Academia and Physical Pain: A Conversation with Sandra Chamberlain-Snider

Well folks, here we are, headed into one of the stranger April long weekends in recent memory.  Wherever you are, we hope you and yours are healthy, sheltered, and well in these strange and tender times.

To ring in the days off, we thought we’d share a post about self-care.

As scholars, we talk a lot about disability, and as teachers, we tend to think about mental health provisions for our students. But, chronic pain sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of hidden disability, if it’s noted at all.

Below, Kelsey and Sandra Chamberlain-Snider, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, chat about their experiences with chronic pain.

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In my work for this blog and in my daily life, I write and talk about dozens of issues related to post secondary instruction and my experiences as an emerging scholar. Pain is rarely one of these topics.

Yet, physical pain has been one of the constants in my scholarly life. I’ve had roaming stiffness and/or pain in multiple areas of my body for years. Officially speaking, I have been diagnosed with a systemic form of arthritis. In reality, things are a bit murkier, and the diagnosis is closer to my rheumatologist’s’ current best guess.

In chatting about my experiences with friends and colleagues, folks have often disclosed that they, too, are quietly navigating on-going challenges related to pain, illness, or injury. (Strange coincidence side-note: Kim and I have EXACTLY the same autoimmune / chronic pain diagnosis.) While I don’t want anyone to experience discomfort, I have often found these conversations heartening: they provide new ideas or resources and remind me that I’m not alone.

So, I thought I would curate such a conversation for this blog.

To do so, I reached out to my friend and colleague, Sandra Chamberlain-Snider – a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, who, like me was diagnosed with a systemic form of arthritis during her graduate studies.

Sandra Chamberlain-Snider

KB: Can you tell me a little about your journey with pain as a PhD student?

SCS: I’d had pain for years but I’m in my middle-fifties. I figured it was part of life. And, I’d also had skin issues for a long time. My GP had been treating me for eczema. In 2016, I got a blood infection from the cracks in my feet, and he sent me to a dermatologist. He took one look at my skin and said: “That’s not eczema. That’s psoriasis.” That kicked things off. Then, a year and a half ago, I started seeing a rheumatologist who diagnosed me with psoriatic arthritis.

Now, the skin issues come and go. Sometimes, it’s great. But, the pain has been a constant. It’s difficult because it’s in your hands and you’re trying to write or type or even look half-way professional with colleagues, or you are interviewing someone and suddenly your hand will cramp up and it’s not like I can just get up and leave the room and shake it off. It became a bit of an issue.

For folks with musculoskelatal pain, there are lots of “tools” for self-massage, rolling, and stretching. Many of these can be purchased for a fraction of the price at your local dollar store: bouncy balls can be used for trigger points, rolling pins can be used as rollers etc.

KB: I get that. I have a few psoriasis patches and roaming pain and stiffness. The pain comes and goes from lots of different places including my left big toe, my left ankle, my right knee, both of my hips, my lower back, the knuckles on my left hand, my right wrist, both my shoulders, and my neck. Also, I currently can’t fully bend my middle or ring finger on my right hand, which all the doctors describe as – and I’m quoting here – “weird.” But, the relatively recent addition of pain in my hands has added an extra degree of urgency because it directly affects my ability to work.

SCS: For me, I know that’s a good part of why I’m in my seventh year of my PhD. My hands only give me so much time during the day. Some days are good. I can get a few hours in. Some days, I get half an hour in and then I have to take a break. And, you know how hard it is to go back into writing or researching when you’ve been interrupted in the middle.

KB: I totally do. Writing is a fragile art. Or, at least it is for me. Especially with heavy-thinking work: it takes time to ease into. If I get pulled away from it, I often have a hard time finding my way back.

SCS: Yes! I try to explain that to my husband all the time.

KB: And, there’s also a strange balance of figuring out when to attend to the pain and when to push through. My friends – many of whom are disability studies scholars – remind me that it’s important to pay attention to my body and that working more slowly can be an act of resistance. (For more on this, Petra Kuppers’ work is an excellent starting place.) I’m trying, but it’s … ahem … still a work in progress.

On an everyday level, I spend a fair chunk of time trying to find “hacks” to make my working conditions easier: I have figured out that suspenders let me keep ice on my shoulders while typing; I have crafted a standing desk from an ironing board (highly recommend); and I have managed to troubleshoot my way through the logistics of working lying down.

