Why is college important HERE?

Presented to the freshmen of Tusculum University Class of 2023, on 17 August 2019.

The promise of the meeting this morning is about being successful as first-year college students. I don’t want to take away from this theme. You need to understand why you’re here, what binds you together as students, and how your purpose in being here is the first step in your success.

The charge I originally took for this talk was the topic “Why College Is Important,” and frankly, I don’t want to take away from this theme either. I need you to know that the time you spend in this space isn’t just important for you; it’s important for your family, it’s important for your community; it’s important for our nation and our world.

But I want to focus in on these themes a little bit.  I want to talk about why higher education is important, why your success is important, and why it’s important in this place.

Many of you are not from around here originally. I wasn’t from around here originally; I grew up in Hilliard, Florida, so far north in Florida it is more useful for me to tell people I’m from South Georgia, and before I moved to this region I worked in what we call “Southern Appalachia”, doing research at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and later serving on the faculty of Shorter University in Rome, Georgia. Those places are of the Appalachian Mountains. But they’re not where you live now.

I moved to Central Appalachia in 2011, to take a job at a place that doesn’t exist anymore in a region I had heard of but didn’t understand nearly as well as I should. I made a very deliberate decision when I took the job that I work on building connections with the people of the region, especially people involved in education. I expected I would fall in love with the countryside, the mountains, the roads.

I did not expect to fall in love with the people as forcefully as I did.

(There are at least two freshmen in this room in those pictures. I’m incredibly glad they’re here. My own goal for myself, over the next few years, is to get to know these places well enough that there are a lot more than two freshmen that I’m aware of and have pictures of from before they showed up here.)

The people of this region, ultimately, are why I stayed, first in Bristol to our north, then in Cookeville, Tennessee to our west, and then here.

If I can share one piece of wisdom, both for those of you who have stayed in one small community for most of your life and for those of you who have come here from outside of our place in the world, and have you remember nothing else, it’s this: get to know these people you are in school with. They have a host of stories to tell you, and they are so wonderful in so many ways. Get to know the stories and the lives of this place.

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There is a host of data from the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is the federal/local partnership that advocates for the region, that will tell you how much distress there is in this part of the world, and how much need there is for economic development. That’s not entirely wrong. One of the core reasons for being a college student in this time and in this place is to help provide for the development of the region. Your desire to learn basic sciences and health sciences, your desire to teach, your desire for entrepreneurship – all of your education to this end is not just something you’re doing for yourself, and I hope you know that up-front. You are going to be contributors to the communities where you land, and much of that contribution is going to be economic. You’re going to draw people to invest money in the region, you’re going to make money and spend money, you’re going to help other businesses be successful and you’re going to help other people make money and spend money.

We preach the parent’s lament a lot: we want you to be better off than we are. And education exists, in the public’s eyes, for economic growth. We can’t dismiss that reality.

But economic growth is not the only thing that’s important. And, bluntly, to put that much hope into economic growth downplays the character of the people of the region. It’s a short path from talk about the strengthening economies to talking about the mythology of the desperate conditions of Appalachia, to the construction of the narrative of people that need saving.

Nobody ‘round here needs saving. Have you traveled some of the roads in Southwest Virginia and Western North Carolina? Have you seen some of the architecture, the artwork?

Have you heard the music and the culture? These people were creating greatness long before I really understood this place existed, and they’ll keep creating greatness long after I’m gone.

And the economics of this place isn’t the economics of South Florida or of the Philadelphia/New York corridor. It would be NICE to have a lot of the money running around, don’t get me wrong. But you’ll find that a lot of money isn’t necessary to live well here. And money is not something that’s valued by several communities here; other things come to the fore, like family, community, country, faith.

In the context of THOSE values, and in the context of things that money can’t buy, why do we need education?

Well, you chose to come to Tusculum, for all kinds of reasons – whether that was scholarship support or athletics or just because the place was convenient for one reason or another. And it’s important for you to know what this place values.

One of the things that I do is advise pre-professional students, mostly students pursuing disciplines like pharmacy, physician’s assistant, and allied health disciplines like dentistry and, yes, optometry. And one of the things that I ask those students to do before applying to a school to study that health profession there is have a look at the school’s mission statement and other things that communicate what that school values. It’s an important way to know that when you’re interviewing to join that school’s programs, what you care about lines up with what they care about.

And you came to Tusculum. How many of you know Tusculum’s mission statement?

Well, let’s have a look.

Listen to the words used.  A JUDEO-CHRISTIAN environment – we have a very distinct faith, but we do not privilege the Christian experience over the experience of other people who recognize Abraham as one of the founders of religious faith. CIVIC arts – we care about how you engage with the public as an informed citizen. LIBERAL arts – that’s not a political viewpoint, but it means the same as COMPREHENSIVE in this case. We don’t just care about you learning the stuff in your particular program, the stuff that’s your major – we care that you partake in all the ways of knowing that have made up the human experience. MEDICAL arts – we care about people learning the best science, technology, and human engagement that can help people heal in the best way possible.

CAREER preparation – we want you to have a job, but not just to make money in the short term, but to satisfy you for life. PERSONAL development – we care about who you are as a person, and we want you to be the best person you can be.

Oh, the one other way you tell what a place values? Listen for the words they repeat.

Tusculum uses the word CIVIC every place they can. We care about your CITIZENSHIP. We care about your place as a member of this society, and we care that you contribute to that society in the most productive, positive way possible.

So many of the things you learn as a student here are to help you be the best citizen possible. You need to see other examples of communication and expression, in speech and English classes, so that you can be the best communicator you can be, so what you care about can be expressed to those around you. You need to be informed as completely as possible, both about what’s happened in the past – your history – and about the knowledge that is building your future – our science. You need the best background on your faith you can get, so you can not merely speak the language of faith to those around you, but you can be encouragement to others to live that faith out better. And you need the arts, to appreciate the creativity of others in this place and express your own creativity on your terms. Encouraging creativity in others and in yourself is part of your best citizenship, too.

All of you need to bring your best selves to this process of education, and to take the education itself as seriously as possible, no matter what place you’re from, no matter what place you’re going. The values that Tusculum believes in are important no matter where you live.

But I hope you see that there’s something distinctly Appalachian about them – the idea that there are things that are more important than economic output, than workforce development, then even personal fulfillment. What we bring as citizens to our whole community matters. How we engage with one another, how we make everybody’s quality of life better, and how we make one another as positively informed as possible.

When Tusculum is at its best, we are both bringing in the most promising students from this region and the most promising we can find from far afield. And we’re making sure those students are leaving as the best citizens they can possibly be, for now and for decades to come.

And we are persuading you that there is a place for you here, among these mountains – in much the same way that I was persuaded, not even a decade ago, that there is a place here for me.

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There are two other things I can promise you. Obviously the choice wisdom at this stage of this kind of a talk is to pay attention to your professors and to heed their wisdom. And look, you should. For one thing, we do have egos, and they need to be fed. My ego is raging. Running my mouth in front of y’all is a thrill. I’m not gonna lie about that.

But we also know a lot of the territory you’re dealing with in these next months and years, and we’re not gonna lie about that either. And it’s not just the academic stuff – it’s the life stuff too. Some of us were undergrads a lot longer ago than others, but we all remember it. We all remember the prof who gave us our first F on an exam. (Roger Lautzenheiser, Calculus I.) We all remember the prof who opened his office to us and gave us an hour when we expected five minutes. (Roger Lautzenheiser, Calculus I.)

We all remember the moments of crushing heartbreak and the moments we came to grips for the first time with depression. If we have never come out as LGBTQ, we remember being in the room with the person who came out and the affirmation they needed.

So know that we as profs have been through a lot of this. Talk to us.

But also know that it really doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do, in terms of defining Tusculum’s quality and Tusculum’s greatness. The dirty little secret is that people with PhD’s in physics who can teach physics and chemistry are a bit of a dime a dozen. If I left Tusculum tomorrow, Tusculum could find somebody to take this job. And they could find someone pretty quick. I will obviously do my best for you, but it’s not because I feel like my position is all that sacred.

