Tuesday, August 05, 2008

WPA-Denver: Working with Librarians

The first session I attended at Denver included a presentation by Sara Jameson, the current acting WPA at Oregon State University.  I have a special place in my heart for OSU because I grew up on that university (my pops taught there for 30+ years).  Anyway, I was excited to see Sara’s presentation not just because she works at OSU, but also because she’s worked extensively with Michael Faris, a queer comp colleague of mine.  This was a great way to start off the conference.

While Sara had a bunch of great material and ideas, the one that resonated most deeply with me was her ongoing collaboration with Anne-Marie Deitering.  This is one example of their work: a piece about embedding information literacy in FYC.  As I see it, this kind of collaboration across disciplines and departments is exactly what we, as compositionists, should be doing.

Given the current pace for tech development, the flurry of new online tools, and the overwhelming tides of information, there is no way we can be experts at everything.  Therefore, it behooves us to not just work with people to get things done; collaboration, in and of itself, seems like one of the best and most efficient ways to harness …

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Monday, August 04, 2008

How to Take Notes

Courtesy of AcademHack, a number of useful suggestions on how to take notes effectively.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Academic Freedom Comes with Higher Pay

Academic freedom is one of the biggest reasons given for fighting to maintain and protect tenure.  Hey, I am with you there.  But, before I can be free, I need to eat and have decent health care.  So, while academic freedom concerns me, parity in pay and benefits is more important.

I am sure that some adjuncts—maybe even a majority—want to preserve their academic freedom and protect their work.  Near as I can tell, the universities largely devalue and dismiss our work.  Why?  Because if they actually valued our intellectual contributions, we would be paid more.  And if we were paid more, then we would accrue more social standing, power, and respect.  Unfortunately, pay scale equals respect in this culture (this is true in the academy as well in spite of cries of denial), and if you make more money, you have greater value.  If you have greater value, as determined by pay scale, it makes it harder for a university to come after you.  Oh yes, they can still come after highly paid and/or tenured folks if they are motivated.  However, it is far easier to dismiss a low-paid adjunct than a high paid tenure tracker.

Parity in pay means an increase in respect from colleagues and the institution.  This respect means being heard, and it means greater protection from …

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Poison E-mails

Dean Dad offers some useful suggestions for dealing with “poison emails.” Hopefully you will never have to deal with such an e-mail, but if you do, try to remember DD’s advice.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Seven Papers in One Month!

Academic Productivity strikes again!  Check out this interview with Dan Navarro, who submitted seven papers in one month!  Surely there is a tip or two in this interview that you can use in your own approach.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Podcasts on Presenting Papers at Conferences

Michael at A Collage of Citations has collected some useful podcasts about presenting papers at conferences.  Surf over there and check them out!

Choice Quote: Bousquet #6

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works.

From “The Rhetoric of the ‘Job Market’” (204-5):

Under the current system of academic work, the university clearly does not prefer the best of most experienced teachers; it prefers the cheapest teachers.  Increasingly, that means the creation of nontenurable full-time instructorships and other casual appointments, a casualization that has unfolded unevenly by discipline and is especially pronounced in English and writing instruction.  In this instance, Bowen has again simply applied the dominant logic and assumed that, even within the context of a general assault on the tenure system, “of course” managers would hire the best “doctoral product” available.  From the posture of common sense, it seems reasonable to assume—as many people have—that the replacement of tenured positions with “full-time” term contract positions means that person holding doctorates will be awarded those jobs.  The fashionable notion that we have an “oversupply” of degree holders sustains this assumption: many graduate faculty imagine that their students who don’t get tenurable work will be leading contenders for contract positions, in which, it is further assumed, they will pursue the scholarship, teaching, and service that they would have done in a tenurable position, albeit on a more sped-up basis, less well paid, and without the protections …

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