8 Part Series on Gamification as Reigeluth’s Post-industrial Paradigm of Instruction: Part 2

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Learner Centered vs Teacher Centered

Picture4McCombs and Whisler [1] define learner centered as: “The perspective that couples a focus on individual learners (their heredity, experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, talents, interests, capacities, and needs) with a focus on learning (the best available knowledge about learning and how it occurs and about teaching practices that are most effective in promoting the highest levels of motivation, learning, and achievement for all learners)” (p. 9).

Students who are permitted the opportunity to choose and control their learning report higher motivation, greater commitment, deeper involvement, and more strategic thinking [2,3]. There are a number of ways of providing choice, such as being able to choose which problems to complete, variations on specific problems, allowing for resubmission, proposing work not assigned, and the relaxation of strict deadlines [4]. Games rarely require the player to complete all challenges perfectly in order to win. A key aspect of a pedagogically gamified approach to providing choice would to provide students with a greater number and variety of tasks to complete than are needed for a perfect score. In the most recent gamified course I taught a perfect score was deemed to be 1000 points (for ease of translation to the university’s standard grading scheme), but the total number of points possible if students were to complete everything perfectly was over 1500 [5]. This means that students can avoid assignments they don’t find interesting AND it also means they can try something that might not work and still earn a perfect score.

This is really important: With this approach they can fail at things and still earn an A. This changes the risk factor dramatically. This is a rarity in formal education. Sure, we sometimes give out work that we don’t grade, or simply grade as pass/fail, but here, I actually DO grade the work, and they only get a good score if they do a really good job. They can earn full points for doing it well, BUT, if they don’t, they have the option of re-doing it and re-submitting it, OR they can do something else to make up the points.

They never get anything for nothing, but they do have a fair bit of control over what they do. Right up until the end of the course, they have the option of earning more points. In other words, I have completely eliminated the case where it becomes impossible to earn an A because of a blown exam or forgotten assignment. My goal is to help them learn, not to punish them for trying.

Just to keep things organized: these are 2012-01-08-14-00-45_wmReigeluth’s 8 core ideas for a new post-industrial paradigm of instruction:

  1. Learning-focused vs. sorting focused.
  2. Learner-centered vs. teacher-centered instruction.
  3. Learning by doing vs. teacher presenting.
  4. Attainment-based vs. time-based progress.
  5. Customized vs. standardized instruction.
  6. Criterion-referenced vs. norm-referenced testing.
  7. Collaborative vs. individual.
  8. Enjoyable vs. unpleasant. [6]

For more on my gamified approach to course design, see here. I am working on a book that should be out in 2016.

  1. B. L. McCombs and J. S. Whisler, The learner-centered classroom and school : strategies for increasing student motivation and achievement, 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
  2. R. W. Adler, M. J. Milne, and R. Stablein, “Situated motivation: An empirical test in an accounting course,” Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 2001.
  3. K. Peer and M. Martin, “The leaner-centered syllabus: From theory to practice in allied health education,” The Internet Journal of Allied Health Sciences and Practice, vol. 3, April 2005.
  4. K. Becker, “How much choice is too much?,” SIGCSE Bull., vol. 38, pp. 78-82, 2006.
  5. K. Becker, “Gamification: A Different Paradigm of Pedagogy,” 2014
  6. C. M. Reigeluth, “Instructional Theory and Technology for the New Paradigm of Education,” Revista de Educación a Distancia, vol. 11, Sept. 30 2012 2012.
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New Book on Learning Processing

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100 sketchesCheck out Jim Parker‘s most recent book, available only as a E-book. “100 Cool Processing Sketches” is a book that purports to teach computer programming by example using a visual language. Contains all of the source code, downloadable. Includes exercises and references.

For artists, for intro programming, and for digital media.

