This week I was talking to my department chair about a course I will be teaching this fall that has few students enrolled currently. In thinking about a change of focus to try to get more students interested I commented that I put a lot of emphasis on writing in this course, to which he quickly responded, "we all do". I was taken back as it sounded a bit defensive. My intent was not to imply that I did more than others, I simply meant to say that I could incorporate other topics because the point of the course was to get students to write a major final essay in history.
A few hours later, feeling a bit ornery, I quietly said to myself, "yes, but not all of us write, and some of 'us' taken twenty years to write a book". After some serious repenting, I thought more about his comment and concluded that we often assume we know what we are doing because we are teaching it(BTW this is not the case with my dept. chair). From my earliest days in the department I struggled with people teaching courses that required a "publishable essay" when they were not publishing at all themselves.
Anyone in academia knows that we are often called to do things we are not trained or even qualified to do. The joke amongst us is that we are okay as long as we stay two weeks ahead of the students in the readings. As scholars we are suppose to know enough about methodology and historical construction to be able to teach a number of lower level courses outside our immediate fields. Once we get beyond that level we are out of our league. So why is it that we can all teach writing and research if we don't do it ourselves?
I know there a few people who can--let's be clear about that--but for the most part those who do not write are rarely qualified to teach it. Some professor out there is probably thinking, " I teach six course a semester, have committee duty, office hours, etc., and you expect me to write". The answer is yes. I don't mean publish major research findings in the top academic or literary journals, but do write. Writing is a skill and when you do it right and do it often you become aware of the intricasies of the written word, and come to understand the pitfalls of trying to put a point across.
But there is another point I want to make. We also have to be qualified to teach anything and qualification usually comes with training and with practice. There are instances where experience trumps education. I have a friend who was a top Chicano writer a decade ago. He began writing while he was a brick layer. He was a prolific writer and got himself published in small Chicano literary journals and then began publishing in small presses. He became so popular--and several dissertations were written on his work--that he got a job at a community college teaching writing and Spanish. Then a few years later, he was hired as a "humanist" at the University of Arizona. At the time and until he retired he had no college degree much less an advance degree in literature.
But he was far from uneducated. He read profusely, getting everything he could find on writing, literature, philosophy, the Spanish language, folklore, culture, and the list goes on. He also use to frequent a small store that sold sandwiches and engage in intellectual debates and discussion with college professors who also hung out there. This is where he made the impressions that got him his academic appointments.
But recently, I read about a long-since retired faculty member who did not get tenure because she had no advanced degree. Her claim to expertise in her field was that she spent a lot of time in the community organzing and since she was teaching about the people she organized, she felt qualified to receive tenure. Those who know me know that I'm all for the barrio people telling their own story and that I tend to be critical of people stuck in the ivory tower who know little about the people they write about. Still, my thought was that having been warned to get more training she was rightfully dismissed for not attempting to do so.
Why supportive in one case and not the other? Did I think that an experienced male without a degree is better than a female with organizing experience and at least a bachelor's degree? Not at all. He was experienced directly in what he was teaching, and he had shown his abilities to publish, and had done so more often than some of those who became his colleagues. He was also a fiction writer which often calls for a different kind of research and different style of preparation. Despite the proliferation of writing programs, most good writers learn by writing and experiencing life, not through academic training or degrees.
The other person was engaged in teaching sociology, history, literature, etc without any advanced training in any of these, and her writings were mostly pamphlets that spoke to the needs of the barrio. I admire the latter, and still admire her work in developing women's studies, but she lacked training in methodology, theory, research fundamentals, and she was not doing research to further the field. Worse, she saw no need to continue her training. Her initial value should not have been questioned but no one can stand still and expect to remain relevant, especially a teacher.
To be able to teach one has to be trained--and in exceptional cases train themselves--and one has to have experience doing what one teaches. How to get the traininng is obvious. But how does one "experience" history, sociology or literature? You do so by researching, presenting and writing; by becoming involved in knowing the subject on the ground. How do we experience civil war history, Greek military campaigns, Islamic medicine? We research, go to museums, visit historical spots, handle the instruments (or guns), go to re-enactments, and write about the topic as much and as often as we can. Academic training usually requires some of that but often not enough. We usually depend on the person to do it because of their passion for the subject. Unfortunately, some people go into the academy because it is a "cushier" job and surely more interesting than say accounting. Even worse, there are some people who begin with passion but lose it and then simply regurgitate what they learned years before.
I have great respect for what happens in the academy. There are fewer more exciting places and what we do there has a lot of impact, much of it positive, on the larger society; but we need to do a better job of training people and have higher expectations of them as teachers. Every future professor should be allowed to teach while in graduate training, and we should have courses that specifically train a scholar to teach. We should not hire people to teach unles they've had internships and temporary slots in which they've taught. And we should expect all of these people to bring a writing portfolio even if not all the work within it is published.
The reality is that most academic departments do a terrible job of training their young scholars to teach, and an even worse job of helping them to publish. Since so many tenured professor were never taught to teach and/or write they are often afraid to show their deficiencies to their younger colleagues, or they think everyone ought to do it on their own just as they did. This attitude does no favors to the students or our young colleagues.
And things may get worse if we continue to replace full time facutly with adjuncts who have neither the resources or the time to "perform their disciplines" or to write about them. We are guaranteeing that our students will learn less even as they pay more.
A final thought: I have never believed that student evaluations really measure the worth or the abilities of a teacher. Yet, so many universities are going toward that method to evaluate their faculty. What they do is not really empower their students to demand a better education but simply provide administrators more control over the classroom since they can use--and often do--these evaluations as swords over a faculty member's head. Teaching is more than pleasing students, or running a "tight ship" in the classroom. It is about imparting knowledge, getting students to enter unknown and sometimes uncomfortable circumstances, and it is about equipping them with the skills and knowledge to empower themselves. Sometimes you do all of that and they still hate you.
As one former colleague loved to say, students often don't know enough to contribute to their education, and it is incumbent upon us to teach them. But we can't unless we are trained and experienced.
