If you are reading this “how to” guide, it can be assumed that you are have also looked at the resources provided by your own institution or by other educational resources that you’ve found online. What makes this one different?

We prioritize self-care for the teacher. Things are tough enough with finding childcare, lack of personal space, lack of daily structure, mental and physical health scares, and added responsibilities. We are university teachers, but hope that our suggestions may apply to educators in several other areas and age groups.

We prioritize self-care for the student. One of the best things about going to school is a student’s ability to build a community and support network of friends, which comes from informal and spontaneous ways to meet each other and to reach out when things get confusing or lonely. We include in our considerations how teachers can better support students’ mental health—including by believing them when they say they are not feeling well or are overwhelmed, by giving extensions, and by creating opportunities for them to build a community while they #stayathome .

We offer best practices, not perfect answers. We are open to feedback and suggestions, because pedagogy is not an island. We are rooting for you!

Please note that select pieces of information may be repeated below to answer questions in other categories.

Where do I start?

When designing an online course, where do I start?

There’s no shortage of design frameworks for online course delivery. And given ample time, choice, and resources, you might decide to redesign and build your course with one of these frameworks. Right now, however, consider assessing what you can keep from the F2F (face-to-face) iteration of the course, what you need to modify, and what you need to remove with respect to learning outcomes, instructional strategies, and summative assessments. And once you’ve determined what outcomes, strategies and assessments to import, consider how they will translate: what infrastructures do you need to effectively implement these elements in a virtual learning environment? What tools do you need to structure course content? What tools do you need to deliver grade assessments?

There are also lots of contexts that require consideration when designing an online course: learner context (i.e. Who are your learners? Why are they taking this course? What do they already know? How do your learners learn? Where are they learning from? etc.); instructor context (i.e. How do you teach? And how can you adapt your approach to teaching in online learning environments? What else is on your plate this term? etc.); course context (i.e. What do you want your learners to learn? What instructional materials and technologies will you use to facilitate this learning? What instructional methods will you use to support this learning? What summative assessments will you design to assess this learning? etc.). This is to say there are many different things to consider, and all the questions, and it is overwhelming. So when designing or adapting your course for remote teaching, keep it simple, make it flexible, design for “good enough.”

A note on flexibility. Flexibility is everything: give your learners the opportunity to choose, whether it’s a choice of which summative assessments to complete (i.e. they must complete four out of 10 assignments); when they’d like to submit the assignment and the corresponding amount of feedback they’ll receive (i.e. submit sooner, rubric comments and written feedback; later, rubric feedback); which assignments to revise and resubmit, etc. They know their schedule and their commitments. Build choice into the course framework and let them direct their own learning. And! Flexibility can also help mitigate your workload.

Should I teach asynchronously or synchronously? Both?

Whether it’s your choice, or your institution has instructed you on which instructional design model you will be using this term/year, we acknowledge that asynchronous and synchronous teaching have pros and cons. Neither can replace the experience of F2F, but we do advise some of the following considerations:

Perhaps we don’t have to say this, but virtual classrooms are not F2F classrooms and can’t be treated as such. We will elaborate, but for now, let’s just say that the factors of eye contact, body language, and “eyes front” attention do not hold. Nor do long speeches, hand raising, and students who prefer to blend into the back of the room.

Even if teaching is asynchronous, holding at least one synchronous meeting at the beginning of the term can help students meet each other. If students are in different time zones, consider whether you could hold a meet-and-greet at a time that works for them. If you enjoy meeting with students, you can also try casual biweekly meetings for which attendance isn’t required. When setting up such a meeting, use a time-based poll such as Doodle.

If you have a choice: classes that are heavy in conversation lend themselves to the synchronous style, including graduate seminars, workshops, and topics that lead students to ask a lot of questions.

If you can choose what times your classes or office hours are held, be mindful of the fact that students may be in different time zones and that there are less than ideal times for them to be trying to learn (3am, for instance).

What changes in the approach to building community in asynchronous environments?

There are lots of cool ways to encourage interaction and build community with course content via apps separate from the learning management system. You’ll want to consider the purpose of the interactions (i.e. is it linked to a course or assignment outcome?), your learners’ familiarity with additional applications, and your capacity to teach, troubleshoot, and support them with unfamiliar applications.

There’s also a lot of existing ways to encourage interaction and build community within the LMS (learning management systems). For instance:

• Create a presence and maintain it: pre-record a welcome message that’s a bit of “here’s an introduction to the course”, and a bit of “here’s an introduction to me as a person/your instructor/your professor.” Invite your learners to respond and introduce themselves so you get to know them too.

• And/or, pre-record short, weekly messages, so your learners get the opportunity to see and hear you throughout the term. Doing any sort of group work that’s shared across the class? This pre-recorded message would be a great opportunity to recognize thoughtful group work! Do you have results to share from a formative assessment? This is also a great space to discuss them.

• Connect regularly with your learners so you can identify what’s working for them or where they might require further support, and communicate what you’re able to change or revisit. There are lots of formative assessments that lend themselves well to online contexts, like anonymous polls, Q/As, Start/Stop/Continue, 1-Minute Papers, Muddiest Point/Crystal Clear. The more targeted the formative assessments, the more tailored the feedback will be. And framing these formative assessments with open-ended questions creates space for learners to feel comfortable asking for clarification, and ensures they have an opportunity to think about what they already know, what they might want to pay attention to, and what they might want to reflect on and or revisit and how that might impact their overall grasp of the material. For example, “What more do we need to know about [theory] or [tool]” or “What’s crystal clear about [theory] or [tool]? What’s the muddiest thing about [theory] or [tool]” or “What can I start/stop/continue with respect to [weekly lectures] or [check-in videos] or [discussion boards]”.

• Consider creating spaces for informal [but still professional and respectful] student-student interactions, like a discussion board that’s for non-course related conversations.

• If your students don’t mind signing up for a(nother) new platform, try Slack or Discord, which are community platforms in which people can have group and private conversations, break off into groups (for group work!), post relevant content, and share files. For cohort building in particular, participants in Discord can see when others are “online,” so even during non-class hours, they can write to each other to talk or hang out virtually.

What if I’m not tech savvy? What if I’m working with others who aren’t tech savvy?

Ok, first of all: no shame here. We both know that age is not a factor when it comes to being averse to technology. But now that we’re all in this together, let’s try to help each other out.

The best tactic is to avoid signing up for or downloading new programs, and to avoid asking others to do the same. We realize that that is not always going to be possible, in which case: the next easiest thing to do is to seek out or offer video guides to using technology. Step-by-step instructions recorded on videos are much easier to follow than text-based instructions (“click which button? Where is it?”) and screenshots (“wait, how did they get to that page?”). YouTube is your friend here, as there are many introductory and step-by-step tutorials on computer programs, and even more have been made since COVID-19 forced us all to stay connected via technology.

If you’re instructing others on technology, turn on your computer’s screen recorder and record the process of what you are trying to explain, whether it’s how to download a browser, how to sign up for Zoom, or where to find this week’s readings.

To turn on your computer’s screen recorder, try these keyboard commands:

What about institutional support?

If you’re wondering what institutional licences are available for particular apps, programs, software; who to contact to purchase institutional licences; what to do when your request is denied; if your department has funding for teaching and learning aids; if your request to purchase an institutional license is denied, what other app, program, software can you use; if there is an open-source option …

Consider connecting with the formal support offered by academic partners at your institution to develop the course. For example, a teaching centre, extended/distance/online learning centre, accessibility services, the library, IT services, media services, etc. might offer self-paced learning, workshops, and or 1-on-1 support resources to help you design and deliver your online course.

What if I’m being asked to do extra unpaid labour? What if my colleagues or students are being asked to do extra unpaid labour?

While much of the labour that goes into online teaching (and, let’s face it, teaching in general) is unseen, those of us in contingent positions, or who are juggling teaching with other responsibilities in graduate school, may really get the short end of the stick. And often you will not even be asked to do this extra labour, it’s just assumed or implied you will do it because you accepted the assignment. Read your contract, particularly if you’re paid for a set number of hours per week, and track how many hours you spend on course-related activities, including training, course prep, answering emails, facilitating, grading, etc. If you’re exceeding what’s outlined in your contract, connect with your union or association to identify your options, reflect on how you might streamline and minimize your workload, and know you might already be doing everything you can to streamline and minimize your workload and it’s still too much.

If you have job security, consider how you might highlight the exploitation of contingent instructors and leverage whatever power you possess in your position to dismantle this exploitation. Employers should inquire how they can better support their contingent faculty in particular. What kinds of support would be helpful, including collecting and sharing resources, having a chat group, arranging formal training in a timely fashion, giving as much notice as possible to contingent faculty for teaching assignments, and even looking to compensate for extra unpaid labour? The best scenario is to pay people for extra work that they do, period.

Student Communication & Transparency

What kinds of things should I be transparent with my students about?

With assignments and exams, be very clear about deadlines as well as your expectations. More detail about expectations is needed than usual (they can’t ask you on the spot, so some anticipation must occur), put the expectations somewhere that students can return to over and over).

State the submission times and submission methods for assignments. Tell students to include their names or some other kind of identification in the name of the submitted document

If grades will be docked, tell them how much and give them examples. If you are open to extensions (oh, please be open to them during this time), be transparent about how much notice you need and when it’s too late to ask (e.g. the day before).

If there is an option to take pass/fail instead of a numerical or letter grade, let them know as soon as possible.

What if different students are e-mailing me with the same questions?

Once a term or more, gather all of their questions and make an FAQ document or video to share with the class, especially since students often have the same question.

How do I address class concerns? How do I know whether they are enjoying or struggling with the class?

Create an anonymous questionnaire midway through the term to allow them to ask for things to start/stop/continue: what would they like the instructor to start doing more of? What kind of requests and exercises would they prefer to stop? What should the instructor continue to do that is working well?

Anonymous Google form

Xoyondo survey

Poll Everywhere

Internet Accessibility, Safety, and Privacy

What if I’m concerned about Internet privacy and safety, including hacking or personal information theft?

Use a VPN (virtual private network), which allows you to mask your device’s IP address with a fake IP address in another location (including other countries!), to protect your computer’s privacy and security. VPNs work like a P.O. box: you can receive the content but hide your home address.

The browser Opera includes a free VPN that can be turned on and off. Here is a video made by Lai-Tze, showing you how to turn on Opera’s VPN.

How can I support learners who can’t access common educational resources because of their geographical location?