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8 Part Series on Gamification as Reigeluth’s Post-industrial Paradigm of Instruction: Part 1

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2012-01-08-14-00-45_wmIn his landmark paper describing what the new post-industrial paradigm of instruction should look like, C.M.Reigeluth outlines 8 core ideas:

  1. Learning-focused vs. sorting focused.
  2. Learner-centered vs. teacher-centered instruction.
  3. Learning by doing vs. teacher presenting.
  4. Attainment-based vs. time-based progress.
  5. Customized vs. standardized instruction.
  6. Criterion-referenced vs. norm-referenced testing.
  7. Collaborative vs. individual.
  8. Enjoyable vs. unpleasant. [1]

Are we really sure that we actually teach people – especially in higher ed? For some time now, I have thought that mostly what we do is select for those who are like us, who can do what we can. We don’t actually teach them. We throw a bunch of stuff at them, and, because they’re like us, they mange to take it in. Have you ever wondered how many we lose? How many of those might have been just amazing if only they’d been given the chance?

Most of us would acknowledge that people learn at different rates and have different learning needs, but most of our courses continue to enforce a lock-step progression of topics and assignments that is much better suited to an industrial style of teaching and learning than a 21st century one. Reigeluth’s new paradigm calls for radical transformation and while that may well be justified, radical change to our institutional structures is unlikely to happen, at least not in the near future. What then can we do in the meantime? Gamification is a pedagogy that can be implemented without the need for institutional systemic change. This series of posts will examine Reigluth’s core ideas and propose a variety of changes that can easily be implemented in the classroom to address them.

This series of posts will go through each of Reigeluth’s core ideas and relate it to Becker’s Gamified ID Model. (stay tuned for an upcoming post on that).

 

While many aspects of gamification are *not* new, some are, and when taken together they create a pedagogy that qualifies as one of Reigeluth’s post-industrial paradigms.

Gamification, done right, addresses all eight of his core ideas.

Picture2Learning vs SortingPicture3

It can be a real challenge to create an environment that focuses on helping students learn rather than sorting them into those who can and those who can’t, especially in university classes with large enrollments. The idea of designing instruction and assessment to foster learning rather than simply sorting students is really the core idea that underlies the other seven.

We have been sorting students in formal education for a very long time, and it is known that a student’s grades affect their likelihood of either staying in or transferring out of a particular program [2], and that a student’s sense of belonging can profoundly affect their persistence and retention rates [3].

Giving them choices and providing opportunities for students to take control of their own learning gives them ownership of their grades and a sense of being an active participant rather than just the recipient.

For more on my gamified approach to course design, see here. I am working on a book that should be out in 2016.

  1. C. M. Reigeluth, “Instructional Theory and Technology for the New Paradigm of Education,” Revista de Educación a Distancia, vol. 11, Sept. 30 2012 2012.
  2. P. Arcidiacono, “Ability sorting and the returns to college major,” Journal of Econometrics, vol. 121, pp. 343-375, 7// 2004.
  3. E. Kim and J. P. Irwin, “College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students by Terrell L. Strayhorn (review),” The Review of Higher Education, vol. 37, pp. 119-122, 2013.
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On Repeatability and Educational Research

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New Cloning Machine by KepowObCame across this a while back (OK, it was nearly a year a go) which sparked a rather strong reaction from a fellow educationalist. I don’t want to make it personal, so I’m just going to relay the exchange, as I think it is representative of the views of a lot of education faculty.

Almost no education research is replicated, new article shows @insidehighered

The word “replication” has, of late, set many a psychologist’s teeth on edge. Experimental psychology is weathering a credibility crisis, with a flurry of fraud allegations and retracted papers. Marc Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard University, left academe amid charges of scientific misconduct. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-Prize-winning psychologist at Princeton University, entered the fray in 2012 with a sharply worded email to his colleagues studying social priming. He warned of a “train wreck looming” that researchers would avoid only if they focused more diligently on replicating findings. And the journal Social Psychology devoted its most recent issue to replication – and failed to replicate a number of high-profile findings in social psychology.
Yet psychologists are not the worst offenders when it comes to replication, it turns out. That distinction might belong to education researchers, according to an article published today in the journal Educational Researcher.

I said that I found it disturbing to think that most of what we claim is known in education comes from studies that are never replicated.

