our ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual values.”

But in a 2010 blog post “Counting What Counts” that Mike contributed to Staying Alive he cautions us to consider “the extreme circumscription of what counts” as faculty work and the “harmful effects” of this narrowing “that are substantial and often unrecognized.” Mike argues “definitions of professional success that devalue service to a community obviously promote corrosive forms of self-interest.” He then calls on Emerson to help articulate a model of professional commitment that does not fall into the zero sum game of institutional life:

I maintain an Emersonian suspicion that most large institutions, often working under the banner of standards and assessment, ultimately tend toward real (if often benign) forms of control—that they tend toward a narrowing rather than an expansion of what counts—with the consequence that they become constraining, bureaucratized, or moribund. I don’t believe, as some do, that the problem is the solipsistic careerism of the professoriate, or that research universities are fundamentally ill-conceived. I do believe that, for a number of reasons that are considerably less compelling than they may at first appear, we have allowed our understanding of professional success in the academy to become far too limited. As Emerson wrote, it is “as if one looking at the ocean can remember only the price of fish.” We desperately need to nurture recognition that there are many different ways to think, write, teach, and serve, and that many varied forms of professional activity and achievement are meaningful, meritorious, and worthy of our respect and support.

I too rely on Emerson when it comes to institutions. At the same time, I have found profoundly useful a document published by the MLA over twenty years ago, a document that offered me a productive space to think more carefully about the professional life I was hoping to pursue. Reinterpreting Professional Service made a case for intellectual work less confined to professional hierarchies and more sensitive to the need for generative faculty participation in that area of our jobs we call “service.”

A couple of years ago I pulled together some thoughts about what institutions call “service” for a group of new faculty at Keene State College. In sharing the document at a new faculty orientation, I explained that service should be a rewarding and productive part of our jobs and that it could also become a dimension of academic work. Might redefining service offer another way to stay alive in the academy?

Redefining Service

Service is Personal and Professional Growth

  • Maximize personal strengths, draw on your expertise, enjoy the work you choose
  • Pursue a personal or professional goal that you find interesting
  • Do something completely new and potentially meaningful, if not transformative

Service is Building Relationships

  • Strengthen relationships with students by choosing committees that include students (e.g. advise student group or honor society)
  • Collaborate with students to sponsor campus events or organizing off-campus activities
  • Work on committees with staff to build your sense of institutional place and history from long-serving members of our community

Service is Building and Sustaining Community

  • Engage in campus-wide service
  • Collaborate with amazing colleagues and make new friends
  • Change the culture of College for the better
  • Partner with community and regional groups and initiatives
  • Pursue rewards of high-profile service that contribute to governance of the College, including administrative roles and leadership opportunities

Service is Teaching and Learning

  • Energize your teaching and learning (e.g. Faculty Development Committee, Student research Committee, IRB, Sabbatical Committee)
  • Imagine new opportunities for yourself and for others. What would you like to change to improve the conditions for your (and others’) teaching and learning?

Service is Scholarship

  • Relate, apply, extend your professional identity and expertise
  • Conduct service-learning and community-based research, or seek out and/or create opportunities for service as a public intellectual (local, regional, national, international)
  • Contribute to your intellectual / disciplinary / professional field(s) through editorial and peer review, leadership and collaboration, etc.

Service is Productive

  • Get things done
  • Improve group process (e.g. action items, goal setting, deadlines)
  • Make meaningful contributions to the work
  • Resign from the committee that is not productive (or the committee to which you are not making meaningful contributions)

Service is a Part of the (Your) Whole

  • Be actively involved rather than overextended (there is always too much work to do but don’t do too much or you will not do your work well)
  • Say no to committees (or, don’t say yes to all committees)

*

This post on centeredness is the second in a series on core values in teaching and learning that began with Design Pedagogy Values.

photo credits: Mark C. Long

Island Time

Leave a reply

From Lynchburg, Virginia, en route from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, on my way to the eighth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. There are over six hundred and fifty attendees this year, from twenty-eight countries. We’ve gathered by plane and ferry to the University of Victoria (“U-Vic”) to share our work in the field of environmental writing and literature.

victoria 008Teresita Fernandez, “Seattle Cloud Cover”

I arrive on the Victoria Clipper, a boat passage we never did during our years in Seattle. A number of ASLE folk are on the afternoon boat that departs from Pier 69. It is good to be out on the water again, with the Cascades and the Olympics lingering in the distance. I am reminded of kayak trips in these waters as we cruise along Whidbey Island and then out into open water. When we arrive in Victoria in the evening we flag down a blue Prius cab that takes us to the University where we settle into the residence halls and townhouses on one side of the campus.