Please be sensitive and sympathetic to the learning environment of international students as well as to the content laws of the countries in which they are living. Some of these countries may enforce firewalls and content regulations, and you should not make any classwork obligatory that may get them into any kind of legal trouble. Remember: a lot of students use shared devices with family members, or access the Internet in public spaces where their screens can be seen. But to answer that question more specifically …

What if my students can’t access specific websites?

Consider using some software alternatives, including open-source options for students worldwide who can’t access certain parts of the Internet websites, or who just don’t want to support monopoly company programs.

Switching.software

Jitsi

Github

Alternatives to F2F (face to face) Classroom Methods

What should I keep of F2F classroom methods?

Some things should be ok to maintain, including the natural time it takes to move around a classroom. It always takes time to set up presentations, shuffle through notes, take a sip of water, sneeze, and so forth. It’s ok. Take your time and let others take theirs.

You can still engage with your students, including by asking them questions and starting conversations. Maybe one of the better parts of virtual learning is that users’ names are included in many video conferencing platforms, so use their names when you are talking to them.

What alternatives are there to F2F classroom tools?

See the University Design for Learning guidelines on how to adapt for both F2F and virtual best practices. However and wherever you’re teaching, provide your learners with multiple modes of representation, engagement, action, and expression.

Are you used to writing or drawing on a board while you teach? Virtual whiteboards may be a great option for you. Try AWWApp or Miro>.

What about group work?

Arrange students into smaller groups (if they know each other, you could also let them arrange themselves). If they are comfortable with it and if the group work allows it, consider asking them to change groups each time so that they can meet new people.

How about class presentations?

With class presentations, students will have to learn some of the same tricks as the teachers to adapt to virtual teaching and learning. One suggestion that may be helpful to them is to be transparent about sections of talks and lectures: ask them to start the presentation with a visual + verbal table of contents (Part 1, Part 2 of talk). Whether they want to keep things as a conversation or read straight off of a paper (which is very difficult to pay attention to even F2F), suggest that they offer visual aids: images, videos, slides, and so forth.

How about interactive or hands-on activities and exercises?

Integrating learner-centred, interactive instructional activities into online teaching spaces is possible, it just requires a bit more time. Learners require clear directions for the activity, clear expectations, and clear links to course objectives. Collaboration is amazing and learners need to know how collaborating with their colleagues is going to prepare them for a summative assessment, or help them meet the intended learning outcome for this particular unit in the course.

Seek out accessible and affordable ways to do hands-on activities at home, even if the project has to change slightly. Usually, Lai-Tze teaches her graduate classes out of a technological lab with lots of equipment for “critical making.” In March 2020, when the COVID-19 lockdown began, her “Critical Media Infrastructures” class turned to making face masks. Instead of using lab supplies and machines, they used spare cloth, vacuum cleaner bags (non-HEPA/fibreglass), old shoe laces, elastics from the dollar store–whatever they had at home. To put their masks together, they used sewing machines, needle and thread, or hot glue guns!

How do I assign grades for things like participation, group work, etc.?

Find ways for them to participate in their own time. For example, ask a weekly question in a forum (either through your home institution or use an accessible chat group like Slack), which can give them the chance to respond in text + via links (many of them are already used to sharing content).

Consider using a rubric so learners have something concrete to reference regarding what’s expecting of them, and so you have something concrete to consult when grading more nebulous course elements like participation. Rubrics take time to draft, revise, and tweak, but once you have them, you have them!

For group work, consider implementing a rubric and/or group contract. Provide all groups with a template they can discuss and modify according to their group’s dynamics. Again, both of these documents give learners something concrete to reference re: expectations, and you something concrete to consult re: grading, and all parties a pathway to recourse should there be any sort of implosion because of group work (it happens.)

Reflective exercises can come in handy too for both participation and group work! For example, “What did you learn through X? How might you apply this to future Y?” Learners often feel comfortable communicating in this mode because it’s metacognitive, they can be honest, and they don’t have to verbalize face to face.

Learning & Accessibility

How can I save my notes for captions, slides, and future lectures?

If you’re recording video lectures and talks, try turning on a dictation program to capture the text while you ramble! While the text isn’t always perfect, you can copy + paste the final product into presentation slides and documents for current and future lectures!

The dictated notes can be used for captions and accessibility. Captions are helpful for students who are hard of hearing, who don’t retain information as strongly over verbal communication, and/or who aren’t fluent in the language of instruction.

To turn on dictation …

see here

Should audio be kept on or off?

Individual participants should be able to choose what makes them comfortable–as long as they are not distracting others. If select speakers are talking, it’s a good idea for everyone who is not speaking to keep audio off. This is useful if a participant’s mic is producing a lot of background noise or feedback/echo. If there is no extra noise and an open conversation amongst all participants is happening, audio can be kept on so that participants aren’t muting and unmuting constantly.

Should video be kept on or off?

Individual participants should be able to choose what makes them comfortable–as long as they are not distracting others. Students should not be punished if they look like they are not paying attention. Even in F2F lectures, they don’t have their eyes at the front the whole time. Also, students should not be forced to keep their videos on. Their homes are private spaces, just like your home, and they may not want to show everyone their bedrooms, their family members, their roommates, and/or their pets.

How long should my recorded talks and lectures be?

We have been given all kinds of advice when it comes to how long/short recorded videos should be, and the answer to this question is that it depends on how long you expect them to either look at the screen or to listen. We strongly suggest breaking up long videos into smaller videos, with the consideration that watching a two-hour lecture can equate to watching a two-hour movie. Longer videos should also be avoided, as they take more time to load and can be difficult to navigate if a student has to refresh the video or if they try to look for “that one part where the Professor defined osmosis.” Have you spent a long time trying to find “that one part” in a movie? Be kind!

If you need more information (about tools as well), look no further than this amazing Tweet on video lectures by Hook & Eye’s Editrix Aimée Morrison:

What do you need in a video lecture? A thread of provocations, by me. First, here's what you don't need: new camera, new microphone, new lighting, new software. You can make EXCELLENT class videos using consumer-grade tools you already have. 1/

— Aimée Morrison (@digiwonk) September 9, 2020

Individual videos should be approximately ten minutes if there is a lot to look at on the screen, and 20-30 minutes if there is not much to look at. Students are used to intently watching five- to ten-minute YouTube videos, but they are also used to listening to hour-long podcasts so long as they can cook, clean, drive, or do other activities while listening. It also helps with their navigation if videos are titled in the same way as a table of contents. So, not “Week 4, Part 3.” Instead, try “4.3: The Principles of New Media.” You can also try including time stamps so that the videos are easier to navigate.

Apply the principles of universal design to your instructional materials and assessments, so learners have a few different formats to engage with course content. Bonus! Many learning platforms now feature built-in accessibility checkers, so you can double-check the way you’ve designed course elements is accessible (i.e. text size and type; alt text for images; page hierarchy etc.).

Virtual Communication

How do I get students to stop talking over each other or to stop talking too much?

Without resorting to enforcing Robert’s Rules of Order, there still needs to be a little structure. In classrooms, some students like to raise their hands, so is there an equivalent? Hand-raising is a built-in option for many video conferencing tools, but the order of who gets to speak next is sometimes up for debate. We recommend having students put an emoji (a hand or perhaps a rainbow, but not a conch!) in the text-based group chat, which denotes that they would like to speak next and in a first come, first served order. For those who have thoughts and questions but would not like to speak, they may type into the chat alongside the conversation.

If a few students are in fact talking too much, remind them to put their emoji in the chat. You can also start to respond to or read out some of the typed comments in the chat, asking if students who haven’t spoken yet would like to elaborate or give an example. If the conversation is clearly dominated by a select few students, it’s time to try getting the rest to speak up more. In which case …

How do I get students to start talking in class?
Try out a class exercise called “free writing,” recommended to us by creative writer Sean Braune. In this method, the instructor poses a question (usually open-ended) and gives the students a few minutes to jot down responses, preferably on paper. When the time is up, no one has to speak and none of the responses are collected or marked. Students can either read aloud, say anything that has come to their minds, or type their feedback and thoughts in the text-based group chat. The “free write” method had been very effective at getting quiet students to participate in class because their notes serve as a safety net.

What are some alternatives for is to communicate via text or video?

If your students don’t mind signing up for a(nother) new platform, try Slack or Discord, which are community platforms in which people can have group and private conversations, break off into groups (for group work!), post relevant content, and share files. For cohort building in particular, participants in Discord can see when others are “online,” so even during non-class hours, they can write to each other to talk or hang out virtually.

If you don’t have to use your institution’s video conferencing platform, consider switching to the open-source, free, and global Internet-accessible Jitsi. Jitsi has screen sharing, chat, and recording functions. There is no time limit. Make a Jitsi “room” with a unique name and send the link to your students. Nothing to download; all they have to do is click.

What if they are abusing the text-based chat function?

Unfortunately, as with F2F classes, students can abuse their devices and class time by messaging each other. But as teachers would also do in class, if they are distracting you and other students, you have the right to ask them to stop. If they don’t stop, you have the right to ask them to leave. If they are extremely disruptive and also won’t leave, you have the right to end the class and end the online session. Students have the right to feel safe in their classroom, whether virtual or F2F.

Author Biographies

Lai-Tze Fan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo in Canada, as well as a Faculty Researcher of the Critical Media Lab and Games Institute. She researches digital storytelling and communication, media theory and infrastructure, research-creation or critical making, and gendered tech/AI/labour. Fan has written for Hook & Eye before, including a guide on “How to Write an Academic Cover Letter.” Learn more at laitzefan.com.

Becky Anderson is a Career Advisor in the Centre for Career Action at the University of Waterloo. She supports the career development of individuals in the undergraduate community pursuing further education. She’s also a doctoral candidate with the Department of English Language and Literature, concurrently pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Cognitive Science. Her research considers methods of immersion across storytelling media.

advice · change management · community · equity · ideas for change · saving my sanity

Woman, interrupted: a guide for men

September 16, 2019 Lily Cho

giphy

image via

It’s a new school year and, if you work in a college or university, that means another year of meetings. Woohoo! I’m in a lot of meetings and I think a lot about how to have a better meeting. One of the things that makes some meetings really dispiriting are unwanted interruptions from male, and male-identified, colleagues who stop women from speaking.

We already know that men often interrupt women in a meeting. It is a “universal phenomenon.” And we have a lot of good thoughts and suggestions for what women should do when men interrupt them. It’s got a hashtag, #manterruption, and there’s even an app to track it. The current global interruption rate is 1.4 times a minute.