The response was that it shows I have a surface level understanding of the purposes and methodologies in educational research. Scientific research is, I was told, too limited. Further, research in education has different purposes and goals. She then went on to list quite a number of methodologies that are commonly employed in Educational Research.

I admit I’m somewhat offended at the accusation of “surface-level understanding”, but OK. I’ll bite. You described classic scientific study quite well, but of course, only a very small part of science research actually comes from studies conducted using this classic model. There is a great deal of research in science that is also done using what you call applied research. These have to be corroborated as well, and my take on the article was that this is what they are comparing.

The goal of improved practice is an important and worthy one, but nearly impossible to measure, so almost anyone can claim “improved practice” if they know how to write it up. I have often seen conclusions drawn from a very small number of case studies, or “statistics” calculated from studies involving 10 or 20 responses, which then get used as justification for change.

Applying natural science research methodologies and purposes to social science disciplines is a mismatch. The goal 0f educational research is improved practice and sometimes also contributions to theory.

Having been in various research worlds – including pure & natural science as well as social science – I am well aware of the differences.
The article states that, “education journals routinely prize studies that yield novel and exciting results over studies that corroborate – or disconfirm – previous findings.” Conducting replications, the researchers write, “is largely viewed in the social science research community as lacking prestige, originality, or excitement.” The article is well worth a read, and it should prompt a long overdue conversation. I think dismissing it as not understanding the difference between science research and educational research only perpetuates the problem.

A fellow scientist said: Science has issues with complexity – it can’t deal with it very well. Social science is not the same as science, nor humanities or arts, but some of the methods used in science can be applied in some cases. So, while the idea of holding all variables but one constant when doing an experiment (ceteris paribus) is a nice idea in theory, it cannot always be done.

However, what *can* be done is to repeat experiments and studies to ensure that the effect being observed is not an artifact of the researcher, the location, the selection of subjects, or some other spurious variable. This is essential. 

Another colleague also chimed in: From my experience as an associate editor on an education journal (and as a program chair on education conferences), reviewers definitely tend to downgrade their rankings for the rare papers that replicate or adapt a previous study or survey instrument.

I’m certainly not trying to suggest that educational research needs to adhere to the “gold standard” of scientific experimentation. That would be silly. Also, impossible in a social context. However, educational research could really use some additional rigor. Working on my upcoming book I have looked at quite a lot of educational research on the use of games for learning. According to a 2011 review of the state of game based learning, many early studies were flawed and of limited use, but more studies now are paying close attention to the design of their studies as well as the kinds of games they choose to study (Felicia, 2011), and that’s only going back 10 years. Games for Learning is an area of educational research that receives quite a lot of scrutiny; I can only imagine what is happening in those fields that don’t get this kind of scrutiny.

I would also add that educational research is not the only field where it is hard to publish a study that is a replication, it just happens to be the field that’s under the microscope in the article that started all this.

—–

Felicia, P., & Egenfeld-Nielsen, S. (2011). Game-Based Learning: A Review of the State of the Art. In S. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, B. Meyer & B. H. Sørensen (Eds.), Serious Games in Education : A Global Perspective (pp. 21-46). Aarhus, DNK: Aarhus University Press.

 

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The Edutainment Era – A Look at What Happened and Why.

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I gave a keynote address at the inaugural EduGaming conference last year. As part of the preparation, I made this timeline:

The Edutainment Era - A Look at What Happened and Why.

 The Edutainment Era – A Look at What Happened and Why.

We are once again experiencing a rise in the popularity of games in formal education. Last time we tried that it didn’t work out so well. By looking at what was going on at the time, we can maybe learn to read the signs better and avoid having the same thing happen again. With the availability of the personal computer in the 1980s, schools began to include digital games as part of their learning technology repertoire. Some refer to the 1980s and ‘90s as the “Edutainment Era” and it followed the typical Gartner Hype Cycle to a tee, except that in this case ‘trough of disillusionment’ became a deep chasm, and games became a pariah, both in education, and in the games industry. A big part of the problem was that with very few exceptions, the games that were being designed could not live up to the claim alluded to by RAND in the ‘50s – most of the games designed simply weren’t very good. Even though the commercial games industry was already well on its way, educational game designers did not seem to be following the same path.

