Hawai‘i Pacific University • Teaching and Learning Center • http://tlc.hpu.edu

Going Backstage in Students’ Livesby Kevin Brown

1 Going Backstage in Students’ Lives

4 Choices of Successful Students

5 Faculty Development Grants

7 When Educators Speak

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Contents

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The Po‘okela newsletter is a bimonthly publication featur-ing articles of interest to faculty regarding pedagogy, scholarship, and service at Hawai‘i Pacific University.

Opinions in this newsletter are those of the authors. Articles are chosen for their power to encour-age reflection and discussion and do not reflect endorsement by the Teaching and Learning Center or Hawai‘i Pacific University.

LLast spring, I was able to play a minor role in

our theater department’s production of Pride and Prejudice. I had one line consisting of two words, and I was a dancer in the two scenes that required dancing in the background. In the midst of rehears-als, students would often either forget that I was there or that I was a professor, so I was able to see and hear them in ways that faculty members seldom do.

In some cases, I heard comments I would prefer not to hear as a professional, especially ones concerning my peers, so I would often drift away at that point. However, there were two insights that I gleaned from this experience that I’m not sure I would have gotten otherwise, or at least not to the same degree.

First, students these days are busy—much busier than I thought they were, and much busier than my generation was in college. Even those of us who were minor characters in the play had to be at almost every rehearsal for

most of the time, which was between two and three hours, depending on the night. In the two weeks leading up to the production, especially in the week ahead of time, we were often there for three to four hours a day. The students who served as costumers or stage managers had to be there even longer, arriving before the actors did and leaving afterward, not including the meet-ings they attended throughout the week.

On top of that, many of the students were also involved with a series of scenes that were going to be performed in the weeks after our production closed, serving as either actors or directors, sometimes both. So they would often have rehearsals after ours ended, beginning at 10 or 11 p.m. Those who were in a lighting and set-design class would tell me about working on their projects at 3 or 4 a.m., as they all had to share time on the light board and that was the only available time for them to do anything.

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I have only mentioned their theater commitments, but many of the students were not even drama majors, so they had other obligations as well. Some were in Greek clubs, others were involved in honor societies. Two of the women played rugby, so they had afternoon practices, as well as games almost every weekend.

Many of the students also had jobs. My university is a private institution with a large population of first-generation college students (roughly 40 percent), so they are often struggling to pay tuition every semester. I have even had students who honestly could not afford textbooks. They have to work even if they would prefer not to, just like so many other students across the country.

Like many institutions, we require students to complete 20 hours of community service each semester. Because I teach at a church-related university, students are often involved in local churches, too. Some of them take part in student government or local politics, while others work as teaching assistants in their departments.

Needless to say, none of them talked about playing Halo 3 for hours on end during their free time.

All of that information connects to the second insight I had during the play’s production, which is that students today do not study as much as my generation did in college. Even though I worked 35 to 45 hours a week in various jobs as an undergraduate, and carried a full course load, I still had long blocks of time to do my schoolwork. I would go to the library in the afternoons if I worked at night, or vice versa, and spend hours reading a novel or working on a paper for a class. I would use time on Saturday to sift through articles and books for research papers and projects, even if I had to work a six-hour shift later on. I seldom had to read books in snatches or write papers in between customers at the grocery store where I worked (though I did read a few books there, most notably Great Expectations, which almost everyone had a reaction to, by the way). But most of the time, I could find a long stretch of time to just sit and digest the work I was dealing with.

Students today, with their many and varied commit-ments, just do not study that way. When they were not on stage, they were working on their homework in the wings, as they had to be ready to go on stage when necessary or to move furniture on and off. Only one other student could come downstairs, as I did, and actually focus on his work. The rest would have laptops with them, and they would write a few sentences, then go on stage and deliver their lines before exiting to write a few more.

They took the same approach to reading, although the only reading they could do during performances was online, as it was too dark to read a textbook offstage, though a few of them tried anyway. It should come as no surprise, then, when we read essays that do not quite cohere or see responses to a reading that miss a key and obvious point.

The best example I saw of this approach to studying was what our assistant stage manager did one night of our per-formance. She had rushed downstairs during intermission, then come back up to complete her night of work. I asked her what she was doing, and she explained that she was working on a quiz. It had been posted online, and it had to be completed by sometime that evening. So she went downstairs during the intermission to read the question, then spent the second half of the performance thinking about how she would answer it. After the show, she went home, wrote out the answer, and posted it. All of her think-ing about the quiz happened while she was managing the second half of our performance.