But there is surprisingly little help for men who interrupt women. We know what women should do when they get interrupted. But men shouldn’t be left out. There should be a guide for them too.

Never fear! Hook & Eye is here to help! Here’s a friendly letter for your male colleagues and mine:

Dear Male Colleague in a Meeting,

It’s really great to see you here! Collegial process is so important and I am so grateful that you have taken the time to come to this meeting. Having your depth of experience and expertise at this table, or in this room, makes all of our work better. I know you know a LOT. It might sometimes (often?) happen that you have the urge to share your knowledge urgently even though someone else is already talking. Maybe the other person who is already talking is a woman? Especially if the other person is talking is a woman, please, I beg you, pause for a moment and consider withdrawing your desire to interrupt and ask the following questions:

Do you really need to do this? Can this point wait until the speaker has finished talking?
Is this an unwanted interruption? That is, does anyone else want you to interrupt?

You might ask, how can I tell if this is an unwanted interruption?

Good question! I’m so glad you asked.

Consider: will this interruption help the speaker clarify or further her point? will this interruption upset and destabilize the speaker so that she loses her train of thought and has trouble continuing to make her point? would other people at the meeting want me to interrupt?

Not sure? That’s good. I work in the liberal arts where embracing uncertainty is one of the cornerstones of intellectual inquiry.

Here’s a quick and easy way to get some answers: ask someone, preferably a woman. Pass them a note. Whisper in their ear. Send them a text or DM. If you’re really organized, before the meeting, arrange for sign that you can make to a colleague, preferably a woman, who will be in the room and she can tell you if your interruption will be welcome.

Ok, you’ve checked and this interruption really would be welcome. Great! But you still shouldn’t be the person interrupting. You still have to withdraw.

Ask a colleague, definitely preferably a woman, to do it for you. This is a terrific way to triple check that the interruption really is wanted. And to make sure that you’re not another dude preventing a woman from speaking.

I know, all this takes time. The meeting is moving fast and you want to interrupt because this point is urgent. You’ve got to trust me on this. It’s not so urgent that it can’t wait a few moments so that you can be really sure that this is a good move.

Thank you. Welcome back. Let’s have a great year of meetings and let’s try for no more meetings where men interrupt women.

advice · new year new plan · teaching · tidying up · Uncategorized

Saying “yes” and sparking joy

January 10, 2019 aimeemorrison1 Comment

I’m kind of a Kondo-ite. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up rivals Pride and Prejudice on my list of sick-in-bed comfort reads. When stressed, I throw things out. It’s never been the wrong thing to do.

It’s my first week back to teaching, after my year-long sabbatical and I’m a little frazzled just from the change in pace, routine, number of people, details to manage, the excitement of a new semester. At night, my daughter and I crawl into bed together with the cat and the dog and fire up an episode of Tidying Up on the Netflix-machine and enjoy the transition from the overwhelm and frazzle of my messy day–oh, wait, I mean someone else’s messy home–to the beatific smiles that arise when you know that when you open that specific kitchen drawer, there’s an open spot to put the can opener back into. Ahhhhhh.

You can use boxes to store and organize smaller items

It’s easy to focus on the before, on the piles and piles and piles of DVDs, the overflowing laundry baskets, counters encrusted with random bric-a-brac, the entire rumpus room of Christmas decorations in April. It’s easy to goggle at the enormous piles of garbage bags. It’s easy to spin cynical narratives of late capitalist over-accumulation and the soothing of every feeling of discomfort with “retail therapy,” easy to tut-tut at a particularly American drive to always have more, damn the torpedoes, the credit-rating, the square-footage of the dwelling, common sense. It’s easy to think: these people need to learn to say no, to get rid of, to limit, to control. A tightening of purse strings. Self-discipline. No. Consider some of the recent journalism on this. Very judgemental.

But.

The Mersier family (the episode I watched last night) made a special point of noting that Kondo doesn’t judge anyone’s possessions, anyone’s choice about what sparks joy and what doesn’t. And that’s true. Kondo is not so much about getting rid of clutter but of recalibrating your joy sensor. People don’t accumulate 200 pairs of socks because they’re trying to be slobs. They don’t stack every participation medal they’ve earned since 1983 into a shoe box and put it on the dining room table because they want to make sure everyone eats on the couch. People buy stuff, hold onto stuff, produce teetering piles in the corners of their rooms because at some point those objects felt like the solution to some sort of problem: mismatched and not enough socks, a way to show their care for their childrens’ childhoods, a way to keep cherished hobbies close to hand but not in the way. The impulses are always positive, the gratifications perhaps immediate, but the long-term effects unexpectedly, drip by drip, exhausting and overwhelming. People buy, and keep, and store things to create joy. But they lose the way at some point without realising it and don’t know how to climb over the mountain of discount nutcrackers that are blocking their view of the future.

Kondo helps people find their joy again. It looks like throwing things away, it looks like saying no, forcefully, over and over: no, you don’t need to keep 40 years of baseball cards you collected with your kids who haven’t lived here for 20 years. No you don’t need an insulated coat you bought for Michigan now that you live in California. No you don’t need 80 cotton t-shirts. No your kids shouldn’t have so many possessions that they need secondary storage areas in the common rooms of your home. Violence, self-negation, rejection, deprivation.

But what if Kondo is asking us not to say no, but to say yes?

Why does everyone look more … free at the end of each episode than at the beginning? Their faces softer and more open, their gestures more expansive, their laughs full-throated? They have said yes to joy. They have found what they’re looking for: a ‘path to winning’ for the Mersiers, and the feeling that a downsized apartment has become a home. A path into the future, a wide-open retirement for the couple with enough Christmas decorations to do up all of Macy’s, enough baseball cards to open a store. An end to the petty arguments and helplessness of the couple with two young children and no counter space at all.

Kondo begins her magic by saying yes to the home. She sits on the floor. She closes her eyes and becomes still. She smiles a little, touches her fingertips to the floor and traces a little arc from her knees around to her hips. It is awkward and time-consuming and non-narrative … and unexpectedly moving. At least one woman cries on witnessing it. Others become awkwardly still, humbled, as if by someone praying. They bow their heads, they smile nervously. Kondo says yes to the home. Yes to the idea that home is a space of care, that we respect ourselves and our families and our great privilege by attending to this space.

I’m going somewhere with this.

I want to ask you: what are you saying yes to in your home, or, in your work? I’ve written a few times in the past year about my own sometimes frenzied sometimes deliberate sometimes emotional sometimes planned “tidying up” of my working spaces. I am hundreds and hundreds of pounds lighter in the most material of ways. I am lighter in other ways too: getting rid of something between 50 and 100 books gave me the freedom to read many more things, greet new ideas, cherish older ones, release my guilt and obligation. I’m not going to read Sadie Plant again, I never liked that book in the first place, I can let that book go. I can read something else.

But I have said yes in other acts of “tidying up” as well. More is not always better. A little bravery and thoughtfulness might find joy in less. What looks like no can be a yes.

You can tidy up your habits, ideas of what work is, what you “should” be or do, what is essential and what is not. This tidying up, too, is magic.

When I started teaching, I had textbooks and a coursepacks and exams and oral presentations and a research paper. I wrote lectures. I had quizzes. For every course. I had accumulated all these teaching strategies from various places and figured I had to use all of them all the time. It was, if you will, cluttered and ill thought out. I did all those things to assuage my anxiety about my own competence. I did them to fit in with what I thought my colleagues were doing. I did it because I thought it was what students expected. It didn’t bring me joy. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. I tried to keep adding things. Do you see where this is going? When I tidied up my pedagogy and assessments, I got rid of a lot: don’t need an exam in a writing course; don’t need a research paper in a methods course; don’t need oral presentations from students in … most courses, don’t need readings for every single class. No to the piles and to the more and to the eveyrthing, yes to leaner, cleaner, focused work. One of my colleagues expressed great shock that I did away with the 10 page research paper in second year course on literary critical methods. But research what? Scansion? Methods are about applying techniques, about learning specialized language, about recognizing instances of a given thing–there are way better ways than ten-sources-at-least-one-academic-monograph-and-two-peer-reviewed-articles-and-not-more-than-one-internet-site research papers in MLA format following the hourglass structure. That’s just clutter. It does not spark joy. It weighs me down.

My dear colleague Frankie and I are teaching a project based graduate course together, one that blends her expertise in social movements, pedagogies of care, racial justice, and critical theory with mine in social and digital media, in design, in communities of online practice, in virality, in platform. We said no to trying to master one another’s fields; we said yes to learning from each other in class and modelling humility and curiosity in that way. We said no to all assigned reading, no to course packs, no to bookstore orders, no to PDFs on the course website, no to performing our own competence by generating overwhelming reference lists. We said yes to really committing to the project-based pedagogy, and so we said yes to supporting students’ research efforts more generously as they build their own reading lists. Students are anxious about what we’re asking them to do for group projects: but we have said yes to devoting the bulk of instructional and contact time to helping them work through it, as their main focus. I expect a lot of emails: I said no to assigned readings so I can say yes to that extra meeting, yes to reviewing that draft, yes to let’s have a look at that reference list. Just writing this out right now sparks joy.

I have said no to on-campus time on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday mornings. Saying “no” to campus on those days is actually saying yes to: rebuilding my spoon stock by being quiet, wearing clothes that don’t chafe, taking yoga breaks, watching the birds out my window as I think and write and process. It is saying yes to a Thursday run during daylight hours instead of with a head lamp after supper. Yes to devoting my energy to the big tasks that need me to really manage my attention for a few hours, uninterrupted. Yes to putting some food into the slow cooker at lunchtime and having a hot meal, relaxed, with my family. These slow quiet focused gentle reflective days spark joy in me, make my work joyful. Yes.

On the flip side, I am saying yes to being on campus for 9.5 hours on Monday, with 4.5 of those actually in classroom teaching. I am on campus for 8 hours on Wednesdays, with grad meetings, and 2 hours of office hours, and 1.5 hours of teaching. I am saying yes, Mondays and Wednesdays, to being open and available and dressed professionally and with a packed lunch and collegiality. And I can find joy in this, too, because I do love teaching, spontaneous hallway chats, chance encounters, solving people’s problems, making handouts with jokes in them, and seeing students laugh. Yes to that shift in energy in a classroom when everyone suddenly gets it. Yes to the student who comes to my office to tell me something that is scaring them. Yes to that poster announcing that talk that I never would have thought I wanted to hear but becomes weirdly salient. Yes to enjoying my collection of 90s inspired mock turtlenecks and roomy pants that taper at the ankle, to patent lace-ups. Yes to the walk to and from campus through the park, feeling the wind, crunching the snow.

