I have been having email threads with a handful of students who took my Economics of Organizations class last fall. Most interesting about this is how forthcoming they seem to be and welcoming of my emails. During the course some of these same students were more guarded in their exchanges with me.
From the seniors, they seem to be improvising with regard to what they will do after graduation. One student had been planning to go to law school. She was accepted at several places where she applied. But she has not opted to attend any of them this fall. Instead she's looking for a job now. While she didn't elaborate on why she's had this change of heart, one might expect that it has something to do with paying law school tuition now in this very soft labor market. I really don't know how one finds a job this summer without having interned for the company the previous summer, but maybe she can persevere enough to land something. Another student, who had gone the internship route and got a job offer from the bank where she interned last summer, had second thoughts (many of them) about whether this sort of work really was a good fit for her. Indeed, she struggled last fall and this spring as well, because school seemed artificial to her. That was before the pandemic. Now she is reconsidering taking the bank job, given that jobs are so scarce having an offer is nothing to sneeze at.
From the juniors I gather the following. Internships still exist but will be done online and many have been shortened, from the full summer to one month, some even to one week only. As there is learning by doing, it's hard to imagine the benefit of a one-week internship, but if companies have a policy of making their new hires from their pool of recent interns, maybe there is a logic to it, anticipating some likelihood of hiring in spring/summer 2021. But, on the flip side of this, the companies will know much less about the interns this way and the interns will have less of a sense about whether they will eventually be offered a job by the company or not. So, the uncertainty multiplies.
The word therapy in my title comes from recently reading Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, where he talks about logotherapy based on such a search for meaning. In the process of having an email thread with one of the juniors, I stumbled onto this video and shared it with him. He was impressed by the video and was able to connect the message in it to the instruction he has been receiving. Much of that instruction is heavily rules based, essentially assuming the worst in student behavior, and perhaps inadvertently encouraging that bad behavior to occur. To be fair to the instructors, in large classes rules may be necessary to keep the teaching manageable. Too much idiosyncrasy from the students can be overwhelming.
But it should be noted that students who do everything by rules that are externally provided don't learn how to make their own life decisions. Evidently, in the present environment making life decisions is crucial for all of us, graduates and college students alike. So, one wonders if instruction can be made less rules-based. Judging whether this is possible based on my experience the last few years, where most students won't attend my class unless a grade incentive is provided for doing so, an individual instructor moving away from a rules-based approach will fail. What's needed is a more systematic approach, that changes student mindset and acculturation, with the aim of getting student behavior to be driven mainly by a sense of responsibility. (Frankl talks a lot about responsibility in the part of his book devoted to logotherapy.) Incentive might still be needed for some things, e.g., 8 AM classes might still need a grade incentive for attendance, but otherwise the incentive approach would largely be pushed into the background.
From my little bit of recent interaction with former students, I'm thinking that students during college, and perhaps recent grads as well, need some mentoring to help them think through these life decisions. Previously, mentoring in college might have been thought of as helping students get through till graduation. Now I think it should be broader, helping students to get through life and how to make the important choices in a way that seems somewhat principled and not so seat-of-the-pants.
Alas, one-on-one mentoring doesn't scale well. So the formal mentoring I'm aware of on campus is offered mainly to low income students, through a program called Illinois Promise, and the mentors themselves volunteer for the work. I have done such mentoring, but I've found it easier to interact with former students (perhaps by email rather than face to face) because having taken my class there is already some bond between us. One wonders if mentoring can become part of the on-load work of instructors, possibly by first having them teach a seminar class version of the course they are already teaching, and then also to rely on upper level students, juniors and seniors, to mentor freshmen and sophomores, with some eye on getting the mentoring to scale better.
My sense of things further is that formal programs that are required might not work very well at all (it's getting back to the rules-based approach) but voluntary programs where the mentor can give a prior demonstration of empathy for the student do have a chance to be useful as therapy. When the mentor is an instructor, how does one reconcile a volunteer activity with it being on-load work? This too is a matter of acculturation, something we should be thinking through now. When I was a full-time faculty member in economics, being involved with the recruiting of new faculty members was an on-load yet volunteer activity. Most of the faculty members in the department felt recruiting to be very important. Yet participating in it wasn't something listed in your CV. I'm thinking that mentoring students needs to be elevated to that level.