As professors, we often have the idea that students sit down, read the assignment, think about it, then write out a response—one action following the other, which is how we would proceed.

However, our students simply do not have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to approach their assignments that way. Instead, they grab whatever they can, whenever they can, and make their responses as coherent as possible in as brief a time as possible. Knowing that this is the way they work causes me to be surprised when I see work that is intelligible, not the other way around.

Now some faculty members may argue that students should simply be less involved. If they have to work, they should cut out some extracurricular activities and focus on their academic work. That approach is certainly the one I took in college, but our students are not in the same position as I was. When English majors ask me for a letter of recommendation, I tell them that it will write itself if they’ve been solid students in my courses, been active in our English honor society (which I sponsor), and have worked in our department’s writing center or as a teaching assistant for one of our composition courses.

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Going Backstage in Students’ Lives continued

Kevin Brown

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Going Backstage in Students’ Lives continued

However, none of them have only done that work, as they know that much more is required of them when they apply to graduate school or go out on the job market. What I mention is the bare minimum, and they know that it is because they hear their peers talking inside and outside of class. They feel they must be competitive, as the woman on their right is president of the student government while the man on their left is doing an internship in a local politician’s office.

I’m not sure how my newly acquired knowledge will affect my teaching, or whether it should. There is no way I can make students give up some extracurricular duties or block out long hours to focus solely on their homework. I suppose I could simply give them fewer assignments so

that they can focus more time on each one—aiming for depth rather than breadth. Or I could focus my teaching on skills, with the idea that students could then apply those skills to new knowledge after they graduate.

Neither approach satisfies me much at all, nor do I think they would serve our students well. I will have to keep thinking about how I can teach students whose lives are so unlike mine in ways that give them what they need to suc-ceed in this brave new world.

Kevin Brown is an associate professor of English at Lee University, in Tennessee. This article originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 14, 2009. Reprinted with permission.

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What if the tables were turned and the faculty’s evaluations of students were being questioned? Let us consider the eight areas of concern from this point of view. How much evidence could we provide to convince students that faculty judgments about their learning are based on solid objective criteria? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that the performance of students with excellent ability is not used to set the standard for the rest of the students in the class? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that most faculty grading schemes are not affected by the attentive, polite, conforming, noncreative student? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that what is taught in the course is useful in other courses, or outside the university? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that the course examinations are both reliable and valid? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that an instructor’s marks are not affected by the size of the class, the gender of the student, the time of day that the course is offered, whether the student is taking the course as a requirement or as an elective, whether the student is a major or nonmajor, and so on? How much evidence could we provide to convince students that instructors who had a particularly rough time when they went to college do not tend to be just as rough on their students when they get them in class? And, finally, what evidence could we provide to convince students that course examina-tions are useful in improving their learning?

~ Taken from Lawrence Aleamoni’s 1987 article “Typical Faculty Concerns about Student Evaluation of Teaching” (NDTL 31, 1987, pp. 25-31). Reproduced in the Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD) listserv, September 22, 2009 by Matt Kaplan, director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan.

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CHOICES OF SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS (Find strategies for promoting these eight success principles at www.OnCourseWorkshop.com)

1. ...see themselves as victims, believing that what happens to them is determined primarily by exter-nal forces such as fate, luck, and powerful others.

2. ...have difficulty sustaining motivation, often feeling depressed, frustrated, and/or resentful about a lack of direction in their lives.

3. ...seldom identify specific actions needed to accomplish a desired outcome. And when they do, they tend to procrastinate.

4. ...are solitary, seldom requesting, even reject-ing, offers of assistance from those who could help.

5. ...make important choices unconsciously, being directed by self-sabotaging habits and out-dated life scripts.

6. ...resist learning new ideas and skills, viewing learning as fearful or boring rather than as mental play.

7. ...live at the mercy of strong emotions such as anger, depression, anxiety, or a need for instant gratification.

8. ...doubt their competence and personal value, feeling inadequate to create their desired outcomes and experiences.

From Skip Downing. On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life, Houghton Mifflin. 6th ed. Reprinted with permission.

1. ...accept PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, seeing themselves as the primary cause of their outcomes and experiences.

2. ...discover SELF-MOTIVATION, finding pur-pose in their lives by discovering personally meaning-ful goals and dreams.

3. ...master SELF-MANAGEMENT, consistently planning and taking purposeful actions in pursuit of their goals and dreams.

