Category: openness

#alt-ac · #post-ac · good attitudes about crappy possibilities · grad school · job market · mentoring · openness · PhD · reform · student engagement · students · transition

From the Archives: Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me During My PhD

melissadalgleish1 Comment

The new school year is well underway, and so is the work I do with our Career Development Committee, a group of graduate students, postdocs, and research associates (who are very much like the STEM world’s version of contract academic faculty). The CDC’s mandate is to provide career development education that helps students and fellows find awesome non-academic careers, and they’re very good at it.

Their big fall event, Career Night, is happening tonight. They bring in 10 alumni or other graduate-trained people in their networks and then do what is in essence a series of short informational interviews. This time, we have everyone from an assistant provost to an academic acquisitions editor, with people from regulatory affairs, government policy, small-business ownership, research administration, and industry science also in the mix. A small group of students and fellows chat with one of the invitees for 25 minutes about their graduate training, their career path to the present, and what advice they have for others looking to move into a non-academic careers, and then they switch, and switch again.

By the end of the night, each person has had a chance to talk with three professionals, and to mingle and network with as many more as they want during the open part of the event. I wish I had access to a similar event during my PhD, and that I had gotten some of the good advice I know my students and fellows are going to get during Career Night. I know I’m not the only one, so here’s what I hope people learn tonight that might also be useful to you, or your students.

***

1. Be Realistic, and Open, About What Comes After Grad School

In the recent America-wide survey by Duke University graduate student Gregory Brennen, the data showed that 83% of graduate students started their PhD expecting to become a tenure-track professor. This is in stark contrast with the current data on how many PhDs actually end up in tenure track jobs—most estimates suggest that fewer than 50% of PhDs end up in any kind of academic job (that includes contract teaching) and that only between 15% and 25% ever secure tenure track jobs. Given this reality, graduate students need to prepare for, and embrace, the multitude of possibilities open to them after they complete their degrees. And they need to remember that being an academic is just a job, and that the are tons of interesting, fulfilling jobs doing other things. Mine is a good example.

2. Make Strategic Decisions About What You Do During Your Degree

 

As a friend kindly reminded me after I kept claiming that I got lucky in ending up in my job, we make our own luck. What seems random is actually, when you look back, a series of strategic decisions that lead to a whole host of post-degree opportunities. In my case, that strategic decision was to take a research assistantship in lieu of teaching during the fourth year of my PhD. While many PhD students fund their studies by teaching, and that’s a wonderful opportunity for people who are looking for careers in education, that may not be the best choice for people who are looking to do other things and need a different set of skills. These other opportunities are also extremely useful academically. Research or graduate assistantships are a big one to consider, as is doing an industry-partnered internship with Mitacs. So might be going on an international exchange, or selecting a graduate co-op program (which UBC now has in English, and Aimee tells me Waterloo is going to develop.) In my case, the research assistantship, researching graduate student professional development programs, let me develop the skills, knowledge, and experience that got me my job as a Research Officer.

3. Take Advantage of the Resources Available on Campus

As grad students, it’s easy to believe that most of the student support services available on campus are there for undergraduates, but that is emphatically not the case. There are a myriad of resources available on most campuses to help graduate students make the most of their degrees, to help them navigate the academic job market, or to help them transition out of academia or into an #alt-ac or #post-ac career. The Career Centre is a great place to start, and they can provide assistance with academic and non-academic job searches; Advancement can often connect grads with alumni in the fields they’re interested in; most Canadian universities now have graduate student professional development programs that offer a whole host of workshops and seminars; Mitacs offers a full suite of free transferable skills workshops; and many faculty members can, sometimes surprisingly, provide guidance and support in the search for jobs in and outside of the academy. It can be scary talking to faculty about plans to abandon the tenure track–believe me, I know–but the culture of silence around #alt-ac and #post-ac transition isn’t going to disappear until we all start talking about it.

4. Consider Creating A Shadow C.V.

One of the most important things graduate students can do to demonstrate to people outside of the academy that they have the needed skills is to have evidence that you’re capable of working outside of the academy. Especially for PhDs, the assumption that we’re overeducated and lacking in practical skills can be hard to overcome without demonstrated outside experience, and having at least one example of non-academic work experience to put in a resume can go a long way toward helping graduate students mentally connect the skills they’ve honed as a graduate students with those that crop up on job postings, and to help overcome the feeling that there’s nothing they’re qualified to do but be a professor. People have started calling experience developed alongside academic work, but not included in academic documents, a “shadow C.V.” In my case, I took a year off between my Master’s and my PhD to work in publishing and continued tutoring and editing throughout my degree. Other people I know have done summer placements, taken part-time jobs, done industry-partnered internships, or created web-based consulting and writing firms that allow them to work on their own time.

6. Learn How to Talk About Your Skills and Research to People Outside of Academia

Academese and English can sometimes seem like two different languages, and this is a major barrier to people with graduate degrees trying to make their qualifications and research make sense in contexts outside of the academy. It’s only natural. Communicating highly specialized research to non-academics isn’t a skill that most academics at any level practice all that much, other than the inevitable attempts to explain your work to your mother, or to someone you meet at a party. This is certainly changing, though. But opportunities to practice do exist, and graduate students should take advantage of them: compete in the Three Minute Thesis; take workshops on clear language writing; practice translating research into non-specialist language. Doing this can seem very non-intuitive for grad students, especially for those who have been academe for a long time, but once they learn how to do it, the relationship between what they do as academics and what shows up in job postings often becomes painfully obvious, as does the potential impact of their work outside the academy. This is, as a side benefit, and increasingly strong focus for many granting agencies, a number of which also now require clear-language or lay research summaries.

