A few university instructional and research approaches

April 9, 2022 6:13 AM

"... now I was getting to know a swathe of 20 first year students, few of whom had any interest in majoring in Philosophy, and with whom I’d keep in touch throughout." Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, describes a structure that helped him work better with First Year Interest Groups (seminars with linked courses). "Who wants another workshop or class that’s just going to serve more of the same old people who are currently being served, in the same old way they’re already being served?" Lindsey Kuper, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz, discusses "Going all in on weird outreach" (several paragraphs in), in particular encouraging undergraduate students to create zines about a CS research project.

(Disclaimer: Lindsey is a friend of mine.)

posted by brainwane (6 comments total)

My summary of Dr. Kuper's approach is a little inaccurate. She says:

As many readers of this blog probably already know, there’s a rich tradition of using zines as a medium for scientific and technical communication. (You might know my friend and celebrated computing zine creator Julia Evans’s awesome work, but hers are far from the only computing zines out there. Check out these quantum computing zines, for instance, or the work of the Computery Zine Fest exhibitors!) I experimented with zine creation as an optional assignment in my distributed systems course back in 2019 — an idea I originally got from Cynthia Taylor, who did something similar in her operating systems classes — and it went well. So for this project, I proposed integrating zine creation into my team’s research process. My plan is to bring back the optional zine project in my undergrad distributed systems class, then use it as a starting point for recruiting interested and capable undergrads into paid summer research positions on my team. The undergrads on the team will focus on creating zines about the team’s research. The resulting student-created zines will be freely available online and will serve as an approachable and fun introduction to our work.

posted by brainwane at 6:16 AM on April 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

This other page at Dr. Kuper's site is all about her teaching computer science with zines, and has links to some of the students' zines.
posted by JonJacky at 9:11 AM on April 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I teach at a public, 4-year regional commuter college, and we have an official, structured mentoring program that offers some of the same benefits as Dr. Brighouse's informal program. Students are assigned a mentor based on their major when they enroll, and if they stick with that major (or a closely related one), they will keep that mentor throughout their time. Our primary responsibility as mentors is to meet with students once per semester for registration advising, but our dean always reminds us that if we only talk to them about classes, we're not really doing mentoring.

I have 15-20 Biology and Environmental Science majors assigned at any time, many of whom take one or more classes with me over the course of their time (the most ever was 5, I believe, including 2 intro classes, 2 upper level classes, and an independent research project). When we meet, we do talk about their classes and career goals, internships and clubs they might want to join, but we also talk about the rest of their lives, how many hours per week they work, their family responsibilities, and their dreams beyond their career goals. They also know that they can always come to me at any time, and I have over the years intervened with campus offices that aren't returning phone calls, walked students in crisis to the counseling center, listened while they cried about the death of a parent, recommended changing majors or taking time off from school, and connected them to services so, for instance, a student wouldn't have to live in their car anymore.

We are not a flagship like Wisconsin, and our students are much more likely to be first generation students and living on the margins in multiple ways. Our mentoring program really does help provide them something that they otherwise just wouldn't have in their lives, a person who understands college who has no agenda except helping them succeed. I have been thanked in a commencement speech, met many babies, attended weddings, and gotten so many emails telling me about graduate school and cool jobs. I am so grateful for the bits of their lives they share with me, the good and the bad. I hope that Wisconsin reads Dr. Brighouse's post and thinks about implementing a more formal program.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:41 AM on April 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

We had a formal mentoring program at my university, but it was pretty generic. I think I met with my advisor once? Maybe twice. I did have a much closer mentoring type relationship with my thesis advisor, whom I am still in touch with -- when I moved back to work at my alma mater years later, we met up for drinks and it was simultaneously weird and awesome.

I'm now on the other side of the fence, and although I really enjoy mentoring and getting to know my seminar students, I'm also struck by how much extra work it is, largely uncompensated in terms of either salary or protected time. Particularly as I'm a woman of color in a male-dominated field-- on the one hand, I really want to be a role model for other young women coming up, but on the other, it's another thing to juggle. Especially if the mentee is struggling themselves. Dr Brighouse acknowledges that he's only able to do this work because he has a light teaching load.
posted by basalganglia at 12:12 PM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison


His full title is the Making Everyone Else On The Faculty Here Feel Inadequate About Our Undergraduate Teaching Professor of Philosophy.
posted by escabeche at 12:22 PM on April 9, 2022 [16 favorites]

"getting to know a swathe of 20 first year students, few of whom had any interest in majoring in Philosophy, and with whom I’d keep in touch throughout."

My college had something like this, albeit in Sophomore year. It was a year long sort-of modified great books curriculum -- I guess I'd maybe call it an "intellectual history underlying the project of a modern comprehensive university" curriculum? We read about a book a week -- Dante's Inferno, Brothers Karamazov, Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Dawkins' River out of Eden, Newman's The Idea of a University. We read broadly across the intellectual landscape, from ancient to modern, from philosophy and theology to sociology and political science to hard sciences to fiction. Every single sophomore on campus was enrolled in one of these classes, regardless of major; sections were about 12-15 people, heavily discussion-focused. (You read a lot, but you didn't have to write a whole lot.) But I think maybe even more importantly every full-time faculty member had to teach one, from the University president to the lowliest assistant professor, the provosts, the deans, some joint-appointed faculty who also were doctors or lawyers or whatever. (But no adjuncts or graduate assistants.) Liberal Arts professors taught them every other year; I think science professors had them once every four years. (It also generally fulfilled your "teach a 100-level survey course" obligation for the year.) Each professor also chose one book to add to 17 or so that were university-wide, one book that to that professor fit into their concerns or ideas of the intellectual project of the university. (My section did Alex Kotlowitz's "There Are No Children Here.")

By the end of the year of twice-weekly discussions with the same 15 people + professor, digging deep into these works, I knew those 15 people and my professor really well, and part of the intention of the whole thing was that we'd stay in touch with that professor throughout our time at the university. Which is largely what happened! It would have been nice if it had this "circle back two years later" component. I also felt like it was a really strong expression of the University's identity and educational commitments, that EVERYONE was expected to take this course where you engaged intellectually with ideas from all over the different departments and all full-time faculty were expected to teach it. They talked a lot about educating the whole person, and creating well-rounded graduates, and had onerous distribution requirements, and they weren't going to hand you a degree if you couldn't pass two university-level classes in math, science, philosophy, theology, social science; one each in literature, history, and fine arts. I forget what else, there were a lot. (You could not AP out of these; like, you could AP out of calculus, but you still had to take two math classes at the university.) They talked a lot about a community of learners that included both students and faculty, and it really felt like insisting every single professor (and academic administrator) at the university teach great books to sophomores in a small seminar format was a vivid commitment to that. Professors couldn't be only in their departments and only teaching graduate students; they had to engage with the larger project of the university.

"smiling at people while they cry in my office"

I am an easy crier, frequently to my mortification. I studied abroad in London, had some tough family stuff happen when I was across an ocean, and ended up crying in the program director/theology professor's office trying to sort out some logistics, while apologizing profusely that I was crying. And he said, "Oh, no, I'm really excited! I've always heard Americans cry in their professors' offices, but it's never happened to me before!"

Uh ... thanks?

(The program secretary later told me that he was legitimately really touched; he'd been with the program a few years, but he worried he wasn't connecting with the American students properly because he was too stiff-upper-lip-ish (and the American students were all on our best behavior trying to rein in our culturally-dissonant behaviors), and me sobbing in his office made him feel like he must be doing an okay job.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:16 PM on April 9, 2022 [7 favorites]