We all seek joy. We wish to be at peace, in comfort, in control, easeful. Our whole economic system is predicated on making us feel insufficient, not enough, and to find abundance by the accumulation of things. The academy, too, is based on muchness: higher grades, more reading, more publications, longer CVs, bigger grants, more more more. But it’s a trap. Like the contributors on Tidying Up, we have been trying to fulfil our very real needs for emotional and intellectual and practical safety, comfort, and joy by overstuffing our closets and our calendars, enacting positivity by saying yes to more sweaters, more assignments, more emails, more committees in ways that are counterproductive to these needs. Full of shame and fear, tired beyond belief, immured by all our own things and obligations and habits, we feel pushed to say no and it’s hard, like we’re being punished or like we are failing.

But maybe it’s not about the garbage bags, not about the awful spectacle of how you let it get to this point. Maybe it’s about the way you can exhale more deeply, about the room freed up in your head when everywhere you set your eyes does not reproach you with some obligation unmet for some problem not yet solved. Maybe it really is about the joy, about the yes, not the no.

What can you say yes to, this semester, by tidying up–saying yes, even though it looks like a no–some small part of your habits and work? Could you, maybe, find a little space for a tiny act of joy?

advice

How to Write an Academic Cover Letter

October 5, 2018October 8, 2019 Lily Cho

RE-POST: It’s the academic job application season again. That means many of you are either writing cover letters, or reading drafts of cover letters from your students. Either way, we can all learn from the very smart Lai-Tze Fan! It’s academic job season. Her advice on writing a cover letter is SO GOOD. Without further ado…

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Recently, I’ve offered to look over the cover letters of a few people applying to professor positions. The academic cover letter is a unique genre, and getting it right is as hard as the first time you wrote a grant proposal. It is your brief chance to show a search committee what you have to offer–including your existing/future research, your teaching methods, and that you’d be a great colleague. The cover letter is less finicky than the grant proposal (hurray, no citations!), but needs to be both cleaner and even more persuasive.

We all know the precarious futures of young academics, as well as the struggles faced by those who have been on the job market for six months or six years. I don’t judge anyone for going into alt-ac or leaving academia all together; some of the smartest people in my PhD cohort chose not to finish the degree, preferring other paths that I’m sure make them happy, and I am happy for them.

For those who want to stay, I’d like to offer suggestions based on my own experiences, noting that different disciplines may have fine-tuned requirements that I haven’t acknowledged here or even differing advice. As I will state at the end, I welcome additional tips that others in the community have to add. Please post them below!

Some background information: I’ve been lucky and am extremely grateful to have had interviews every season and back-to-back tenure-track jobs. I am not guaranteeing anything– these are just observations I’ve made in applying to nearly thirty jobs (some research-focused and some teaching-focused), serving on search committees, and editing dozens of cover letters for others.

I realize the length of the list is daunting. Think of it this way: after the job season, you’ll have written maybe half a dozen varieties of research- and teaching-focused letters. Let’s say you are an artist: maybe one letter highlights creative practice, one highlights curriculum building, one is suited for a fine arts department, one for social science, and one for the humanities. You now have templates that can be recycled and tweaked for most future job applications, but the first time is usually the hardest.

A lot of these suggestions you may already know. I hope the list may be useful, but whether or not it is, please offer your own advice to other scholars giving the job market a shot. I myself focus on helping young scholars, including women and non-binary people, and especially those of colour like me.

These suggestions aren’t necessarily in order, but I’ve also organized them in a way that, if you prefer, can be followed step-by-step.

Note on terminology: I was trained in Canada, so some of my terminology will reflect this. Other countries and systems have their preferred terms for “tenure” (such as “substantiation”), graduate students (“postgrads”), and various levels of teaching positions (“lecturer” in Canada vs. the UK). Please keep these variations in mind for your own job-seeking needs.

Throughout this document, the word “department” is used, but may also refer to specialized programs, research labs, centres, etc. to which you may be applying.

BEFORE YOU START

The #1 rule

Do not waste the search committee’s time. Don’t give them extra work or extra pages, don’t submit something that is incomplete, and don’t mislead them with confusing information.

Optional: Crack down on social media

The world of academia is small. Scholars that are associated or in close contact with any departments to which you apply shouldn’t be able to see questionable photos on your Instagram or read unprofessional posts on Facebook. Please don’t think that I am suggesting that friends who are academics do not care about who you are; nor would I ever advocate for faculty members to share others’ private information (we have witnessed these breaches of privacy and everyone gets upset). What I refer to is a scholar’s conflict of interest that might put them in a professional bind; maybe they’d even like to help you out, but they may excluded from important conversations because they are a bit too close to a job candidate.

Again, this is up to you! But if you are interested in limiting social media, then you could, for instance, place select people on private/acquaintance lists, have separate personal accounts, or even temporarily deactivate. If you haven’t done this yet, that’s ok: start now and limit visibility on previous posts that are questionable. What counts as sharing too much information you can decide for yourself, but as a rule of thumb, do not publicly criticize your current department and students, nor the department to which you’re applying or its faculty members. You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are also entitled to protect them.

ONTO THE LETTER

2.5 pages max

The cover letter should be 2.5 pages max, even with a signature at the bottom and your school logo/letterhead at the top (if you are currently affiliated with a school, then do use their logo and make it small). The signature adds a personalized touch.

Do your homework

Following the rule of not wasting the search committee’s time, take the time to learn what this department is about. Go online and explore their website, perhaps for 30 minutes per university. Familiarize yourself with their and the university’s research/mission statements. Do they offer their students/graduate students professionalized degrees–which means they want practical and culturally engaged work? Do they offer a more conservative or more experimental approach to their course offerings and/or graduate programs?–or is it a mix? Which faculty members do similar research to yours and in what ways do you offer something different (just figure this out, but never state in the cover letter why you are different from Professor X or Y)? What does their curriculum look like?

Other questions to consider, but which you may not want to address in your cover letter: Are they interested in collectively answering a problem–such as lowering the carbon footprint or greater representation for Indigenous students, cultures, and histories? Are they Hispanic serving? Is there a high number of international students? Is their student body composed of many “first-generation students” (this means something specific in the USA compared to Canada)?

The gist is: find out what they care about and what they’re dedicated to demonstrating to their current/prospective students, and make sure you explicitly state how your research, teaching, and/or service may share some of the same concerns. From what others have said, this method has never failed in making me stand out as a serious candidate in cover letters, Skype interviews, and campus interviews: learn about their goals and respect who they are; write them a letter that is unique to them; do not waste anyone’s time, including your own.

Optional: Write it as a story

While very few scholars have focused all of their work around a central interest, your task is to find a central interest or concern that can encompass many (not necessarily all; do not force it) of your work. The effect of the storytelling cover letter is that it can make you look focused and consistent, and the bonus is that central interests are often expressed in very simple and recognizable academic language: “I work on the representation of LGBTQ+ communities”; “I work on people’s relationship with food”; “I work on youths’ relationship with social media.”

Examples would be helpful, so I’ll plug them in when I can. My own cover letters have noted my interest in many media forms, including photography, print texts, and computational media. My method of tying these together is to state that “I work on storytelling in and across media,” which allows me to include traditional and experimental modes of storytelling. Not only does this narrative justify why some of my publications are on literature and some are on smart phone apps, it also makes it easier for committees to trace my career trajectory from being a literary scholar to a media scholar.

This overarching narrative allows the committee to follow an explicit argument, which many cover letters do not have. Cohesion is key here, so that everything seems to have its place. That does not mean the narrative is even accurate, but it’s the effect you’re going for.

Organize for easy/fast reading

It helps to organize sections so that they’re easy to skim. If you like, you can use headers such as “Background”/”Education,” “Research,” “Teaching,” and “Service” (call them whatever). What I cannot stress enough, however, is to start every section with one overarching sentence that summarizes the rest of the section. The sentence should take a structure like this (let’s say it’s the Research section): “My research focuses on [central concern] through a, b, and c,” where a, b, and c are your main qualities/interests in each area. The rest of the paragraph is up to you, as long as it covers a, b, and c–preferably in order.

The rule of thumb is to imagine that your reader will only read each header and the overarching sentence. What do they need to know? When you’re editing the cover letter, see if a stranger can figure out what you work on and teach just by skimming the letter.

Note: I’ve seen many cover letters that discuss educational background with research or that don’t have a service section at all. My advice here is to appeal to the department to which you’re applying: for example, if they clearly pride themselves on service or community engagement, then do not leave out a Service section!

THE CONTENT

Read the job call

Unless a general description has been used, a lot of what the committee wants you to speak to in detail–especially in your cover letter–is already in the job call, thus revealing exactly what you should focus on. The call will often state what position the job is trying to fill: sexuality studies? Critical race studies? If the job call includes a long list of desired expertise, the first two or three are the main foci, and the rest are perks that you can choose to mention as desired.

Based on these listed expertise, mention in every section you offer (research, teaching, etc.) how you approach these area(s) with specific examples–and here, it is again beneficial to take a look at the existing curriculum. What concentrations do the department or their programs offer?

What’s the difference among cover letters for research jobs, teaching jobs, and contract jobs?

This is possibly the most common question. Unfortunately, research positions, teaching positions, and short-term/contract positions each require unique content. I will try to be specific, but do have a look at the job call and use your judgement to figure out what kind of requirements are asked of you; tailor the cover letter to suit.

First, know the difference. A quick Google search may be enough to tell you if a university is research or teaching intensive; on Wikipedia, my institution is listed as “a public research university.” Then have a look at the website of the department/program/centre to which you’re applying and read for what their undergraduate and graduate programs offer potential students: are they intent on professionalization and internships? Do they stress being trained in critical theory? Very quickly you will figure out what kind of department you’re dealing with. That said, the job call may reflect this or may deviate slightly. For additional information, also see the item “include a summary of your teaching philosophy” below.

Note: if you’re applying to an American university, you can check out their research/teaching classification according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (where, for instance, PhDs are only granted by “R” or “Research”-level universities).