7. Think About What You Really Want to Do

Many PhD students are committed to being professors without actually knowing what the life, and the job, of a professor is really like. Our archives here at Hook & Eye can be pretty illuminating. Parts of it match up closely with the starry-eyed dream, but others definitely don’t. Meetings are endless and often frustrating. Grading is a slog. The pressure to publish and get stellar teaching evaluations can be debilitating. Students are disengaged. Service takes up far more time that people realize, and there’s never enough time for research and reflection. Graduate students should be figuring out what it is they really love about academia, and thinking about other jobs that might let them do those things more. The book So What Are You Going to Do with That? includes some fantastic exercises, ones that helped me realize that the things I love to do and am good at doing–coordinating, facilitating other people’s work and success, communications, writing, mentorship–are key components of all sorts of #alt-ac and #post-ac jobs, including my current one.

8. Think About What You Really Don’t Want to Do

As PhDs, we’re indoctrinated to believe that we should be willing to give up everything for a tenure track job. At some point, I shrugged that indoctrination off and made a list of the things that were more important to me than tenure: I didn’t want to move, wait until I was 40 to have kids, spend most of my life grading papers, spend multiple years as a contract professor, or write things that no one would ever read. For me, those were pretty convincing reasons to give up on the idea of becoming a professor, which requires total mobility, limits reproductive choices, requires far more teaching than research for most people, and mostly values journal and book publications that most people won’t read. The most important thing I had to convince myself of–and that we must tell graduate students, over and over–is that choosing where to live, desiring to have a child without worrying about compromising doctoral work or chances at tenure, refusing precarious employment, are totally legitimate life choices that are okay to voice aloud, despite the tendency of academia to suggest that if you aren’t willing to sacrifice your whole life, even your whole identity, to being an academic, you’re a second-class citizen. It broke my heart, in a good way, to have a whole gaggle of female Queen’s students come up to me after my talk and thank me for saying out loud that my desire to have kids before I was 35 was a factor in my decision making. It is for many people, and that’s something that should be discussed openly.

The other important part of this equation is to get graduate students talking to people they know in academia and outside, and find out from them what their jobs are really like. So long as we perpetuate the belief that academia is the only worthy place of employment, and that a professorship is the only truly fulfulling and engaging job, graduate students will ignore a whole host of career possibilities that might be a much better personal and professional fit.

9. Don’t Conflate Who You Are With What You Do

This is an obvious one, and a hard one to avoid–but if graduate students can avoid the trap of believing that they are academics, and that if they don’t get to continue to be academics they’ll be nothing, they’ll save themselves a horrible and painful identity crisis if the time comes that the professoriate becomes an unobtainable dream. A professorship is just a job. It is not a vocation, or an identity, and graduate students are so much more than the single career option the academy tells them is worthy.

10. Enjoy the Ride
 

Getting paid to read for comps. Taking classes totally outside of your area because you can. Auditing things purely for interest. Debating theory over far too much wine. Style-stalking your favourite professor. Choosing conferences based purely on location. These are some of the best parts of grad school, and they should be relished, and they often aren’t because PhDs are too busy conferencing and publishing and professionalizing and shadow-CVing and comparing themselves to all of the other PhDs they know. Yes, those things need to get done (minus the last one) but statistically speaking, the chances of getting to stay in academia on a permanent basis are slim. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.

***

So, dear readers, what do you think? What advice would you give to current graduate students facing the reality of a terrible academic job market? What advice do you wish you had gotten during your PhD?

advice · empowerment · keynote · openness · skills development

Keynote! Tips for presenting to a big crowd

aimeemorrison8 Comments

I gave my very first keynote lecture, two weeks ago, at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), in Victoria. It was in a giant lecture hall, that was too small, so there was also an overflow space in the foyer, with a live feed. In all, there were several hundred people listening.

Holy shit, that was scary!

That’s only the middle third. Holy crap. Add two wings and an overflow room.

It was scary because, well, that’s a lot of people. But it wasn’t really the size of the crowd that had me insomniac for several weeks before the event. What was really scaring me was that I suspected that doing a keynote was not like doing a longer conference paper for a bigger group of people, but something entirely different. Something I didn’t know how to do, and that I couldn’t find rules for. Ultimately, I asked advice from some people who had done keynotes before, and mostly I just reverse engineered keynotes that I liked and ones I didn’t to try to determine the patterns.

Maybe you’ve never done a keynote before, and you don’t know the rules either. Maybe you do lots of keynotes, and you have it all figured out and are itching for a venue in which to share this information. I’ll lay out my ideas here, and you can take or add as you wish.

Do not go over time.

This is crucial. I mean, no presentation should ever go over time, but there’s something that’s the absolute WORST about a long lecture to a big group of people that seems like it’s not going to end. And if there’s no time for questions, people get mad, and rightly so. My time slot was 50 minutes long. I calculated 10 minutes for two sets of introductions, and tried to make my talk 35 minutes long, leaving five minutes for questions. My talk came right before an open bar reception, so you’d better believe I knew that everyone had their eyes on the clock. As it happens, I talked for 38 minutes, and we started a couple of minutes late, so we had exactly one minute for questions, but we walked out the door on time, dammit.

Rift in the space-time continuum.

The bigger the crowd, the slower you have to talk. That is, the more people there are in the room, the fewer words you can say. This is true. There’s something about the bigness of the room, and the amplified shuffle-in-seats, doing-Twitter-backchannel, occasional-cough background noise just makes speaking more slowly imperative. So if you can get through 2500 words in a 15 minute conference paper, for a 35 minute keynote, don’t go over 5000. Where did the extra five minutes go? Cough, tweet, shuffle, fuzz of amplification through big speakers.

Signpost.

One great keynote I saw laid it out at the beginning: “I’m going to talk for 40 minutes. There are three topics. Here they are: the first two give the context, and they’re pretty short. The last one is the argument and it’s a bit longer, but there’re lots of pictures.” And he did exactly that. It was soooooo easy to follow as a result and I also didn’t get restless because by giving us the blueprints, the speaker allowed the audience to build the mental memory house into which to slot everything we heard as we heard it. I just totally stole that idea and used it. It also helps people live tweet, I see from the backchannel transcript of my talk.