victoria 027One of many rabbits on the U-Vic lawns

I spend my first full day on the island at the ASLE Executive Council meeting and then, in the afternoon, help to facilitate a pre-conference workshop on the academic job search. The following day I am part of a roundtable for graduate students—“Finding Your Niche: Thoughts on Negotiating the Job Market”—where I share some of my experiences as a graduate student, job candidate, faculty member, search committee member and department chair. As the Coordinator of the ASLE Mentoring Program, I organize mentoring meetings, and on Wednesday I conduct one of these meetings with a post-doctoral instructor at Stanford University.

victoria 020John Felstiner and Lynn Keller near the summit of Mt. Finlayson

On Friday afternoon I join a group of about fifteen or twenty on an afternoon walk up Mt. Finlayson—one of the highest points in Southern Vancouver Island.  John Felstiner and I enjoy an hour-long afternoon conversation about poets and poetry as we pick our way down from the rocky summit and under the canopy of evergreens. Then, on Saturday, I co-faciltate a wonderful half-day workshop with my colleague John Tallmadge. “Staying Alive: A Workshop for Academic Professionals” brought together a group of fifteen or so faculty to discuss academic life. John’s summary of our meeting is available on our Staying Alive blog.

victoria 007Sculpture on the Seattle Waterfront, near Pier 69

In and around these meetings were numerous conversations, meals with colleagues and friends, an author’s reception (where we had copies of Teaching North American Environmental Literature available) and a wonderful donwtown dinner with K and I and M and J. ASLE  is a remarkable thing, and I am deeply grateful to the commitments I share with this wily group of teachers and scholars devoted to the environmental humanities. Since the inception of our organization, we’ve diversified our membership and the program reflects a vibrant field of intellectual work. Every time I get together with these people, I come away renewed by the ideals that motivate our lives as teacher, readers and writers.

summer09 040A pre-conference afternoon kicking steps in the Tatoosh range, south of Mt. Rainier

The Canadian venue for this 2009 ASLE gathering has been especially rewarding for me, as I was among a group who advocated for a Canadian site on the ASLE Executive Council many years ago. Our conference organizer, Dan Philippon, and our co-organizer and host, Richard Pickard, have done a beautiful job  keeping us all headed in the  right directions and encouraging us to best use our limited time here. Kudos!

A Couple of Days at the MLA

1 Reply

Every December English professors and aspiring academics make a pilgrimage to the Modern Language Association convention (affectionately known as the MLA). Once again, I found myself among those professors. This year we all gathered in San Francisco to meet with one another and reflect on our work as professionals, present our scholarship and talk about teaching, plan future projects, or to look for a job or interview prospective candidates for a job. Last year, on sabbatical in India, I actually missed the MLA convention-a first since I was a graduate student, and the first convention I have not been at the MLA convention on a hiring committee since 1999.

San Francisco was MLA’s 124th annual convention, and thousands of us English and Modern Language people filled the Hilton, Marriott and Fairmont hotels. Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association currently has 30,000 members from over 100 countries. There are 134 divisions and discussion groups for specialized scholarly and teaching interests; 45 membership committees overseeing association activities and publications, close to 300 members elected to govern the association through its Executive Council, Delegate Assembly, and other governance committees; over 600 members serve on the executive committees of the 86 divisions and 48 discussion groups that represent the scholarly and teaching interests of various constituencies within the profession; and over 2,000 members give papers and readings each year at the convention. It’s a crazy scene. If you are interested in a glimpse of what happens in these sessions you can check out the program for the 2008 convention at http://www.mla.org/conv_listings.

So what takes someone like me away from family and snowy New England fields between Christmas and the new year? Well, a few years ago I took on responsibility for organizing and chairing the annual session on the small college English department sponsored by the Association for Departments of English (ADE). This year I focused the session around teaching in the small college department. When I was thinking about the topic for the session last winter in Pune, India, Gerry Graff assured me that my session would fit well with his 2008 MLA presidential forum, “The Way We Teach Now.” (Happily, the small college session was listed alongside the featured presidential forum on teaching in a brochure produced for the convention.)  My idea emerged from an abiding interest in complicating the commonplace story of the profession organized around the research institution at the center with all other academic institutions on the periphery. I’ve published essays on the shortcomings of this perspective and have more recently been reading and thinking about the historical contributions of faculty who work in small college departments. These departments have essentially functioned as microclimates in the profession-fostering some of the most significant changes in English studies. My question was how does the small college department continue to generate its own conditions for innovative pedagogy, curriculum development, and the possibility of integrating the professional activities of reading, writing and teaching? More than forty people showed up for the 8:30 AM session, a good turnout indeed. Here is how I introduced the speakers:

During its fifteen years of life this session has focused on the differences between the graduate school and the small college department. Those of us involved in these ADE sponsored sessions have sought to make visible the working conditions in institutions beyond the research university. We have also used this occasion to complain about the organizing fiction of the graduate school at the center of the profession. At the 2005 convention in Washington D.C., however, I organized a roundtable that brought together graduate studies directors and small-college department faculty. For me, this conversation presented a significant turn toward talking together about our profession, as well as our shared commitments to teaching, reading and writing.

