This week, Teaching Thursday is joined by a guest blogger, Dallas Deforest. He offers two case studies that compare his experiences teaching at two different universities in Ohio. As the number of adjunct faculty increase across the country, more and more faculty will share Dallas’ experience of teaching at multiple universities simultaneous. While this undoubtedly presents simply technical challenges (two different types of students, different academic calendars, different faculty and student expectations), as Dallas’ post notes, this will also present opportunities to deal with larger pedagogical and theoretical issues that teaching at one place for many years will often obscure.
Dallas DeForest, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Ohio State University
Last fall I was an adjunct instructor at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, in the Classics department. I taught one section of their Greco-Roman Civilization course to approximately 75 students. It was a welcome change for me, since I had taught only Western Civilization I in the history department at Ohio State University previously. Western Civ.—an absurdly structured and outdated course in 21st century academia—can grow tiresome fairly fast, so I welcomed the opportunity to teach a more focused course in my field of “expertise.” The experience was, on the whole, a good one. Many of my students were hard-working and interested in the subject matter, and I was able to prep and deliver a course that I hope to have the opportunity to teach in the future.
In many ways, WSU and OSU are similar. Both are public institutions; both offer graduate degree programs (WSU mainly masters level with a few Ph.D. programs; OSU the whole gamut); both have study abroad and honors programs; both have a litany of social groups and extracurricular activities for the students; both have good research libraries (Dunbar and Thompson); both have comparable in-state tuition rates; and both draw their students overwhelmingly from Ohio.
But there are important differences, too, especially in admissions policies and the student body (and its size: c. 12,800 vs. c. 40,200 undergraduates). WSU maintains an open admissions policy for all who meet a series of minimum requirements. For Ohio residents a 2.0 GPA, 18 ACT composite or 840 SAT critical reading and mathematics score and a college preparatory curriculum are necessary; for non-Ohio residents a 2.5 GPA, 20 ACT composite or 960 SAT critical reading and mathematics score and a college preparatory curriculum are required. OSU uses a closed admissions policy. The academic backgrounds of the student bodies are also markedly different:
Standardized Tests:
Average, middle 50%: WSU OSU
SAT math: 430-570 590-680
SAT critical reading: 440-550 540-650
SAT writing: N/A 540-640
ACT: 18-24 25-30
High School Class Standing: WSU OSU
Top 10%: 14% 53%
Top 25%: 35% 89%
Top 50%: 65% 99%
Yet perhaps the most glaring difference comes in freshmen retention rates and overall graduation rates:
WSU OSU
Freshmen retention rate: 70% 92%
% graduating in 4 years: 18% 51%
In 5 years: 37% 74%
In 6 years: 41% 75%
(data may be found here, here, here and here.)
For my classes at Ohio State it has been fairly easy to judge the abilities and limits of my students, and I’ve framed my course content appropriately around these (as I see it). The student body is relatively uniform in terms of its academic background, which is due, in part at least, to the admissions policy. I typically have a couple of standouts in my classes, a couple of poor performers, while the majority consists of average B-level students. Most are full-time students, aged 18-22.
Planning and executing my course at Wright State was more challenging, for several reasons (though the faculty at WSU were very helpful from the start and I structured my course based on their recommendations—reducing my assigned readings and eliminating the major writing assignment I have in place at OSU). First, there are the differences in academic skills and backgrounds noted above. WSU also has a much higher part-time student population compared to OSU (16% to .08%) and many of these students are adult learners; many students in my class were going to school part-time (or full-time) while maintaining full-time jobs, for example. Several approached me at the beginning of the quarter to tell me that, because of work, they would have to miss 40-60% of the course altogether. No such thing has ever occurred during my 6 years of teaching at OSU, where there are few part-time students and the adult learners are, generally, taking courses for fun after retirement. Many more missed between 25-30% of class because of time conflicts with work or family. It is difficult for me to gauge the academic level of this group of students because they missed so much class time, but they didn’t generally do very well in the course, despite my efforts to help them through it.
I also had some students who seemed wholly unprepared for college course work. Most of these were standard college freshmen, aged 18 or 19, who were the products of poor primary and secondary schools systems (my theory, at least). Some in this group attended class only sporadically, even skipping exams and quizzes, while insisting upon maintaining their enrollment in the course (often vociferously via email); others attended regularly and worked hard. This lower tier of students had tremendous trouble digesting concepts, remembering basic factual information and comprehending the reading assignments. I spent many of my office hours with those who attended regularly, working slowly through the reading assignments and course material. But nothing in my graduate education had prepared me to teach (basic) literacy skills effectively (which is, sadly, what was often needed in these cases). My sister-in-law, who has a Masters in education with a focus in literacy studies certainly could have done a better job. Yet there I was, and suddenly this was a part of my job, for which I was neither qualified nor prepared. This group of students struggled throughout the course, though the ones who attended all passed. Again, this isn’t something I’ve encountered at OSU.
Yet alongside these students, which represented approximately 1/3 of my class, were those who compared well to an OSU class: average B-level students, and also some very elite students, who could excel, in my opinion, in just about any college setting. The latter were presumably recipients of WSU’s merit-based academic awards, which by the numbers demonstrate that these students are at or above average when compared to OSU students.
My experience at Wright State left me with a lot to think about. First, although we tend to think of state schools as a monolithic category of sorts arrayed against private schools, this is a false understanding of the college system. State schools vary widely in nearly every conceivable academic category and in the composition of their student bodies (something which is probably obvious to many, but still isn’t fully reflected in our discussions of the academic system). Teaching at one could be markedly different than teaching at another and could require an entirely different skill set. My WSU class ran the whole gamut: elite recipients of merit-based awards all the way down to students with minimal literacy skills—a range that simply isn’t present at OSU. How does one teach effectively to such a group? How does one make sure the course material is sufficiently rigorous and meaningful for the elite students but also manageable for the those toward the bottom of the class academically (esp. for those who are trying really hard but were the products of poor primary and secondary schools systems)? I attempted to do this by varying the level of my lecture material, mixing readings and making some optional, and providing numerous options for students to answer on my exams. But I’m not sure this really worked at all, nor am I certain what I could have done differently, which forced me to think about the implications of open admissions policies, academia’s response to the needs of adult learners and whether college teachers can (reasonably) be expected to offer the remedial instruction some students require when they arrive on campus. Can we realistically be expected to be both “Professors,” with a capital P, and basic literacy instructors, making up for the failures of the secondary school system? Are open admissions policies related at all to poor graduation rates? Is course content diluted to an unacceptable degree as a result of this? As the need for adult retraining increases in a 21st century knowledge-based economy, are the nation’s universities in a position to meet this demand? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I’d love to hear what people think about them.
Another question to consider: which group of students stands to gain more from a liberal arts education? Or do the separate groups need a liberal arts education for different reasons?