If you are applying to a research-heavy position, the Research section of your letter should take precedence. Make sure you present a comprehensive research pipeline (academic speak for “your next books/projects”) that shows, regardless of whether you are finishing your dissertation or you’ve been on the market for five years, that you can hold your own as a serious researcher. You’re publishing in refereed journals; you’re collaborating as befits your discipline (and maybe it doesn’t); you are applying or at least planning to apply for research grants. Make yourself look like you’re full of research ideas, full of energy, full of action. For more on this, see the item below entitled “present yourself as a multi-faceted scholar, not a one-trick pony.”

Note: If your dissertation or another book-length (research or creative) project is being edited or submitted for publication, say so, and also state which presses you will or intend to submit it to.

If you are applying to a teaching-heavy position with some research (such as some 1- and 3-year positions, including limited-term appointments and visiting assistant professorships), the teaching section of your cover letter should use the same amount of space as the research section. It is vital that you do not present yourself as foremost a researcher, but as equally researcher and teacher, or perhaps as a research-minded teacher. Ideally, you will present yourself as someone whose research interests have shaped your exciting pedagogical methods. Here, the “write it as a story” method of cover letter writing is effective, especially in communicating an earnest account of how your research and teaching are intertwined. Make sure that your Teaching Dossier, if requested, offers concrete examples of your experiences. I know many disapprove of sharing free sample syllabi in job applications; how many you choose to share is ultimately up to you, but if you want to do it, then include syllabi for classes you’ve previously taught (if applicable) and mock syllabi that suit the needs of the department to which you’re applying.

If you are applying to a teaching-only position (including full-time, part-time, and contract lectureships and limited-term appointments), your research statement may be no more than a paragraph to explain your background and maybe to offer context to your teaching interests. Simply put, unless a teaching-heavy job call notes that there are some research expectations, this position involves little to no research. Therefore, it is extremely crucial that you do not present yourself as a researcher or even as a teacher who is interested in making the jump to a more research heavy position in the future. Focus on sharing your teaching experiences, especially if you’ve ever worked as a writing instructor, a tutor, a mentor, a course designer, a translator, or if you’ve instructed in other languages, education systems, or countries. Mention any relevant pedagogical training you’ve had that may be an asset. The advice above about including sample syllabi holds; in fact, in many cases, job calls may ask for it

Jobs asking for curriculum and program development

If the job call notes that the successful applicant will develop a new program (graduate, undergraduate, certificate), then speak to your experiences especially in teaching and service in designing courses/capstone projects in this field, developing curriculum changes, and/or participating in meetings and committees where such changes have been made. Following the section above, it may be beneficial to include sample syllabi to show the depth or breadth of your design and development capabilities.

The interdisciplarian

The presentation of oneself as interdisciplinary without seeming “watered down” is a common concern for young scholars who did or are doing PhDs that are interdisciplinary, non-specific, and non-traditional. I would spend no more than two lines making an argument for this, though, as everyone is ultimately interdisciplinary: a full-time faculty member cannot be a one-trick pony who produces one major project. If successful in acquiring a tenure-track position, you would be expected to juggle research, courses, service, and student projects/theses/dissertations from a variety of fields, so interdisciplinarity means flexibility. In your cover letter (and also in potential interviews), do not apologize for your diverse background. Do try to highlight which one (or two) areas in your interdisciplinary work most strongly match the job call, proposing it as an asset that you have all this under your belt–and more! The key is to avoid looking unfocused. Instead, foreground your high aptitude in select areas.

There are a few ways to present interdisciplinary research. You could briefly speak to how your expertise in X, Y, and Z areas allows you to–or, how it is even necessary to–address the current state of [your central interest/concern]. Or, structure this sentence backwards: the current state of [your central interest/concern] requires that your dissertation bring together X, Y, and Z areas.

If you’d like to explicitly state the value of connecting multiple disciplines for your research, have a look at the argument you made in your dissertation literature review that brings together these various fields. The literature review might argue what the connection is, as well as how your approach is unique in bringing these together; however, the cover letter is not the place to persuade the search committee of this novelty. Instead, the cover letter should get to the gist of the results/payoff: summarize, in plain language, what the disciplinary connections bring to your research or how they advance the project.

I’m certain that others have more advice about how to present oneself as an interdisciplinary scholar; please do share your thoughts if you’re comfortable.

Avoid too many details

What a search committee wants to glean from the cover letter is who you are as a general package, not about the contributions of every article you’ve published/submitted and the details of every class you’ve taught. If they want details, they will go to your CV, so only mention major milestones/accomplishments that contribute to an overall argument/story/focus in your cover letter. Lists are your friend. Use plain language and curriculum-esque categories that anyone on the committee, regardless of their expertise, would understand. For example, if you work on fashion in Jane Austen novels, you could say that you draw from literary studies, gender studies, and consumer culture–three areas that are general enough for you to riff off of, discussing how you’ve extended one or more of these to related or future research projects.

If the application calls for a separate Research Statement, Teaching Dossier, or otherwise, then leave these sections (Research, Teaching) short and sweet in the cover letter (again, lists are your friend!), followed by “For more information, please see the attached [STATEMENT].” This means that these sections of your cover letter need to be impactful enough for the search committee to get an idea of what you do and to be eager to look at the separate attachment. If you’re working on a new book or project, give a one-liner on what it’s about or what it’s called, then let the separate statement say the rest.

Note: Unless stated otherwise, Teaching Dossiers should be 20 pages, give or take a few pages. Be strategic in what you choose to include, shaping the Dossier around the job and therefore not including every teaching evaluation or sample syllabus you possess. Pick syllabi that most strongly reflect the department’s current curriculum as well as the general areas they are seeking to fill in their job call. For teaching evaluations, all you need is an average of the scores or the average score of each question. You can always say that originals (evaluations, letters of recommendation, etc., are available upon request).

You’re a multi-faceted scholar, not a one-trick pony

You are no longer or soon will no longer be a graduate student. Do not present your dissertation as the only research project in your cover letter; do not treat it as your magnum opus. Instead, extend the dissertation and any other side projects/publications you’ve worked on by explaining how they have led to your current and next research questions or projects. One of the biggest mistakes I see in cover letters for research-based jobs is when an applicant doesn’t list their three- and five-year research plans, which is one thing a research-based institution will ask about if you get a first-stage and campus interview. So let them know early: what is the next book or project going to be? Also mention any grants or projects you’re excited to get up and running.

If you’ve picked the “write it as a story” approach, you could present your research plans as the next step in the story after the dissertation, mentioning in 1-2 sentences the way your next book/project answers questions or extends issues raised by your original interests. Everything comes tied together this way.

Taking this one from Prof. Jennifer Harris at U Waterloo (thanks, Jennifer!): If you’re a scholar who focuses on a single author, “you need to work harder to prove your interests extend beyond that author. Don’t spend all your time [explaining] how innovative your approach to that author–show that this inflects your understanding more broadly.”

Be clear when listing publications and accomplishments

Use numbers to save room and create quick effect. You currently have: X refereed journal articles, X forthcoming, X submitted for consideration; X book chapters, X forthcoming, X submitted; and so forth. Unless it’s a book, you’ve won an award, or there’s a very important co-author, there’s no need to name most or any of the publications; that’s what your CV is for. If you’re comfortable, you can also mention that you have X institutional, association, national, and/or international grants/scholarships won, for a total of $X.

Do not try to “trick” the committee with fancy numbers or misleading organization. A common way this is occurs is when scholars state in their cover letters or CVs that they have “7 publications” when they actually have 2 refereed journal articles, 3 non-refereed journal articles, and 2 book chapters. If you’ve done this by mistake, change it, as unclear organization or formatting makes it difficult for the committee to break down your contributions. And yes, it does matter: for every 1 kind committee member who takes time to look up these individual publications, 9 may toss out the application.

Name dropping may be a waste of space

Don’t make the letter about other scholars you’ve worked with, because the committee is potentially interested in you. Talk about you. There’s a small exception to this: if you’ve worked with a person who is very important to the field that the job call is seeking, it may be worth to quickly mention the collaboration. What I’m critiquing is name dropping to excess or mentioning names that won’t mean much to some members of a (likely interdisciplinary) committee. Don’t waste space with this.

On the subject of name dropping, do not mention members of the faculty that you’d like to work with or who you are inspired by (this is more likely something to do during a campus interview if you and a faculty member are getting along, but even then, avoid being overly presumptuous). It is possible for you to engage with or collaborate with some of these people if you get the job, but until you are successful, you cannot know about internal politics in the department. I don’t mean to be unkind, but naming current faculty who interest you is actually a tip for graduate school applications; doing so in an academic cover letter might suggest that you still think of yourself as a student instead of as a potential colleague.

Include a summary of your teaching philosophy

Unless the job call is completely administrative, the cover letter should have a teaching section. The length of the section will vary depending on what the position is looking for, but even if a separate teaching dossier is requested, your cover letter should still state what kind of teacher you are.

In plain language, include a brief summary of your teaching philosophy that is founded on your interests and experiences. For instance, following the “write it as a story” technique, I say that my research on digital devices has led me to think about the ubiquity of popular media for today’s undergraduate student; therefore, I train students to think about digital cultures and technologies both in the classroom and in their lives, aiming to extend their critical thinking to everyday situations.

Back to stating what kind of teacher you are. Ideally, you are the kind of teacher who fits easily into a department’s existing curriculum (and if requested in the job call, also their future plans). It is not helpful nor your place to propose reinventing their wheel; instead, state your teaching areas/interests so that they complement the department’s offerings and concentrations. If you are applying to a department that is slightly different from or more specific than your training, shift the language into their court. For example, if you did your PhD in media studies in a social science department and are applying for a media studies position in a humanities department, words such as “communication,” “policy,” and “technology” can be replaced with “rhetoric,” “system,” and “media.”

Finally, ask others to read it over

It doesn’t hurt to exchange letters and get the insight of others. (:

There is a comment section below. Please add your own tips and suggestions, including anything you think I’ve missed!

Lai-Tze Fan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, conducting research in the Critical Media Lab. She is also an Associate Editor and Director of Communications of electronic book review. For more information, visit https://laitzefan.com

advice · disability · enter the confessional · teaching · Uncategorized

Work hack: adrenaline management

September 20, 2018 aimeemorrison2 Comments

I prep almost all of my classes in the 90 minutes before they take place. I usually teach two classes per day, two days per week, so my two teaching days are actually prep-two-classes-teach-two-classes-do-office-hours days. It’s pretty intense. Ok, it’s really intense. I sleep really well after those days. I do my runs really fast and hard on those days. I talk a lot at supper on those days.

