Inside the Current Issue

Reports from the Front: The Adjuncting Experience

In this special section... The Tensions of Teaching Marriah Star Critical Adjuncting Kimora Reflections of an Adjunct Teacher Daphna El-Roy On Love, Hate and Adjuncting Dan Skinner Graduate Students: Sign your Union Cards! Andrea Morrell Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization Spencer Sunshine The Value of Student Evaluations Jonathan R. Wynn Experts Ask: Do We Need Adjunct Pedagogy? Mark Wilson The New Proletarian Academy James Hoff Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent Szidonia Haragos

Experts Ask: Do We NEED Adjunct Pedagogy?

Mark Wilson

Adjuncting comes in for a certain amount of criticism from pundits professing to be concerned about the quality of undergraduate education. But it turns out that those who question the adjuncting process, whereby harried graduate students minimally trained in pedagogy teach crucial subjects to impressionable freshmen, may not be up on all the latest research.

"Our most surprising conclusion is that teaching cannot be taught," says Dr. Frieda von Kind of the Bathesda, Maryland Center for Instructional Education. "Teaching, our research strongly indicates, can only be learned."

Dr. von Kind's research, published in the latest issue of Science Digest, followed two groups of budding academics. The first, Group A, was given a series of interactive classes in pedagogy early in their graduate education, taught by masters in their fields. The control cohort, Group B, was furnished with a similar curriculum taught by mice. The study followed members of both groups through their university teaching careers all the way into dotage, the technical term for which is distinguished emeritus professor.

The results were stunning. The findings clearly showed, with a strong correlation of p < 0.005, that regardless of their experience of educational instruction members of both groups routinely ignored all pedagogical principles and simply copied to the letter whatever their own favorite professors had done. This finding was particularly striking for those members of Group B whose most meaningful educational relationship had been with the instructors of their mice-taught control curriculum.

"They scurried up and down in front of their classes and chewed on their students' papers just as their old heroes had done," Dr. von Kind said of these respondents. "Most interestingly, this technique still left them in the top quartile of professors at certain private universities."

Dr. von Kind noted that her research corroborated the results of a similar earlier study performed in France, in which the control instruction was conducted by a rutabaga.

The Advocate has obtained a list of the participants in the study and was able to track down several of them to discuss the results.

Evan McNulty (CalTech): "You know, I was in Group A, the instructed group, so you'd think I would have been the poster child for the glorified, Yale-approved, high-falutin' Accepted Teaching Process and all that crap. But the thing is, every time our pedagogy group went through some damn fool idea of how you're supposed to run your class, it was all wrong. Like fondling. They told us in our pedagogy class that we're not supposed to fondle the students, especially not during the lecture. And I was thinking to myself, that's not the way Dr. Woodnut handled his classes. Christ, he'd grab two or three students per class, and at least one on the way out; boys, girls, didn't matter. And I learned everything I know about philosophy and ethics from Dr. Woody, we called him. So I sat there in those damn fool pedagogy classes thinking, 'This is bull.' I tuned out on the whole thing and went my own way, and I'm sure my students at the eleven great universities I've worked at so far would thank me for it if I were allowed to contact them."

Jen Park (Northwestern): "One thing I learned from the mice is that you have to do what's natural for you. You can't approach teaching from any other perspective than your own character and skills. Fortunately, I have a special talent for mime. You'd be surprised how effectively you can communicate things like, say, Napoleon III's manipulation of the Crimean War through mime. Though I must admit that my lecture on World War I borrows heavily from the work of my mentor, Dr. Marceau."

Kevin Montgomery-Scott (Excalibur College): "It is in my estimation a fallacy to consider that the educational process should be undertaken in a manner that in the slightest degree deviates from the high scholastic calling to which we all, as academicians, fervently aspire, and consequently it is therefore a matter of most grave concern to myself and other of a like cast of mind that, in keeping with the general denigration of our once-so-carefully-guarded and much-heralded culture there should now come a most ill-advised movement which seeks to intrude accessibility and clarity into the pedagogical process. I strenuously oppose such efforts inasmuch as the introduction of consideration for the extent to which students apprehend the fruits of our academic labor is a dire threat to our cherished ability to concentrate on the true role of the scholar, which is to say the limited publication of copiously footnoted reference monographs for the exclusive use of next generation of select denizens of the tour d'ivoire."

Ellen Wheelock (Dartmouth): "Look, teaching is organic. It's like life. You can't impose order on it. You have to just - you know, it's like this orange. Or better yet take this credenza. This credenza doesn't have order imposed on it! It just is, and you respond to it, and you say, that's a credenza, and this is an orange, and that's a Honda motor-bike. It's just the way things are. You can't compare a Honda motor-bike and an orange, and yet in a way I just did. Because there's a connection there. Things are. And they always will be, most of the time. That's the beauty of it."

Terrence Kudzu (Kansas State): "When I was an undergrad, I walked into my Intro to Sociology class on my very first day of school and immediately connected with our professor, Mr. Mertz. It turns out that he was an adjunct and a third-year grad student, and he was just as scared as I was! I responded to him because I understood what he was feeling. His trembling was my trembling, his sweat was my sweat. And as he mumbled and stumbled through those fourteen weeks of lectures (they seemed so much longer!), I strained to hear every word he said, and I think I learned more that way, reaching out and meeting him half-way, than if he'd been confident or assertive. Sadly, he died not long after in a tragic laundromat accident. But when I stood up in front of my first 200-student lecture class as an adjunct myself, I felt the spirit of Eugene Mertz live again through me."