The Problem of Thomas

The eviscerating cuts to Alberta’s post-secondary education system anger me; I believe that what I teach is important, and I want to protect the study of literature.  Mostly, these cuts enrage me because I believe that a healthy post-secondary education system is not only beneficial to Alberta but is necessary for our province to succeed in the future.  A well-educated citizenry can only be positive.

More than the fact that our current government ran on an election platform of stable funding for the education system and then cut funding by more than seven per-cent, I am enraged by the way in which these cuts have been meted out.  Obviously, they were surprise cuts, and the government has demanded large institutions to make drastic, horrific changes in only two years.  But it is how these cuts have been handled in the media and on social-media by our alleged champion, Mr. Lukaszuk, that sicken me.

Forgetting, for the moment, that this leader has limited experience with this portfolio or its “stakeholders,” and that the education portfolio also includes “enterprise,” and that he is also the Deputy Premier, his personal approach to these cuts is absolutely insulting.

This is a man who says that he will “deal” with angry professors; a man who says that he has not heard much from students or their parents; a man who is dismissive of the work done by lauded researchers and teachers; a man who engages, on Twitter, in ad hominem attacks against a far more rational professor than I who attempts to maintain fact-based, logical discourse about these cuts.

I have been blocked by Mr. Lukaszuk, and for good reason.  I called him an arse.  When he tried to capitalize on a school-shooting by re-tweeting another person’s tweet about the heroics of teachers, I said that it might be important to fund the heroes.  Don’t forget that he was the Minister of Education when devastating cuts were delivered to that sector.  Don’t forget that doctors and teachers in Alberta have also been bullied into accepting cuts.

All of this happens while a government in power for more than forty years refuses to levy a tax or increase royalties to the Oil and Gas industry.  We have to remember who the masters of Alberta truly are.  These masters are not Redford or Lukaszuk.

What I would like to address, though, is that Mr. Lukaszuk--even if he serves only as a diversion, an object of derision, as several people have astutely suggested--apparently had a tough go of it while at the University of Alberta.  There has to be something behind his absolutely dismissive attitude to instructors of higher education.  He seeks to woo students: the new doublethink is “Not on the backs of students,” all while student options decrease and non-tuition fees increase.  He is building Alberta for you by dismantling it.

Above all, Mr. Lukaszuk is clearly engaged in a divide-and-conquer strategy that is doomed to fail.  He does not know the students I know.  His absurd statements that these cuts will not affect students, that he is in support of students, that students come first--all of these statements would be dismissed by many students who have taken my classes or any number of post-secondary classes in Alberta. Remember:  this is a government that promised two per-cent increases to post-secondary education for three years.  Students are not as stupid as you think they are, Mr. Lukaszuk.

Moocing with Alberta’s Post-Secondary Education System

I first encountered the word MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) when I was on Facebook. A renowned and highly-respected expert in my field was offering a free course. I quickly enrolled in the class, joined the FaceBook group, and was eager to begin my studies.  I even told graduate students in the department about the course; this was, indeed, exciting news.  I thought I might be able to “borrow” some ideas about texts that I regularly teach.

The enrollment for this course grew to over 35 000 people.  I was inspired by the idea of a charismatic, well-intentioned, absolutely wonderful professor teaching an often-maligned field of study.  I imagined what I could do with half that many people, a quarter of that many people!  That professor became an on-line rock-star.

The graduate students that the professor (or university) employed to assist in this endeavor were equally inspiring.  They were all bright, passionate, absolutely devoted to the subject at hand.  The recorded lectures were excellent; the discussion boards were helpful, if hit-or-miss.  But 35 000 people around the world were discussing a subject about which I am deeply passionate.  “That can’t be a bad thing,” I thought.

But as the course progressed, I realized that this was not education; it was not even “edutainment.”  It was a way to feel that one’s time on-line was, in fact, spent fruitfully.  I completed the first “test” (which was rudimentary and graded electronically) that did not take into account more nuanced readings of a text, more knowledge than was expected.  I even began my first essay, which was to be ‘assessed’ by five or six of those registered in the MOOC, while I was to ‘assess’ five or six essays on my own.

That moment made me realize that the MOOC is not a form of education.  In my opinion, the government of Alberta is attempting to capitalize on a popular and ill-fated trend in education.  The MOOC will die off in a very short time.  To be clear, I think it is a great opportunity for those interested in particular topics, for those who have hobbies, to learn more about their passions. It is not a way to receive an education.

I (and my young children!) continued to watch lectures for a little while, before life got in the way.  And that is the problem with MOOCs.  It is not possible to imitate a class-room on-line.  You will not have an expert in the field of study offer you advice on how you can improve your essay.  The person commenting on your essay could be twelve-years old.

With that said, I think MOOCs could be a hearty welcome to people who do not have traditional methods of education available to them.  On-line courses are fantastic in that regard because there is direct instructor-to-student contact.  But MOOCs do not allow for that.  Those who wish for individual instruction, who have specific questions, who want to get expert advice?  You might as well go to Yahoo! answers.