Have a look. If you have anything you think should be added, drop me a line.

In case you’re wondering, the timeline was made using http://timeline.knightlab.com/and google sheets. Very easy to do.

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Helping Students Advance At Their Own Pace

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This came across my feed the other day. It’s a great example of why it is so important to have people who understand BOTH teaching AND technology.

Finding the Most Creative Ways to Help Students Advance At Their Own Pace | MindShift | KQED News.

In 2005, New Hampshire’s Department of Education set a policy requiring schools to implement a competency-based system, but didn’t define the specific skills each school would be expected to master.

This is a great argument for state (or in my case province) wide curricula. The Canadian system has flaws, of course, but it’s better than a free-for-all.

“There wasn’t any training nor was there funding for it,” said Ryan Kaplan, Principal of Windham High School in New Hampshire.” Every school had to figure it out on their own.”

PRIORITIZING INNOVATIONS

The question of student pace — the main feature of a competency-based system — has not been the most important to Windham teachers and administrators. Instead, the school staff has worked hard to integrate technology effectively into its curriculum.

Here’s a problem: integrating tech and developing a competency-based system need to be done TOGETHER. It’s not iPads/computers first, THEN figuring out how to switch from drill and kill to a competency-based system. Technology is a TOOL, not an “innovation”. It’s what you use TO INNOVATE, not the innovation itself.

“How do you do it with 30 students in a classroom. What does it look like and how does it work?”

OOOOH! I know! I’ve been doing it in classes that range in size from 6 to over 250, and using technology is absolutely an important part of that. However, the KEY is that I understand the technology – I know what it’s capable of because I know how it works Blind_men_and_elephantThis is REALLY important. Without that, all you see is the outside. It’s like the blind men and the elephant. In order to really be able to SEE, you need to understand the beast. Most teachers, through no fault of their own, don’t. Unfortunately, most faculty in Education, ALSO DON’T, and this is a serious problem. Sure, they may be whizzes with their Apple devices, and they may be really competent USERs of technology, but the vast majority of them don’t actually understand how any of it really works. Therefor, they can’t possibly teach their students (who will become teachers).

Bernasconi is skeptical of allowing each student to move at his own pace through content, worrying that a system like that will lose its rigor. She teaches some units in a mastery-based style, but only chooses topics that lend themselves to a clear leveling-up of knowledge, like genetics.

See, here again, it takes someone who understands BOTH education AND technology. I’ve been doing this in my classes, and I’ve talked about it here, and here (search the tag gamification on my blog for more).

“How can I be effective and an excellent teacher when I’m trying to teach everything at once?” Bernasconi said. She teaches from a student-driven inquiry standpoint and can’t imagine helping students moving at 12 different paces. As it is, she helps students interpret the driving question in an assignment, facilitates lab experiences, manages lab material and acts as a resource to students throughout the day. She doesn’t see all that being possible if students are all in different phases of the process.

Part of the problem is that this whole “student-driven inquiry” thing needs work. I don’t think we’re doing it right.

“I think that where folks struggle with it is the infrastructure for it,” Bernasconi said. “How do you do it with 30 students in a classroom. What does it look like and how does it work?” In her genetics unit when she gives up some control over pacing, technology has been very helpful. She has a YouTube channel with video podcast lessons that students can check when they need help. But she’s skeptical of relinquishing her class to technology entirely.

See? It’s NOT about relinquishing control to technology, it’s about gaining control of technology so it allows you to do the things you want to do. In order to make that work, you need to understand the technology.

“I get nervous about taking the human element completely out of it,” Bernasconi said. “A discussion in my class is really powerful. It’s interactive; the students are asking questions; they’re challenging each other’s thinking.” If students were moving at completely different paces it would be harder to leverage that community element of learning, she said.

The thing is, they’re NOT going to be moving at completely different paces. That’s part of the problem with the way educational “innovations” are implemented: people seem to think it’s always all or nothing. New Math? Great! Let’s change everything to that? Whole word reading? Let’s throw out grammar and phonics! The thing is, nothing works for all learners, in all situations, and all the time (Mann, 2001, p. 241).