Be yourself, no matter what group invites you

Some keynotes flub it because they try to write the paper that they think the inviting group would produce, if they were writing it. But you’ve been invited because of the work that you do. Don’t try to master someone else’s field and give a keynote on that. Because a) you’re not going to master it and b) as a result it’s kind of simplistic and insulting. But also c) they invited you to talk about what you’re an expert in. So do that. I got totally balled up on this DHSI keynote for MONTHS because I was trapped in the ontological weeds: what is DH? Do I do DH? I need to write something for all the different kinds of DH that will be there! Oh God, I’m a fraud. Ultimately, I made the case for my own book project as a kind of DH. The best feedback I got was from this researcher who does computer stylistics (pretty much the opposite of what I do)–he told me he was listening and was like, “nope, nope, nope … oh, wait, hold one … that’s right … yes … huh! I didn’t think of that … cool!” We still do radically different things, but now he understands what I do, and we can talk about it.

Be yourself, though, for that goup

Like using fewer words for a bigger crowd, consider how to frame your ideas at a higher or more accessible level for a keynote crowd. You might give conference papers to an audience of the only eight people in the world who’ve read everything you’ve written, and vice versa. The keynote group is not that crowd. Include everyone by pitching to the kind of experts described in the conference theme or call: the DHSI group knows about some field in the humanities, and they use digital tools. In my paper I gave a solid gloss of affordance theory and applied it to interface design / self-narration problem. I did NOT go into the internal debates in the field on that theory, but I could’ve if it came up in questions. Which it didn’t. Would’ve framed the same part of the talk very differently for a design studies conference, or for a literary studies audience.

Present

A keynote is more of a performance than a conversation. And it’s more theatre than film: be bigger and broader, generally. I used a remote to run the slides so I could stand in the middle of speaking area at the glass podium instead of hiding in the corner behind the computer. I gesticulated. I marked in the text where to look up at the audience. I marked in the text where to slow down to deliver the punchlines to maximum effect. (This also allows people to live tweet better; they’re better able to quote you correctly.) When people laughed, I waited for them to stop, and I smiled at them. I also managed my slides in the same way I’ve done for years, but which many people on Twitter stopped to remark on: I show blank/black slides in between content-laden slides. I don’t know about you but when there’s a slide and someone talking, I compulsively try to relate the image to the talking. So if I just want people to focus on what I’m saying, and there’s nothing I need them to look at, I just black out the screen. Pictures when relevant, blank when not. Apparently, not a lot of people have thought of this, and it was very popular.

Be present

I have always been very impressed when the keynote at a conference has been around and participating in the whole conference, and making an effort to connect with people. I am way less impressed when they fly in two hours beforehand, talk, and then go to dinner with the big wigs or their friends from grad school before flying home. I’m no bigwig but it is now the case that I’m senior to a lot of people, and that many people want to meet me. So I walked around with a smile all week and made a special effort to meet at least five people every day that I didn’t know before. Some days I met ten. It was a weird thing to see people get weirdly tongue-tied and nervous and talk too fast when they come up to me. I know what it’s like to BE that person who’s nervous, not be addressed by that person, so I’m learning how to be very friendly and engaging and not scary for people. I’ve met such nice people!

Keynote selfie in a keynote about selfies. #metaselfie #humourme

I will be a lot less scared and nervous and anxious and insomniac if I ever get asked to do another keynote. As it turns out, it really was the fear of the unknown genre that was making it all so stressful. I hope these notes might be useful to you for YOUR first keynote. And of course, if you are a keynote habituée, please add any further advice in the comments below!

#alt-ac · #post-ac · good attitudes about crappy possibilities · grad school · job market · mentoring · openness · PhD · reform · student engagement · students · transition

Things I wish someone had told me during my PhD

melissadalgleish8 Comments

I was invited, about a month back, to give a talk at Queen’s University to a mixed group of grad students, adjuncts, faculty and staff on hacking your graduate degree for maximum post-PhD flexibility. I hosted a similar session for some students at my university today. The point of the talk is that graduate students can make strategic choices about the opportunities they pursue during their degrees,  and that these opportunities can help them develop a variety of skills, a strong professional network, and a compelling body of work which can make it easier for them to pursue a variety of career paths inside and outside of the academy. What I wanted to do was have an honest conversation about the things I wish I had known during grad school, things that would have made my time there even more enjoyable and productive, and that would have made my eventual transition onto the #alt-ac track (both mentally, and literally) more seamless and painless. And how does one hack one’s graduate degree, you might ask? Here’s my advice. (Do note that it places the onus on graduate students, who were my original audience. The conversation about what faculty and administrators should be doing, and about why some of this shouldn’t be the responsibility of our PhDs, is for another day.)

1. Be Realistic, and Open, About What Comes After Grad School

In the recent America-wide survey by Duke University graduate student Gregory Brennen, the data showed that 83% of graduate students started their PhD expecting to become a tenure-track professor. This is in stark contrast with the current data on how many PhDs actually end up in tenure track jobs—most estimates suggest that fewer than 50% of PhDs end up in any kind of academic job (that includes contract teaching) and that only between 15% and 25% ever secure tenure track jobs. Given this reality, graduate students need to prepare for, and embrace, the multitude of possibilities open to them after they complete their degrees. And they need to remember that being an academic is just a job, and that the are tons of interesting, fulfilling jobs doing other things. Mine is a good example.