The thing that makes Tusculum famous, and the thing that Tusculum will be known for in the years, the decades to come?

It’s sitting in front of me right now. Not one thing. 400 of you.

How you learn from us is meaningful. But how you learn from one another is what stays with you. You’re not at your best here because you need to show respect to that PhD. You’re at your best here for the people sitting next to you, because of your responsibility to make THEIR time here as important and as meaningful as it can be. You’re at your best here because when you leave here, you need to have the education and the relationships and the capacity to live together that the world around you needs to see lived out.

The mission you just heard there is for you to take up and hold up. You need to prepare for a life after this place. You need to take this space to develop yourself mentally, emotionally, spiritually. You need to prepare yourself to be a citizen of these mountains, this nation, and this world.

This is your task. You take it from here.

The full slide deck was prepared with Google Slides and is available for your review, with credits for all images.

The story of one new graduate student

My mind keeps returning to a road trip to Western Massachusetts in January of 2012.

Don’t pay much attention to the hiding child on the left. We’ll talk about her another time. (And yes, young one, your time is coming.)

We took that exceptionally talented child on the right to a college there to start an academic career. There was promise all over the thing. Certainly, there are memories of the fear that comes with taking someone who has been so much at the center of your life for the better part of two decades on one part of the trip and driving back home without them. But it was an incredibly joyous trip as well, in no small measure because we saw the promise in the place, we saw how tight-knit the community was, and I knew what it was like to join a small, tightly-knit community across the country from my home myself, and how completely that place informed who I became.

There are so many of us, especially those of us who have benefited from higher education over the course of our lives, who make trips like that and who want what we experienced so desperately for our own children.

This is what you need to know: That promise we saw in January 2012 was never fulfilled.

I will still look back on the decisions we made in that part of life and insist we didn’t make a mistake – the child didn’t, and the parents didn’t. In another era of our history, I do believe that the promises made would have been taken seriously, and all parties would have understood the commitments they were making – especially parties involved with a college that was part of an institution with a nine-figure endowment, resources that placed the institution among the genuinely elite.

But the way that my child’s education progressed through 2012 and 2013 laid bare for me, in a way that had never been clear to me before, how completely cynical our higher education apparatus had become, and the extent to which my child was far more of a revenue stream for that institution than a student to be supported through their education. Even through a career that I had spent at independent colleges in the midst of real economic stress, I worked alongside people who took the needs of the students with the utmost seriousness and who would put other priorities aside when the human needs of a student were being threatened. We did that even as we became increasingly convinced that our own needs weren’t going to be cared for by the institution, and our own futures were increasingly uncertain.

But over the course of a year, I saw the decisions made by this elite institution we had put faith in repeatedly put revenue to the institution over educational experience.

I watched my eldest child discover activism, in a real and tangible way, as the realization that the experience they had been promised would be diluted at the hands of students who provided immediate revenue to the college, and that if those students put underrepresented populations of the college under threat, the sanction they’d receive would be inversely proportional to the revenue they could provide.

We had hard conversations over how we needed to receive the financial support in keeping with our real need, not the need that the College Board’s proprietary paperwork was communicating, and we wouldn’t be able to keep that child enrolled in that place without real consideration. Again: I’ve worked at these places for over a decade now. I know how the game is played. But the institution simply did not care, and frankly ignored everything I ever said.

The experience we had at that school – the experience that talented child had at that school – ultimately failed. We all made mistakes along the way. But at one point in our history, you could have confidence that the institution would have interest in making sure that the student would be cared for throughout it all.

At that one place, that concern never materialized.

For a while, that was our major experience of our own children’s higher education. And that experience was being further colored by the economic failure of the institution where I worked, a place where I was confident on balance that we were doing right by our students. If you ever wonder why I have the deepest of suspicion of where we stand in higher education in the early 21st century, there are a host of reasons for that. When that child decided to stay away from school for a season of life, I had a very difficult time arguing.

I don’t think we understand nearly as well as we should how precarious our nation’s leadership in higher education is – and how much of that leadership we have already lost. When you make all of your decisions about the bottom line and you alienate the people who are predisposed to be your ambassadors, not just for one season of time but for a lifetime, you lose the trust that the whole enterprise runs off of. And then you wonder why so few people respect the academic knowledge of the professor, or the place of the institution as an employer and an economic center worth investing in.

Trust is not something that you’re guaranteed. It is not birthright. It is earned through evidence that accumulates over years, decades, generations. That evidence is slipping away, and our institutions’ place in our nation’s conversation along with it.

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The institution’s promise may not have been realized.

The child’s promise was.

After that season away, there was a decision to restart, half on a whim, at a regional university, if not in our backyard, at least a few yards over. The failure of the institution placed me at a sister regional university, and we discovered that there’d be tuition benefits at one place by virtue of me working at the other. It was a no brainer.

One of the classes, potentially in support of a poorly-articulated health science path to be named later, was general biology. It was taken under an instructor, Cerrone Foster, who I still haven’t met, much to my own consternation.

I have told the story many times in many circles of the phone call that I received halfway through the term; the professor, working on online postings, minding his own business, when the phone call from the child comes unexpectedly, fraught with all the uncertainty that comes with your relentlessly-independent child calling unexpectedly…

“DAD! WHY DID YOU NEVER TELL ME GENETICS WAS SO COOL!”

(The salt of the father who cut his pedagogical teeth on General Biology I being told by his eldest child that he hadn’t sufficiently shilled for Genetics will be set aside. Grudgingly. There is still salt.)

The absolute enchantment that was awakened by an instructor who cared deeply about the discipline she taught, and who cared about the individual students in the room and nurturing their talent instead of making sure revenue stream obligations to the school were met, is something that even now, four to five years on, we haven’t contained. The student with a wrecked grade point average and every reason to be cynical about higher education for the rest of their life became deeply passionate about every biology course ahead, making the major change that would become permanent, learning not merely to understand the discipline but to explain it to the students who would come after them.

Cerrone Foster, I do not know you, but you lit a fire, and it continues to rage.

A group of students flanked by two biology researchers, with the students in the middle roughly the same age as the researcher at the right was when they started college. Shamelessly stolen from that researcher’s social media feed.

Over that time, I wound up returning to the region myself, and we wound up living and working within an hour of one another. I’m not going to pretend that the prospect of landing where my eldest child was going to college wasn’t part of the appeal of a move to East Tennessee. But I wasn’t remotely prepared for the vigor and energy with which that child embraced East Tennessee, and made the place genuinely her own. It remains the most stunning part of the entire story.

Two summers, we’ve even shared the same employer; while I’ve taught summer classes online to varying degrees of success, that child has been front and center in reaching students who would be first-generation college admittees and ensuring they know that the things that make those students who are the very fabric of this part of the world know they are valued and important. At this place, in the summer of 2018 and the summer of 2019, I firmly believe the child has done more important work than the father.

The obvious conclusion to this story is that the child finally and triumphantly finishes that degree, and is grateful for the role that regional university has played in their life, and then chooses to move on to the elite university that will finally allow them to achieve their full potential.

The plot twist is that when the graduate school application process happened, and multiple options were considered, only one was taken with urgency and seriousness.

And that is how my eldest child, Catherine Pearson, early-college recruit and early-college dropout, completed their degree seven and a half years after starting, with honors, and chose to pursue their graduate education at that sterling doctoral institution…

…East Tennessee State University. PhD pre-candidate, Biomedical Sciences.

And how their father, who has lived through higher education in his entire career and knows the risks of the undergraduate and graduate institution being the same regional university, could not be prouder.

The job, you see, isn’t merely quantity of enrollment or retention or even assessment of standards. The job is making sure the student knows what their identity is, gains a fuller understanding of the world around them, and knows their path to realizing all the promise that is captured within them.

I saw clearly how I’d find that path among these mountains.

I never expected, and I don’t even know that I wanted, my own child to find their own path through these mountains.

