Thread by @WeaverRew

Remember when I asked you about the messages you got about teaching? Here is what we learned! BUCKLE UP. (Thread) #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter #digped

https://twitter.com/WeaverRew/status/1567517374768680961?s=20&t=M4A7vyQkt19k9dSWImzzVg

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First, thanks to all of you (such a huge response!) who responded and began to create community around this painful experience so many of us endured. I appreciate you. We learned A LOT about the discourses of #Teaching and #Pedagogy in #Highered last week. 2/

Here are some common words/phrases y'all used last week: focus, distraction, job, too much time on teaching, too good, evals, tenure, teaching awards, unspoken, career suicide, grad school, kiss of death 3/

Let’s begin with a thought from discourse theorist @jamespaulgee: "Discourses are about how we know what we are to each other and what we are doing with each other in encounters (in speech or writing)." 4/

For everyone who engaged with this question: we were *people to be lied to*–lied to in support of academic structures so focused on preserving the fiction of the “research first” TT RI job that the damage to new teachers and their students was never acknowledged or healed 5/

I heard a lot of grief in these responses–the kind of grief that only comes with acknowledgement. Acknowledgement a lot of us have been waiting for a looong time. 6/

That fiction, that emphasis on research over teaching for jobs and advancement, is now clearly such a big lie whose original purpose or truth seems less and less clear as time goes by, 7/

as less research oriented jobs are available (as @DrPardi said,“those jobs are rare and other jobs do in fact care if you're good at other things”), and as the very structures of traditional academic research and publication are breaking down and disintegrating-- 8/

–the current peer review crisis is the most recent example of this, but it’s been going on for a long time now, as @kfitz pointed out in her book about academic publishing. 9/

As @dgooblar says,"the career path for most academics is not one in which research plays a dominant role. Those academics lucky enough to secure a FT job at an american college or university generally spend around three times as many hours on teaching as they do on research" 10/

So why the lie that you don’t go into grad school to teach? Why the fiction? 11/

well...justification for making TAs carry heavy teaching loads of departments where the bulk of students in that dept’s classes are non-majors, for example, and yet most of the “senior faculty” do not teach those undergraduates-- 12/

And it serves an even more heartbreaking purpose: according to Derek Bok (qtd in @dgooblar's The Missing Course), profs rarely research teaching when they remake curriculum because they're "afraid to find out they have to completely remake their approach in the classroom" 13/

I would add to Bok’s proposed fear of remaking the approach: fear of acknowledging that you haven’t done right by your undergrad or graduate students if you’ve been this kind of professor. 14/

Some people seem really confused by the confusion of new grad students who encounter a lack of pedagogical training or toxic attitudes toward teaching—somehow we’re wrong to expect that upon starting to train for the professoriate, we’ll get pedagogical training. SHOCKING! 15/

But WHY is it a surprise that most of the population understands professors to be teachers?? After all, Students experience professors as teachers! Students experience professors as teachers! Students experience professors as teachers! 16/

Why, as the popular sign says, am I still protesting this shit?! 17/

Because of that lie–that we don’t go into grad school to teach– which is so, so seductive, even for current grad students who know about the terrible academic job market. 18/

Like the lie of “rigor” (see @TheTattooedProf's thread from yesterday), the lie of “professors are primarily researchers” conflates knowledge with pedagogical skill and thus convinces people that they can teach with only knowledge. 19/

It’s a mistake, always has been–and it didn’t have to be that way, and is correctable. We begin by reminding ourselves that Charles Eliot, the main modernizer of higher ed who did so much to damage and dismiss the role of teaching, retired from Harvard to be a eugenicist. 20/

So many people including @CathyNDavidson and John Zimmerman and others have written about this history. The origins of the rejection of pedagogy in #HigherEd are not mystical and lost to time. 21/

Its origins are in hubris, ignorance, misperceptions, all kinds of minoritization and discrimination, snobbery, "well-meaning" thinkers, lack of ability or desire to learn, and the devil you know. 22/

To be clear, I'm not saying that professors shouldn't do research. I say this: professors who teach students should have ongoing pedagogical training. NO EXCEPTIONS.

The mistake is correctable, and the work is worth it. So many people here have been doing this work a long time, and this conversation is getting louder and LOUDER. 23/

It makes me hopeful that we're doing some long-needed acknowledging, and that more and more faculty are open to it. The structural changes will take time and probably won't come easy, such as ppl on P&T committees who advocate for rewarding teaching 24/

Some of the hardest work will be one-on-one conversations with fellow faculty. Some of that work needs conversations with chairs and deans and admin, and I know it will be hard. 25/

But our students deserve it, and so do we. 26/

Oh, and for the admins or advisers who told grad sts or new profs that a teaching award would be a "kiss of death," oops:

That would be a teaching award from TRIO Student Success Services, an Excellence in Teaching Honors award, and in the middle, my college's Professional Development Award--for writing, editing, and talking about #Pedagogy in #HigherEd. /End

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