2. Make Strategic Decisions About What You Do During Your Degree


As a friend kindly reminded me after I kept claiming that I got lucky in ending up in my job, we make our own luck. What seems random is actually, when you look back, a series of strategic decisions that lead to a whole host of post-degree opportunities. In my case, that strategic decision was to take a research assistantship in lieu of teaching during the fourth year of my PhD. While many PhD students fund their studies by teaching, and that’s a wonderful opportunity for people who are looking for careers in education, that may not be the best choice for people who are looking to do other things and need a different set of skills. These other opportunities are also extremely useful academically. Research or graduate assistantships are a big one to consider, as is doing an industry-partnered internship with Mitacs. So might be going on an international exchange, or selecting a graduate co-op program (which UBC now has in English, and Aimee tells me Waterloo is going to develop.) In my case, the research assistantship, researching graduate student professional development programs, let me develop the skills, knowledge, and experience that got me my job as a Research Officer.

3. Take Advantage of the Resources Available on Campus

As grad students, it’s easy to believe that most of the student support services available on campus are there for undergraduates, but that is emphatically not the case. There are a myriad of resources available on most campuses to help graduate students make the most of their degrees, to help them navigate the academic job market, or to help them transition out of academia or into an #alt-ac or #post-ac career. The Career Centre is a great place to start, and they can provide assistance with academic and non-academic job searches; Advancement can often connect grads with alumni in the fields they’re interested in; most Canadian universities now have graduate student professional development programs that offer a whole host of workshops and seminars; Mitacs offers a full suite of free transferable skills workshops; and many faculty members can, sometimes surprisingly, provide guidance and support in the search for jobs in and outside of the academy. It can be scary talking to faculty about plans to abandon the tenure track–believe me, I know–but the culture of silence around #alt-ac and #post-ac transition isn’t going to disappear until we all start talking about it.

4. Consider Creating A Shadow C.V.

One of the most important things graduate students can do to demonstrate to people outside of the academy that they have the needed skills is to have evidence that you’re capable of working outside of the academy. Especially for PhDs, the assumption that we’re overeducated and lacking in practical skills can be hard to overcome without demonstrated outside experience, and having at least one example of non-academic work experience to put in a resume can go a long way toward helping graduate students mentally connect the skills they’ve honed as a graduate students with those that crop up on job postings, and to help overcome the feeling that there’s nothing they’re qualified to do but be a professor. People have started calling experience developed alongside academic work, but not included in academic documents, a “shadow C.V.” In my case, I took a year off between my Master’s and my PhD to work in publishing and continued tutoring and editing throughout my degree. Other people I know have done summer placements, taken part-time jobs, done industry-partnered internships, or created web-based consulting and writing firms that allow them to work on their own time.

6. Learn How to Talk About Your Skills and Research to People Outside of Academia

Academese and English can sometimes seem like two different languages, and this is a major barrier to people with graduate degrees trying to make their qualifications and research make sense in contexts outside of the academy. It’s only natural. Communicating highly specialized research to non-academics isn’t a skill that most academics at any level practice all that much, other than the inevitable attempts to explain your work to your mother, or to someone you meet at a party. This is certainly changing, though. But opportunities to practice do exist, and graduate students should take advantage of them: compete in the Three Minute Thesis; take workshops on clear language writing; practice translating research into non-specialist language. Doing this can seem very non-intuitive for grad students, especially for those who have been academe for a long time, but once they learn how to do it, the relationship between what they do as academics and what shows up in job postings often becomes painfully obvious, as does the potential impact of their work outside the academy. This is, as a side benefit, and increasingly strong focus for many granting agencies, a number of which also now require clear-language or lay research summaries.

7. Think About What You Really Want to Do

Many PhD students are committed to being professors without actually knowing what the life, and the job, of a professor is really like. Our archives here at Hook & Eye can be pretty illuminating. Parts of it match up closely with the starry-eyed dream, but others definitely don’t. Meetings are endless and often frustrating. Grading is a slog. The pressure to publish and get stellar teaching evaluations can be debilitating. Students are disengaged. Service takes up far more time that people realize, and there’s never enough time for research and reflection. Graduate students should be figuring out what it is they really love about academia, and thinking about other jobs that might let them do those things more. The book So What Are You Going to Do with That? includes some fantastic exercises, ones that helped me realize that the things I love to do and am good at doing–coordinating, facilitating other people’s work and success, communications, writing, mentorship–are key components of all sorts of #alt-ac and #post-ac jobs, including my current one.

8. Think About What You Really Don’t Want to Do

As PhDs, we’re indoctrinated to believe that we should be willing to give up everything for a tenure track job. At some point, I shrugged that indoctrination off and made a list of the things that were more important to me than tenure: I didn’t want to move, wait until I was 40 to have kids, spend most of my life grading papers, spend multiple years as a contract professor, or write things that no one would ever read. For me, those were pretty convincing reasons to give up on the idea of becoming a professor, which requires total mobility, limits reproductive choices, requires far more teaching than research for most people, and mostly values journal and book publications that most people won’t read. The most important thing I had to convince myself of–and that we must tell graduate students, over and over–is that choosing where to live, desiring to have a child without worrying about compromising doctoral work or chances at tenure, refusing precarious employment, are totally legitimate life choices that are okay to voice aloud, despite the tendency of academia to suggest that if you aren’t willing to sacrifice your whole life, even your whole identity, to being an academic, you’re a second-class citizen. It broke my heart, in a good way, to have a whole gaggle of female Queen’s students come up to me after my talk and thank me for saying out loud that my desire to have kids before I was 35 was a factor in my decision making. It is for many people, and that’s something that should be discussed openly.

The other important part of this equation is to get graduate students talking to people they know in academia and outside, and find out from them what their jobs are really like. So long as we perpetuate the belief that academia is the only worthy place of employment, and that a professorship is the only truly fulfulling and engaging job, graduate students will ignore a whole host of career possibilities that might be a much better personal and professional fit.