And that is why East Tennessee State University is one of the most successful universities I have ever known. They did something far, far more important than providing my child with an education.

They provided my child with a home.

A statement of academic purpose

We cannot allow our curriculum to be set by Wall Street.

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I am increasingly viewing my own work as an educator from two different sets of eyes. One pair of eyes is my own, with all of my experience and all my frustration at what is available to students, and with all the motivation to provide better options for my students.

The second pair belongs to my eldest child, now well into their 20’s, as they navigate through the extractive pits and snares that so many publishers have left in the traditional regional university.

We shared a moment of frustration one Friday afternoon wrestling with the homework solution associated with the campus’ recently-adopted inclusive access option. The problem was straightforward enough, but the software wouldn’t accept the obvious answer. There was even a fit of the frustration every physics student knows well – let’s just toss ANY possible answer around that possibility into the software, because I know the calculation is right. Nothing was accepted.

I suggested “try 0.674 instead of 0.67.”

“No, Dad, that’s too many significant figures.”

“Try anyway.”

“DGAKDGAKGEKAGDKS THAT IS TOO MANY SIGNIFICANT FIGURES BUT IT TOOK IT”

I know exactly why that worked, of course, because I used that exact software over a decade ago, before it became a pawn of the academic publishing monolith who is pushing that inclusive access option on a whole campus of unsuspecting students. Despite the code existing within their software to check for significant figures, that particular question predates the code – and never has been revised. It checks within percentage tolerances – in this case, plus or minus 0.5%. It would accept 0.671 meters to 0.677 meters, in this case – but the answer was based on multiplying a sine of 22 degrees by a measurement of 1.8 meters. The correct answer, by significant figure rules, must be 0.67 meters.

That same dumb issue has existed for over a decade. And, at least in one class of problems in the software, it’s never been fixed. And the price of the software keeps climbing – the two-semester access to that software, which is required, is now $127.50. Of course, buying the access in a bundle with new textbook – or even with other coursework, under our fancy inclusive-access scheme – will lower your costs.

Because of course you don’t want to pay too much for software we haven’t overhauled in a decade.

I have been quietly working in my corner over a decade of my own, from Shorter University to Virginia Intermont College to Tennessee Technological University and now to Tusculum University. I’ve been learning the ins and outs of a different piece of software, called Moodle, which is open-source learning management software. And the way I’ve been learning it is finding better ways to deliver homework to my own students, in a fashion that lines up with what the software from the for-profits can provide, but is more immediately customizable to what I’m trying to accomplish and that I can be more accountable for.

I don’t need to work in the corner anymore. As the costs that are placed on our students become more and more oppressive, the work I do increasingly needs to be in the open. And other people like me who are working in their own corners need to be called into the open as well.

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One of the most vividly informative experiences I’ve been able to have in my career was the chance to work in the Innovation Lab at the Online Learning Consortium’s Innovation conference in Nashville in April 2018, and through the connection with Keegan Long-Wheeler of the University of Oklahoma, to help moderate a conversation on “Online Lab Science” (the website for that conversation may be found at onlinelabsci.keeganslw.com). It became clear from listening to faculty, program coordinators and instructional designers in that conversation that the reason for many to be interested in how laboratory science coursework could work online was rising pressure from their own campuses to have science curriculum online, to complete a fully online program. Many science faculty had reservations; many online program coordinators and instructional designers reported back that their own faculty were resistant or simply rejected the idea out of hand.

My own interest in how laboratory science education could be brought online was a product of Tusculum’s need, for the repurposing and development of a physical science course that would allow students to complete general education requirements exclusively online. I was qualified for this work because of my previous experience; I had previously brought two courses online at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia – astronomy, based on Seeds’ Astronomy: The Solar System and Beyond, and a “survey of natural science” course based Trefil and Hazen’s The Sciences. I have found both books to be tremendous resources, and so my own curriculum development for those courses was relatively minimal. Labs were not terribly sophisticated, either; the astronomy course “lab” was star observations and a video presentation that only two students (in a class of four) completed successfully, while the survey course had no lab at all and only a few hands-on activities. I implemented publishers’ online materials for the purposes of assessment (MasteringAstronomy for Seeds, WileyPlus for Trefil and Hazen), and the course was very ordinary, both in terms of material covered and bimodal student outcomes. The only grades I gave in these classes were A, B, and F, and the students who “earned” the grade of F did so by failing to complete a large fraction of the course requirements, stopping out before the course was done. And the work that the students did in those courses were the very definition of “disposable assignments” – locked in an learning management system, to which access to the course was closed off at the end of the term.

My last online course before this year was in 2011. In the intervening years, it is increasingly apparent that major publishers and other vendors have seen the desire of instructors and institutions to outsource the development of curriculum to save time, and have provided the resources to match that desire – with all the trappings that come with purchasing designed equipment and proprietary software. Publishers in particular have made their course materials increasingly extractive, designed to maximize their profits at the expense of taking permanent course supplies away from students. The “inclusive access” plans that Pearson PLC or Cengage Learning are marketing with increased intensity to professors involve providing access to online textbooks and proprietary software for the period of time the student is enrolled in the course, at prices that are well reduced from the list price of the textbook. The catch, of course, is that the online access is cut off at the end of the term, so that the publisher doesn’t lose any of the value to the cynical student who will sell the text at term’s end. In a subtler way, laboratory kits that suppliers provide for purchase, by their very nature, provide enough unique equipment for a single semester’s study, and are designed to only allow the student to do work in the context of a class. When the kit is out of material, replenishing that material can be prohibitive to the student whose curiosity is heightened.

All of this reinforces the concept that the knowledge the student is obtaining through their coursework is disposable and only exists to allow them to complete course requirements – not something that is permanent and can be carried with them in relevant ways throughout life.

This flies in the face of my hope for education, as something that is genuinely empowering and that can be carried with the student not merely for the duration of the course, but beyond.

One of the least realized promises of the world we have created with the Internet is the capacity for students in different places to communicate knowledge with one another as part of their process of learning – peer teaching over distances and in different geographic contexts. In parts of the world such as central Appalachia, exposure to authentic diversity has to be an intentional effort, and it is not done easily through student recruitment. Connection to students at other institutions from cultures that are apart from central Appalachia – even outside of the microculture of the rural online learner – can help the student go beyond the textbook towards authentic learning. After all, we are preparing our students not for a world of knowledge scarcity, but knowledge abundance (Weller, 2011; Stewart, 2015) – the literacy of the student is not going to be determined by their recall of a wealth of facts that they could look up elsewhere, but for the capacity to use that information in creative ways and communicate the applications of their understanding, both to their neighbors and the wider world, not merely by traditional communication and presentation but by networked means.

I work at Tusculum University intentionally, because of the place of the institution within the central Appalachians, because of the freedom provided by the institution’s independence from the state, and because of the civic arts tradition of the institution that obligates me to be the best possible citizen of the region, state, country and world. If my belief is that education is empowering, and I am an experienced practitioner of education in ideas that are freely available, it follows for me personally that I have a moral obligation to share my expertise and resources as freely as I am able to do so in faithful service to the institution that employs me.

I am incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in meetings like OLC Innovate, and I don’t want to minimize that gratitude. But a majority of the publishers and vendors who support such meetings and who engages in sales at those meetings are working to extract the last possible dollar from the students who use their services, not to provide the first available dollar to support the learning of the student (language borrowed from Shirky, as reported by Young, 2013). It is critical to me to be able to work out means to support student learning separate from publisher resources, using as many resources that the student can keep for themselves permanently.

The open education movement fits alongside these goals (as introduced by Biswas-Diener and Jhangiani, 2017). Open education is best known in the substance of Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible textbooks and similar resources that can take the place of the textbooks and proprietary software that students are sold. The free availability of these resources is the most frequently reported appeal of OER, and in an environment where textbook prices are spiraling out of control, that appeal is obvious.

