In-Class Versus Online Teaching: A (Dis)Embodied Enterprise

I train and supervise the graduate student teachers in our department who teach the basic course (a hybrid of theory/overview and public speaking). I love the job; it's wonderful to see them grow as teachers, to gain reflexivity in their curricular concerns, and move on to teach other classes.

But one of the most difficult things for me is articulating what it is I know about teaching. I've been teaching at the university level for approximately 17 years, yet I have trouble distilling that experience into any sort of overarching list of guidelines, do's and don'ts, or rules. Sure, I can provide advice on specific situations, both real and hypothetical. And we have year-long training meetings, a lot of which consist of me fielding questions regarding classroom management, grading, handling difficult students, etc.

But, I'm not sure I even "know" anything about teaching. Rather, my difficulty in articulating what I know is due to where I know it: the body, my body. Simply, teaching is an embodied experience. That statement will not shock many of my colleagues, especially those in Performance Studies. There have been countless articles and books written at this intersection of embodied performance and teaching, so I'm not forging new ground here either.

But this embodied approach to teaching and learning is increasingly coming under fire (and ire) from administrators and those supporting a consumer-based model of education. I don't use the term "consumer" with too much derision, as I understand the practical value of such positioning. Adjunct teachers, especially, may benefit from a pay-per-student model of education, perhaps best served through online education. The adjunct teacher featured in this story earned upwards of $120,000. That's full professor money at some universities.

While I have taught online classes and recognize the good and bad of the "democatization" of the teaching enterprise--or, perhaps, the move toward a more capitalistic, customer-driven model of education--one thing was always missing: the embodied experience of teaching. I realize that online teaching may complicate or problematize the notion of embodiment rather than simply negate or erase embodiment. I do know, though, that what I "know" about teaching resides in my body, in the ways I feel and remember feeling in the classroom. And however I may articulate that knowledge, it takes other bodies in the classroom as well.

Students cheating: What to do?

I have my own ways of preventing plagiarism on scholarly papers, most notably using turnitin.com and relying on the vigilance of the graduate teaching associates in our School. I'm also very careful, perhaps overly cautious, about student privacy as per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). For example, I have on more than one occasion refused to tell parents who contact me how their child is doing in my class. Of course, dealing with "helicopter" parents is another subject altogether. Needless to say, these parents were none too happy that I was not forthcoming with the performance of their children in my class.

But when I read this article about a professor going "vigilante" on students he caught cheating, I had to take a step back and wonder how best we can prevent cheating and plagiarism rather than trying to catch students in a "gotcha" sort of way.

One of the ways I do this to make the turnitin.com match reports that tell me how high a match is to other papers and articles in the database (numbering in the millions) available to the students themselves. What I've found, and this is especially useful for graduate students, is that doing this helps students understand the importance of paraphrasing. First, there's less a chance that they will plagiarize if they have it in their minds from the outset to mostly paraphrase. Second, since a high match only indicates a match to existing text and not outright plagiarism, a closer look reveals how much the student is quoting.

This last part is important for graduate students, as I try to communicate to them that they shouldn't let other scholars speak for them; they shouldn't quote unless the original language is poetic, unique, and otherwise something they couldn't themselves put in a different but equally explanatory way. So, a student sees the match report and gets a first-hand look at how often he or she is quoting. A high match in this case may not mean plagiarism, but it does mean that the student's scholarly writing skills need work in terms of synthesizing ideas and paraphrasing others' ideas.

One certainly fallible way I do my part to prevent and educate students about cheating. I'm not saying the professor in the article linked above eschewed this attitude. It just got me thinking.

Flashback to a simpler time...my old website!

Just had a strange experience. I went searching for an old hypertext performance I had put together for a graduate class at Arizona State University. It's a personal narrative that plays with voice and the temporal nature of storytelling by using hypertext to lead the reader to (seemingly) unrelated websites that may (or may not) contribute to the story being told. Most of the pages linked from my original page cannot be found, and I didn't bother to update them, but you can experience it here.

The strange part, besides reading what I wrote years ago (which has since been published in a different version), was that this narrative was linked to an old website I created as a Ph.D. student. It listed similar (but ultimately different) research interests and foci for teaching. The descriptions were more complicated yet stunningly simple in their assertions. I've changed them to link to my current page, but before I did I marveled not only at my own assessments of my research and teaching but the fact that I had this other, outdated, piece of me floating in cyberspace. I had literally lost track of myself!

Students as facebook friends: Too much, too close?

What's the harm? I innocently thought. Having a facebook group for the basic communication class I teach was a great idea (started by a student and now handed over to me and the GTAs for the class). It wasn't long before undergrads (first-year students) started adding me as a friend. Given the group we all belonged to it, I felt refusing to confirm students' friend requests would be a bit of a double-standard. Sure, I would be well within a traditional student-teacher relationship if I had refused, but it seemed a bit hypocritical to encourage them to use the technology to foster community among lecture students and then refuse to fully be a part of that community.

Needless to say, this is no longer a traditional student-teacher relationship, and refusing to confirm students' friend requests of me is not like refusing to give them my home or cell phone number. It's more like asking them to be part of a phone tree with me and then refusing to give them my phone number.

So, social networking technology like facebook (which I believe can be an effective teaching tool) has changed the student-teacher relationship. This isn't news. And others have theorized, speculated, and written about this change better than I can.

More specific for me, I now get news of their photo albums on my own facebook news feed. While none of these photos are of a...compromising nature, some come close. Some involve activities that could be illegal, and others just provide more information about the students than I'd like to know.

The students aren't to blame, although they should think about taking down some of these photos before embarking on a serious job hunt or be "found out" by potential employers doing the regular google-facebook-myspace search of applicants. No, I think it's just a matter of technology fostering unintended consequences in a more nontraditional teacher-student relationship.

Interestingly, I think the next step is to use these experiences of mine as teaching tools in the classroom, examples of the ways technology is both open and public (even when we think it's private or, at the least, harmless to our "online reputations"). I'll certainly include this little talk in my lesson plan for lectures to the basic oral communication class I teach.

So, all I can do now is grin and bear it...and not click on the pictures when the icons pop up in my news feed!

In the Back Seat of Mom's LTD

I've been using Rhapsody music player lately and love it. While they don't yet have all of "my" music available, I stumbled across some songs that had special meaning for me.

I'm not saying they're all good songs, but for anyone who grew up in the 70s riding in the back seat of their parents' LTD (or some other monstrous gas guzzler), you may be able to relate.

Just click on the title of this post and enjoy!