9. Don’t Conflate Who You Are With What You Do

This is an obvious one, and a hard one to avoid–but if graduate students can avoid the trap of believing that they are academics, and that if they don’t get to continue to be academics they’ll be nothing, they’ll save themselves a horrible and painful identity crisis if the time comes that the professoriate becomes an unobtainable dream. A professorship is just a job. It is not a vocation, or an identity, and graduate students are so much more than the single career option the academy tells them is worthy. 

10. Enjoy the Ride

Getting paid to read for comps. Taking classes totally outside of your area because you can. Auditing things purely for interest. Debating theory over far too much wine. Style-stalking your favourite professor. Choosing conferences based purely on location. These are some of the best parts of grad school, and they should be relished, and they often aren’t because PhDs are too busy conferencing and publishing and professionalizing and shadow-CVing and comparing themselves to all of the other PhDs they know. Yes, those things need to get done (minus the last one) but statistically speaking, the chances of getting to stay in academia on a permanent basis are slim. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.

***

So, dear readers, what do you think? What advice would you give to current graduate students facing the reality of a terrible academic job market? What advice do you wish you had gotten during your PhD?

balance · body · classrooms · learning · openness · teaching · yoga

In which the teacher becomes the student. And it’s weird.

aimeemorrison

I spent 18 hours of last weekend in stretchy pants, making deliberate contact with various weight-bearing points of myself to a sticky mat, in a big sunny room, with 20 other people, taking notes, touching people with my “magic button” hands, directing their sun salutations, and being quizzed on the broader points of Ayurveda.

I’m in yoga teacher training. And it’s really weird to be a student.

Obviously, I’ve been a yoga student for years already, relinquishing the seat of the teacher to someone up at the front of the room, keeping my eyes on my own mat. Being a yoga student for me was an exercise in letting go of control, of letting someone else direct the show for a while, of keeping my eyes on my own mat and learning to be mindful. Getting into that flow is fairly easy for me. Yoga is a practice, not a perfect: you do it right by showing up, and continuing. Yoga in this way is a lot like writing: a lonely endeavour requiring grit and steady effort, over the long haul, accumulating into strength that manifests in individual ways.

But yoga teacher training is more like class: there are tests, and homework, and other assessments and you’re being taught a body of knowledge you have to master before you’re done.

So I’m that kind of student again, and it’s probably a useful experience for my life as a professor, now that I’m (ulp) fifteen years out of the graduate seminar, and seventeen years away from my undergradute experience. The gulf between my experience of university classrooms and that of my students is growing: I see class more and more as a pure learning space, as an obligation that needs to be regimented, too, if I’m going to get my other work done, as a luxury of dedicated time to be curious and access a subject area expert, as a set of names and stories I have to manage to make a connection, without burning out. I don’t know, really, how my students see class anymore.

But I just spent a weekend in their shoes. (Or bare feet. On a medidation cushion rather than a chair.) I have worried about how I’m going to find time to get the homework done–two hours of home yoga AND two classes a week? That’s hard! I can do the written homework fairly easily … oh and someone made digital flashcards for Sanskrit pose names. When is the courseware package going to be available? I’ve shot up my hand and given the wrong answer in front of 20 other people and been met with, “Yessssss, that’s interesting but no.” And I’ve shot my hand up enough to have my teacher’s eyes slide past me with, “Can we hear from someone who hasn’t given an answer yet?” I’ve been puzzled and I’ve been confident. I even got a little bored and my back hurt and I wanted a nap, at a certain point on Sunday. I’ve done group work, introducing myself awkwardly to strangers, and figuring out a process to take turns pushing on each others’ inner thighs, or leading sun salutations with verbal cues. the whole time I’m wondering if I’m doing it right, and how I would know that. It’s exciting and exhausting and confusing and worrying and fun.

At yoga teacher training, it seems, I’m learning (again) what it’s like to be a student, in a formal learning endeavour with real stakes. It’s humbling and illuminating.

I went back to my own class on Monday–the one I teach–and looked at my 14 sudents with a new kind of perspective. I heard what I was saying to them with a sort of doubled consciousness, like I used to when I was just starting. I could imagine what they felt like as students, even as I continued to occupy my role as teacher. Some of them are more or less curious. More or less prepared. More or less awake, or hungry, or distracted. Some have a burning desire to just graduate and others have a burning desire to learn to use Photoshop and some are too overwhelmed by the bombarbment of new information to desire much except a little respite and maybe a muffin. Just like me.

I am grateful for this unexpected extra benefit from my new training. I guess I forgot how long I’ve been in the classroom just as a professor, and not as a student, and didn’t realize what impact this might have on my teaching and on student learning. As I whipsaw between intellectual and physical/spiritual pursuits, between student and teacher, between satisfying learning and frustrating learning, I’ll keep in mind that that is what it is like to be a student. Any student. And we’ll see where that takes me, and my own students, in our time together.

Embodied learning: feet truly parallel, and active

faster feminism · new year new plan · openness · women

Faster Feminism Redux: Welcome Back, Y’all

erinewunker

I am sitting at my new desk in my new office at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. If you missed my hello/goodbye announcement in the spring here is the short version: I have moved. I’m now in this lovely town for a 12-month limited term contract. I’m thinking about beginnings and I am thinking about changes. I am also — always — thinking about poetry…

You fit into me / like a hook into an eye

That is how Heather began our first post three years ago. If you’re a long-time reader you may recall that Hook & Eye began in part as a reaction to the CERC brew-ha-ha in which absolutely zero of the nineteen new Canada Excellence Research Chairs we women. We also began Hook & Eye as a means of fostering community. Where, we wondered, were women working in universities in Canada? How were they negotiating the quotidian and extraordinary challenges of their diverse work environments? How are our colleagues–old friends or yet-to-be met acquaintances–thinking about and living through their experiences as raced, gendered, classed, and situated people in today’s Canadian university? And what are they wearing?