But again, publishers can cynically use the pursuit of “low cost” to sell more extractive resources, resources that limit access and communicate the wrong lessons about the applicability of coursework beyond the classroom. So it is important to take the practice of education beyond simply the communication of free resources and the implementation of OER in coursework, to philosophies of open pedagogy (DeRosa and Robison, 2017). We seek not merely to have students use freely accessible resources, but actually develop their own educational creativity to provide their own material to add to those resources, and in the long term, for infrastructure to exist that’s sufficient for students to produce their own resources that will meet them at their point of need. In this we approach the full realization of education as empowerment; we do not merely teach students facts or ask students to complete cookbook laboratories, we provide students the structure necessary to use the resources available to them to make knowledge most relevant to them, and even to extend that knowledge as scholars in their own right and communicate that knowledge to peers as widely as possible.

We don’t merely want our students to be the best possible scholars we can be; we want them to set their own direction through that scholarship. In an environment that seeks to eliminate our students’ agency, we want to provide our students with a climate that allows them to take the most complete control of the resources at their disposal, and use those resources for their best benefit.

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The results of a rather remarkable study were released on July 26, 2018.

The study addressed student attitudes towards the increase of textbook costs. The headline data from the study were the kind made for newspaper headlines – 43% of students surveyed reporting that they’d skipped meals to afford textbooks and class materials; 85% reporting that class materials were a source of financial stress, in line with tuition and a greater source of stress than highlighted items such as room, board, and health care; just shy of 70% of students who worked while in college saying books were a major reason they needed a job; disproportionate minority impact.

That’s not the remarkable bit.

The remarkable bit is that the survey was a product of Morning Consult, who was contracted to complete the survey by Cengage Learning.

Cengage dunked on a problem they helped to create, in order for them to promote…their own solution (emphasis my own):

“The survey’s results should be a wake-up call for everybody involved in higher education. This is especially true for the publishing industry, including our own company, as we historically contributed to the problem of college affordability,” said Michael Hansen, CEO, Cengage. “The data is clear: high textbook costs pose barriers to students’ ability to succeed in college.  Too many learners today are making painful tradeoffs between course materials and bare necessities like housing and meals. Our industry must embrace what students are telling us. That’s why our company has developed a new subscription model that lowers costs.”

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so cynical.

I will always be grateful to Nicole Allen of SPARC for putting this cynicism into stark relief:

The publishing industry spent a decade denying that textbook costs were a problem, and now they are putting out research on how bad the problem is as though it’s something that “happened” as opposed to something they did. Ask yourself: whose agenda does this serve? #textbookbroke https://t.co/kphyxStbXL

— Nicole Allen (@txtbks) August 12, 2018

I will freely own forceful distrust of Wall Street solutions to a problem that Wall Street created, and I will own that distrust even more forcefully given the doctoral degree I hold, and the advanced degrees we’re required to hold as faculty of the institutions where students deal with these problems most. The theory is that we earned those degrees because we’re capable of coming up with explanations for difficult circumstances, and solutions to difficult problems. We should not protest our own helplessness when it comes to the costs our students bear.

And frankly, when it comes to solving those problems, I’m far less likely to trust Wall Street than I am to trust the people of the land around me. The places where I live and work weren’t so much planned as they were carved out. The terrain is some of the most difficult in the country, even the world. The blood and sweat and ingenuity of generations past allow me to make my life here doing the comparatively comfortable work of making scientific knowledge understandable and accessible. If they feel like somebody’s getting rich for no good reason, somebody’s probably getting rich for no good reason.

We cannot allow our curriculum to be set by Wall Street. We cannot allow what is presented to our students in classrooms and in study to serve corporate aims. We must clear space for what our students study to be subservient to our students’ needs, first and foremost – in cost, in accessibility, in permanence, in creativity, in empowerment.

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I’m publishing this today in parallel with a third and final presentation in a cycle of talks I’m giving surrounding my work in non-majors physical science teaching online, at the Open Education Southern Symposium at the University of Arkansas. Similar material was presented at Transformative Teaching and Technology conference at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI (where slides have been uploaded) and at Appalachian College Association Summit XXI in Kingsport, TN. 

The past two years have completely redefined who I am as a scholar. I have been on this path for a very long time but the past two years have provided multiple opportunities for me to actually put what I’ve been doing into a meaningful context, and to realize that I have something very important to add to this conversation.

The people cited below – and in particular, Rajiv Jhangiani, Robin DeRosa, Keegan Long-Wheeler, Bonnie Stewart, Bonnie Stewart, and by the way did I mention Bonnie Stewart – have been incredibly generous with their time to make sure I had points in this document right and to lead me to this point. I cannot possibly thank them enough.

My “second postdoc” as instructional staff at Tennessee Tech laid much of the groundwork for this direction; thanks to Steve Robinson for the offer of the job and for being a spectacular (accidental?) mentor in STEM education research, to Paula Engelhardt for also modeling spectacular work, and to Mary Kidd, Mustafa Rajabali, and Adam Holley for being wonderful colleagues and collaborators. 

Laura Gogia has collaborated with me on a publication that indirectly fed into this work, and I’m completely in her debt for her work and her support. Rissa Sorensen-Unruh did spectacular work editing that volume, and has also fed into spectacular conversations going forward.

I also owe a mammoth debt to Karen Cangialosi, Maha Bali, Ken Bauer, and so many others in the open education community (and I’m certain I’m not remembering names of key folks!) for important conversations at points in this process.

Lastly, to Autumm Caines, Jim Luke, and Lee Skallerup Bessette, who in so many ways are People Without Whom.

 

Biswas-Diener, R. and R. Jhangiani. 2017. Introduction to open. In Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. London: Ubiquity Press.

DeRosa, R. and S. Robison. 2017. From OER to open pedagogy: harnessing the power of open. In Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. London: Ubiquity Press.

Stewart, B. 2015. In abundance: networked participatory practices as scholarship. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 16:318-340.

Weller, M. 2011. A pedagogy of abundance. Spanish Journal of Pedagogy 69:223-236.

Long-Wheeler, K, and Pearson, D.C. Online Lab Science. Website archive produced for OLC Innovate 2018; onlinelabsci.keeganslw.com.

Young, J.P. 2013. Clay Shirky says MOOCs will matter, but worries about corporate players. Wired Campus blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education online (audio of quote lost).

2018. New survey: college students consider buying course materials a top source of financial stress. Press release from Cengage Learning with associated infographic.

Why a professor buys his books from the bookstore

Friday, I made a visit to my campus bookstore, and I bought my books.

The guy who runs Tusculum’s bookstore, Cliff Hoy, is a great guy, and the work that Tusculum’s bookstore does is first-rate. Whenever I’ve had weird requests, he’s been able to honor those requests, and he’s been accommodating when I’ve poked my head into the bookstore to see what the students experience when they come through. (He even put up with my dad when my dad came through to pick up university^[1] swag, and my dad will wear a campus bookstore manager OUT.)

This spring, I put in front of him the weirdest request I’ve ever put in front of a bookstore.

I told him that I wanted him to order textbooks that I already knew that the students had free access to. And that I was going to ask the students to buy them anyway.

I still don’t know if he really believes me, but he ordered them, and I then I did the weirdest thing of all: I bought the first copies. And I bought them new, not used.

I wouldn’t do that for just any book. But I did it for books that have that logo over there in the upper-right corner.

Those who have known me for any length of time know that I’m a shill for the OpenStax project. That dates back to 2012, when I stumbled into a reviewer role for one of the first OpenStax textbooks, OpenStax College Physics. There are a ton of other open textbook projects that have come and gone, even publishers that have released materials with Creative Commons licensing that have then pulled that licensing back like so much toothpaste stuffed into a tube. OpenStax has been pretty darn steady for six years now, and is only gaining momentum in terms of the volume of material that is made available in the freshman and sophomore curriculum. The OpenStax bookshelf for mathematics and the OpenStax bookshelf for the sciences have filled out splendidly. (Memo to OpenStax: give me a Differential Equations text and an Organic Chemistry text, and I’m giddy.)