4. ...employ INTERDEPENDENCE building mutually supportive relationships that help them achieve their goals and dreams (while helping others do the same).

5. ...gain SELF-AWARENESS, consciously employing behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that keep them on course.

6. …adopt LIFE-LONG LEARNING, finding valuable lessons and wisdom in nearly every experi-ence they have.

7. ...develop EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, effectively managing their emotions in support of their goals and dreams.

8. ...BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES, seeing them-selves capable, lovable, and unconditionally worthy human beings.

SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS STRUGGLING STUDENTS

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Faculty Development Grants

Russell Alfonso, assistant professor of humanities, is award-ed for presenting his paper, “Confucius and Coltrane: Creativity and Affective Improvisation in Chinese Culture and American Jazz” at the SACP Annual Conference in Los Angeles, California, 2009.

Dale Allison, professor of nursing, is awarded for attending the 36th Annual Academy of Nursing Meeting & Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, November, 2009.

Antonina Bauman, instructor of marketing, is award-ed for chairing two roundtable sessions on “Formative Assessment and WebCT tools and Authentic assessments in Online Business Classes” at the E-Learn 2009 Conference in Vancouver, Canada, October, 2009.

Robert Borofsky, professor of anthropology, is awarded for presenting his paper, “Manuscripts We Are Seeking at California University Press and What This Alliance of Presses Means” at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December, 2009.

Patricia Burrell, associate professor of nursing, is awarded for presenting her paper, “Practitioners’ Perceptions of their Cultural Competence with Hawai‘ian Clients: Results of a Community Education Program” at the 35th Anniversary of the Transcultural Nursing Society, 1974-2009: “Resettlement and Resurgence: The Roles of Transcultural Nursing” Conference in Seattle, Washington, October, 2009.

Kathleen Cassity, assistant professor of English, is awarded for presenting her paper, “Folk Persuasion: Exploring the Rhetoric of Authenticity in American Folk Music” at the Conference on College Composition & Communication in Louisville, Kentucky, March, 2010.

Guk Hyun Justin Cho, associate professor of management, is awarded for presenting his paper, “The Influence of South Korean Television Dramas on Hawai‘i Residents’ Perceptions of South Korea as a Potential Tourist Destination” at the 15th

Asia Pacific Tourism Association Conference in Incheon, Korea, July, 2009.

Kenneth Cook, professor of linguistics, is awarded for pre-senting his paper, “True, False, and Not-So-Obvious Cognates in Samoan and Hawai‘i” at the Eleventh International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics in Aussois, France, June, 2009.

Ronnie Crane, associate professor of mathematics, is award-ed for presenting her paper, “Online Homework: Does it Work?” at the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco, California, January, 2009.

Jon Davidann, professor of history, is awarded for attend-ing the American Historical Association Conference in San Diego, California, January, 2010.

ReNel Davis, associate professor of nursing, is awarded for presenting her paper, “The Cultural Competence Journey: Integrating a Multidemensional Approach into Nursing Education and Practice” at the 25th Annual Conference of the Transcultural Nursing Society in Seattle, Washington, October, 2009.

Stephen Dye, professor of physics, is awarded for pre-senting his paper, “Geo-neutrinos” at the XI International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics” in Rome, Italy, July, 2009.

Patricia Ellerson, assistant professor of psychology, is awarded for her poster presentation, “Social Distance and its Effects on Judgments of Moral Transgressions” at the APS Annual Conference in San Francisco, California, May, 2009.

Julie Elting, assistant professor of nursing, is awarded for attending the Maternal and Low Risk Newborn Nursing Conference in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, February, 2010.

Jiasong Fang, associate professor of chemistry, is awarded for presenting his paper titled, “Microbial Community Structure

The Faculty Development Policies & Activities Committee has recommended the following 30 faculty development appli-cations which have subsequently been approved by the President, for a total allocation of $43,423.82. The grants will go to fund a variety of professional development initiatives by faculty at Hawai’i Pacific University and reflect the steady growth in scholarship activities among HPU faculty members.

and Physiological Status of Different Types of Biofilms in an Acid Mine Drainage Site Determined by Phospholipid Analysis” at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California, December, 2009.

Susan Fox-Wolfgramm, professor of management, is awarded for attending the 36th Annual OBTC Teaching Conference for Management Educators in Charleston, South Carolina, June, 2009.