One of Kelsey’s crowning achievements: a do-it-yourself set up for working lying down. If anyone wants to try, the key is that you still need proper eye-line ergonomics, which means you need to align your forehead with the top third of the screen.

I’m super pleased with myself on most of these discoveries. But, I do find that simple things – like sitting ergonomics – are made harder by the structures of academia.

In the last six years, I have variously worked as a graduate student, sessional instructor, and postdoctoral researcher. But, I’ve never had a permanent office. Compared to the systemic discrimination and barriers that so many people encounter, this hardly constitutes an issue but it means that I can’t curate my working space.

SCS: Or, the space isn’t there when you’re able to use it. In 2016, we [Sandra’s family] got kicked out of our rental and we had to move quickly. In the new place, I have this little room to do work in. Which is great. I’m feeling good and ready to go. But, then my husband decides to pull out the ceiling for nine months, so I was working in the dining room area with two dogs, and I couldn’t get any work done. And, I went to the local library and the universities to work, but it wasn’t as efficient. So, finally, nine months later, everything was stable, but then the pain came. And, it was like you walk two steps forward and then get pushed back.

I [Kelsey] have experimented with loads of apps that help track pain and/or body cycles (pain, movement, menstrual cycle, sleep etc). Some help. Some don’t. The ones that do help offset some of the mental tracking labour.

KB: Totally, and it doesn’t only impact writing and researching; it also affects teaching.

Last year, I was mid-way through a class on performance and archives, and my pain suddenly flared. It was intense enough that I felt light-headed. At the break, I took myself to the washroom and had a very earnest conversation:

“Kelsey,” I said to myself. “Is there any chance you’re going to pass out? Because, if there is, you need to call off class.”

After a bit of back and forth, I decided I was okay to continue.

In retrospect, I think I’d try to handle that differently by signalling to my students I wasn’t feeling well or ending the class early. But, I often think about that moment because it drew my attention to how few resources were available to me to mitigate the situation.

Unlike elementary or high school teachers, university instructors don’t have colleagues down the hallway who can step in. I can ask people to cover classes, but pain isn’t predictable. And, even if it was, there isn’t a pool of substitute teachers. Usually, I’m asking a colleague, and I often need to bank some of those favours for conference travel or the like.

SCS: I think, too, it’s part cultural: When do you ask for help?

KB: Oh yeah … totally.

SCS: We’re academics. Even though there’s lots of issues and precarity, many of us are fairly privileged in that we get to study what we want to study. So, you’re not always quick to call out. Or to ask for a favour.

KB: And more generally, patriarchy, neo-liberalism, global capitalism – all the “isms” really – tend to belittle interdependence and asking for help. I’m trying to apply concepts from anti-oppression groups, disabilities communities, and critical disability studies to my everyday practices, but it’s not always easy.

Let’s talk about chronic and other kinds of pain, not only in private discussions over a beverage of choice, but also with our colleagues, students, and institutions.

SCS: And, when you’re in pain, you’re not always the most even-tempered person. My husband and I have been in each other’s lives for over forty years and he’s gone through some suffering as well. The last couple of months have been particularly difficult because we’re both in pain. And occasionally I’m like, “Oh my God, are we becoming this squabbling old couple?” But you have to step back and recognize what’s happening, which is, in the moment, so hard.

KB: Yes. I’d like to say that my experiences with pain make me more empathetic, and sometimes they do. But, when I’m having intense amounts of pain, that’s not always true.

And not all the work is personal. Some of it has to be broader. I’m trying – where I can – to push for, and model, systemic changes.

As a teacher, I try to incorporate pain, illness, and injury into access statements and course policies. I’m also working to recognize that not all experiences of pain are going to fall neatly into the purview of institutional access and disability protocols. I can (and want to!) work with students and colleagues to figure out how to navigate bodily changes and to respectfully support one another.

I’m also working to be more open with my own experiences, both as a principle (vulnerability can be really powerful) and to spark discussion. The more I talk to people about my pain, the more they talk about theirs. Those discussions are critical for changing larger circles of discourse.

SCS: Yes. Absolutely.

KB: And, this chat is part of that, I suppose.