But I get why adopting OpenStax texts makes a guy like Cliff nervous. One of the key features of the OpenStax texts is that the text material itself is published under a Creative Commons license – specifically in this case, CC BY 4.0. That license means the content of the text is freely available to all who want it – and, in fact, a student can access both the text of the physics book and the atoms-first chemistry book online, the whole thing, and they don’t have to pay a dime. I just told him that I was giving away the thing he’s trying to sell, to obtain revenue the university^[1] can use.

And I’m trying to persuade him to buy in to that game plan when my namesake textbook publisher is selling him a game plan that will address affordability in a different way.

I sure don’t believe that every professor should buy their own books. The precarity in our own industry is also real, and you shouldn’t take for granted that a professor is making a living wage, let alone enough of a salary to buy textbooks. But I do believe every professor should seriously consider the costs students encounter from within their shoes, and ask seriously if their textbook selection is playing a role in making those costs unreasonable.

One of the things I’ve spent time working on this year is a full game plan for how I do scholarship at this late stage of my career. And increasingly I feel like an important part of doing that scholarship is promoting the sharing of knowledge in ways that the likes of Pearson Higher Ed and Cengage Learning can’t understand if they’re going to fulfill their business models. The basic science knowledge that’s in a major publisher’s textbook is fundamentally the same as the knowledge that’s in an OpenStax textbook (or the freely-shared, Creative Commons-licensed textbooks from another old friend of mine).

We don’t want our students to feel like the knowledge they need to succeed is limited to a publisher who wants to take the student’s hard-earned money in exchange for that knowledge (or their parents’; after all, I’m helping my own child with textbook purchases this week). We want our students to know that they live in an age of knowledge abundance and we want them to use that abundance critically, to their full benefit.

And that benefit needs to be as much of a win/win as it can be, for everybody. I’m not at a public university. (My child is, and frankly, there are some profs who ought to be ashamed of the costs they’re making their students bear.) Some of my students can carry the weight of purchasing textbooks. And we need to make that purchasing process something that they don’t dread.

I’m giving my students that message. Yes, you can download the text; I have it on my iPad, and I’ve got links to the content I’m teaching that you can have on demand as you work on your homework. But you can also have the hard copy. Some of you do better with the real live book than reading your screen. You’ll pay a little less than $50 for the physics book, which I’ll use the whole year. You’ll pay a tad more than $60 for the chemistry book, and that’s the whole year too. That’s a price that Pearson Higher Ed (#norelation) and Cengage Learning can’t compete with. And I know where OpenStax’ profits go – right back into making the resources free for the students who do need free, right back into making that Differential Equations and Organic Chemistry textbook I’d love to see.

So that’s what I’m telling my students. The textbook is free. Please buy it.

And I wanted Cliff to know that I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

^[1] This post originally said “college” in these spaces. Cliff, in his generosity, felt compelled to mention that if I left “college” in this piece, someone might find out and fine me the going rate not saying “Tusculum University“, which I hear is $10. Cliff is a wise, wise man.

On being a freshman from…somewhere

We’re three weeks into the new semester, and both of my 4-credit-hour lab science classes have probably gotten to know me better than they’d like. We’ve run an exam in both of them, a second exam in #chem101tc is much closer than that crew would like for it to be, both classes have started to get around the equipment in their labs, and people who really don’t need to be worried about their grades are starting to worry about their grades.

However, I still don’t know my class in our freshman orientation structure – the Tusculum Experience – nearly as well as I’d like.

Part of that is simply the schedule. It’s a weird schedule, so for those outside of Tusculum looking over my shoulder, let me fill you in: I see the two lab science classes all day long, twice a week, for eight weeks. There are two lab sessions scheduled per week, as opposed to one a week in a conventional semester schedule. At the end of the eight weeks we end the block and we run a second eight-week block with different two-day-a-week classes for the rest of the fall. The Tusculum Experience class I only see one afternoon a week, in a one-credit-hour setup, but I’ll see them over the full 16 weeks of the fall.

So the Tusculum Experience class and I just haven’t gotten the time together, and I haven’t gotten used to making sure they get the sequence of assignments they need, and making other arrangements, and Wednesday afternoons can just get awkward y’all.

The thing that makes our experience common are the readings, an online book called Voices of Tusculum that the good English professor Michael Bodary arranged and got assembled for us.^[1] And I’ve been reading and reflecting on the class assignments out of that book as I’ve gotten my fall started.

Three of these essays, one of which has been assigned in the first three weeks of the class, are by my colleagues, two of whom I’ve gotten to know pretty well (by Jonita Ashley, currently Acting Dean of Students, and Kim Carter, who is the campus EPA Coordinator, Chemical Hygiene Officer and laboratory coordinator) and one of whom I haven’t gotten to know so well yet (David Smith, the Director of Student Support Services). And it occurs to me, reading all of these, that all these people have something in common that I don’t:

They’re all from around here. And they’re working not-at-all-far from where they grew up and where they started college.

I’ve joked – a lot – that my career is Hank Snow’s classic country song “I’ve Been Everywhere”. But it’s true. And it’s been a laundry list all over the land east of the Mississippi. I went to school, and then I did a postdoctoral research appointment at a university, and then I’ve taken teaching jobs at all kinds of places. Hey, this is the list, from high school to now:

Hilliard Middle/Senior High School (Hilliard, Florida)
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Terre Haute, Indiana)
The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio)
University of Alabama-Birmingham (Birmingham, Alabama)
Middle Georgia College (Cochran, Georgia)
Shorter College (Rome, Georgia)
Virginia Intermont College (Bristol, Virginia)
Tennessee Technological University (Cookeville, Tennessee)
Tusculum College (Greeneville, Tennessee)

That’s a list, y’all.

And it was a pretty natural list. I grew up in Hilliard, Florida, but my mother was raised in Coweta County, Georgia and her family settled all over the Atlanta area. My father was raised in Berea, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, and my grandfather actually graduated with his Doctor of Dental Science from Ohio State, almost exactly sixty years before I got my Ph.D. from Ohio State. My uncle on Dad’s side went to Texas, and there are Pearsons in Ohio, Texas, and Florida – with others scattered about.

I love the Central Appalachians, and I moved to Tusculum very deliberately to return to this area. But I’m not from here. And what’s more, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with being from somewhere. Even that small town in Florida where I grew up was one that had a lot of families that spent their entire lives there. Even spending sixteen years of my life there, I never completely belonged, because I had a father who the Federal Government brought in to work at that air traffic control center in town.

That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not a good thing. It’s a thing. It’s a thing that has made leaving a lot easier, in my life, than it would be for a lot of others. And it’s made my emotions about places are lot more even-keeled than they otherwise would be (even though I can be a super-emotional man). But I see a lot of the lifelong relationships that people have in a small town, and the depth of investment, and I feel like I’ve missed something that is exceptionally special there.

It’s a thing I don’t think I know about a lot of my freshmen yet. I still remember the first Physical Science student who followed me – and I saw he was from Ware County, Georgia and hey I know where you’re from, man, and it ain’t near here! But that’s a reality of being at a place that recruits for the sports.

I wasn’t in for the sports. I just wasn’t connected to that small town, once upon a time, and that school in Indiana that wanted me around was all kinds of appealing (and I was choosing between the school in Indiana and – alternate history alert – the school in New Mexico. I wanted out of North Florida, y’all.) There was difficulty and awkwardness of all of a sudden being in this place where I knew nobody and it felt like they were all from more sophisticated places than Hilliard, Florida (they weren’t, but it felt like they were) and all kinds of adaptation was involved.

I think I’m going to keep telling that story as this fall goes forward, and I get to know a group of freshmen who are going through a version of what I went through, and what Dr. Ashley and Ms. Carter and Dr. Smith went through.

But right now, I want to know where are the freshmen of this place are from. Are they dealing with the challenges of all the family and friends being close enough to want you at home, or the challenges of having all your family and friends so far away?

