Weekend Reading – Valuing the Syllabus Edition

Last week, it was my great pleasure to get to go to Michigan State on the invitation of the HuMetrics HSS group for a Valuing the Syllabus workshop. You can see the whole Twitter stream of the event by searching the #HSSvalues hashtag. They also recorded a podcast after the event, which is worth a listen as well to get an idea of how the group came to be and the work they’ve been doing so far. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about the syllabus, a cornerstone of teaching (for better or worse). I brought my experience as an alt-ac (instructional technologist, faculty development) and a former contingent faculty member.

Before we got together over the two days (and then got stuck at various airports because of WEATHER), we were asked to read the following:

• HuMetrics and their values. Their five values, that informed and drove our discussions: Equity, Openness, Collegiality, Quality, Community.

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s introduction to her latest project, Generous Thinking (which, like her last book, Planned Obsolescence, is now available for open peer-review and commenting).

• “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

• Mining the Secrets of the Syllabus

This is all catnip for me. Generosity and affect? Check! Valuing teaching? Check! Humane ways to reward scholars for their work? CHECK! On the second day, however, I had A Moment. We were talking about citation and even an acknowledgement section for our syllabus, and I thought:

I’m having a Peggy Olson moment: realizing how strange it would be to ask for some sort of credit in collaborating with faculty on designing syllabus, imagining the reaction akin to Don Draper #hssvaluespic.twitter.com/cPnzcmLlB5

— Lee Skallerup Bessette makes zero magic (@readywriting) March 2, 2018

I was thinking about generosity as well as intellectual property and adjuncts and affective labor and recreating canons and dominant networks and outliers…

It’s still tangled in my head, wanting to value teaching, but recognizing the real exploitation of adjuncts and alt-acs, and the risks of recreating existing hierarchies.

My colleague Chris Rice pushed my thinking around this even further:

If your online learning IP policy focuses only on faculty & institutional ownership, but neglects participation by high-value IP-contributing staff, you’re doing it wrong.

Producers in film & music enjoy point participation on the final products. #highered should do the same.

— Christopher S. Rice, Ph.D. (@ricetopher) March 3, 2018

I encourage you to read the whole thread. Is the most humane way to recognize our work in the classroom is not to just get credit but also be fairly compensated?

(Yes. The answer is yes.)

Have a great weekend.

[Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash]