Multimodal Composition (Pedagogies)

Curtis brought up a question in class yesterday that we didn’t have time to fully explore. He asked about tenure-track faculty contracts and teaching loads in relation to summers and, generally, what I like to call “face time.” That is, when do faculty have to be on campus, and do they have to work during the summers?

This is a question that academics often get asked (especially from moms and dads who want to know why you can’t come visit for weeks at a time every winter break or summer… ), so let me respond by giving an example of an academic schedule. I provide this schedule — a day in the life, if you will — to demonstrate that although faculty in a position such as mine normally only teach in the fall and spring semesters, two things must be noted: (a) summer teaching is extra money and so sometimes we do it and sometimes we don’t, but if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re sitting around watching TV all summer. (I know this wasn’t the intention of Curtis’ question, but it still needs to be said.) (b) teaching is only a percentage of our work contract with the university. We get tenure based on research (despite the university’s emphasis that we must also be good/great teachers). We have to prove ‘excellence’ in either teaching or research in order to get tenure (and be above-average in the other category), but since it’s nearly impossible to prove excellence in teaching (because excellence, in this sense, often indicates national recognition), the area that we hav to focus on is research.

In my case, teaching accounts for approximately 40 percent of my time contracted to work at the university. (There’s all sorts of problems with this formula, but I won’t go into it here.) Scholarship/research output accounts for another 40 percent. Service counts for 20 percent (although that’s probably a little high — and the time I’d shift away from service would have to go towards research). This is what you’d call the 40/40/20 split in academia. (Mine really should be more like 40/50/10…). That means that I should be spending about 50 percent of my time researching and writing articles and books and attending conferences and all the things that help me show ‘excellence.’

However, good (and great) teachers often spend more than 40 percent of their academic years (Sept-May) on teaching, which leaves us scrambling for time to spend on research. Ask anyone in academia…they’ll tell you the same story. Some folks make up for not being able to do enough research throughout the year by spending their summers writing (so no extended summer vacations or TV-watching marathons) because, well, our jobs depend on it. In my case, because part of my research-load is editing Kairos, I can’t put things off til the summer. I have a publication schedule to maintain. This is why I only come to campus 2-3 days a week. I’ve had undergraduates ask me whether I eat bonbons and watch TV those days I don’t come in, thus all the excrutiating details here about what it is I actually do. On those days, I usually work 10 hours in front of my home computer, uninterrupted, and try to crank out research. (I also do some teaching prep at home.)

But, it’s not all research and teaching. And this is where the service part — or just the odds and ends part — can bite an academic in the butt. Those of you who’ve worked corporate stuff probably recognize the below schedule — any kind of job is filled with little things that have to be done and that eat away at your time to do the big things you need to get done. Here’s what I did yesterday, for instance:

• 7:00am got up, made coffee, pilled cat, cleaned litterbox
• 7:30am made list of stuff to do for the day (keep in mind that what’s listed below only accounts for half of what i needed to get done)
• 7:45am started checking email (I get about 200 non-spam emails a day, half need responses)
  Some of these emails were Kairos authors submitting work – the deadline for a special issue was yesterday – so I had to respond to all those; some were for an article I’m working on for which my co-author and I are getting ‘quotes’ from about 50 people in the field, deadline yesterday, so I had to respond individually to each contributor and provide directions for further response in some cases. Also, I’m prepping for the TA training class, which I’m coordinating as part of my service role as chair of the technology and pedagogy committee, and I had to prep the syllabus (via email coodination with some faculty and staff), email folks in the dept to ask them to lead discussions, and find the readings, which I have to scan today because half of them aren’t electronic. Also mentored some students via email re their PhD programs

• 9:00am worked on a letter of recommendation for student (using a template) [even with the template (i've written a letter for this student before), it took me 2 hours to write, read, reread, proof, revise, print, proof, fix, print again...]
• 11:00am revised my self-assessment letter for my tenure binder per my T&P cmte’s recs. Added in several other documents that indicate they need to look at my online portfolio
• 11:30am graded a student blog for 3040, including responding/grading two mini-assignments included within. Emailed the student his response. (ate lunch while grading)
• 12:00pm collected receipts from a conference trip made 3 weeks ago to turn into Amy so I can get reimbursed for the travel expenses.
• 12:15pm read through an online article in order to provide a contributor to above article some prompt questions to respond to based on that article. Then emailed him with the Qs.
• 12:45pm showered
• 1:10pm went to Post Office to mail stuff for school (on my dime) because it needed to get out ASAP and sending it through the mailroom at school would take a week
• 1:20pm ran out of gas on my way to the gas station
• 2:30pm finally made it to school; parked illegally to save time
• 2:40pm talked with a colleague about doing a guest lecture in 3040 next week
• 2:50pm ate lunch while checking email
• 3:10pm printed tenure binder docs I’d prepped that morning and placed into binder
• 3:45pm got book from Keith to make reading copies for the TA practicum
• 4:00pm realized I’d forgotten the articles for 7480; found articles all online (whew!)
• 4:15pm finished prepping for class (wpa outcomes, ix CDs, etc.)
• 4:20pm put note on class door and went to lab to meet students
• 4:30pm taught class until 7:05pm
• 7:15pm left school, went to eat dinner and gripe about work with colleagues
• 9:00pm got home, pet Gizmo
• 10:00pm went to bed

The things I didn’t get to yesterday include: revising a diss chapter to give to my research-reading group for next Monday’s meeting (as part of my supposed book project); a second letter of rec for a colleague at another institution; journal presentation responses to doc students; making the readings into PDFs for practicum; finishing the tenure binder stuff; reading/responding to handed-in-late 3040 students proposals. So all that stuff gets pushed to today and is added to other new business that came in via email this morning and steady work on the article that was supposed to be finished this weekend (thank goodness we got a one-month extension — an unheard of thing, for the most part.) Lots of little crap all day long to keep us busy. I love most every second of it, but this is why, for instance, when you ask for a letter of recommendation, we get grumpy when you don’t give us a month’s lead time. (Not that any of you have done that!!)