I am writing this blog post because I believe the Redford government and Mr. Lukaszuk, in particular, given recent tweets, are interested in making education more accessible to Albertans (while raising non-tuition fees and reducing the number of seats) by using MOOCs.  We are certainly moving into an era where group-think and the wiki are new modes of developing knowledge.  It is easy to lose the voice of the expert in a shouting-match of competing voices.

MOOCs are a great supplementary resource, and for those instructors who would like to teach them, I think the more knowledge disseminated, the better.  But it is no substitute for an in-class face-to-face discussion in which the knowledge is created in the discussion, in which the teaching happens in that moment, where an instructor can see confusion on a student’s face or, better yet, enlightenment.

So, please excuse me, while I prepare for my next three face-to-face lectures, where students do not have anonymity and are required to take ownership for their ideas and actions.

I can only hope that Albertans will require the Redford government to take the same kind of ownership.  Why should we require more of our students than we do of our leaders?

Misperceptions of Advanced Education

I first joined Twitter to show my children pictures from the International Space Station, thanks to Commander Hadfield. I then encountered many poets I admired and soon followed them. Twitter was, for a very brief time, a wonderful place to be. Soon, the thoughtless, myopic and utterly destructive cuts to Alberta's post-secondary education system were dropped. Twitter suddenly became a place that made me very angry.

In several Twitter “discussions” about post secondary education, I realized that many people do not fully understand the job of university faculty members.  Perhaps that lack of understanding falls on us, the faculty members, for not doing an adequate job explaining what it is we do.  It seems that many people think the only valuable work we do is classroom instruction.  Even if our jobs were exclusively about teaching, there seems to be a misperception of what goes into teaching.

Unlike K-12 education, the curriculum is not created for us, in part because in order to teach the most current research in the field, courses need to change every year.  As a department, in many meetings, we determine our curriculum in order to best serve our majors, as well as other faculties (such as Education). So far, we are able to develop our own courses, but who knows what Mr. Lukaszuk has in mind for us with the ill-conceived and excruciatingly vague “Campus Alberta.”  Much of the work that goes into teaching occurs outside the classroom.  Designing a course can take days or weeks.  If it is a course I haven’t taught in the past, then the course design takes months:  text selection (which includes reading the books under consideration), developing fair assignments, organizing the readings in such a way that the course has a trajectory or narrative; all of this takes a long time.

Of course, in English courses, the most time-consuming part of the job is grading.  Every term, I have a cap of one-hundred and sixty students.  On average, one-hundred and thirty complete the three courses I teach.  In each class, I assign two essays and a final exam (as well as several smaller assignments).  On average, it takes me half an hour to grade a five-page paper.  That means that twice a term, I have roughly seventy hours of grading.  I must complete this work after all of the daily planning and teaching is finished, so that is work that is done in the evening.

I hope detailing just the amount of work that goes into the drudgery of grading will help to dispel the myth that academics don’t do a lot of work.  It is important to keep in mind that outside of office hours, I am also answering student e-mails well into the evening.  In some ways, we are always doing our jobs.  Of course, we take time off, and a great benefit of this profession is that we are able to determine when we take time off.  I am not saying that every academic has a great work ethic; of course there will be loafers, as there are in any profession.  But, as a general rule, the halls of academe are teeming with over-achievers.  Remember, these are people who paid to go to school for six or more years after an undergraduate degree, which is six or more years without a salary.  They do this, generally, because they love the discipline they study and are good at it.  To pursue a terminal degree, however, is a sacrifice, a sacrifice for the creation and development of knowledge and the fundamental belief that advanced education is beneficial not just to the students enrolled but to the province and the nation itself.

The Redford government’s cuts to Alberta post-secondary schools damage the benefits of post-secondary education because they reduce the quality of education a student receives.  Larger class sizes, more classes for each instructor, eliminated or “suspended” programs are all detrimental to Alberta.  More teaching demands on professors means less research will be done; and Mr. Lukaszuk keeps saying that we are not good at turning research into money.  If that is true, the way to improve the commodification of research is certainly not to cut, with destructive results, the very institutions that engage in that research.  I hope that I don’t have to explain to our Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education that not all research can be turned into money; sometimes, the knowledge that is gained from research is more valuable than any dollar amount contributed to Alberta’s economy.

All research, though, improves teaching.  I say that as someone paid to teach and not to research.  In order to offer the best education to our students, we need faculty who are aware of (or who are engaged in) the most current research.  As an instructor, my job description requires that I get written permission from the Dean to engage in research.  Of course, I do research, but I am not given any credit for it; that research is, effectively, a hobby, even though it directly influences what and how I teach in the classroom.  Even at an institution that MacLean’s labels “Primarily Undergraduate,” faculty research is absolutely essential to student success and therefore the future success of Alberta.  Imagine if a computer science professor were to be teaching DOS programming in 2013:  I can’t imagine there would be much money to be taken from that kind of research and teaching, but that is the direction Alberta post-secondary education is headed under the “leadership” of Mr. Lukazsuk.