SCS: Glad I could be a part of it!

Reflecting on Teaching & Elections

The Canadian federal election took place on Monday October 21st. This post is an offering in the form of a reflection.

Tune in next time for Part II from Joanne Tompkins!

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I wake up groggily.

My body urges me to hang onto sleep. But, my mind has other plans: I need to check my phone. I flop my arm out toward my nightstand, instinctively thumb my way to the interwebs, and pry my eyes open so that I can read the news. Nothing has changed in the time since I fell asleep: the Liberal Party of Canada won the most seats in the 2019 federal election and will seek to form a minority government.

I spend the next forty-five minutes in a daze, scrolling through news and my social media feed. There is no lack of potentially unsettling items – election commentary, the popularity of the hashtag #weexit, signalling a surge of interest in Alberta’s separatist movement – but mostly I feel relieved that I didn’t wake up in an alternate reality where the balance of governmental power swung to the far right. It’s a low bar, but in the context of western politics this year, it nevertheless earns a sigh of relief from me.

Despite my relief, I’m grateful I’m not in a classroom today, an indirect result of teaching during the 2016 American election.

As you may remember, in the fall of 2016, Donald Trump ran against Hilary Clinton in the American federal election.

That same fall, I taught my first university course as an instructor. I was teaching an upper level theatre and performance theory class.

I’m largely proud of the pedagogical work I did in that class. Behind the scenes, however, it was what I would politely refer to as a shitshow. I was figuring out the online learning system and the specific potentials and constraints of the classroom space; I was doing huge amounts of prep work; I was playing with my style as an instructor; I was writing my dissertation prospectus; I was completing articles, and I was doing all of this while caring  for my mother who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer (I should say here: while she still has the routine tests, she’s currently healthy and there have been no signs of cancer since she finished treatment in 2017). It was, in short, not the easiest autumn for me.

Then, about three weeks into semester, I realized something: I’d scheduled my feminist theory class for the day after the American election.

Oh boy.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t do that on purpose, but it mattered that I hadn’t. And, it mattered, in particular, that semester. As November approached and the campaign filled the ether, I kept looking at my syllabus. There was no way that topic on that day was not going to be a thing.

Six weeks later, I was proven right.

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty emotionally even-keeled human. But, the results of the American election – wherein Donald Trump, after a vitriolic, racist, misogynistic, ableist, xenophobic, islamaphobic (to name a few of the plethora of “ists” that might be included here) campaign, became president of the United States of America – intersected with the challenges of my personal life and shook me. I cried most of the 45-minute drive to campus.

And, then, as teachers do, I pulled myself together, walked into class, and looked completely normal.

Things were not normal, however.

Even though I was teaching in Canada, I could see that the election results had significantly affected many of the students. They looked tired; their shoulders were slumped; their expressions were solemn, sad even. And yet, there they were, in their theatre and theory class at 10 in the morning, looking at me.

I could feel the teaching moment open-up in front of me: the next 80 minutes could be a lesson that bridged the classroom with the world, that created space for the plethora of student experiences (including those that were ambivalent or happy about the election results), and that prompted genuine dialogue.

And, just as quickly, I knew that I couldn’t capitalize on that opening. I was too new as an instructor and too personally exhausted.  I performed my lesson plan, and it went fine. But, it wasn’t transformational. It wasn’t even particularly good. It was just a lesson.

I know that many postsecondary teachers see elections as opportunities to generate dialogue or to meaningfully connect the classroom to the world at large. I respect that a great deal.

As an early carer instructor, however, elections have often felt like elastic bands around my teaching practice. The opportunity of the added tension is palpable but so are its constraints:

How do I capitalize on the increased political awareness that tends to accompany elections?

How do I encourage inclusive, respectful, dialogue?

How and to what degree do I perform my own political values?

How do I balance all of these questions in relation to my role as a contract instructor, in a workplace where many of my colleagues have positions that grant them more job stability, and by consequence, more room for error and conflict?

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I offer them, and my election reflections, as a gesture to the other teachers who don’t either.

Sometimes, we don’t, or can’t, capitalize on teaching moments. And, that’s okay. Others will come along.

In my case, I hear another federal election cycle is on the horizon in the United States. As you can imagine, I can hardly wait.