“To give over control of your classroom to your students, to trust them to learn and use the tools and the environment you’ve created — it’s terrifying,” Bernasconi said. “And the first time I did it I had no idea what I would get back. I was blown away by what students produced.”

News flash: You never actually had control of your classroom. It’s a myth. Don’t mistake disengagement for compliance.

COMMUNITY PUSHBACK

The innovative teaching practices that Bernasconi and her colleagues exhibit, coupled with good test scores (top five in the state) and high achieving students haven’t inspired Windham’s teachers or parents to care much about moving towards the time-flexible education system that competency-based models offer.

“You are fighting against learned behaviors,” Kaplan said. “We have learned a traditional system that we’ve been using for 100 years.” Parents and taxpayers don’t see why that system should change. In fact, they see competency-based education as an intervention for low-performing districts, not for them.

“We have teachers doing incredibly innovative things, but using a more traditional way of assessing it,” Kaplan said. “We don’t have a system where you have to pass every competency in the course.” Students can still average out to a passing grade and advance to the next level, even with holes in their knowledge. It’s that exact scenario that competency-based learning is meant to prevent.

“In a true competency system you would need to pass everything and there would be no social promotion,” Kaplan said. “It’s where I feel we need to go. It’s happening, but slowly.” Without the support of teachers, parents and district leadership, and operating as a first-year principal, there’s not a lot Kaplan can do to push the agenda forward more quickly.

EXPERIMENTING AND RETREATING FROM COMPETENCIES

Kaplan feels better about the lack of progress Windham has made towards a more authentic competency-based system when he thinks about Campbell High School. The school opened 14 years ago with the intention of being entirely competency-based, long before there were state laws requiring schools to take that route.

“In a true competency based system — and we opened with it — you did not have a letter grade,” said Dennis Perreault, a veteran social studies teacher at Campbell. “You were either advanced, proficient or NC (not demonstrating competent).” In less than a year local education officials told Campbell to get rid of that system and adopt a traditional A-F grading system.

“What was kept is if you don’t pass a competency, you don’t pass the course,” Perreault said. Similar to Windham, each department has its own set of competencies. For social studies they are fairly broad: Comprehension, analysis, evaluation, research and writing for the social sciences.

“I think we’re doing a lot of what we set out to do, but we’re just not doing it in the manner that we thought we would be doing it,” Perreault said. For example, the school has a policy that all students can retake any assessment that is part of their grade in recognition that each student learns differently. Perreault is comfortable with the middle path the community decided on because at its essence he thinks it allows for personalization.

Yes. THIS. See? It CAN mesh with a traditional system.

Bethany Bernasconi agrees. “There’s great danger in a good initiative that’s not done well,” she said.

EXACTLY.

 

It’s an interesting read – worth reading the whole article.

Mann, D. (2001). Documenting the Effects of Instructional Technology, A Fly-Over of Policy Questions. In W. F. Heineke & L. Blasi (Eds.), Research methods for educational technology ; v. 1: Methods of evaluating educational technology (Vol. 1, pp. 239-249). Greenwich, Conn.: Information Age Pub.

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Worth a Read: As learning moves online, trigger warnings must too

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As learning moves online, trigger warnings must too

As learning moves online, trigger warnings must tooDana Ruggiero, Bath Spa University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

When I was a first-year student at university, our class of 300 students watched Jodie Foster get gang raped in the film The Accused. Our professor, an experienced teacher, told us before the movie that: “anyone not comfortable with scenes of violence against women could leave and complete an alternate assignment”. Nobody left.

Now, 15 years later I am a senior lecturer in a university and we are still having debates about these kind of trigger warnings that lecturers give their students before reading or watching graphic material. Since then, the pace of higher education has not changed but the way that we impart information has; from online learning to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and “gamification” – where students play a game as they learn, we are living in a world where as Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan put it “the medium is the message”.