So much of our academic work is that goddamn cliched iceberg: you can only see the 10% that sticks up above the waterline, while the looming and awesome bulk, the main structure holding everything together, sinks deep down under the water and away from the light. I’m starting a series of posts where I am going to describe my 90%, and I invite you to pitch us some guest post work hacks of your own.

I had this idea for a long time that being a good and organized professor would be to map out a syllabus three months in advance, and then in the three months before term I should create detailed lesson plans and formal lectures and slide shows and extravagant LMS pages and the whole shebang could be in a three-hole punch splendor-binder of preparedness before day 1.

I have learned I’m never going to be that person.

First, after my first year on the tenure track, I have NEVER prepared a “lecture” per se. It takes me hooooouuuuuuuurrrrrrs and it’s boring to do and I hate it. Second, I have noticed that if I try to schedule a semester worth of lesson planning into sensible one hour blocks of effort over long period of time before the semester in question I simply procrastinate and then hate myself, which is not a good use of my time. After all that procrastinating and self-hating I was always doing it all at the last minute anyway and hating myself for that too.

After some years of this, and from sheer exhaustion, I gave up trying to do it “right.” I decided to try to manage my own inclinations into a functional work plan, one with less “procrastinating” and less “should” and less “hating myself” and more kind of finding my own talent and supporting it.

I now sometimes create ornate slideshows of images with headers and the headers are tied to topics that I will jot a 3 bullet set of notes for myself to speak from. You know how long it takes me to make a 30 slide presentation on internet history? 30 minutes. I am a MONSTER at Google image search and if Keynote were a symphony I would be first violin. Most days, though, usually I walk into class with one sheet of typed notes, with an agenda/outline for class at the top, and the briefest of notes to lead me through it. And I will have prepared that in the period just before class. I schedule this purposefully now. My teaching days are teaching-and-prep days and I schedule the time that I need to get the prep done before I teach and I’ve accepted that that’s how I do things. I have been teaching long enough that I’m pretty confident in setting aside the right amount of time. I know myself well enough to know that I’m more likely to hate myself for procrastinating if I try to start too soon than I am to succumb to panic because I’m not prepared enough.

lecture-notes — Good enough. Let’s go to class.

Caveat: I need a good syllabus for this, the kind I make in a one-day blast, where I have to pick out every single reading and set all the deadlines and lay out the entire schedule in excruciating detail. Normally before the semester starts, then, I have read all the materials I have assigned, at least once, even if I don’t have great (i.e., any) notes, so I’m not learning new content every day. As long as the frame of the semester–schedule, topics, reading, assignments, due dates–is laid out clearly in advance, I just need a short window of time before class to get my class plan ready.

So much of many of our troubles in this job come from not being taught the processes for producing the end products, and then, after that, from not knowing that there are many different ways to get to that end product and that some ways will work better for different scholars, depending on their natures, inclinations, life circumstances, and more. Me, I have an incredibly difficult time getting motivated to do things that I’m not 100% interested in doing right now–like many people with ADHD, rewards and consequences and importance I understand on a cognitive level but they just don’t make me stop procrastinating; I need interest, novelty, challenge, or urgency. I used to think I was lazy and irresponsible; I’m actually usually mostly just nearly dying of boredom. Prepping an 80 minute class in the 60 minutes directly before that class takes place is interesing, and urgent, and kind of a challenge. Highly motivating. Not boring.

It turns out that what I’ve been doing all these years is self-medicating my ADHD by producing an urgent situation that releases adrenaline into my system and allows me to focus intently. I get in the flow, and I really enjoy prepping my classes this way, and it all feels very fresh and fun when I walk into class with a brand new lesson plan still hot from the printer and I get to surf my way across the ideas and energy of the room and see if it’s all going to come together or not. I find the whole process very energizing, exciting, and rewarding. Mostly, it comes together and my students describe my classes as really active and engaged and fun. Me, I have a great time, too. It works for all of us because I’m playing to my own strengths instead of fighting them to do it “the right way” that’s never going to work for me.

I won a teaching award this year.

The flip side of this, of course, is having to learn that my way is not the only way. When I discovered this prep and teaching strategy I told all the teachers I knew, and urged them to try it. “It’s amazing!” I told them, “Everyone should do this! It’s so fun and efficient and functional!” Friends and colleagues demurred. I just could not understand these people, my friends!, who went to class with prepared lectures and handouts and worksheets, and novels with sticky notes in them, materials they laboured over in the summer or on their non-teaching days. It took me a long time to learn to really hear it when they would tell me that speaking in front of people was scary and they liked to be prepared in order to feel less anxious, or that they were more comfortable with a more encyclopedic command of the material in the case of any eventuality, or that they really liked the process of taking a few months in advance of a course to settle and refine their ideas. When I started, I thought my way was the Wrong Way and worked hard to be the Right Way; when I finally figured out that my own way was the Right Way, I wanted everyone else to do it that way too. Finally, I’m coming to a more mature understanding that maybe there are a lot of different right ways to prep for class, run that class, make a syllabus. If you feel good and competent, and your students feel adequately supported, and it’s not harming your health or burdening the support staff, then that’s the right way, too.

I’m still learning new tricks, going to workshops, reading about new kinds of class activities online in the blogs and the literature, talking to my colleagues. I’m refining My Way, trying to make space for other people to have Their Way, and learning from it all.

I would love to learn from you, too: do you have a class prep hack that really works for you? Pitch a post, or leave a comment, or suggest another iceberg-bottom-bit you’d like to see explored further.

advice · sabbatical · Uncategorized

Clearing the decks

February 28, 2018 aimeemorrison1 Comment

I said I would write about some of the work I did in the six months leading up to my sabbatical in order to prepare to make the most it when the time came. One the main things I did was clear the decks, in a pretty thoroughgoing way. There were many “decks” to clear: my home office, my campus office, my two computers, my cloud storage, my grading and feedback for graduate students, peer review obligations.

I had this worry that January 1 would roll around, and I would helplessly spin around in one or another of my offices, with no surfaces to put things onto, desperately trying to remember where I put a printout. I had visions of endless search-and-preview loops on my MacBook, trying to find a document I knew existed but where I had just digitally stuffed in the wrong place out of expedience. I woke up at night afraid the towering pile of dissertations and INCs would smother me at any moment, anxious also of forms unsigned and letters unsent, chewing my nails about article reviews coming due and me forgetting them, or worse, spending all my time on them.

So I read a lot of dissertations, made plans with students, took scrupulous care to get all of my grading and peer reviews done before the end of fall term.

The more serious problems were in many ways the more straightforward ones of space.

I had too much stuff: too many books, so that new ones had no place. Too many stacks of printouts, and no room in the cabinets, too many references in my Zotero just dumped in, too many folders and subfolders for all my projects across two computers and two cloud storage services. Too many late library books, and fines.

It was probably early October, sitting in my office hours, brain dead from having submitted my SSHRC IG application, that I decided to do something, right now. Sitting at my desk, I looked at the big pile of books stacked like a tower in the corner. I would put them away. But there was no shelf space left.

Something in me snapped. All I could see were the wrong books in the wrong places and the right books hidden and no room to breathe anywhere. Ghosts of the past, past roles and past theories and outmoded scholarship and fields I don’t participate in. I removed somewhere between 8 and 10 linear feet of books, and brought them all to the giveaway cabinet in the common area. This took hours. I sneezed nearly the entire time. Everything was dusty and neglected and crammed in. I made space. I shelved all my new books. It was beautiful.

This started an avalanche of paper. I went through my teaching files: 13 years of lesson plans and overhead transparencies and grading rubrics and printouts and attendance records. Recycled. I went through the 4 linear feet of printouts stacked in piles on my bookshelves: from course packs and grad classes, stuff I copied out of my own books, stuff I didn’t care about, stuff that was outdated and useless. About two linear feet went right in the bin: the other two went to my RA, who put them all in my Zotero database, and filed everything. I went through research notes from projects long completed, marked up drafts, correspondence, notes-to-self. Recycled. Grad chair documentation of an informational and non-confidential nature: recycled. I freed up over a hundred file folders this way. Then I recycled the file folders to the giveaway cabinet.

I have been a professor for 13 years. In the beginning, it was important to accumulate lesson plans and course evaluations and desk copies of textbooks and my new scholarly library. I have been in the same office for 13 years. I didn’t notice when not-enough-stuff became enough-stuff and certainly not when enough-stuff because way-too-much-stuff. I’m going to have to remember to do the work at regular intervals. It’s remarkably invigorating.

There was, suddenly, room to breathe. I had removed literally hundreds of pounds of paper from the office, linear foot upon linear foot of stuff I don’t need, desk drawer after cabinet of stuff squirrelled away and completely forgotten. Oh yeah: I cleaned out all my desk drawers, too. Goodbye powdery packets of tea dated 2008, au revoir mystery bag of … aspirin? ibuprofen?, so long 20 stick pens that don’t work, one weirdly rock solid Clif bar.

I found my awfully late library books. I paid my fines.

I did the same work at home: box after box of books–textbook samples, books I bought in grad school, old notebooks full of old notes about things I’m not ever going to need to think about again. Goodbye to all that.

It felt good. It felt like taking off all these chains attaching me to the past, to projects never-completed, or well completed, to paths I really am never going to pursue, to things that have outlived their usefulness, to clutter and distraction. I made space for new printouts and new books and new ideas. It felt fantastic. It took, literally, weeks.

And then the digital decluttering: my MacBook Pro was sending out cries for help in the form of crashes and meltdowns. Since 2004, with every new computer I got (five?) I used Migration Assistant to copy the old hard drive over to the new one. The result was a crufted up machine with three versions of MS Word, incompatible suites of Adobe software, and backups of an iPod I haven’t had since 2010. My 500GB only had 30GB of space left. At the Apple store we rebuilt the machine from scratch, and I completely reviewed all my documents and folders. I deleted A LOT. My 500GB hard drive now has a little more than **300GB** of storage free. And it doesn’t crash anymore. Like in my physical offices, I made space and set things up to foreground the work I want to do now, making everything easy to find and easy to call to hand. This took over a week.