Being a Student Again: How Taking Classes Made Me Reflect on Teaching Classes

I feel like I’m in high school again, and it’s been an unexpectedly good thing for thinking about teaching.

I recently moved to Montreal and decided to take French classes. As I filled out the online registration forms, I thought to myself, “A little morning routine, a little french, and the possibility of interaction with other humans in the brand new city I’ll be google-mapping my way through? This is a great settling-into-a-new-city-plan.”

I wasn’t wrong: the classes have been immensely useful for grounding my first couple of weeks. They have also been unexpectedly helpful for thinking about my own teaching.

Here are the top three things that being a student has got me thinking about:

The Vulnerability of Learning

As a kid, I was in French immersion – a Canadian public school program where students from non-French speaking families take most of their elementary and high school classes in French. So, technically, my French is decent. Practically, it is not.

Trying to find my knowledge of French has been felt like being in the movie Inside Out: I spend my morning classes running around my brain, searching for old memories. Much to my dismay, it seems that many of these memories have been dumped to make room for new skills and knowledge.

To the shock of no one that knows me: I have a robust set of feelings when I’m not instantly good at something. So, when my teacher hands back my homework, and I see the 1003 minor grammar errors, I can’t help but wince a little.

Other than the hit to my ego, this has been a critical reminder of the the vulnerability of not knowing, of not understanding, of trying but not getting it right the first, second, or even the third time. I try to acknowledge this vulnerability when I teach but sometimes I forget how amplified it can feel for students.

Exams

Three weeks ago, I could not have told you the last time I took a midterm. That changed, last Wednesday. And, much to my surprise, I think that’s a good thing.

As a university instructor, I know that tests can be good evaluative and pedagogical tools, and I do incorporate final exams into some courses. But, I also know that tests favour certain learning styles over others and can prompt huge levels of stress and anxiety for students. In the context of rising mental health crises across American and Canadian post-secondary campuses, the stakes of stress and anxiety can be concrete and significant. It doesn’t help that, even when test-related stress is contained to the classroom, students generally hate exams.

Actual archival evident that I took a French midterm some time after high school.

In my French class, I was no different. I did not want to take my midterm. In fact, I briefly considered refusing to do so (me: at my most mature).

After having a little chat with myself, however, I decided to write the midterm. This meant I had to study. And, you know what? Studying prompted me to engage with the material in a way I’d been avoiding: I went back and reviewed some of the core concepts; I memorized the rules; I did mock exercises.

Did it bring back a whole bunch of weird want-to-succeed-in-evaluative-contexts feelings? Why, yes it did. Did it also light a fire under my learning feet? Most definitely.

On Mattering

As a university instructor, I’m aware that, within the context of a classroom, I am in a position of power. As a student, I am am actively reminded of how this power looks and feels.

The teacher – who is like every french teacher I can remember: energetic, kind, passionate, precise – is the point toward which I, and all the other students, are oriented physically and intellectually. And, boy oh boy, do we notice everything she does:

• I notice that she tends to stand on the right side of the white board (likely so she doesn’t have to cross when she needs to start to write a sentence). This means that she often unintentionally favours the right side of the class, who are physically closer to her.
• Another student feels that she pays more attention to those with stronger language skills.
• Another student feels her pedagogy is better than any of the other instructors they’ve had.

Even for adults with diverse areas of expertise and experiences (the class of twelve includes adult learners from 7 different countries who work in a range of fields from health care to hospitality to academia) the teacher matters, and that mattering often articulates in very embodied, and sometimes very emotional, ways.

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I already knew all of these things, of course.

After all, I’ve spent big chunks of my adult life as a student. And, even though I’m done with formal coursework (phew!), I’m an active learner. I take professional development workshops, praxis sessions, and all kinds of classes. And not all of these classes are in areas where I excel either. I, Kelsey Blair The Historically Inflexible, take yoga classes.

But being in a semi-intensive, pass-or-fail class with medium-level stakes for most of the students has reminded me, at a bodily level, of what it feels like to be a student.

This, in turn, has reinforced something I already suspected: being a student, particularly in moderate- to high-stakes environments, is invaluable to the development of my teaching practice.