You see, I find myself once again in a Janus-faced stance looking back at the original impetus for this blog, and looking forward towards the unknown of another semester. Fresh as a newly-cracked moleskine or foreboding as start of hurricane season? Only time will tell…

You fit into me / like a hook into an eye
A fish hook / an open eye

In the three years since the blog began we have addressed an incredible amount in inequity. We have had guest posts that deal with rape culture on Canadian university campuses. We have had pieces on job-place harassment. We had — and then stopped running — a monthly post called This Month In Sexism. We didn’t stop running the feature because we rant out of material, no. We stopped running it because readers requested that we stop because it was too disheartening. Fish hook to open eye, indeed. Or rather, here’s to the undeniable need to keep talking, thinking, teaching, and practicing faster feminism.

Of course, as Heather wrote in that first post Hook & Eye’s aim is a double one: it is both an intervention and an invitation. We envisioned this space as a place to talk politics, pressures, panics, and pleasures. And yes, we probably do want to know what you’re planning to wear for your first day of class. We also want to know how your feminist praxis is evolving. In short, we want to know what our readership cares about and we want to continue to bring a diverse set of topics to you for your consideration.

Oh yes, we. That trickiest of pronouns. Such an easy one to wield with blindness to the kinds of exclusions it can enact; such a wonderful work when one feels a part of that we. We have undergone shifts in who we are here at Hook & Eye. Heather has moved into the position of Editrix Emerita as she moved into her new office as Vice Dean of Arts. Aimee and I have welcomed Margrit into the roster of weekly editrix-writers. Last year we were fortunate to have a collective of regular writers (thank you Danielle, Liz, Jessica, Liza, and Melissa!) and this year Melissa will be joining us on a semi-regular basis. And as ever we are grateful to out guest posters who give of their own time and take the risk of thinking in public.

Perhaps to my eye the greatest shift in who makes up the collaborative writing we of Hook & Eye is the shift to the sheer number of precariously employed. We now have a disproportionate number of un- under- or precariously-employed writers. And while writing in public is always risky, writing in public while precariously employed carries its own unique challenges. As I have performed (again, and again, and again) with a mix of determination and complete sheepishness the number of precarious workers is on the rise. Writing publicly, creating a readerly collective, trying to create the conditions for solidarity: these are some of the possibilities afforded to us by social media. Of course, we — in that shifting collective of bodies that comprises the pronoun — need one another as much as we need our own political and social consciousness to keep us from forgetting the various ways in which these generative aims carry the potential for permeating inequity. Fish hook to open eye? Yes, that’s the risk, but I would like to suggest rather that these pernicious and diverse inequities offer us new ways of coming together. Faster feminism.

As we head into a new school year another section in the Hook & Eye archives opens. We would like to invite you to continue to read, comment, and heck, maybe even write a guest post for us. For now, though, how about inspiring us with some of your new year’s resolutions?

enter the confessional · notes from the non-tenured-stream · openness

On Doubt

erinewunker1 Comment

Last Monday I didn’t write a post. I couldn’t. The tank was empty. The well was dry. I had less than nothing to say, and so I said nothing. No big deal, I told myself. It is March. Everyone is busy. Readers will understand a missed post here and there. Your co-bloggers will get it. It is fine. And it is fine. The world doesn’t stop if I — or anyone else — misses a post from time to time. But here is the thing: I missed a post not because I was tired for the first time. Goodness knows I have been tired for approximately the past five years. No, I missed a post because I am struggling with doubt. And despite my reticence to do so, I want to think through the function of doubt here.

Struggling with doubt over what? You may well ask.

I have written before — and often — about the affective bind of precarious employment. Most recently both Margrit and I have framed this feeling of inertia through Lauren Berlant‘s concept of cruel optimism. Berlant describes cruel optimism as one of the non-purgative affects that gets in the way of one’s ability to move forward in a positive and fulfilling manner. It is a state of suspended agency. Indeed, I came to Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism after having written a short piece on the importance of hope. My argument in that paper was that hope was crucial for the kinds of perseverance needed to survive precarious academic work.

More recently I wrote a companion piece to the hopeful paper that reframed the necessity for a particular kind of cynicism. Two years after the hopeful paper I found that the naivete of that earlier me had made room for a more critically-minded, still tenacious point of view. Moreover, though I still routinely struggle with the sense that being frank is risky when you’re precariously employed, I found I was less swayed by the inner voice that whispered ‘just smile and charge ahead.’ And so it would make sense that my doubt stems from the impossibility of predicting the job market and my own place in it. And while I am certain that precarity influences my own recent experiences of doubt, I am less certain that it is the central cause.

No, I fear my sense of doubt comes from the larger and more esoteric worry: what if none of this work in the Academy matters? What if? What if?

Doubt is one of those wobbly feelings that can keep your feeling stuck. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it. It chips away at the foundation of your sense of self until you’re left standing on a latticework of lace. Consider one of the final scenes in the 2008 film version of Doubt:

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/PWNja7skJ2Q&source=uds

Look at the way Meryl Streep’s character collapses under the weight of unknowing. There is a pulling in and away from the context of her work that reminds me of images of controlled demolition: when doubt takes hold the subject implodes, folds in on herself.

Yet, doubt also offers a critical position from which to question the status quo. It is a place from which to strategically position yourself against dominant discourses that flatten over the kinds of work that can — and often does — happen in engaged classrooms, ethical and urgent research projects, acts of academic magical thinking, and those gorgeous moments of collaboration. So I suppose I find myself wondering how to reframe the potentially paralyzing experience of doubt (of self doubt, of doubt about the academy and on and on) in a productive and potentially empowering position of careful unknowing. In other words, in a month that has seen (more) massive cuts to education (courage, my Albertan comrades!) and seen the status of women in Canada stagnate to name but a few instances of doubt-inducing events, how can we harness the productive questioning power of doubt without becoming over-wrought, apathetic, or withdrawn?