Do they hope to have a list of places as long as mine is – or maybe even longer, or maybe from places farther afield than just “east of the Mississippi” – or do they hope to just have a short list of places around East Tennessee?

Part of the joy of doing what I do for a living is I get to hear these voices. Not polished voices, and not experienced voices. But voices with experiences of their own, and stories of their own to tell. I will never tire of hearing the stories.

[1] Y’know, I promised Bodary a chapter for this Voices of Tusculum thing. I think he’s still a bit salty at me that I didn’t deliver. Next year, man…↑

Graduation day, circa May 6, 2017

Originally a post on the Facebook wall from May 6, 2017. Edited now a year after the fact to say: these words still resonate, and I feel all the same things, and more.

Graduation day feels as weird today as it ever has, for me.

I’ll be there at Tusculum today, and please say hi. But understand if I’m a bit far away.

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One of the neatest groups of students that I had was the honors seminar I taught in Fall of 2013 at Virginia Intermont College. It was super-timely – our topic started out as standardized testing (our books were Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test and Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System) but it quickly shifted into talking about what we expect out of education and what the future of education should be. At one point I envisioned it as a start to those students’ careers and an encouragement for them to be critical as they went through education, but it turned into a set of very real lessons on the days that were to come.

If some people had cared a bit more about the fate and future of our institutions than the money that was or wasn’t somewhere, the freshmen in that seminar would have been graduating from Virginia Intermont College today.

Many of them are graduating – but from institutions far and wide, in circumstances that have been fraught. At least one already completed her degree; a couple of others have a way to go, and a couple I’ve just completely lost track of, and it kills me.

On the one hand, that group was where my work at Virginia Intermont was just getting started. On the other, it was the group I had to shepherd out the door. There are so many things about VI’s end that break my heart, but the thought what that group would have become and of the continuity they could have provided for the college’s next chapter is the one thing I can’t get over, the one thing that is the cruelest.

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As if that wasn’t enough to be tearing at my heart, the end of VI tossed me into a completely different situation at Tennessee Tech, one that was by its very definition “temporary” but with relationships with students that were every bit as meaningful.

I’ve seen news of med school and dental school and pharmacy school and every kind of professional school admissions clogging my social media feeds these past few days, and it’s wonderful, but it’s also very melancholy. So much of the circumstances at Tech kept me from building the kinds of relationships with students that I had built other places. I was able to catch glimpses of students here and there, but not see the full person develop. It was a deeply frustrating environment to work in, simply because of its size; some people adapt well and work well in that environment, and that’s a wonderful thing. I never did.

That doesn’t make the heartache for the people who make up that wonderful community in Cookeville any less real, though. For all my difficulty fitting in to that community (and for all the burden from the circumstances that put me in that community in the first place), Tennessee Technological University is one of our best. There’s far more good that happens there than bad. The people who make that place go are among our best educators and scholars, and I would recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat.

And the students who are graduating from Tech today are nothing short of remarkable. So many who are so incredibly talented, and who are so well equipped for the next stage of their lives. I’m incredibly proud of them.

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I knew as 2016 was winding down that if the opportunity presented itself, I needed to be back in a small college setting and I needed to be investing the time getting to know the small place and the individuals that make up the community. That’s why I’m here. I’m very grateful for that. I’m even more grateful that place is East Tennessee, in this part of the country I love dearly. I know there are going to be far happier graduation days ahead.

In another circumstance, I’d list the names of graduates who I knew who I was grateful for; I’ve done that on a day like to day in the past. But I’d be typing forever, and I’d be forgetting a LOT of people who don’t need to have their accomplishments minimized.

This will have to do.

Graduates: I love you, and I’m so proud of you. I love you, and we need your talents so desperately. I love you, and I believe you will make a better future for us.

One more meaning of open

This post, and all others with the “openlearning” tag, are part of the #OpenLearning17 cMOOC that is ongoing under the auspices of the AAC&U. However, none of these posts are going be very neat reflections on the week’s events and readings, and I’m limiting myself to a short amount of time to compose them and leave them in an attempt to redevelop a discipline of blog writing. We will see where this takes us.

I was reminded a little more than a year ago of what I’ve always wanted “open” to mean in my classes.

I was getting to know a couple of pretty nifty football players in my physics classes at Tennessee Tech in Fall 2015, and was reveling in getting to further my bit of football nerd with guys who played. I remember thinking that this was going to be a bit of fun the afternoon the football player in my PHYS 2020 section dropped by the office to ask a couple of questions about the first exam and the conversation turned towards the end to his high school teammate who was quarterbacking the Iowa Hawkeyes, which of course brings out the BIG TENNNNNNNNNNNNNN [1] fan in me, because I forever wanna go back to Ohio State, to ol’ Columbus-town. [2]

I’ve always enjoyed the student-athletes in my classes, and always enjoyed the ways they broke the “dumb jock” stereotypes – especially the football players who owned their science coursework, from the elite linebacker slaving over a copy machine in the library to the placekicker owning a physics lab by sheer force of personality to the wide receiver making the mathematics behind classical mechanics look far too easy. I’ve always felt like I understood the double life those athletes have to lead, and that I’d supported them as well as I could.

I believed that until roughly the afternoon of November 8, 2015.

The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP pic.twitter.com/fMHbPPTTKl

— Coach Gary Pinkel (@GaryPinkel) November 8, 2015

I’d recognized there had been tensions building at Mizzou all fall, and I think I had heard a rumor or two about a graduate student leader organizing action in defense of both grad students and African-Americans. (Naturally, I was more concerned about the graduate students and whether they’d have insurance on their assistantships.) I know I hadn’t heard a lick about what Concerned Student 1950 was, or how that leader was so alienated by his university’s lack of concern about the racism he experienced on a regular basis that he was moved to hunger strike.

And when that alienation drove players on the football team to tell their coach that they didn’t feel like it was time for games, and their coach (and all credit to Gary Pinkel forever for his immediate support) arranged for that picture to demonstrate that he stood with those players, my lone reaction was “I really don’t have a clue, do I?”

So many others have described that disconnect, but I’ve since always thought Bill Connelly described it best when he described his own experience as a student:

There have always been two Missouri campuses, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that isn’t unique for college towns. There has always been unofficial segregation, and most of it comes by choice. You gravitate toward that with which you are familiar, even (or especially) when in unfamiliar territory. Maybe that means people from your high school. Maybe that means people of your color.

I was lucky. Mizzou attracts a pretty diverse population, in part because of the journalism school. My dorm floor was made up almost equally of students from Kansas City, St. Louis, rural Missouri and Chicago. I came from a small Oklahoma town that had more Native Americans than African Americans, but I was on a floor with quite a few black students. One became my roommate. Others became good friends.

You can find common ground with just about anyone if you try, and we didn’t have to try very hard. But no matter how similar we were in our tastes and preferences — sports, music, TV, girls, whatever — I was randomly exposed to our differences. One friend had regular meetings with an advisor as part of aid he was receiving to be able to attend the school. Another would act differently when we would encounter a black acquaintance on campus.

Little things opened a window into a different world. Things like attending the NPHC Homecoming step show, where you’re suddenly in the vast minority and having an incredible time.

It didn’t take much empathy to realize the experience of any member of any minority population is simply different. It could still be good or mostly good, but it was going to be different, and there was no way around that. And while every black student gets exposed to a white world while attending college, not every white student gets the same experience.

At one point in my life, I was immersed in the recognition of every different culture that made the modern university. You could not possibly attend Ohio State and not be made aware, and – God bless Elizabeth Gross, God bless her priorities steering admissions to the Biophysics Program at Ohio State – I was in a far more diverse environment than most at Ohio State. Students from all around the country, men and women, never as many students of color as Dr. Gross wanted but dang if she didn’t try. And then the international students, and she could have filled a program with students from China or India with the pile of superior applications from those two countries, but she made a point to push the admissions committee to take applicants from every nation seriously, and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the Ukraine and Nigeria and I know for a fact I’m not remembering every example. The student who followed me in my graduate lab was from – of course – Iran.