The Year That Was, 2016: What Happened When the Students Created the Supplementary Course Reader and Set Their Own Deadlines

Back in May 2015 I wrote three reflective posts about the academic year just passed: what worked, what didn’t, what I hoped to do differently in 2015-16. This year, instead of following that formula, I’ve decided to report on two of the changes I implemented. One went substantially better than I thought it might – though there’s room for improvement, as you’ll see – and the other kind of tanked, in a way I didn’t anticipate – though in hindsight I totally get it, and managed to salvage it nevertheless.

1. Students Create the Supplementary Course Reader

Last year, my teaching assistant for my 20th Century Theatre course, Madison Bettle, built an amazing tool for us all: a reader on our website designed to fill in some of the historical, cultural, and political gaps in student knowledge that we might not get to (or get to fully) in class. Labelled the “supplementary course reader”, Maddie’s tool was a hit with students, who reported using it constantly to prepare for class, essays, and exams. When she reflected on the reader’s popularity, however, she noted that it was a bit too one-way for her liking: it was content delivery online, which meant it also smacked of the kind of passive learning we both like to avoid. She suggested perhaps students ought to be involved in the reader’s creation, as well as its downloading, in future years, and I eagerly took up that suggestion.

This year, 20th Century Theatre began with a visit from Maddie, who explained the supplementary course reader’s construction and purpose to the new cohort; this information complemented the course reader assignment description I’d set out in the syllabus. Students were responsible for creating two course reader entries over the year, one per term; they could choose the weeks they would contribute, as well as the topics they’d write about, or they could suggest their own topics. Each contribution was worth 5%, and I purposefully designed the task so that it would be fairly easy for a committed but not necessarily gifted student to achieve 5/5. Students needed to tick 5 boxes, from being on time with their draft submission to me, to covering some basic content bases, to editing their draft in accordance with my suggestions and uploading their final draft to our website; they did not need to create something perfect, nor indeed essay-like. The purpose of the reader, I stressed, was to contribute to our shared understanding of the periods and cultures under discussion in class, not to make an argument or demonstrate exceptional grammar skills. Newsy posts were good; so were photos and videos, plus useful links in the Works Cited. It was fine to start with Wikipedia, but not a good idea to stop there. To assist students confused by this (admittedly somewhat unique) assignment, I created a model entry for the first week and talked us through it in class. I also made a point of drawing attention (in a good way) to the first couple of posts made by students in September.

[You can take a look at our crowd-sourced supplementary course reader here.]

The pros? My god, the students were on the ball about this. Maybe a quarter of the time did I have to remind them to get me drafts on the Monday afternoon before the week’s classes; once I’d done so they were immediately responsive, and of course by that point I’d already read and commented on the work submitted by students ahead of the game. I found it really important to vet the drafts; I hadn’t realised until the first wave of work came in that the draft editing stage was my opportunity to arrest any egregious mistakes that probably ought not to be published on the web. (Although the class’s WordPress site was designed not to be easily searchable by bots or trolls, it was nevertheless public.) At the same time, though, the students were clearly making valuable contributions to our collective knowledge as a class, and I also used my read of their first drafts to encourage them to augment ideas, both with text and with supporting images and videos.

The cons are all down to me. In fact there’s really just one big con: I was so busy imagining this assignment and creating the scaffolding for students to contribute to the reader that I forgot entirely to think about how the reader could be used, actively, in class or toward future assignments. I often pointed at the week’s contributions in class, noting whenever possible links to our discussions or to my or my TA’s pocket lectures; I don’t think that was enough, however, and I felt at year’s end like all that great material was just sitting there on the website, underused. I did not – again, not really thinking enough about application! – ask the students on the mid-year survey how the course reader contributed to their weekly prep, nor did the stats WordPress offers give me enough information about who used the course reader page when. (Maddie’s reader was exceptionally well used because she was an instructor on the course; I’d really like to know to what extent students were willing to use one another’s work as authoritative. My guess is: less than I’d hope, more than I fear.)

So, while I’ll certainly keep this assignment for future iterations of the course, I’ll give a great deal more thought next time to how its materials will apply to student learning outcomes overall, and I’ll poll the students actively on how they use the course reader materials. I’ll probably also design a larger, capstone assignment for the course with the reader in mind.