Strangely enough, as I was thinking about how to answer my own question I thought of Ndidi Onukwulu’s version of “Maybe the Last Time.” Do you know it? In her pacing, her gestural performance, and her whimsical completion of the song Onukwulu embodies the kind of critical unknowing and questioning that I’m thinking towards:

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/jBNCc61G-tc&source=uds

Thoughts? How do you think through your own experiences of professional doubt?

openness · reflection · student engagement · teaching

Designing good courses

erinewunker1 Comment

Coincidentally, I’m picking up Aimée’s baton, and thinking about how to design a good course. I have more questions than answers. Like, how do you design a good university/college course? What you do when you start thinking about what should fill the syllabus, the lectures, the seminar discussions, the assignments? Do you think in terms of learning goals? Do you have a narrative? What makes it a “good” course in your mind? Your excitement for it? Putting your own research interests in it?

Oh, yes, and I have yet more questions, but I think I have made my point. In fact, these questions have been on my mind as I have been navigating the job market and investigating the department offerings. I go on the website, check out their courses, and dream about which of them I’d like to teach. And then how I’d like to teach them. It’s a fiction, just like any other document/exercise in applying for jobs, and it adds to that emotional investment applications demand. But it’s a very exciting fiction: putting myself in those classrooms, interacting with those imaginary students, talking with them about texts that interest us all (one is allowed to take the dream wherever one wants, no?). What texts would I put on the syllabus and why? What’s is the connection between them? What’s the single most important idea or skill or connection or digression I’d like the students to leave the course with? What kinds of conversations would I like the students to engage in? What would I like to hear from them? Yes, I know, I’m killing you with the questions here.

I have been teaching first-year English for a few years; long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, to build in that flexibility that allows for alterations after the course has started, so I can tailor it better to the group. This term, however, is the first time I’m teaching a 200-level course. I am relishing the opportunity. I spent a *lot* of time thinking about the texts, the assignments, the day-to-day, or rather class-to-class content. Basically, I’ve been trying to find answers to the questions I asked you earlier.

The good news is that the class is amazing, mostly because of the students, who are interested, engaged, smart, and very generous in their contributions, their interpretations, their connections, their digressions, and their interactions. Everybody I had talked to told me it would be so in a 200-level course: no longer the overwhelmed or lost first-year, not yet the jaded fourth-year, these students are enthusiastic in my friends’ experiences as well (although I do have quite a few fourth-year students, and they are just as generous). However, even if this class ends up as a resounding success, I am still unsure I’ll know the secret and how to replicate it.

And that’s why I’m turning to you, dear readers. What do *you* do when you design a course? What do you look for when you take a course? I loved it when Jessica mentioned she liked those instructors who came undone just a little bit, but I’m not sure one can build it in as a strategy. So, how do you repeat success and weed out fiascos?

mental health · openness · saving my sanity

Pie for breakfast; or, the mid-semester fess-up.

erinewunker9 Comments

Sometimes I am a real slacker.

Or at least I feel like a slacker. Take last night for instance. I have a stack of marking to complete, I have to job applications on the go that Must Be Posted!, I have a meeting with the academic planning committee first thing this morning, I have lectures, I have laundry, I have a partner (hi M.! Remember me?). Oh yes, and I have a blog post due. So what do I do Sunday evening? I cooked. I knit. I hung out with my dogs. I watched television and folded the laundry.

The dogs know how to chill out … sometimes.

Here’s the thing: I am not a slacker, not really, and my wager is that you aren’t either even — or especially — if you feel like one. I have a terrifically bad common habit of making negative statements about my quotidian needs. This is a habit that is endemic to academia, certainly. Indeed, I suspect it is a habit that is common to the conditions set by out neoliberal moment: workworkwork and if you’re not working, well, you’d better feel pretty horrible about all that. Further, I am almost certain that women are very prone to this tendency to negate the need to take an evening. Here’s just one snapshot of my women just below my age group who are not academics. No matter how many articles I read, no matter how often my nearest and dearest tell me I need/deserve/must take time for myself I still find it a struggle.

Fast-forward to last night. It didn’t seem to matter that on top of the usual business of the previous week I had spent Saturday in a ten hour meeting (no kidding). It didn’t matter that a friend had suddenly passed away on Monday. It didn’t matter that three times this past week I have had to vacate the house with my two crazy dogs because our landlords have decided to sell and the house needs showing. Heck, it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m writing run-on sentences: I simply could not let myself settle down.

So here is the confession: All of my best laid plans from September? They are limping along. (Actually, one of the plans is going amazingly well thanks to my collaborator’s constant encouragement) But I still seem to succumb to the mid-semester craziness, and when it hits I push myself until I crash. Which brings us to pie for breakfast.

Peach breakfast crisp! Thank you Smitten Kitchen!

I wrote a while ago about good advice my dad gave me. Last night as I was looking at the grading and looking and my knitting and longing to play around with my new cookbook (a gift from my friend EB!) I remembered something my 96-year-old grandmother tells me: sometimes you just have to throw up your hands and eat pie for breakfast. So I opened my new cookbook, made peach breakfast crisp, then made some cauliflower pesto just because, and I spent the evening on the couch.

Cauliflower pesto! (Never mind that if you look closely you can see the piles of grading off in the corner…)

Today is going to be a scramble, but last night it was worth it.

How about y’all? How are you handling the mid-semester scramble?


I am eating breakfast pie while I write this. No make-up, haven’t brushed my hair, must be out the door in five minutes…

openness · writing

Who do you write for?

erinewunker1 Comment

Hi Everyone! My name is Liz Groeneveld, and I’m delighted to be joining the regular cast of H & E contributors!

Becoming a contributor to a blog is a new thing for me. And, I find that it’s raising all kinds of questions. How do I want to frame my voice? How do I write about academia in a personal way? How do I walk the line of writing on a personal level without veering into overly confessional self-disclosures?  Who am I writing for? Who do I want to read this? Who will read this?

