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- Xena Crystal Li-chin Huang | A journey of thousand miles begins with a simple step. (This new wikiblog is under mass construction! Welcome to add your thoughts or edit the existing contents- in particular, the issue of the so called- Double Bs- Boredom and Burnout, and what and how we can do about it! Thanks) | ![[Untitled]](http://image.wetpaint.com/image/1/HVnJECVAuNvq9381lVX-fw1955/GW78H86 "[Untitled]") The Intellectual Hidden Curriculum
So great is the multiplicity of function of the 2-year college, and so great the eclecticism and diversity, that they can hardly be intelligibly described as single institution at all. 'This college is really many colleges,' one often hears. Put another way, the most striking cultural feature of community colleges is that they lack a center; they are not driven by many unitary view of what education, especially nontraditional education, is all about.
As new institutions they had no strong traditions to draw on. Since the canonical model encouraged them to regard curriculum and pedagogy as purely instrumental, they took from here and there, theory from this and that tradition, practices from wherever..." - MacGrath and Spear, 1991 | The following article is another way to look at "Teaching Enhancing Issues" by Thomas R. Lord ED30126
"Most people do not associate community colleges with the terms "scholarship" and "research." One reason is that the mission statements of community colleges rarely include these terms when discussing teaching excellence. Another is that most people within higher education still hold the antiquated view that scholarship is simply research leading to publication. Other efforts such as addressing professional audiences at regional or national meetings, designing and conducting workshops and symposia, and preparing articles for respected professional journals are neither noted nor appreciated.
If a broader view of academic scholarship were generally accepted, encompassing professional activity, artistic endeavor, engagement with novel ideas, community service, pedagogy, and research and publication, it would be more widely recognized that scholarship takes place at community colleges.
Scholars at community colleges tend to be among the most devoted of the institution's instructors, for they make time for research while teaching a heavy course load, and are often not financially supported for their research by the institution.
To encourage scholarly activities, the New Jersey Department of Higher Education recently sponsored a statewide conference to showcase two-year college scholarship. If scholarly activity is to prosper, community colleges must begin to value and stimulate scholarship from their faculty." (AJL)
The original article was attached at the bottom of this page. |
The Community College Professor: Teacher and Scholar. ERIC Digest. ERIC Identifier: ED272248
Publication Date: 1986-05-00
Author: Oromaner, Mark
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse for Junior Colleges Los Angeles CA. The community college developed, in part, as a response to the preoccupation of elite universities with research (Parilla, 1986). Indeed, one of the strengths of the community college has been its commitment to student development. This commitment is evident in the amount of resources devoted to counseling and tutoring, and in the emphasis on teaching as the primary faculty responsibility. Unfortunately, this emphasis has frequently caused classroom teaching to be divorced from scholarship. If it is often assumed at the research university that superior or popular teachers are inferior scholars, it is often assumed at the community college that scholars cannot be good teachers. One consequence of this asssumption is a reluctance to hire Ph.D. holders as community college faculty (Harrison, 1979; Smith, 1979).
SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING
Although the teaching role is not a necessary condition for successful scholarship, some form of scholarship appears to be a necessary condition for successful teaching over an extended period of time. As a result, the stress on teaching in community colleges may have led to a decline in the quality of teaching.
In an autobiographical essay on the importance of research for teaching, Hans A. Schmitt (1965), a Tulane history professor, argued that teaching wears one out, that one gets tired of it, and that it can become monotonous. Only the excitement of research can keep the teacher vital: "Take research out of a teacher's life and you condemn him (or her) to a robot existence" (Schmitt, 1965).
Twenty years after the appearance of Schmitt's comments, Parilla (1986) and Vaughan (1986) made similar observations. Since Schmitt's time the terms of the argument have changed to scholarship, faculty renewal, and burnout, but the message remains the same: teaching should not be separated from scholarship. Vaughan places his plea within a historical context and suggests that recent developments in the community college world have made the case for scholarship particularly compelling. The fact that new colleges are not being opened, that enrollments are declining, that funds for professional development are scarce, and that community college faculty are aging, all reinforce the importance of scholarship as a means of enhancing "both our performance and our image as professionals" (Vaughan, 1986, p. 14). These developments, along with the fact that community college professors have relatively few opportunities to teach a variety of courses, necessitate the development of a mechanism to prevent boredom and burnout. In short, the concern that universities have expressed about the impact of the aging of the faculty on the quality of scholarship (Oromaner, 1981) should be paralleled at community colleges by a concern for the impact of the graying process on the quality of teaching. This concern must involve an analysis of the contribution of scholarly activities to the quality of teaching.