So when Gerry Graff invited members to consider showcasing “the best thinking by our members about teaching and its relationships with scholarship and writing” (“Letter”) I happily projected into his words my conviction that most of the best thinking about these relationships comes from members who teach, read and write outside the research institution. However our professional discourse continues to be shaped by persons speaking from the perspective of the doctorate-granting institution to those of us who have learned to organize our intellectual lives around teaching. As Dana Ringuette articulates the problem in his recent response to the “MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,” research professors have clearly not thought much about “what it means to be primarily a teacher in a community of research, writing, and scholarly exchange” (“We Need to Talk” Profession 2008 190). Faculty at research institutions are quite naturally on the margins of this conversation; and, as Ringuette suggests, we have much to learn from one another as we consider how our intellectual work might be organized around teaching.

As an associate editor for the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, I have the privilege of working closely with faculty whose writing documents the centrality of teaching to the work of scholars and professionals across the field of English studies. In fact the three speakers this morning are contributors to a forthcoming special issue of Pedagogy focused the small college department. The introduction I am drafting for the dedicated issue, tentatively titled “Centers and Peripheries,” is organized around a question I would like to use to help frame our conversation this morning: How might what happens in the small college department affect what happens in the research university?

 

Our three speakers make visible the working conditions and institutional dynamics that affect teaching in the small college department: in this case, a private and selective institution, Macalester College, a Comprehensive Catholic institution, Marywood University, and a Public Liberal arts college, the University of North Carolina Asheville. We will first hear from Stuart Y. McDougal, is DeWitt Wallace Professor of English Emeritus at Macalester College. Professor McDougal was the chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, when he was recruited by Macalester College to create a new English department. While at Michigan, he held appointments in English, Comparative literature and film studies, published widely in the fields of modern literature and film, and served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association.  The title of his presentation is “Promoting and Managing Change in a Small College English Department.” Our second speaker, William Conlogue, is associate professor of English at Marywood University, Professor Conlogue teaches introductory and advanced writing, an introduction to world literature, and a variety of American literature courses. In addition to several articles on American literature and the profession, he has published a book, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture, and has served two terms as chairperson of the Marywood English department. The title of his presentation is “Institutional Structures and the Small English Department.” Our third speaker this morning is Margaret Downes, from the department of English at University of North Carolina Asheville, a founding member of COPLAC (the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges). Professor Downes currently serves as Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, and has served as interim Associate Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, chair of the Department of Literature & Language, and director of UNCA’s Humanities Program. She recently served as President of AGLS-the Association for General & Liberal Studies-and currently directs that organization’s international activities. The title of her presentation is “Enough! or Too much”: The Blakean Paradox of the COPLAC English Department.”

But I didn’t just fly to my native state of California to introduce this session, or even to take two lovely, long early morning runs over Nob Hill and down to the waterfront out toward the Golden Gate Park.  For I had been asked to speak as part of a special session arranged by the MLA Publications Committee, “The Profession and the Liberal Arts: A Discussion of the MLA’s Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life.” This recently published book included my essay “Reading, Writing and Teaching in Context” and the session offered participants to discuss the range of working conditions for faculty beyond the research institution.

The convention also had me attending a workshop for department chairs as a representative of Keene State College. I also met with three aspiring members of the profession as part of my yearly contributions to the annual MLA job counseling service. These meetings are always gratifying as I feel that my experiences are useful for graduate students considering the job market or new PhDs asking for feedback on their job letter or cv. What else? Well, surely a memorable bowl of Thai soup, sushi, and brief visits with friends and colleagues. And I sat in on a few other sessions-from the great to the not so great. I ran into my friend and graduate school advisor Leroy Searle, as well as one of my former Bread Loaf students, Brian, who recognized me in the chaos of the Hilton lobby.

All in all, a productive few days, though unfortunately neither the time nor the money to visit my brother in LA or friends in the Eastern Sierra. Next year the convention convenes in Philadelphia. And then, early in 2011 in New Orleans, the convention will take place in early January as the MLA moves from its current dates between Christmas and new years.