,
16 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
The career landscape for anyone specializing in higher education pedagogy is ... weird. The work of faculty development, the work of teaching teachers, is too often perceived as instrumental.
As I’ve waxed poetic (and not so poetic) before, higher education pedagogy is (at most institutions in the U.S. and beyond) not perceived as a discipline. And the folks in this field are too often seen as doing service work — not research, not teaching.
The people who do the work of teaching and learning development are too often relegated to staff roles at institutions where the faculty / staff divide is persistent (and sometimes cruel).
Because disciplinary expertise in higher education pedagogy isn’t made legible by institutional structures, folks qualified to lead the conversation about teaching and learning in #highered are deprived of voice and influence.
Recently, I described my profession as “teaching teachers,” and one response I got back was a declarative, “faculty aren’t students.” Those words have wormed their way through my brain over the last several months.
The idea that “faculty aren’t students” reduces teaching to something less than a craft, an art, an area of study, a philosophical project. It’s one explanation for why the majority of #highered faculty get zero direct preparation for the work of teaching.
In fact, many #highered faculty get even less than zero preparation for the work of teaching, because they are actively discouraged from thinking about teaching, learning to teach, writing about teaching. As graduate students. And again as new faculty.
Many #highered faculty get less than zero preparation for the work of teaching, because they are forced to talk and think about teaching in secret, worried they might break the illusion that having expertise in a field automatically prepares one to teach in that field.
Many #highered faculty get less than zero preparation for the work of teaching, because they are belittled for having (and prioritizing) teaching as a specific focus.
Over the years, when I’ve said that my major research area is higher education pedagogy, I’ve been asked, “but what’s your field?”
As a graduate student, when I said I wanted to work at a teaching college, I was told to not say that out loud.
When I taught at a community college while getting my Ph.D., I was told I shouldn’t mention my community college work — that it made me seem “distracted.”
I have been told my CV looks “muddled,” that it doesn’t tell a “coherent” story, that the “content-area” of my research isn’t clear. Because, at most institutions, higher education pedagogy is simply not legible as an area of research or teaching.
At one point, in an interview for a teaching center director position at an elite public R1, I asked, “what are the opportunities for teaching in this position?” And was told, “oh, it hadn’t occurred to us that the person in this position would teach. This is a staff role.”
Of course, there are pockets where none of this is true, and the #highered teaching and learning development community is a motley crew of brilliant researchers, teachers, and humans. But our work is precarious. And institutions are structured in ways that make us precarious.
An entire field should not be seen as an affront. We need strong advocates for the complex work of teaching, asking hard questions of #highered — researchers, designers, librarians, technologists, teachers, students. Those are the colleagues I want to work with and celebrate.