RESEARCH ON SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING..... continued, please click the following link.
http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-924/scholar.htm
| This section was excerpted from Oromaner's ERIC ID: ED272248 I
n a study conducted by Pellino, Blackburn, and Boberg (1984), almost 90 percent of the respondents at research-oriented universities replied in the affirmative when asked "Are you actively involved in research which you expect to lead to publication?" Predictably, only 22 percent of the respondents at community colleges gave an affirmative response. In addition, approximately 60 percent of the community college respondents stated that they had not been active in such research since graduate school.
From an institutional perspective, however, the question is not appropriate for community college professors; it is certainly not relevant. An appropriate and relevant question is: "Are you actively involved in scholarship which you expect to lead to an increase in the quality of your teaching performance?" When asked to indicate the amount of time spent on an "activity you consider to be of a scholarly nature," excluding teaching and immediate classroom preparation, 95 percent of the community college professors indicated at least one hour per week; and over 20 percent indicated eleven or more hours. Unfortunately, although a great amount of knowledge has been generated concerning the development of quality research at the university, relatively little knowledge has been generated concerning the relationship between various forms of scholarship, including research, and the quality of teaching at the community college. In part, this reflects value and stratification systems in higher education and, in part, it reflects the separation of scholarship and teaching at the community college. | ibid-
Given the state of our knowledge, the author (Oromaner) proposed to adopt the principle, "Let a hundred flowers blossom." That is, the most liberal definitions of scholarship should be employed. Pellino, Blackburn and Boberg (1984) have identified six dimensions of scholarship:
1.professional activity;
2 research/publication;
3.artistic endeavor;
4.engagement with novel ideas;
5.community service;
6.and pedagogy.
Examples of each include reviewing articles for a journal; publishing an article; performing or exhibiting an artistic work; engaging in systematic study to gain new knowledge or acquire a new research technique; delivering a talk to a local civic or religious organization; and preparing a new (and extensive) syllabus for a course. The systematic processes involved in each of these activities will do much to strengthen teaching and to combat boredom and burnout. |  ![[Untitled]](http://image.wetpaint.com/image/1/c2nldAsd8jdDls6VizT8Yw5010/GW131H126 "[Untitled]")
Q: What is pedagogy/andragogy, where is research of, for and by 2-year Colleges?
Canonical educational theory sees pedagogical practices and curricular content as the conscious design of faculty and administrators. Consequently it offers a vocabulary of efficiency in understanding schools, their failings to be traced to ineffective coordination of instructional means and ends. For interpretative social s
cience that all looks like the wrong cast of characters. Since schools are cultural sites, and curricula cultural artifacts, what is really needed is an alternative vocabulary of commitment, practices, and tradition for understanding what are more like public symbols and rituals than products of rational calculation.
When schools are understood as cultural artifacts the conscious purposes and choices of the staff will seem less important. What moves into focus is the language of the participants and the social practice to which it gives meaning. Curricula become the public space where the informal, latent theoretical commitments of faculty members, departments, and divisions meet and interact. Often, as we saw in the case of the remedial/developmental accommodation, very different, even opposed, educational traditions can co-exist peacefully- or seem so.
The academic culture of community colleges is not so much ineffective as unintelligible. Because of their distinctive history of open-access institutions are incredibly complex cultural settings characterized by a diversity of pedagogical practices through which faculty unconsciously play out differing and sometimes conflicting educational commitments.- ibid | A: 2-year colleges are centers of educational opportunity. They are an American invention that put publicly funded higher education at close-to-home facilities, beginning nearly 100 years ago with Joliet Junior College. Since then, they have been inclusive institutions that welcome all who desire to learn, regardless of wealth, heritage, or previous academic experience. The process of making higher education available to the maximum number of people continues to evolve at 1,173 public and independent community colleges. When the branch campuses of community colleges are included, the number totals about 1,600. This section is your resource for community college statistics, historical information and facts.
The community college's mission is the fountain from which all of its activities flow. In simplest terms, the mission of the community college is to provide education for individuals, many of whom are adults, in its service region. Most community college missions have basic commitments to: - serve all segments of society through an open-access admissions policy that offers equal and fair treatment to all students
- a comprehensive educational program
- serve its community as a community-based institution of higher education
- teaching
- lifelong learning
Excerpted from The Community College Story by George B. Vaughan. | |
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