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Small liberal arts colleges are experiencing unprecedented pressures, including looming ones Demographic abyssdevaluing the central principles of liberal and public education The rise of anti-intellectualism. The most radical responses to these pressures have been significant and sweeping budget cuts in anticipation of declining enrollment, including the elimination of programs and large groups of faculty positions. This was the case at my institution, Carthage College in Wisconsin.
As a result of all the austerity measures, the responsibilities of faculty at university-based institutions have changed primarily in real time to focus more on increasing recruitment, retention, and graduation rates. These changes have been felt by all faculty, including those of us in tenure-track positions, who have often had to bear responsibility Greater administrative and service responsibilities.
Aside from shouldering heavy workloads, faculty are often asked to cater more to the desires of consumers – that is, students – and adopt student-centered teaching practices. However, while focusing on the needs of our students is laudable, it is not always effective Christina Maslach and Susan E. Jackson As we have noted, the stress of working closely with individuals or groups with high needs can be a major contributor to burnout.
Robert T. Blackburn and Janet H. Lawrence He argued that self-knowledge should guide an individual’s approach to teaching, scholarship, and service, encourage faculty to make choices in areas that harness their abilities and interests, and perhaps protect against burnout. Here, I advocate for a model of faculty engagement that builds on their vision, one that enables faculty to approach their work in a way that benefits themselves, their students, and their institutions: I call it the selfless teacher-scholar model. In fact, I have found that selfishness, counterintuitively, can be selfless!
Although I draw my approach from my personal experience as a psychology professor working at a small liberal arts college, there is no reason why this guidance cannot be transferred to other educational contexts. Indeed, this approach can encourage faculty members at research institutions, for example, to view their teaching responsibilities in a new and stimulating light.
Selfish teaching
Start by asking yourself: “Are there particular facts or pieces of disciplinary content that our graduates need to know?” My colleagues in the Psychology Department often ask ourselves this question, and we always arrive at the same conclusion: the process of psychology is more important than the content. Thus, we treat content as a means of communicating the process of psychology – hypothesis testing, theory development, statistical inferences, research methods and the like.
If your major is similar in its focus on process rather than content, this should enable you to teach content that best advances your expertise and interests. In fact, American Psychological Association 2014 Introductory Psychology Initiative He advocated a course framework that enabled teachers to teach the content they felt most comfortable with, as long as they were sampling topics from each of the five broad areas of psychology. In other words, we must resist the temptation to teach every textbook chapter and instead focus on content areas that allow us to best communicate the processes we want students to understand.
We’ve all experienced the discomfort associated with educational materials that aren’t in our wheelhouse. It can be exhausting when you try to maintain false enthusiasm for it. But if you instead focus on content that you’re legitimately passionate about, then This energy will be transferred to the students. Sometimes, learning goals will require teaching content that you have no passion for, but the enthusiasm you gain from teaching to your strengths will allow you to get through those times.
Besides determining how to teach core curriculum classes, the self-centered teacher-researcher also achieves departmental learning objectives by offering specialized courses in his or her area of expertise. In my case, before I became an academic, I was a professional magician. I have found ways to incorporate my previous career into my current career. In fact, one of my research programs explores cognitive psychology through the lens of performance magic. As such, this topic can be a powerful tool for inviting students to think about perception and mental processes.
To this end, I regularly deliver a training course on The cognitive science of magic This benefits me as much as it benefits the students. Perhaps surprisingly, so is the science of magic A thriving research area. Selfishly teaching this course gives me an opportunity to catch up on any research I have neglected over the past year. I am also very passionate about the subject area, and this enthusiasm rubs off on the students. Finally, offering this course creates a channel from students to my lab. After taking the class, students understand the hypotheses being tested and the general approach I use. Of course, these students are not just workers, because the work I do with them in the lab is collaborative in nature. It benefits me and it benefits them.
Selfish grant
In the modern university, the boundaries between teaching and scholarship should be blurred. Research is a powerful educational tool. In fact, it was identified as High-impact exercise. As with most high-impact practices, supervised research is also labor intensive for the faculty member.
I have sat on or chaired many faculty search committees, and I regularly read teaching philosophy and scholarship statements in which candidates described what I consider a fatal mistake: inviting undergraduates to generate and test their own hypotheses. Science is hard, and inviting students to create and test their own hypotheses sends the opposite message: “Science is easy and you can do it in a classroom!” Moreover, it usually wastes everyone’s time.
In order to generate sound hypotheses, one must know the work that has already been carried out in the research area. Without an adequate foundation in prior work, student researchers often arrive at hypotheses driven only by their intuition.
They then took the time to design weak experiments to test these incomplete hypotheses. Hypotheses are not supported by data, and the project dies. It cannot be presented at conferences or published. It’s not science, it’s an exercise in science. Practicing science is an absolutely wonderful experience for a student, but a college teacher often feels like they need to accompany them on the journey, trying to familiarize themselves with unfamiliar research literature so they can advise on the project. A faculty member puts time and energy into a project that has no legs. Only the student benefits from this work.
An alternative to this dead-end exercise involves inviting students into the fold as co-researchers in your ongoing research program. Note that co-researchers have different responsibilities than research assistants, as is the case Partners in discovery. They influence the direction of science and have a hand in almost every element of the research process.
This effect is acquired over time. When a student joins my lab, I usually invite them to focus on a project for which we are already in the data collection phase. While learning the ins and outs of data collection, students can conduct background reading to quickly become familiar with the literature and theories that inspired the current work. They can then have a role in analyzing the data they have collected and conceiving and designing the next step in the research programme.
One concern I frequently hear about this model of faculty-directed research is that students want the experience of testing their own hypotheses, so they are unlikely to accept research that is not their own. That was not my experience. Students quickly take ownership of projects. In fact, they often forget that the ideas were never their own in the first place.
These collaborations tend to be more beneficial than one-off collaborations when students test their own hypotheses. This model has led to a large number of student presentations at conferences, and highly motivated students have become authors of my published works. The relationships were truly symbiotic.
Develop your selfless selfishness
My model has implications primarily for teaching and scholarship, but faculty must also take into account their interests and abilities when committing to service work. Time pressures are Greatest perceived stress For faculty members, they should engage in service work that does not feel like a misuse of their valuable time. Maybe this Most important for the participating professorswho often experience an increase in their service’s workload that does not match their promotability, leading to a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.
The truth is that we are pulled in different directions in academia. We are supposed to be jacks of all trades, but this expectation is unreasonable. Each of us has different competencies, and integrating those competencies is what makes faculty a collective tick.
Adopting a more selfish approach to your work can feel alienating and uncomfortable. One way to identify your selfishness is to write your personal mission statement and let that mission statement guide the choices you make in teaching, scholarship, and service. The idea you bring to your assignment and its execution will not be viewed as selfish by promotion and tenure committees. Instead, he will be seen as self-aware and focused. You will be seen as a virtuous teacher and scholar.
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