Having the best program – having the best university – meant diversity mattered. It meant we recognized one another’s voices. It meant we recognized how we thought differently, how we engaged differently with the science.

That was an incredible inheritance for me to receive. And then I moved south, first for the postdoc in Birmingham, then for the faculty job in the deepest Deep-South part of Georgia. And although it didn’t happen all at once, my surroundings began to get progressively whiter, and progressively more comfortable. And my understanding of that inheritance started to fade.

Twitter helped some, forced me to pay attention a little bit better. But the Mizzou boycott snapped me to attention. I felt comfortable, and many of my students felt comfortable. But some might be afraid. Some might be desperately so.

I made a point in my next meeting with my classes to say that this was on my heart, and a guy like me might think he understands but he might not have a clue. And what’s more, he might think it’s cool to be seeing a bunch of football players in his class and enjoy a few yuks with them about the game but he really doesn’t understand a thing about their experience, especially when they’re black and he’s white. And I promised – whenever a need was in front of them, and they felt burdened – to be an ear who would listen.

I have kept that promise imperfectly, perhaps even horribly. I jumped jobs within the year, after all. And even as I left one group of football players behind, I entered into a new class at the new place and couldn’t seem to build the connections with those athletes burdened by that double life anywhere near as much as I wanted. Part of the difficulty is simply the age difference. Once I might have that cool young prof who could do no wrong and who everyone wanted to hang out with. Now I have students who are the same age as my own kids, and I’m the same age as their fathers – or even older. Father Time, the saying goes, is undefeated.

But even in this moment of history – especially in this moment of history – we’re still human, together, in a time where the laws are being torn up and rewritten seemingly to inflict maximum pain on the people who aren’t like me, who don’t share my skin tone, who aren’t my gender. It seems to me that even pointing out the age difference is so much useless whining. We need one another, we need to be working together and not against one another.

I care about so much of this open pedagogy movement, so much about making academic resources available freely (“free” as in speech and “free” as in beer), so much about opening my educational practices to empower learners. But – with all respect to Pomerantz and Peek, and all understanding why I should read an article on the “fifty shades of open” – the meaning of “open” that matters most to me is the open relationship I need with my students.

My student’s lives are important. I don’t need to pretend that they are simply in my classroom as automatons and their engagement and effectiveness aren’t influenced by what happens outside the classroom, what happens in their families, what happens in their workplaces – and yes, what happens in Washington, D.C.

I need to create the space that allows my students to be the most open, the most honest, the most free (and “free” as in without restraints, without judgment, without fear). That doesn’t just matter in humanities or arts classes, that matters in the sciences as well. Students need to be affirmed. Students need to know their experience matters.

And I need to continue to commit myself to the willingness to listen, no matter where that listening takes me.

[1] BIG TENNNNNNNNNNNNNN, of course, should always be spelled with fourteen “n”‘s. No real reason.
[2] to the stadium to hear the band, by far the finest in the land

I need excuses to try new things, or: Saying Hello to #OpenLearning17

I’m getting ready to go to bed, honest.

But before I go to bed, I need to thank Autumm for reminding me of what I heard at OpenEd – that #OpenLearning17 is a thing, and is happening, and I’d fully intended on being a part of it.

Even as I’m still getting my arms around this demanding new job in this demanding new place, I am going to take a few hours of my time this spring to (attempt to) keep up with this and make a few public comments along the lines of this here syllabus. I have plenty of good reasons – nah, let’s be real, excuses – for doing so:

1. I’m still an Open Education neophyte. I threw in a couple of last-minute assists towards one open educational resource in particular that I love a lot, but OER are one thing; that’s not fully shifting your attitudes towards the classroom or your methods of teaching to give the learner more control and to give you less. I want to see more of what my peers at other institutions are doing.

2. I speak for two groups of faculty that don’t tend to get a whole lot of attention in these dialogues.

• I’m science faculty, and historically physical science faculty (although I seem to be focusing a lot more on biology these days, darn that cross-disciplinary doctorate) and I’ve had roles in pre-professional education and pre-professional advising in particular. Premeds get a very precise list of courses they have to take to prepare for a very precise standardized exam that plays a very outsized role in their admissions process. Other pre-professionals (pre-dentistry, pre-optometry, pre-pharmacy) have different precise demands. The things asked of those teaching and advising those students don’t tend to get associated with “student agency.” How do we take well-defined – even overly-defined – curricula and bring open attitudes towards our work there?
• I’m employed at a private (or, to use the industry euphemism, an “independent”) institution with less selective admissions in the Central Appalachians. When you think of private colleges, you think of places that have large endowments and a wealth of resources – environments that I have never worked in.  And when you hear of institutions tending towards open access, you think community colleges or regional state universities, not privates. The vast majority of my students are either local or are student-athletes drawn from a wider region (but still generally East Tennessee or border counties of nearby states). There are a lot of faculty like me, but I don’t hear too many of the voices like mine among the open education community. How do we take our rurally-educated, tradition-conditioned students and reveal the possibilities available to them?

3. I’ve had an occasion or two to start conversations locally about what Open Education is and how to go about implementing it – despite the fact that, at present, I’m not really anything that resembles a role-model. (This semester will be, I fully hope, my last pass at teaching organic chemistry for some time. Am I having my students purchase access to a vendor’s proprietary software so I don’t reinvent the wheel for a class that I may never teach again? You betcha. There’s open practices, and then there’s essential laziness, and I am fully embracing the latter right now.) I need more deliberate ideas for how I go about becoming somebody who has practices that can be pointed to, especially if (as above) I’m constructing those practices specifically within that premed-education context.

4. I still have a ton of thoughts throwing around my head about my fall, and everybody’s fall in particular, and a really stupid election, and a really amazing conference, and these people who have come into my life both locally and internationally and have been inspiration and dedication and love. I’m not going to get them out without a framework. This is a nifty and relevant framework. Let’s go, then.

5. OMG YOU MEAN I MIGHT GET COACHING FROM @GOOGLEGUACAMOLE WELL THAT’S ALL THE EXCUSE I NEED RIGHT THERE I AM IN AND I MEAN I AM ALL IN YOU GUYS

So, #OpenLearning17, then. I’m going to speak up, and probably be kind of dumb doing so, and probably leave myself open to be shouted down a bit. That’s fine. I have a lot to learn.

Be patient with me. I will be listening.

But first, sleep.

What it means to go home

(1) I have written entirely too many of these things, because I have moved my family around entirely too many times.

Real Professional Development Goal, August 2016-forever: make this the last of these things I ever write.

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(2) In July of 2011, I wrote this:

I have been offered a position at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, VA, to teach chemistry and physics and play a key role in building that school’s natural science department. The position and the surrounding professional development is nothing short of the perfect job for this point in my career.

 

For those of you who came into my orbit sometime after that, and don’t know how that story ended, it ended with financial problems overrunning the college, and getting laid off not even three years later. It was not a fun time.

Now for you to be convinced that I’m crazy: I still believe what I said five years ago to be true.

With all respect and love to my friends in Georgia who were so good to me, but who I left to chase what was to me a dream of a job: Virginia Intermont was where I found and made a home. I thought I loved the mountains when I lived in Rome (Georgia, y’all) and worked at Shorter. In Bristol, I knew. I saw this forgotten and less fashionable part of the country and, being a less fashionable person myself, I found a real sense of place.

I went all-in on Virginia Intermont because I saw what was possible for that kind of school in that season of time when I was at Shorter, how the unlikely student could grow into the leader and the visionary. I built an entirely-too-vivid picture of what that looked like at VI. I wanted to see that vision become a reality, so badly that I bought a house and made Virginia Hill my home.

What I found in exchange was the truest sense of learning community, unlike any experience I have ever had. It was the greatest of privileges to be a part of it. The students I taught at VI are people I cherish and love – every last student, through the good times and the bad that we shared (and God knows, if you’re that close, you’re going through everything together). We went through as difficult a transaction as anybody in education should ever deal with. They have been faithful to me, and I hope that I have been as faithful to them. Those students, far above and beyond anything else, were worth that move for me.