The nature of university study is changing, with one in four students in the US taking at least one online class during 2012, and numbers climbing. Traditional undergraduate university students in lecture halls are now just one part of a market that includes working adults and others drawn in by the flexibility of online learning. However, with this flexibility comes ambiguity, and the lack of face-to-face communication can increase misconceptions about the purpose of covering graphic or explicit material.

The grassroots movement of students asking for trigger warnings started as a simple request from a literature major at the University of California, Santa Barbara: give students a heads-up before covering graphic material that could cause flashbacks of trauma. Like wildfire, the trigger warning issue has caught public attention around the world setting off debates between students, staff, and faculty from the internet to the ivory tower. For students and faculty that interact completely online, when the ivory tower is the internet, the trigger warning can look completely different.

Open for discussion

I often give a guest lecture in education classes on videogames and learning. This includes an online section where students are asked to review games like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, Decisions that Matter, Choice Texas and Darfur is Dying among others. This leads to an online discussion about what players learn when they play these games.

Prior to students participating in this activity I post an announcement that gets emailed to all of them simply stating that: “We are exploring different types of games freely available on the internet. Some of these games are on topics that you may find hard to deal with. Please post a response in the ‘Ask the Instructor’ if you would like to talk about the assignment.”

By posting an announcement on the system there is a degree of certainty that all the students will at least receive the message; whether they read it or not cannot be controlled. The closed discussion forum where students can ask the instructor a question or set up a video chat gives the students the opportunity to voice concerns. In the five years I have been giving this lecture, both in the US and the UK, not one student out of thousands has posted in the “Ask the Instructor” section. In fact, this assignment which comes with the email announcement tends to have more participation then the assignments that do not come with email trigger warnings.

Tonia Dousay, an educational technology professor at the University of Wyoming, teaches classes on message design where she uses in-line trigger messages where the video is embedded, such as this one about how to fly a jet which uses an analogy of a woman playing golf.

A classic clip from the War Department.

Dousay says:

When I show How to Fly the P-47, the warning is usually along the lines of: ‘Please consider the context of this video when it was produced. Who was the intended audience? What’s their ethnicity? What’s their age? What’s their socioeconomic status?’ Thus, the warning is embedded in the question. In my weekly video overview for the week this video appears, I re-emphasize with my voice that students should consider the context when viewing the video and challenge students to explain how they might reach the same audience today without using the same tactic.

Gamified modules and MOOCs, where students can earn badges for completing tasks, in online learning offer another challenge for faculty. In such modules the way forward is to complete the task and a new task is then released. In one gamified module in Introduction to Child Psychology students are asked to watch a programme called Secret of the Wild Child about a 13-year-old child who had been chained to a potty for much of her life. The programme has its own trigger warning embedded on the webpage.

But this can cause problems. If a student has concerns about the content of this programme in a class that may have thousands of participants and only one instructor, the wait time may be considerable and the student will be stuck at that point until the concern can be addressed.

Caution on entering virtual worlds

Augmented and virtual reality experiences are growing within higher education as well. Researchers at the University of Houston’s Graduate School of Social Work have built a hyper-realistic world to recreate situations that trigger cravings for drugs like heroin. With technology advancing to the point of immersive sensory experiences (this experience has a scent machine and treadmill) trigger warnings become even more applicable for the virtual world.

Some in the media have compared trigger warnings to the equivalent of content warnings on CDs and movies – but we this kind of media is different to set in class. Students are expected to interact with the content and synthesise it into their own work. Students no longer receive their education directly from a person standing in the front of a lectern and the learning experience may now take place virtually or across augmented realities.

This means we need to question the way in which we prepare our students to tackle the material that is presented. Faculty should take proactive steps to address potentially triggering material that they set students to watch or read online, prior to a meltdown occurring.

The Conversation

Dana Ruggiero is Senior Lecturer in Learning Technology at Bath Spa University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

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On Sessionals (aka Adjuncts)

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Picture17Came across this comment on sessional instructors while wandering the web the other day:
Educational Technology Professor: The Value and Contribution of Sessional Instructors – Diverse Expertise and Relevant Professional Experience.

· The majority of GPE Sessional instructors hold full time employment elsewhere, and teach one or two courses per year with Werklund School of Education.

