More on Teaching Stream Appointments

I wish I could say that I am astounded that YUFA members are even considering teaching stream appointments. Sadly, there is little that surprises me in the market-driven, instrumentalist university. Thanks to Craig Heron for provoking me.

1. In the Faculty of Education, we live with a teaching stream in the form of seconded appointments from school boards. This is not to disparage the obvious skills of seconded colleagues. It is rather to point out what I see as seconded faculty's anomalous position in the university. When I had attained a Masters degree and taught at various universities, I was accorded the title “professor” and was expected to design courses and carry out my teaching responsibilities in accordance with professorial protocols. This is not a matter of semantics; it is also not about elitism. It is about the intellectual expectations which are part of being a person who teaches in a university. I was not a “course director” and here semantics do matter. There is no pedagogic or organizational reason why seconded faculty cannot engage in research and some do. However, the Faculty of Education has not organized seconded faculty into the work of the Faculty so that they could engage in research with tenure-stream colleagues and grad students as part of their work, not in addition to their teaching. The field of education emphasizes teacher-research and reflective practice. It is curious and a missed opportunity that the Faculty of Education has not availed itself organizationally of the potential of secondees-as-researchers. With doctoral colleagues, Kristy Buccieri and Cam McDermid, we have written a dissenting piece, Not Only the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Reconjuring the PhD.

I emphasize the importance of research to teaching in that I cannot imagine how and what to teach without recourse to research – my own and that of the graduate students whom I supervise and teach. It is the restless curiosity of encounters with the thinking of others – in and out of books - which permits me to bring unusual associations and enthusiasm to my teaching. However, institutionally segregating seconded faculty from research has resulted in a de facto practice/theory split which is an ongoing feature of the work in the Faculty of Education despite discourse to the contrary. As well, seconded faculty bring with them their customary work culture of hierarchical organization; this does not fit well with professorial insistence on collegial decision-making. In the fall of 2010, during contentious discussion on how cut-backs would be managed in the Faculty of Education, I was informed by a seconded faculty member that he did not see involvement in the issue as part of his “portfolio of responsibilities”.

2. What could incite tenure stream professors to support the institutionalization of teaching stream appointments? Self interest and historical/comparative lack of understanding. On the latter, let me point to the case in point of British universities and Jan Newson and Claire Polster’s cogent Academic Callings: The University We Have Had, Now Have, and Could Have. Canadian Scholars Press.

With respect to self-interest, the value of professors is now measured in terms of how much grant money they can acquire; we are inundated with daily salvos in York's Yfile and the occasional decanal missive on this matter. Our “units” have research officers and our internal social media enable this monetary obsession. If SSHRC is no longer funding course release for grant holders and it is the expectation of the granting body that universities will absorb this cost - and it is really impossible to be administering grants and applying for new ones without course release - then self-interest mandates that professors support a teaching stream option. Such myopia makes tenure stream faculty competitive with one another in new ways and we scheme how to represent ourselves and our collaborations in textually embroidered ways. The intellectual acumen of the professoriate is diverted away from considered thinking and writing and even, perhaps, teaching, into discursive obfuscations. As a minor member of a recently successful SSHRC submission, I know of what I speak. Besides, when did it become necessary to get grants to do research? The professoriate would be better served by applying their talents to supporting and appointing junior colleagues. However, by my choice of words, I betray my thinking: professors are a part of a collective, not only individuals stepping on the necks of others to achieve fleeting notoriety.

3. Let me present the bona fides of my arguments. I am 59 years old, a woman and an Acadian from a working class background. I have benefitted from the opening up of university education in the 1970s. I am the only person in my immediate family who has gone to university following high school, and I am the only person in a widely extended family with a PhD. This is not a matter of pride but of fact. I taught in the public school system for 7 years and came late to graduate work at 28. I received my first tenure stream appointment when I was 35. Due to my “non-traditional career path”, I will not receive a very good pension. I was mentored by two leading (male) sociologists and would not have pursued graduate work had they not convinced me, in my late 20s, that I had a good mind. One of these mentors, Dr. Henry Veltmeyer, at Saint Mary’s University, also convinced me that undergraduate students deserve an education in critical thinking. It was and is Dr. Veltmeyer’s position that dissent is necessary in a democratic society. I am part of the “Canadianization movement” in Canadian universities of the 1970s and 80s wherein I learned that I needed no longer to feel inferior to the supposed intellectual superiority of British and American thinkers. I learned that academics do not have to be elitists; that we can choose to be facilitators of a learning process in which students can learn to learn for themselves not just what they are intended to receive in an education for pacification; students can read and think widely and come to have authentic choices about what to think and do. I learned that I had a responsibility to make a place for those hitherto excluded from academic work - people very much like I am.

Commenting on this Story is closed.