,
9 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
As an instructor, I have very rarely had the types of experiences with students that are described in this piece. I would like to better understand why this is the case. insidehighered.com/views/2019/05/… Hypotheses worth exploring:
Impact of gender. We know that students view and treat male and female instructors differently. Entirely possible that I haven't been subject to the "customer service" mentality described here because of those differences.
Impact of institutional context. The piece is written in the context of a community college and it's implied that students are primarily motivated by credential seeking. Is that overt goal less prominent at the selective 4-yrs I've worked?
Message reception differences. It's possible that I've been subject to this type of communication but interpreted it differently. Ex. I interpret students wanting to know when something is going to be graded not as customer service demand, but expression of grade anxiety.
Course context differences. The article describes responding to student emails at late hours. I give on-call hours for email in my course policies and give explicit context of what students can expect in terms of response. (Timely as possible, but not 24 hours a day on call.)
Institutional role differences. The instructor describes being required to be a front line advisor and keeper of a PIN that students need to register. This creates a role that's independent of instructor as an administrative gatekeeper. Could create turbulence in instructor role.
Something that's not different. Experience. The author is a highly experienced instructor, with roughly the same years at the role as me.
I'm thinking through this list because my first instinct was to respond with criticism of an unproductive mentality and attitude towards students, but it has to be viewed with more depth and seen as more complicated than simply declaring someone else has the wrong attitude.
My chief criticism of the piece is that it fails to extend the courtesy and effort of thinking more deeply about these phenomena from the student perspective, and I didn't want to repeat that in responding to the piece itself. It's complicated. We should treat it as such.