When January 1 rolled around, I had at least a clear sense of what I was going to do, and, importantly, I had enough mental space, enough shelf space, enough desk space, and enough hard drive space to just get right to it. Everything was radically simplified and pared down. It turned out to be one of the very best things I did to get ready for my sabbatical.

advice · disability · enter the confessional · productivity · Uncategorized

I did it myyyyyyy waaaaay: and you should, too

February 21, 2018 aimeemorrison1 Comment

I love paper. I love paper journals and notepads, I love printouts, I love paper books. I love pens and highlighters and pencils and erasers and tape-flags and Post-Its. I love sorting my printed-out grading into stacks, into piles. I love cerlox-bound dissertations on my lap, squeaking under my highlighter. I love 12 sheets of scrap paper on my desk as 12 weeks of a semester as I plan out a grad course. I love fanning my research notes across a 7′ by 10′ area rug and crawling among them, attaching paper sticky notes. I love printing out 40 pages chapter drafts and arranging them linearly across all my kitchen counters, then cutting them with scissors, sticking bits together with tape, and rearranging them linearly, over and over. I even do outlines on tiny strips of paper that I cut up and arrange and rearrange and cut and add and throw away and rearrange again.

Please note the paper bits are actually in bulleted and sub-bulleted lists.

I love paper. E-stuff, hilariously and paradoxically, I’m not so keen on. I love social media and happily surf multiple streams and platforms simultaneously, obviously: this is my research area, after all. But. I don’t read journal articles online, don’t grade online, don’t buy e-books, or e-magazines, don’t use a stylus on a tablet. I’m happy to read the whole internet online, and happy to free write and do maybe up to 30% of my editing work online. The whole work online thing gives me the heeby-jeebies and makes me desperately confused.

I often feel like some cranky Luddite, making my students print papers and hand them in. I feel like a monster for compulsively printing hundreds of pages of research articles when I’ve got them all stored as PDFs on my tree-saving screen. I feel dumb and old-fashioned when I ask my coordinator to print out all the bits and pieces of the graduate teaching assignment instead of working virtually on the beautiful spreadsheet she’s made.

Basically, there’s a part of me that knows I get the best results, more happily and easily, when I use my paper methods. And there’s a part of me that thinks I should instead do it completely online and virtually because my way is weird and therefore terrible.

I’m learning a lot about myself since my ADHD and autism diagnoses. One of the things I’m learning is that a lot of my ways of working are actually disability hacks: as it turns out a LOT of my people are very visual and a LOT of my people have poor working memory. Instead of trying to change myself to fit the ways of working I think I should have, because other people, I should maybe instead celebrate that I have, by trial and error and very little help or encouragement from anyone, kluged my way into some best practices for my particular career and set of challenges. I should congratulate myself on the self-knowledge that got me to a place that I’ve devised a whole workflow that minimizes the disabling effects of my particular forms of neurodivergence and allows me to shine.

I suggest to you, too, that maybe those “one weird trick for productivity” hacks that you use and are secretly ashamed of, might be something YOU should be proud of, too.

For me, paper is visible in very important ways: scale, scope, the gist. How much progress I’m making, how much I have left. Where the holes are, sometimes literally. Paper is a massive memory aid, an externalization of my working memory, all the more crucial the larger or more complex a task becomes. Colour coded sticky notes and pens and paper clips and highlighting–I scan it from above and easily zoom down to what I need.

For me, electronic text is inscrutable and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie in the front row of the cinema with a pinhole camera: I can’t get any sense of scale or make sense of anything, and I get dizzy, to boot. There’s no way I could follow any kind of narrative and it’s a challenge not to barf. All the blue light, not enough screen, too many tabs and open windows and nothing findable. Stress nap!

I thought requiring my paper memory prosthetics meant I was too dumb to “keep it all in my head.” I thought that getting frustrated and anxious using virtual text meant I had no attention span (well, okay, that’s true). But honestly, who cares? As I build up a body of research and teaching and service, I can see that I actually produce really good stuff. Who cares if I do it weird? Pretty much no one, actually. So why am I (are we?) so hard on myself (ourselves?) for doing it my way?

My former coordinator, watching me use pencils and scrap paper and printouts and rulers and tick boxes and lists and hand-drawn tables to slot 140 grad students into 3 semesters of teaching with no overlaps, howlers, or inequities, laughed at me a little (rightly so, I look like a loon; we laughed together a lot) but she kept all those sheets: they really worked, and it was fast, and it was fair. It all eventually got put into a spreadsheet for tracking purposes, but it was okay that I did it my way.

And it’s okay that you do it your way. This job is supposed to be about results; we are supposed to be free to do the work how and when we want, as long as we produce the required end-products–a syllabus, a lesson plan, a dissertation, a teaching schedule, an academic article. But in truth I think a lot of us secretly or not-so-secretly berate ourselves for doing it wrong. It seems so strange to me but here it is: in a profession where we get almost no training in the methods for actually doing our jobs, when we figure out our own methods, we’re nearly always convinced we’re doing it wrong, and should be ashamed of ourself, or at least very secretive so we don’t get found out.

There’s a vast market in productivity advice (I know, I write a lot of it) and there is much we can learn from different kinds of best practices and different kinds of systems, particularly when we haven’t yet found a system that works for us. We should remember, though, that there are different systems, and it’s okay to prefer one kind of working style over another.

So now you know my one weird trick: Print everything, and spread over all flat surfaces with paper so that I can see everything I’m working on and with at the same time. What’s your one weird trick?

advice · sabbatical · Uncategorized

All the things I’ve said “no” to

January 31, 2018 aimeemorrison

Like many academic women, I’m trying to learn how to say no–I can’t believe how deeply socialized I am to never want to disappoint anyone, how deeply-rooted is my fear of being ‘unlikeable’, how unshakeable my imposter syndrome that any opportunity turned down represents the tide turning toward my inevitable unmasking and the end of everything.

I have a problem with saying yes that is partly being socialized female, partly about an ADHD time-tunnel problem where there is only ‘now’ where I can make someone happy and get excited about a new opportunity and a vast amorphous and distant ‘not now’ where somehow the work will happen and I’m not mysteriously triple-booked, and partly about feeling a deep moral imperative to use the incredibly privilege of my tenured professorship to be available to committees and students and collaborations and such. Basically, I am afraid to say no, I feel like an asshole when I say no, and I have terrible foresight into what all my yesses might mean for my actual workflow.

Knowing this, I vowed to make a change on sabbatical. I booked myself a 365-day, all-day meeting and it runs like a ribbon all across my iCal for 2018:

say not — I know there’s a typo. I’m just NOT going to go and change it. No. I’m saying no.

And! I have indeed been saying no. And it was very hard! I was still eating Christmas cookies and day-drinking when I got an email at the very end of December asking me if I would be interested to keynote an undergraduate media conference … in mid-January. I immediately dropped everything and stood in my kitchen, rationalizing a way to say yes, while my partner stood there agog. I was all like, “well, I think I have a paper I could really easily convert into something for this, and it’s on a weekend so that wouldn’t eat into my writing time and it’s close by so …”

No. I said no. It was hard but then? I stopped thinking about it. Poof: literally one less thing to worry about. Because, to be honest, I would have been stressing about slides and making the talk perfect and it would totally have taken away writing time.

Saying no is getting easier. I did not say yes to all the students who asked me for reference letters, just the ones who are working directly with me. I did not say yes to reading all the CVs of our job applicants. I did not say yes to a campus advocacy thing. I did not say yes to participating in another conference. I did not say yes to three separate request for peer review. I said no.

Something amazing happened: I immediately forgot all the things I said no to. I actually had to dig through my email to generate the list above. Let me be clear: I am not wracked with guilt or regret. It’s amazing and freeing! I simply do not even remember what I have said no to. I just moved on. Another thing: no one wrote back to beg me to reconsider. No one. I have not ruined anyone’s life by saying no.

Saying no to all these other things has meant more clearly saying yes to my own sabbatical project: I have made incredible progress this month on a book chapter that was nothing but a good idea and some free writing–it’s grown into a real thing and I have enjoyed focusing exclusively on that this month. It feels really, really good to focus like this, not in a rush and not in a race and not in a panic and not stuffed into the cracks of All The Other Things.

I am still saying yes to things other than my writing: I’m meeting with grad students about their chapters, and I’m participating in defences. I gave a lunch time talk to a women’s group, and am giving that same talk to a staff association lunch. And I am saying yes to some opportunities–that I am choosing, for my own needs–to give talks on my current research in ways that feel like they support what I want to get done this year.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that, ultimately, saying yes to one thing always has costs, because time is not infinitely elastic, nor is attention. (This is very hard for me to learn.) A yes to something is always, ultimately, a no to something else, and I’m trying to learn to do that accounting every time I’m presented with an opportunity. I said that I wanted to use this sabbatical to really focus on finishing my big projects, and I find that since I’m saying no to things that aren’t that, I actually am making real progress on the thing I am trying to prioritize.

So I have said no, and the results of my negative responses to all these asks has been positive progress on my main goal, and a more positive and less-stressful rhythm to my days. I have said no, and I’m here to tell you: it feels good.

academic publishing · academic work · advice · book · collaboration · public engagement

How to set up a project website: first questions

January 26, 2018January 26, 2018 Lily Cho2 Comments

Lately, every time I attempt to post here, it seems that there is a new torrent feminist griefs and grievances that pulls us out into a giant ocean of tears and anger. It’s been another week of allegations, accusations, and awfulness. And some stuff hit closer to the H&E home than usual and we learned that, sometimes, the way to deal with bullies is to ignore them into obsolescence. It’s all been really hard and I know we are still feeling all of it.

But, still, there’s work to do and we rock at this work thing when we need to. So here’s a small starting point for thinking about setting up a website for your research project.

When I started working on my current Big Project, it occurred to me that I should have a website for it, but I had no idea how to set one up. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do, and how to do it, and I’m still figuring a lot of it out on the fly. Over the next few months, I’m going to post about this process and talk to other folks who have done this too.

I launched my project website about a month ago and it has been so lovely to see some of the work moving out into the world. It’s called Mass Capture. Check it out, if you’re so inclined. It’s cool and beautiful and I’m really proud of it.

Thinking back on the process, there were a bunch of starting questions that I needed to work through but it took me longer than it should have to even know to ask those questions.

In the end, for me, this was the most important one: how do I want the information on the site to be different than what will be in my book?

cool

Ok, I am betraying my humanities-oriented sensibilities here. The Big End Thing of your research project might not be a book but, in my field, it is still generally that most staid academic object: the single-author monograph, peer-reviewed, and published by a university press or equivalent. So, yes, for me, there is a book, and I am writing as fast as I can. I knew that I had a lot to say, and that not all of it should be said in the book. It took a while to figure out how to separate material that would work best for the book and material that would be best for the site. Of course, there will be some overlap but it has been interesting to see how clear the division between those two things became once I started to really think about what I wanted to say and how to say it.