Marc Jason Gilbert, professor of history, NEH Endowed Chair in World History, is awarded for presenting his paper, “Feeding the Flames of Post-Classical Commerce and Information: Cambodian “Firehouses, “Indian Caravan Serais, Mongol Yams and Inca Chasquis in World History” at the 2nd Conference on Combodia in World History, Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, January, 2010.

John Hart, professor of communication, is awarded for presenting his paper, “History of the Organization and the Duties of the Board of Directors” at the Little Big Horn Associates Conference, Billings, Montana, June, 2009.

Carlos Juarez, professor of political science, is awarded for attending the 5th Annual ODNI Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence Summer Seminar in Seattle, Washington, August, 2009.

William Kazarian, assistant professor of English, is awarded for presenting his paper, “Examination of the Careers of Adjunct Faculty in Higher Education: Intellectual Curiosity – Migrant Laborers: How Adjunct Teaching Services are Utilized and Valued” at the Intellectbase International Consortium Academic Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, October, 2009.

Michael Kelley, associate professor of psychology, is award-ed for attending the Buddhist Recovery Network Conference in Los Angeles, California, October, 2009.

Jean Kirschenmann, assistant professor ESL/Applied Linguistics, is awarded for presenting her paper, “Building a Classroom Library with Student-authored Texts” at the 17th Annual Korea TESOL International Conference in Seoul, Korea, October, 2009.

Scott Okamoto, associate professor of social work, is awarded for presenting his papers, “The Development and

Validation of the Hawaiian Youth Drug Offers Survey, Gender Differences in Drug Offers of Hawaiian Youth in Rural Communities: A Mixed Methods Analysis, and The Social Contexts of Drug Offers and their Relationship to Drug Use of Rural Hawaiian Youth” at the 14th Annual Conference of the Society for Social Work and Research in San Francisco, California, January, 2010.

George Satterfield, associate professor of history, is award-ed for presenting his paper, “French Partisan Warfare: From Matchlock to Flintlock (1670-1750)” at the Society for Military History 76th Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, April, 2009.

Frances Spohn, associate professor of nursing, is awarded for her poster presentation titled, “The Relationship Between Student Nurses’ Perception of Caring Dimensions and Their Caring Self-Efficacy” at the Global Nursing Education: The Role of the Professional Doctorate Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, October, 2009.

Mark Tjarks, associate professor of English, is awarded for presenting his plays, “Two; “Folie A Deux” and “The Woman Who Married the Wrong Man” at the 16th Original Play Festival in Kona, Hawai‘i, August, 2009.

Mark Tjarks, associate professor of English, is awarded for presenting his paper, “Diagetic and Non-diagetic Tensions in O Brother Where Art Thou” at the Conference on College Composition & Communication in Louisville, Kentucky, March, 2010.

Jeanine Tweedie, assistant professor of nursing, is awarded for presenting her paper titled, “Going to the Movies: Teaching Transcultural Nursing to Digital Natives” at the Transcultural Nursing Society, 35th Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington, October, 2009.

Arthur Whatley, professor of global leadership and sustain-able development, is awarded for presenting his paper titled, “Sustainability as the Core Theme in Graduate Management Education: A Synopsis of Two Programs” at the Management International Conference in Barcelona, Spain, November, 2008.

Houston Wood, professor of English, is awarded for his attendance at the Basic Mediation Training in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, September 2009.

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Faculty Development Grants continued

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The first of the new breed of compressed generations was the so-called Generation X, consist-ing of those born after 1965, who are supposedly characterized by qualities of independence, resilience, and adaptability. Tragically, before that generation could even reach its teenage years, it was killed off and replaced by Generation Y, consisting of those born after 1977. But it seems that Generation Y was unhappy with the label, and one can understand why. The letter X carries with it an aura of mystery, while Y is merely the letter after X, always playing second fiddle. Even in graphs, X is the independent variable, adventurously staking out new ground, while Y is the plodding dependent variable, following along in X’s wake. Who wants to be part of that crowd? So Generation Y was rechristened as the Millennials, a catchy title for those coming of age at the turn of the century, and it has stuck.

~ Mano Singham, director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education and adjunct associate professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. Quoted from his article “More than Millenials: Colleges Must Look Beyond Generational Stereotypes” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 2009.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

~ Henry David Thoreau, author and philosopher.

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

~ Carl Rogers (1902-1987), psychologist

WHEN EDUCATORS SPEAK…

We would like to hear from you! If you have original quotes or anecdotes that you would like to share with other faculty about your teaching experiences here at HPU, please

send them to the Teaching and Learning Center along with your name, your title, and your permission to publish them in the Po‘okela.