But they weren’t the only benefit. The other thing I realized in my time at Virginia Intermont was how much of an island I had been on in the work that I did. The very first time I went to an Appalachian College Association Summit, and had time to talk to colleagues from places like Ferrum and Montreat and Ohio Valley and Pikeville and Brevard and West Virginia Wesleyan – and realized that these people had been talking to one another for quite some time about the same troubles I had as a faculty at a resource-limited small private college in the South – I realized what professional development what would look like for me over the long term.

Losing Virginia Intermont didn’t just mean losing the school and the students – it meant losing colleagues over several states in this precious region who had wisdom to share and who knew what the difficulty in this time of history for small private colleges looked like. It was such a benefit over those three years. It ended abruptly – I was scheduled to attend an ACA Teaching and Learning Institute in June 2014, before VI closed in May 2014. The abruptness was as hard to take as anything.

The time I spent at Virginia Intermont confirmed some things that I valued and revealed new things. I always knew how much I valued the time spent with students and how much I appreciated institutions that encouraged the development of genuine learning community. I really understood – for the first time in my young-punk career – how much I had to learn from those who had done the same kind of work I had, at the same kinds of institutions I had.

And – there is no other way to say this – I fell in love with Central Appalachia. And I longed to make that place home.

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(3) I have been ridiculously fortunate to have been at Tennessee Technological University for the past two years. I had wanted to chase after better, more active learning in my classroom for a long time; I knew the benefits, and it’s not like I didn’t try to draw communication out of my students in the classroom, but I was exceptionally comfortable in a traditional chalk-and-talk mode, and in a position where I was teaching three different courses at once, as much as I loved that diversity of work, I didn’t really find myself in a position where I could push the active classroom as much as I wanted to – or, really, as much as I needed to.

Observing Steve Robinson and Paula Engelhardt in the process of implementing an active learning curriculum for the algebra/trig-based physics sequence has been, in nearly every sense, a better educational experience than anything I got out of a postdoc. This is the stuff that will make me better as a professor: finding ways to make students productively uncomfortable in a classroom setting, and creating an environment where they aren’t just hearing information but internalizing it and making knowledge their own. I don’t have all the answers, and maybe I have a ton of experience with some of this stuff, but it’s so much more valuable when the student makes an observation, draws a conclusion, carries a new experience with them to inform how they see the world.

And I have been privileged to work alongside this whole department – but especially with Mary Kidd, Mustafa Rajabali, and Adam Holley in making this curriculum work for the wider student population. The one time before in my career I worked alongside another physics educator, I was a problem child and overopinionated and I am sure I torched more than that one bridge in the process. I probably was the same here, but rather than putting me off, these sweet people listened and challenged me right back, We have been, I hope, iron sharpening iron day in and day out. I could not possibly have had better colleagues these past two years.

I have very few regrets, but not finding a way to teach like this and engage like this sooner in my career is one of them; as much good as I’ve done in a classroom in my career, I am more confident than ever that there is a better way than simply telling a class what I’m going to tell them, then telling them, then telling them what I told them.

There was a thought that simply doing this work, and refining this work to make it more and more effective, would have been the most valuable thing I could do going forward. I did have the opportunity to remain at Tennessee Tech, within this department, and I’m grateful for all the people here who supported me and invested so much in me. At several points in April, I was seriously thinking of what settling in Cookeville would look like.

That would have been bittersweet. As good as it was to be wanted, it would have involved narrowing my vision – the career spent bouncing between disciplines would be over, the advising of students at various points on academic and pre-professional paths would be over, the focus on the wider institution and on higher education would have been over. So many things that I have valued so deeply would no longer come with that place. Quality teaching is so important, and being in a role focused on quality teaching would be worthy. But there were so many things I felt were undone.

And there was that tiny little issue of a place, a place where my eldest child was finding home as well, still carrying an attachment. And wondering if there was a way back.

And I reached a point where I didn’t think there was a way.

And then things started to happen.

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(4) I honestly didn’t know what to think when I received that first email, except an old colleague was there and she had been pretty high on the thought of me getting the job and joining the faculty. I honestly thought the email came too late; we were ready to decide to stay put; I had other interviews at similar schools and found in one way or another that they were after somebody to fill a very narrow faculty line and could do as well to hire a young punk straight out of grad school (like I once was) than somebody who had been around the block a time or two.

And then a phone call. And a serious conversation. And a recognition that I came from a different place and a different experience, and a recognition that they were looking for a different professor and a different impact. We agreed to keep talking. And soon.
The interview, honestly, wasn’t like any interview I’d ever had in my career. It was comfortable, from the very first moment. Many of the formalities started to be dispensed with early. I was recognized, not as somebody who was a warm body seeking a job, but somebody who had a unique skill set, a unique background, and who could do unique things.

I started to understand that they didn’t just want a physicist, or a chemist, or even a molecular biophysicist. They wanted me – who I had been, who I am now, who I could become. And I could get a picture of becoming a far better scholar in this community than I am now.

Future colleagues – for that’s what they turned out to be, and what I was able to see them as from even the first conversation – spoke directly, and honestly, and with hope. Students spoke to what was good about their experience, what needed to improve, and why they loved the place.

I’ve left interviews before being completely confused about what the job was, and what my responsibilities might be. Here, I saw a role, and I saw it completely.

I have never been so excited leaving an interview (even as I left it to scramble back to Cookeville to give an exam). The place was not perfect, but the imperfections were very clear and not hidden at all. The job ahead was clear. And I hoped I’d be given the chance.

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(5) When the dust settled, on April 21, I had an offer from Tusculum College, just outside Greeneville, Tennessee, a little more than an hour away from Bristol, on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest on the North Carolina state line.

It was an offer to join their faculty as Associate Professor of Natural Sciences, with teaching responsibility across physics, chemistry, and – my word, is this really happening? – molecular and cellular biology.

There are a host of other benefits and responsibilities that come with that. But, more than anything else, it’s a return to a faculty position serving a small, teaching-centered liberal arts (and, Tusculum would remind you, civic arts) college in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains.

It’s work I’m prepared for in every way, shape and form.

I am as grateful as you could possibly imagine for the opportunity.

My prayer now is very simple: for me, forever, this will be what it means to go home.

On not knowing what’s next

Most of you are outside of the Virginia Intermont community who have a gander at this space, and so you haven’t much cared about the fact that VI’s intended merger with Webber International fell through today. Go and read about it if you want. I’ll wait.

All that really says:  I, and a whole lot of people I work with, and a whole lot of students I teach, have no idea what our lives look like after July 1.  VI has not officially closed yet.  But the fact that the release talks about “moving with haste to guarantee accredited options beyond July 1 for our students who are not slated for graduation” gives you a clue how certain the path forward isn’t.

I’ve suspected that this was the direction things were heading for a while.  I thought I was ready for it.  I honestly didn’t have a clue, and having talked to a lot of sweet people today, they weren’t totally ready for the reality either.

So: if you want something out of me about our future beyond a massive shrug, I ain’t got it.  Sorry.  I may be able to do better next week.

What I know is this: I’m going up to campus tomorrow morning and running my mouth about physics and chemistry, and I’m going to do some stuff in a chemistry lab tomorrow afternoon, and in the midst of everything I’m going to listen to my students as they wonder about their own futures and how I can help them.  Which is, more or less, what I’ve done for the past 14 years of my life.  As long as I have stuff of that sort to do, I’m going to continue to do it.

A couple of weeks ago, after David Letterman retired and late night went into upheaval all over again, I remembered how Conan O’Brien carried himself at the end of his run on the Tonight Show and how impressed I was with how positive he was.  Today, I watched that again, and got inspired all over again.  Frankly, I think it’s the most Christian response to disappointment I’ve ever seen:

All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you. It’s just true.

There are two things that are true of my life in 2014.

I have not gotten exactly what I thought I was going to get.

And amazing things have happened to me.