2. Students Set Their Own Deadlines

Still in 20th Century Theatre, I decided to hand power to each student to decide when they/she/he would hand in the theatre review assignment, as well as the major research essay assignment. In the first case, we took two field trips to see shows in Toronto, one in November and one in January, and students had the option to review either show, handing in reviews the week after the field trip. In the second case, students were given a roster of dates to pick from in March and early April, and could hand in their research essays on any of the three, provided they selected their due date in advance. We chose dates together before Reading Week, when our research librarian Melanie Mills came to speak to the class about time management. The rule was that students could ask for “extensions” on their original deadlines up to and including the final suggested due date, as long as those extensions were requested before their chosen deadline rolled around. Plus, a bonus for anyone handing in on the first or second suggested date: feedback from both me and my TA Meghan, plus a chance to “do over” for a better grade.

I – VERY naively, clearly! – assumed students would take full responsibility for their learning as a result of this process, and hand stuff in according to the schedules they set for themselves. Students often complain to me that their stuff in my class is due the same week as everyone else’s class’s stuff; I figured if I gave them the option of picking their own due dates, and encouraged them to look at their schedules and think in advance about how to balance their assignments, they’d nail it AND stop complaining to boot.

Um. Ya. Yup. Right.

It turns out students are way human, and procrastinate about their own self-imposed deadlines exactly as well as I do. Loads of them picked the first deadline; by the end, only two or three of 25 actually handed in that day. (Similarly, while everyone professed the best of intentions with the theatre review assignment, only two students reviewed the November performance.) They came to me shame-faced, asking if they could extend; true to my word, I granted them the extensions requested, and could only commiserate with them about how hard it is to stick to a deadline you impose on yourself. When the advantages are theoretical (I can party AFTER I hand in!) and the consequences limited… well, we all kind of suck at sticking to our word.

In the end, though, the abject failure of the set-your-own-deadline task was saved beautifully by a meta-assignment I attached to the research essay. Students were invited to keep a time management journal, writing at least four entries in it reflecting on how the preparation for their research essays was going (and on how they were doing at sticking to their deadlines). The return was golden: create a time-management plan (in class with me and Melanie at the start of the process), write the entries, and hand in with your research essay’s final draft, and you’d be rewarded with a bonus 5% on top of your essay mark, no strings attached.

To my surprise, students DID keep the journals. (Admittedly, I offered short bursts of time in class on occasion to write entries, guaranteeing a certain amount of buy-in.) And in keeping them, they took a surprising amount of time and space to reflect on what went wrong when they failed to keep to their originally chosen deadlines. The TM task, in other words, allowed students to confront their bad time management habits directly, and to think carefully about why they had not managed to take full advantage of the opportunity to set their own, more effective, deadlines for the research essay. While I would have liked to see students better use their time to begin with and hand in early for the do-over opportunity, I was really glad to read so many honest, forthright self-analyses, evidence that, at the very least, I got students thinking about how much their schedule chaos is down to their own making, rather than their profs’ tendencies to, you know, schedule final assignments at the end of term.

(Plus, it’s kind of a relief to know that your prof is also great at procrastinating, and is constantly working on that … I wasn’t shy about sharing this all-too-human reality with them, either.)

So I think I’ll use the choose-your-own-adventure deadline option again too – though this time primarily to watch students realise, along with me, how hard it is to work effectively within so much freedom. Something tells me that’s the best lesson to learn, and to learn early.

Kim

 

Evaluate me!

This past week I prepared my first set of “module reports”. Here in the UK (or at least at my school, Queen Mary), at the end of each term instructors and convenors take some time to reflect on what happened during their modules (aka courses), to examine and comment on trends in the student evaluation data, and to share future plans for each module. In my department there’s a standardised template for this task, and after looking at it online I was kind of dreading filling it in (six times over). Finally, last Monday, and with permission from the colleague in charge of collating the reports, I decided to chuck the template out and write about each of my modules in an extended way in my teaching journal. I then imported that writing into a Word doc and sent it to her. Job done!

And now I have to ask myself: template tantrum aside, what took me so long?