· Contrary to the national public discourse on sessional colleagues as under appreciated, underpaid individuals who “want to be on the tenure track”, the sessional instructors who teach in GPE are not seeking a tenure track position and they report high levels of satisfaction in their teaching roles, experience success in their teaching, and feel valued for what they contribute to graduate students’ learning and development

I used to teach in the faculty she talks about. I have a different take on it. I’ll tell you that at the bottom of this post.

This is the article she mentions: Sessionals, Posted on March 6, 2014 by Alex Usher

A problem in generalizing about sessionals is that they come in two distinct varities.  First are the mid/late-career professionals who already make good money from full-time employment elsewhere, and who help provide relevant, up-to-date content based on practical experience in programs like Law and Nursing.

…

In Arts & Sciences, on the other hand, sessionals are much more likely to be recent PhD graduates looking to get a foothold on the academic ladder.  Unable for the moment to make the tenure track, taking multiple sessional gigs lets them stay within the university system, but prevents them from doing what they (and indeed the entire higher ed system) value most: research.  As a result, being a sessional can sometimes take one further from the tenure track, rather than closer to it.  The sessional “crisis”, needless to say, focuses on this latter group, rather than on the professionals.

…

And why is their pay so low?  Partly, it’s a free market and there’s a heck of a lot of people willing to do academic work for very little pay.  But partly it’s because institutions have a conscious choice to prioritize pay rises for existing full-time staff (gotta pay more for research excellence!) over hiring new full-time staff. Had pay levels stayed constant in real terms over the last 15 years, and the surplus gone into hiring, the need for sessionals in Arts & Science would be practically nil.

Let’s take these point by point:

  • [girlprof] & [Usher] Most sessionals have full-time jobs. (Usher says this only applies to the professional disciplines)
    • I’d really love to know what the actual numbers are, because my experience with the sessionals I know and talk to say that this isn’t true. Many actually try to make a living as sessionals b/c they love teaching.
  • [girlprof] Don’t want tenure track positions.
    • I don’t know whether this is true or not. I know some of the sessionals I know would love to have full-time, tenure-track jobs. Some want positions that include research, but others don’t. Others – and I fall into this category – actually want something most universities don’t seem to know how to do: tenure-track (or at least long-term) part-time positions. I’m talking about 1/2 year full-time, or full-year 1/2 time (i.e. 5 full days every 2 weeks). I’ve never understood why universities don’t do this (unless it’s simply b/c they can use sessionals instead). Anyone who has ever work 1/2 time can tell you that the company always wins – they always get more than 1/2 time.
  • [girlprof] Aren’t underpaid.
  • [girlprof] Satisfied and feel valued.
    • Here again, this is likely based on the opinions of those who get re-hired. In order to get re-hired, you need to agree with the administration, because, although they say they support academic freedom, it only applies so long as you say good things about the institution, administration, and faculty. They won’t say anything obvious, of course. They will simply impose tighter and tighter restrictions on what you do, and likely won’t hire you again.
  • [Usher] Arts & Science: Most are new grads.
    • I know plenty who have been at this for 10 years or more. That hardly qualifies as a new grad.
  • [Usher] Low pay b/c schools focus on research.
    • I figure they pay poorly b/c they can. Working as a full-time faculty member I earned roughly $40/hr. not counting benefits. As a sessional, I earn about 1/2 that with NO benefits. For someone with a PhD and an international reputation (as is the case for many people I know), that’s kind of an insult.

As someone who has spent the bulk of her career teaching as a sessional, I don’t really have many warm and fuzzy feelings(*). I especially don’t have any warm and fuzzy feelings from how I was treated at the UofC. Although my early years there were great, the institution, in spite of what it keeps trying to tell people, is merely a dark shadow of its former self. Most of the people who stay there are either stuck (and can’t go elsewhere) or they have drunk the kool-aid.

(*) My current sessional position at MRU has been a breath of fresh air compared to the UofC. Part of the difference is that I am actually treated with some respect, rather than as a second-class citizen – even when I disagree with them. They even pay better. Go figure.

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