Jim McGrath, PhD

Tag: higher ed

  • Pedagogical Investments in Flexibility and Accountability

    As I mentioned in my last post, I’m currently an Instructional Designer at Salem State University’s Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI). At times I will use this space to highlight some of the work I’ve been taking up at SSU as an instructional designer. I’ve got a few different motivations for doing so:

    • I’d like to amplify some of the work I’m doing at SSU beyond our more local networks and communication channels
    • I’m interested in documenting some of that work in a more permanent way since university websites get revamped, emails get deleted, etc.
    • I’ve talked to some folks about what it’s like to move into the world of instructional design and I’d like to give those people a clearer and more informed sense of the kind of work that I do in our little corner of that world.

    One of the ways that the CTI team supports faculty at SSU is by distributing a weekly newsletter. In addition to information on upcoming programming, tips on teaching with technology, and links that may resonate with our faculty community’s pedagogical interests (among other things), we also take turns writing “Recommended Read” content on time-sensitive teaching topics or on subjects that are hot topics in higher ed. My colleague Abby Machson-Carter has been the main force behind our newsletter over the last few years, and we’ve found that this particular format and approach seems to resonate with our audience at SSU (based on faculty feedback as well as analytics generated by Mailchimp on open rates, clicks, etc.)

    The content below was originally shared in an email sent on February 2nd (2023), and its original title was “High Standards and High Care: Flexibility and Accountability.” Thanks to CTI Director Eliza Bobek for that title, and thanks to Abby for copyediting and for providing light revisions to this piece.

    ***

    In the early days of the pandemic, many instructors chose to be more flexible with students regarding attendance, the submission of coursework, the amount of readings and tasks assigned, and other course expectations. More recently we have heard concerns about continued movements toward flexibility: that it may negatively impact student engagement, that it does not prepare students for expectations in professional settings, that there is a loss of academic rigor and accountability (among other arguments). 

    But investments in flexibility do not mean that instructors and students are abandoning accountability. It can be helpful to be precise and transparent with students (and with ourselves) about why we might see the benefits of flexibility, while also setting clear expectations to students who may need extensions, absences, or breaks in course workloads. We can model approaches to flexibility taken up in numerous other professional contexts, and commitments to the benefits of flexibility do not have to mean that we are neglecting obligations to educate and prepare our students for their lives beyond the university.  

    Here are some perspectives on how to practice flexibility while also teaching students about the value of accountability:

    Prioritize Learning, Not Compliance: In a Twitter thread in which he discusses why he no longer grades attendance or class participation, educator John Warner notes that he asked himself “Am I rewarding compliance or am I measuring learning?” Answering that question helped Warner reflect on the roles that structure and guidance played in his teaching and course materials. 

    Define what flexibility means to you: Despite good intentions, sometimes notes about being open to extensions or absences can be a bit unclear or vague to students, especially to first-generation students or to students still learning how to communicate and interact with their instructors. A recent article looks at the ways that making expectations explicit rather than implicit can help improve clarity of expectations and make the task of completing coursework more equitable for all.

    Flexibility Beyond Deadline Extensions: Advocates for flexible teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Ed note that flexible deadlines are important to them. But they also discuss the ways that they meet students where they are. They make course expectations more transparent, introduce more forms of active learning, and create space for students to build relationships with one another. If students are struggling with major projects and their attendant deadlines, consider revising those exercises into smaller, more discrete segments with early opportunities for feedback. If students are struggling with attendance but keeping up with other work, it could be helpful to reflect on what’s happening in live sessions and see if there are strategies or structures that would make attendance more urgent or engaging.

    Further Reading

    Staying Flexible Without Being Overwhelmed

    Balancing Flexibility and Accountability

    How To Give Our Students The Grace We All Need

    Email Jim if you have questions or comments / feedback: jimmcgrath[dot]us[at]gmail

  • Memories, Medals, and Bookshelves

    Photograph of an English medal received by my grandfather in 1941 and an English medal I received in 1999.

    Note: I wrote this back in the fall of 2012 for Rosie’s Basement, a storytelling project started on Tumblr by a friend. I’ve always liked this piece, so in the interest of longer-term preservation and increasing its visibility, I’m posting it here.

    I will always remember my grandfather as one of the first adults who ever lied to me. “Watch this,” he’d say, popping an olive into his mouth, pretending that it had traveled down his arm, flexing his bicep to reveal the source of his muscles. He was like a real-life Popeye, tattoos and all, a former Navy man who lied about his age to fight in the Second World War. I don’t know how often he pulled the olive trick, more than once, less than a hundred times, but close. Part of me likes to think that I was in on the joke, even at that age, that I requested its repeat performances despite knowing its secret, that Poppy knew that I knew, but loved that I loved him for the free one-man show. He let me in on the long con of life, but he also showed me how to have fun with it.

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  • New Book Chapter: “Our Marathon: The Role of Graduate Student and Library Labor in Making the Boston Bombing Digital Archive”

    Our Marathon

    Alicia Peaker and I co-wrote “Our Marathon: The Role of Graduate Student and Library Labor in Making the Boston Bombing Digital Archive,” a chapter appearing in the new volume, Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community. 

    You can read a preprint PDF version of our chapter here (thanks, Humanities Commons!). Here’s an excerpt:

    In 2010 Matt Kirschenbaum wrote “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” for the Association for Departments of English (ADE) bulletin, in which he argued that “digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home” [11]. While there were (and there continue to be) skeptics and vocal opponents of digital humanities methodologies in these institutional spaces, his point was that many English departments had already begun to embrace, cultivate, or otherwise contend with the impact of digital tools and contexts on literary studies. But in the case of Our Marathon, many of the questions we received about the institutional context of our project stemmed less from an aversion to digital humanities work and had more to do with the project’s self-identification as an archival initiative and its investments in the curation and preservation of particular kinds of material culture: items left at public memorials, social media activity, and first-person narratives, all of them related to a national tragedy. Why is an English major behaving like an archivist, a metadata specialist, a project manager? What more could they know about the long histories of curation, preservation, and community engagement, topics that may not be covered in English department coursework? How might English departments anticipate student and community investments in initiatives like Our Marathon and be prepared to support such work?

    Thanks to editors Robin Kear and Kate Joranson for their feedback on our contribution to this project. And thanks, of course, to Alicia, for being great: it would be cool to co-write and/or collaborate on something again in the future. I look forward to reading the rest of the volume: if you’re interested, some of our co-authors have been putting links to preprint versions of their work on this Google Doc.

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