Mr. Lukaszuk wants money from research, and to achieve that end, he has cut $147 million dollars to post-secondary education, where that research happens.  He is one of the many who seem to misperceive the work done by Alberta's post-secondary faculty.  To be blunt, I do not think Mr. Lukaszuk understands how the post-secondary education system works; his dual role as Deputy Premier and Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education exists only to make drastic and devastating cuts to our schools and our future.  The axe-man cometh.

Students, I implore you to speak out against these cuts, about the reduced quality of YOUR education; Mr. Lukaszuk thinks that by wooing you, you will buy his illogical statements and party policy.  Let’s let him know the benefits of critical thinking.

The Failure of Metaphor: Why Education is not a Business

As the realities of the Alberta government’s cuts to post-secondary education begin to take shape a couple of weeks before the return to campus, I’ve heard and read many defenders of the cuts explain that our colleges and universities are government-funded businesses.  In some ways, this metaphor is true.  Obviously, these institutions are government-funded.  Clearly, there are business-like transactions:  students pay for what the cut-defenders call “a service,” so tuition is kind of a service fee; we have “stakeholders,” including students, staff, faculty, sessionals (but that’s another topic unto itself), administrators, board members, the government, tax-payers of Alberta, and tax-payers of Canada; post-secondary institutions have assets and expenditures; they spend and receive money.  My salary is partly paid by tax-payers.  Many of these transactions look a lot like business.

They look like business transactions because we have made them look like business transactions.  We have made education, particularly post-secondary education, a business through metaphor.  However (and this is the only academic reference I will make), Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) suggest that metaphors both highlight and hide: they highlight similarities and hide differences.  What has happened with education is that many have begun to cling too tightly to the similarities of business without recognizing the differences.  This is not to say that education does not benefit business; far from it.  I only hope to point out that the metaphor that “education is business” fails in many ways.

Before I begin, I think it is necessary to bring to your attention that I am not a tenured faculty member:  I am not, in fact, in a tenure-track stream; I am not, actually, a member of faculty.  I was hired to teach and not to research (and that is another topic unto itself).  Despite my “second-class status” in the post-secondary education system, I will defend tenure and tenure-track positions.  But I want you to know that I am not a six-figure professor defending my high pay out of self-interest.  I am the lowest of the low, except for contract workers.  I actually have benefits, while sessionals do not.  I don’t have to apply for a job every four months, while sessionals do.  My “continuing appointment” is effectively “tenure-light.”  I’m not sure I have the same job protection as tenured members of my department, since I have to have written permission from my Dean to engage in research.  (Sorry, that was wee bit of a rant.)

But enough about how people employed by universities (who have been eviscerated by these cuts) are all a bunch of loafing leftists who contribute nothing to the economy; I can tell you that after twelve years of post-secondary education, my salary is not “commiserate” with my experience.  I can’t tell you about administration or finances or give you numbers.  All I can do is tell you about my practices teaching students and how the metaphor of business absolutely fails in my classroom.

The business metaphor fails because I do not produce products in my classroom.  I do not directly contribute to the economy in my classroom, and I never intend to do so.  Students are not products; they are not “human resources;” neither are they consumers in a literal way.  They do not buy my words, my ideas, my expertise.  They do not buy their degrees; they earn their degrees by studying with people who know the most about their areas of specialty, who are experts in their fields, who want to instill in their students a love of what they love.  In this way, education is not a business.

I should say, though, that many students don’t “buy” my ideas metaphorically, either.  Many times I have had students who disagree with me.  I have had students with whom I have fundamentally disagreed regarding their interpretations of texts who have earned A+s  in my class.  I recall one incident while I was teaching Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and one male student spoke up against the argument of the text, against feminism; his statement provoked, as you might imagine, numerous responses from the class.  At the beginning of the next class, I began by saying that I admired that student’s courage; even though I disagree with his ideas, I absolutely admire him for speaking out.  A university is a place where ideas need to be opened to criticism, where ideas need to be discussed.  That is how knowledge is created.

What does this anecdote have to do with an argument against literally making education a business, you may well ask?  My response: in what business transaction would my discussion with that student have happened?  In what business transaction could I see a student’s eyes blink into awareness, into understanding?  In what business transaction could I see students discussing important ideas, important authors, new authors, with passion and admiration?  Booksellers might be the only other business I know.

My final anecdote is one I heard second-hand, and it perfectly encapsulates how the failure of the metaphor that education is business harms everyone invested (metaphorically and literally) in education:  while at the University of Calgary, a professor explained to me that, after three weeks after the first essay had been returned, a student asked, “when do we get our essays back?”  The professor replied, “I have already returned them.  If you would like yours, see me during my office hours.”  The student responded, “I don’t work for you; you work for me.”