These kinds of questions aren’t new ones; they’ve been asked on H & E before. For feminist-academic types working in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS), particularly, these questions around voice, writing, and audience come up frequently in the work that we do.

An example: this semester, I have the great pleasure of teaching a fourth-year Honours capstone course in Women’s Studies. It’s the companion class for students writing Honours theses. The course is meant to help students find their critical voices, to provoke exactly the kinds of questions about their writing that I’m now having about my own.

One recent class discussion reminded me that, when I wrote my fourth-year undergraduate thesis (way back in the last century), I had an imagined reader in mind. My imagined reader motivated me to keep writing and to style my writing in a way that I thought was relatively clear and accessible. My imagined reader was my mom.

For that project, my mom was an ideal imaged reader. Imagining her reading the thesis motivated me to write and–above all–to finish the project because, as I tell my students and as others have said before me, the best thesis is a finished thesis.

Addendum: my mom did read my thesis. As I recall it, her response was something like “Thanks for sharing that. I couldn’t really make head or tail of it.”

There can be a gap between our imagined reader(s) and our actual reader(s). Is this some kind of failure? Hardly. Did having an imagined reader motivate me? Yes. Did I finish the project? Yes.

We never really know who will pick up our work or read our blog posts. We never really know how our work will translate to others.

So, why am I writing for Hook and Eye? Who is this writing for? It’s for me. And for you.

Who do you write for? Are they real, imagined, or somewhere in between?

administration · change · openness · politics · slow academy

Veep: or, can you be a netizen and move up the ladder at the same time?

aimeemorrison2 Comments

We’ve lost Heather. You haven’t seen her blogging here since last year, when she took up her post as Vice Dean, and worried about how to be in administration and on the Internet at the same time. And it turns out that that is a dance that no one has yet really mapped the steps to, Heather included. I miss her in direct proportion to the pride I feel for her in her new role.

We’re recruiting new bloggers, and the response has been really wonderful, but from the field in view in front of us, Heather noted: “Aimee, you are the old lady blogger now!”

Well, shit. This old lady blogger just took on an administrative post, too.

July 1st, I became Vice President of our Faculty Association here at UW. How this happened I’m not quite sure. I remember putting my name in to be on the Board, after a friend and colleague whose service to this organization I have greatly admired and appreciated asked me to, but this veep thing snuck up on me.

I mean, I did say last year that I’m in the sweet spot to be cranky, by which I meant, having secured tenure without completely burning out or embittering myself on either academic inquiry or collegial governance, I ought to use my (however limited) powers for good. These are weird times. Exciting and full of possibilities, but also worries and scarcity. It’s hard to know where universities are headed. We have a systemic, continent-wide jobs and employment crisis. We are all being asked to do more with less: more research with less granting agency funding, more teaching with fewer professors, more graduate training with fewer academic jobs, more knowledge mobilization with no less academic publishing, more enrolments with less infrastructure renewal, etc.

But here’s the main challenge I’m feeling: a lot of this work is confidential. Confidentially, Internet, just between us, I’ve never been very good at “confidential.” I’ve always considered “confidential” with its cousins “unsayable,” “private,” and “taboo” and the repercussions of decorous silence and discretion, I feel, have not been particularly empowering to lots of people. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, I say. However, I’m now receiving memos headed “confidential” and reports labelled “draft — not for circulation” and I’m bound by those rules. And in some ways I really do understand the value of closed-door work on some issue. On other issues? I think this “discretion” is misplaced and old-fashioned.

In any case, I’m not sure what to say about issues where I know more than I’m supposed to let on. Should I preface all of my writing here by saying, “I have no real knowledge about any of this, from an administrative point of view, which means I’m allowed to write about it”? Because that seems like a good dodge, but also maybe counterproductive, in the long run. I’m pretty sure that this new role is meant to capitalize on my passions, my talents, and my mouthiness, rather than to lock them up in small committee rooms away from the people I care to talk with, but I’m not sure how to manage that. I don’t think the idea now is that I should restrict myself to blog posts about academic haircuts and other such institutionally inconsequential topics.

And perhaps I’ve already said too much.

So where I’m sitting now, I’m feel a little bit pinched between getting what feels like a good deal more institutional agency and the feeling I might be expected to shut up a bit more on the inter tubes, to manifest the discretion and compartmentalization that’s been blasted to bits by services like Twitter, for example.

This is a generational issue. Probably Heather and I are at the vanguard of a generation of academics who are either digital natives or skilled early immigrants to Weblandia, moving up the ladder, where the sorts of cultural change we’re expected to deal with in our undergraduate teaching hasn’t really penetrated.

The mismatch extends beyond administration and into the ranks, of course. Five years from now, how is anyone going to find a tenure referee who is both in the candidate’s field, and completely arm’s length? Aren’t we already beginning to see the kinds of networking and interconnection that social media offer us as normative? Won’t it actually mark you as an outsider if everyone who’s anyone isn’t on your Twitter feed? And there’s the question of knowledge mobilization as well: to what extent should academics be for seeking out opportunities to break their research results out of the academy and into the bigger world, or at least out from behind the Elsevier paywall and into open access repositories. What about when a social media upstart collates retraction data to ferret out and publicize academic chicanery, in full view of the public, but the institution’s processes (often for very good reason) take place over longer duration and behind closed doors?

I like blogging and tweeting and posting photos and asking hard questions and making embarrassing disclosures, all in the name of working continually to improve this great big academy we all love so much (well, sometimes … and in some ways …). Can I still do that? How hard should I push? When should I back off? If I am a change agent, what things am I actually trying to change as I go to more and more meetings where attendees are accompanied by their assistants?

I have no idea. But I’m going to try to work it all out here, in public, with you.