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If capacity utilization of a resource is 100%, then to allocate a bit of the resource to yet another use, it is necessary to for some other current use to be disabled. With that sort of thinking understood, I'm guessing that the initial response to making mentoring an on-load activity is for the faculty to push back and request that the number of courses they teach be reduced. But giving course reductions in this case would break the bank. What can be done about that?
In Economics, when I was hired back in 1980, the standard course load among tenure-track faculty was four courses, two in the fall and two in the spring. Now the course load is three courses a year, as that became the norm in the discipline at other research universities in the country. We might envision a reversion to the earlier norm, but with the time spent on that fourth course to be allocated to mentoring instead. In this way of thinking the time for mentoring would come out of either the faculty member's research time or from the service work they do. The move from a four course load to a three course load reflected a resource abundance within Economics as a discipline. That resource abundance is no longer there, but the institution has become used to tenure-track faculty teaching 3 courses. Having them mentor students would be a reasonable way to adjust to current circumstances.
Much undergraduate teaching is done by specialized faculty, who are not on the tenure track. Many of them do no research at all. Teaching is their full time work. How can we get them to embrace mentoring under the circumstances? I wrote about something similar some years ago, the second out of six posts labeled Everybody Teaches. In this case, the focus was on these specialized faculty (there I referred to them as adjuncts) who typically teach the same course from one year to the next, often in a large lecture class setting. Over time the courses tend to get stale and become very mechanical (done by the rules). The post was about ways for the instructor to experiment in the teaching with the aim of keeping the instruction fresh. A critical piece of that is getting the student reaction to the changes made in the course. In the post, the instructor would learn this by teaching one discussion section, more intensive than typical discussion sections taught by graduate student TAs. The student mentoring, which would happen the following semester, can then be seen as of value to the instructor in getting a sense of the student beyond the class the instructor teaches. It thus can be viewed as a complement to instruction, in which case the specialized faculty might do it willingly on load.
Of course, this needs to be worked through. As such faculty are now unionized, the union would need to go for it. That consideration is beyond me here. I simply want to note that if the mentoring becomes a feature of what undergraduate education is about, then it can be thought of as a necessity to attract enrollments. The university and the union's preferences should be aligned regarding wanting to have more students on campus who are paying tuition. Beyond that observation, I wouldn't want to guess as to the outcome of bargaining on this matter.
I want to turn to a different issue with teaching loads and then close. There is a peculiarity with using course loads to measure teaching obligation as the measure doesn't include course enrollments. A different way to measure teaching obligation is by FTE (course enrollments times credit hours per student). Consider a course that gives 3 credit hours and has fifty students. This generates 150 FTE. Now consider two sections of the same course, with each section having 25 students. The FTE are the same in both cases but the teaching load is twice as high in the second case as the first.
I'm bringing this up here because of how campuses seem to be responding to bringing students back to campus in the fall. For the sake of safe social distancing, the model that seems to be emerging is for about 1/3 of the students to attend per class session, with the other students getting the instruction online, and then rotating the students through who comes and who gets the instruction online. An alternative approach would be to break the class into three sections, each taught in blended format. Then all the students get the same content taught face to face and the same content given online. Further the total time in class for all three sections would match the total in class time for the course before the pandemic.
This alternative makes more sense to me except that it would mean the teaching load had tripled. So it could only work if instructors agreed to that. If the class had originally been slotted for three hours on one day per week, then the instructor could implement this alternative informally, by dividing the students up into three groups, each of whom came for one hour only. It gets harder for the instructor to coordinate if the three face to face sections are separated over several days, because then the students are somewhat out of sync with regard to the online content. So there is that issue as well. In the old days, the three hours in a row was done only as a special request for instructors who wanted to contain their teaching to one day a week. Now it might be viewed as a benefit for implementing this blended model without having to deal with the course-load issue. Three sections that met for one hour on the same day each week, but were not offered back to back, might be the most preferred way of doing things. Yet it could only happen if the instructor assented to this in spite of the increased course load.
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Let me conclude. The point I'm trying to make above is that the pandemic should get us to rethink what the approach to instruction should be, rather than to best approximate a return to how things were done before. The combination of the pandemic and the soft labor market make it necessary to ask - what would instruction be like if that were the new normal? Your answers to that question may be different from mine, and I'm okay with that, but I'm not okay with proceeding without having the question posed at all. We need to do that.
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