To get to this first question, I would say that it helped me to think about how some material just works better online. That includes things like maps, interactive elements where I knew I would want to embed a lot of links, and writing that wouldn’t fit in a peer-reviewed academic book like interviews with members of my research team. You will likely have a different list. The key was realizing that I could and should disaggregate the stuff for the book from the stuff for the site. And, as the postscript at the end of the post reminds us, the stuff for the site could be the place where I could design my project so that it could be really public from the ground up.

I also wished I had talked to more people who had already set up project websites about their experiences. So, over the next few months, I’m going to interview other people who have done this and share those conversations with you. To start us off, here are some thoughts from Sharon Sliwinski whose gorgeous project website, the Museum of Dreams, has been a source of huge inspiration for me.

Here’s what Sharon say:

Q: What’s your favourite thing about having a project website?

A: The ideas travel! One of my favourite features about website analytics is the information about geography. The Museum of Dreams has been viewed by people in Brazil and Bolivia, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. It’s also interesting where it hasn’t gone — no hits in China for instance. Of course I realize that website “clicks” doesn’t necessarily mean that the ideas are being meaningfully engaged, but then Stuart Hall taught us that’s true of any form of communication. I’m in a Faculty of Information and Media Studies, so we think hard about the medium, about the relationship between form and content. Websites are a familiar form. Billions of people engage them daily. Scholarly journal articles have a rather more specialized role in the dissemination of ideas in the 21st century. (She says with just a hint of sarcasm.)

Q: How did you work out how to distinguish your project website from your other publications? Was it important for you to do that?

A: The animating idea of the project is itself is fairly unique (I’m tempted to say “odd”), so distinguishing it from other publications wasn’t much an issue. The initial idea for the Museum of Dreams was to create a place to house the various dream reports I found in the historical record. Dreams are rather difficult things to find through the usual search methods, but then when you start looking for them, they’re everywhere. I had way more research “data,” so to speak, than I could manage in traditional scholarly form. Dreams don’t exactly lend themselves to academic scholarship. (I got a lot of eye-rolling in the early days of this project—political scientists were particularly dubious.) At first the idea was simply to build a searchable database. I looked at a lot of museum websites to get a sense of how they handle representing their collections online. Then I borrowed from museum websites I love. The International Center of Photography has a great site. Google’s Cultural Institute is also an inspiration.

Q: What surprised you about this process?

A: It’s a lot more work than it seems. If all goes well, a website is intuitive and easy to use, but also compelling. But there’s a lot more behind-the-scenes work to information management and website design than I expected. My project also turned into something much more collaborative than I first planned. We have a growing roster of collaborators who produce entries for the “collections.” Working with artists has been a special pleasure. I learned so much, for instance, from the way the Canadian dancer and choreographer Cai Glover transformed on of Walter Benjamin’s dreams into a dance piece. He really shifted my thinking about the nature of dream-work—as the labour of turning experience into a new form. These kinds of unexpected dialogues have been immensely enriching.

Collaboration has its challenges, too. At the moment a small group of my colleagues and I are designing a workshop that will bring the Museum of Dreams to a migrant community in Geneva. This opportunity came about as a result of the website. It’s been a struggle to figure out how to make this project “relevant” to people in serious states of social and political precarity, but it’s also been generative. I didn’t quite realize that having a project website meant making a long term, open-ended commitment to translating one’s scholarly ideas into something that is useful to the public. But I take comfort from the fact that Sigmund Freud worked hard at this as well — he constantly strove to make his ideas understandable to a broad public. He failed a lot. Failure is part of it.

Q: Is there anything you would do differently if you were to do it again?

A: I think I would have talked to web designers sooner in the process. I thought I could do it on my own in the beginning. There’s an inbuilt narcissism to the scholarly profession which can get in the way sometimes. I’m still learning how to shed the armour of being a professor, the subject-who-is-presumed-to-know, as Jacques Lacan would say. More humility is an on-going life goal!

p.s. It occurs to me that I didn’t say anything about access — obviously SSHRC and other agencies have a mandate to make their funded research more publicly accessible through “knowledge mobilization” initiatives. But as you well know, there are profound barriers to accessing scholarly work with most of the academic journals being behind paywalls. So the access question also played a huge part in my thinking about the Museum of Dreams. How to build a research project that is designed for the public from the get-go?

Thank you Sharon!

Finally, if you have project website stories, please get in touch!

administration · advice · work

Campus visit mystery: interview with the dean

January 12, 2018January 13, 2018 Lily Cho

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It’s job interview season in the academy and this post is about what was, for me, the most enigmatic part of the campus visit: the interview with the dean.

BUT, let me first say of the wave after wave after wave of sorrow and grief and anger coming out of the courage of the women who have come forward, privately, semi-privately, and publicly — not least, Julie McIsaac yesterday — to tell the stories that are passwords: I am listening and reading and listening some more and I am here in grief and sorry and anger with all of you and all of this rumbles like subterranean thunder all through my days and my thinking and will continue to as we keep working through how “we might wield the power we already have.”

It also occurred to me that posting about the campus visit, a thing that only a vanishingly small proportion of the people who apply for jobs will actually do, might not be especially useful, especially given the unrelentingly bleak number of jobs available. And then I realized this post isn’t just for the five people out there who might end up doing a campus visit interview this season.

This post is really about decanal power.

When I have interviewed for jobs, the most mystifying part of the campus visit was the interview/meeting with the dean. I understood, more or less, the function of the job talk, the interview with the hiring committee, the meeting with the graduate students, the meeting with the undergraduate students, and even, albeit much more fuzzily, the lunches and dinners. But I really didn’t understand what was supposed to happen in the 15 to 75 minutes (some meetings were really brief and some didn’t seem to end) where I would sit down, one on one, with the dean. There may or may not have been an interview with a dean that went for over an hour and wherein we talked only about a book, not in my field, that the dean wrote a couple decades ago that I did not read. It is entirely possible that many of you know way more than I did. If so, just feel sorry for me and for all the poor deans who watched me fumble through that part of their day because I really had no idea what I was doing.

I knew that this meeting was important. In my experience as a job candidate these were always meetings and not exactly interviews. Questions were not fired off at me. There was an off-the-cuff feel to the whole thing. I’m not even sure that there were any questions asked at some of the meetings I’ve sat through. They were the least standardized part of the day. It was obvious that these meetings mattered since there are no extraneous elements to the jam-packed campus visit schedule. But I did not know really know why.

Now, after having served at two different universities and on multiple hiring committees over the fourteen years that I have worked as a professor, I have some idea.

Deans have a LOT of power over the final outcome of a job search in their faculty. Without being too specific, I have seen one or the other dean make decisions that are entirely contrary to the explicit wishes of the hiring committee and the department. I have seen one or the other dean kill a search before it begins. I have seen one or the other dean veto one or another shortlisted candidate even though the department was enthusiastic about that person. Sometimes this happens at the long list stage. Sometimes this happens after the campus visit. I have seen one or the other dean kill a search after the search has been completed. So, even after the department (or at least the departmental hiring committee) has gone through the whole entire hiring process (reading all the applications, developing a long list, developing a shortlist, going through all the trouble and expense of the campus visit for the shortlisted candidates), the dean can still say no to the hire. And even when the dean and the department are in agreement about the hire, the hire might still fall apart because the dean is in charge of the negotiations and the dean and the candidate may not remotely agree on the many, many parts of a contract that are up for negotiation.

Deans can and do make these decisions alone. At this level, the decisions are not made by committee. The dean usually consults with the department (via the chair or the chair of the search) and their own associate deans, but they really don’t have to. In my experience, there is nothing in the governance docs that require a dean to make these decisions in consultation with anybody. I’m not even saying that this kind of executive power is a problem. Maybe it is but that is a separate conversation. I can see how, sometimes, not every decision can be made by committee.

Mainly, I want to point out that one person has enormous power over the hiring process. That person is not answerable to the department. I have definitely participated in searches where I had no clue what happened after we made the recommendation to hire someone and sent that decision “upstairs.” Even though I understood that I wasn’t owed an email or a memo about what happened, especially given that pretty much everything that happens in a search is confidential, it was still really weird to be on a hiring committee and learn more about the outcome of that search from twitter or rumour (granted, sometimes they are the same thing) than I did from my own university.

Don’t even get me started on how I wanted to weep whenever a dean decided something that was contrary to the wishes of the departmental committee and department. I think of all that lost time, all those hours reading files and interviewing, and all of the smashed hopes of the candidates, and I still want to weep. But again, I am genuinely not questioning the actual decisions themselves. That is a whole different conversation. I just want to draw attention to the fact that may seem obvious but was not obvious to me: a job candidate can have the enthusiastic support of a department and still not get hired because the dean decides against the hire.

So. If you are a job candidate, what to do? Unlike prepping for the hiring committee interview, where your supervisor and grad programme are likely in a great position to advise you on probable questions and strategies, the interview/meeting with the dean can feel like a total crap shoot. The questions they might ask are not so obviously routinized. They might not even ask any questions.

Still, here are a few things you can do:

read the job ad! I know this is obvious but, honestly, I have seen more than one search fail because the candidate, even after we brought them for a campus visit, did not understand the language of the ad and what the department and the university are looking for.
read the job ad in relation to other relevant docs about the university such as the university’s strategic plan or the university academic plan; every university has one and your job is to figure out how you fit in it even though it will likely read like alien-corporate-speak and seem to have little connection to your research.
talk to people in your network to get a sense of what challenges the department’s home faculty (remember, the dean has to deal with a bigger picture than the dept) is struggling with including all the obvious things like: overall enrollment; recruiting and retaining stellar undergrad and grad students; curriculum development; and relationships with the communities that the university serves
remember that the dean will still have to make the case for your hire to a bunch of other people higher up on the decision-making chain and you have to make that part of their job as easy as possible

There are likely lots of other things that I haven’t thought of (please, tell me!).

As for the bigger picture on decanal power, I want to emphasize, as if you didn’t already know, how crucial it is for those of us in the university system, at any level (student, adjunct and TT faculty) to take part in the decision-making processes at the decanal level that we have access to including (advance warning, this will seem boring): attending faculty council and voting on things; and asking lots of hard questions during the decanal search process including questions about “collegial governance,” a phrase that gets tossed around a lot but which often doesn’t connect to clear processes for good governance or collegiality. Collegiality is a term that we use to cover a series of almost unnameable things like “fit” and there are a lot of reasons why we need to be way less subtle about what that means.