The exercise was terrific. By far, the most useful (and satisfying) part of it involved looking seriously – which is to say carefully, and for longer than 15 minutes – at the student evaluation data for each course I taught in 2012-13. The jury remains perennially out on whether or not eval data can tell us anything useful about student experience and/or professorial teaching skill (for two recent articles, one on each side of the debate, look here and here). Nevertheless, I’ve always taken student evaluations seriously, read them (I thought) with some care, and marked up my hard copies before sticking them in a dedicated folder in my filing cabinet for future reference. I realized this past week, though, that never before have I taken a dedicated (and not a short) period of time to really look properly at both the data and the written student comments on my evaluations, and to cross-reference student experiences across several concurrent courses.

Doing this (slow, measured) cross-referencing was really eye-opening. I know I’m good at certain key teaching elements (being engaging in front of the class; managing group activities effectively; connecting with students who can’t quite articulate what they need, and helping them to figure out a path forward), but I’m less good (as I suspect we all are) at working out how exactly I can improve my teaching in those areas the evaluations flag (often nebulously) as potential problems. That’s likely, in part, because in the past when I’ve read my evaluations just for me I’ve been drawn to the good stuff (of course), and I’ve worked actively to minimize the impact on me of the not so good stuff (of course, again). As I noted in my post back in April on failure, it’s a fairly typical human reaction to receive criticism alongside an immediate urge to mitigate it; without doubt, in the past when I’ve read student evaluations I’ve done so with an eye to absorbing the good, pushing past the bad, and getting on with other things (aka forgetting about it). This time around, because of the demands of the “module report” exercise, I had to spend a good chunk of time observing, accounting for, and then writing about both the good I’d achieved and the places I’d failed to achieve what I was hoping to do.

What did I learn? For the most part, things I knew already, but only intuitively and for myself: that I’d often felt rushed in my seminar on Naturalism (a number of students asked in their evals for longer seminars, which was gratifying [!] and also took some of the sting out of the comments saying that they had felt rushed, too); that the course I ran on gender and power in early modern drama had been taken over a bit too completely by its experimental archive component, leaving some students feeling that they hadn’t really completed the course they’d signed up for; and that a number of students weren’t completely clear on my marking criteria. I also discovered trends that are likely evidence of more global difficulties in our department and even higher up the chain: for example, students struggle to understand aims and objectives in all of my courses, even though “aims” and “objectives” receive their own headings on both my (extensive) course outlines and on our department’s virtual learning environment module pages. For me, the take-away here is that students may need more help navigating our new virtual learning software, and probably also that they ignore a good chunk of my outline documents (maybe those should be shorter, and easier to navigate, too…).

The other thing I realized while reading, reflecting on, and writing about my evaluation data is that I’m not satisfied with the evaluation documents we use here at QM (and that’s not just a QM problem – I’m not satisfied with any of the evaluation forms I’ve ever filled in, or handed out for filling in, as a student or as a teacher). To minimize marking labour these are multiple-choice forms, with not a huge amount of space made for students to reflect in writing on their experiences; the questions are generic, enormous, and need to apply easily to vast numbers of different kinds of courses in order to be cross-reference-able across the entire university (and beyond). I understand, in other words, why the forms look the way they do, but the fact remains that, for courses driven by intellectual curiosity and creativity, complex research questions, and extended pieces of reflective (and research-led) writing, answering “yes”, “no”, or “maybe” to very general questions about teacher preparedness, methodology, and resources can only tell us so much about student experience. I know it’d be a lot more work to program and evaluate written reflections, coding those reflections for key words and themes (in 2008 I led a qualitative data-driven teaching study at Western University, so I do really get what a pain in the ass this kind of work can be), but I suspect we’d learn more, and more useful things, from text-centred evaluations in programs like English, Drama, and elsewhere in the Humanities, if not also in the “hard” sciences and engineering.

More importantly: in courses driven by creative thinking, writing, and performing, as all of mine are, evaluations that ask students to “grade” their instructors on the same terms – that is, via creative thinking and writing – as those by which we grade them might bring a welcome sense of fairness to the evaluation process. After all, if I stand up in front of the class and tell my students that their assessment of my work really matters to me, and is an important part of our shared classroom labour, I’d like to be able to hand out those darn forms knowing that I’m asking them to offer me the kind of feedback I’ve proudly offered them, and that I will, indeed, be taking it seriously.

Kim

PS: mid-term evaluations, how to create them, and how best to use them… the subject for another post, perhaps. Meanwhile, check out the terrific evaluative resources provided by the Cornell Centre for Teaching Excellence here.