And none of this stuff includes the Kairos work that I have to do to prep for our next issue. While academics can plan their own schedules, they also have to plan around others’ schedules. Like tomorrow I have two meetings which will take about 4 hours of my time, all told. Given the other things (like two other appointments) that I have to factor into the day, supposed free-times like “summer” quickly, and simply, just don’t happen. We can talk in class about how to manage your time so that you do get some free time. Mine is between 7-10pm weekdays when I watch TV and sit with Gizmo. He requires that mommy time, and by that point of the day, I need it too.

cb

Hey all. Tyrell sent me his intro to the proposal and he agreed that I could share it with you as an example. Here it is:

Where East Meets West
Asian fighting arts in Logan Utah?

Summary/Abstract

Eastern martial arts practice is taken at face value in our society. You can’t enter a small town or a thriving metropolis without seeing a sign emblazoned with “Karate” or “Tai Kwon Do”. In the same places it would be much harder to find an outlet providing you with the western version of martial arts. For instance, when was the last time you saw an ad in the phone book for boxing. Even on T.V. boxing pay per view matches have been replaced with Mixed Martial Arts tournaments. The weird thing is that most of these martial arts come from half way around the world. Probably the two most popular in terms of general acceptance, Karate and Tai Kwon Do, are from Japan and Korea respectively. Yet in the United States alone 21.7 million adults have tried some form of martial art during their lives(ma museum), and that number is likely to continue to grow. Currently of those participating in Martial Arts 85% are under the age of 13 (MA museum). Here at Utah State University there are five self defense classes offered for P.E. credit. Of those three are directly eastern; Aikido, Ta’i Chi, and Karate, with the other two; Kickboxing and R.A.D.(Rape Aggression Defense) drawing many of their techniques from the eastern arts (usu.edu). So what has driven people in Logan Utah to teach and practice a discipline forged thousands of miles away? How has this cultural phenomena pushed through our western society when our own fighting techniques stay in the back ground? Is it a function of popular culture or determined individuals?
Having been born in rural Utah and growing up practicing the martial arts I have an insider’s ability to talk to martial artists in terms they are familiar with. Research will focus on individuals and their reasons while framing those against the U.S. culture we are all familiar with. Video or audio interviews with practitioners here in the valley will compose most of the documentary. Necessary background and cultural information will be gathered from publications such as Time and other trusted national sources.

Things I’d point out about this – Tyrell started with a too-big question last week (Why Martial Arts?) which we then narrowed to the Eastern Martial Arts that are mostly practiced locally. So, above, you can see how he’s asking some questions about why eastern martial arts (and why in Utah) set against the larger social and cultural issues of Western practices such as boxing. I imagine, for instance, that in his documentary, the comparison between Western and Eastern will set up the dramatic question at the beginning (or near the beginning) of his documentary, but it won’t take up too much time because his real focus is on the why/eastern/utah question.

I hope this example helps a little. I’d be happy to read abstracts, such as the one above, before Saturday, but allow me 24-hours to respond.

-Cheryl.

This is mostly for the 3040 students, but I thought it might be useful for the 7480 students for later, when we get into the new media stuff.

This morning on the vlogtheory listserv, Matthew Clayfield posted a commentary on the definition/description of videoblogs. He starts, however, with a critique on the social aspects of videoblogging, which is still riddled with digital-divide issues, nearly 7 years after the first blog post on vogs. Here’s how he starts:

I haven’t much to say about videoblogging as of late, primarily because of the speed of my internet connection, which simply isn’t fast enough for me to download increasingly and unnecessarily large video files. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old saying goes, and I’ve simply lost interest in all but the return of Chasing Windmills. I never really paid much heed to the point made by Adrian Miles’ vogma manifesto about respecting bandwidth, though in retrospect I probably should have; for all the rhetorical arguments to the contrary, the vlogosphere isn’t really that democratic a place. Not only is it blind to the digital divide, which it more or less flatly ignores, but its increasingly high technical standards make it virtually impossible for many people to partake, including people like myself who used to be in the thick of things. And as I sit here on the outer, only occasionally looking in on the petty factional squabbling, I can only muse that the citizen’s media crowd has confused itself—a small and relatively elite clique—for the citizenry in general—a much broader group for whom the agency offered by videoblogging remains out of reach and out of the question, and whose problems it probably wouldn’t do much to help anyway, at least not on any practical level.

Here’s his whole post, in which he lays out the argumenst for competing definitions of what a videoblog actually might be.

–cb

Hey class. I need to adjust the syllabus for class tonight — it only means that you do NOT have to bring in those crafty supplies. Instead of making something (which, it turns out, we don’t have time to do), we’re going to focus on something already made. Sorry this is late in getting to you. I was trying to make it all fit, but it just won’t.

–cb