by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University
My subject here is pedagogical summer camp for professors.
For my first column as your new Teaching Standards chair, I am remembering two sunny experiences I had with week-long summer sessions for professors. The first one, at Indiana University’s School of Journalism in 2003, was for journalism professors transitioning from years in newsrooms (I had 26 years myself) to the university classroom. The other in 2010, held at Rollins College, was for professors from a variety of disciplines, from a number of private liberal arts colleges around the South.
At the time, it didn’t strike me as particularly odd to be packing off to summer camp to get better at teaching, like a kid going to Camp Keewaydin to practice camping and canoeing. The university sending me to these sessions holds teaching as its essential reason for being, expecting its professors to be teacher-scholars, rather than scholars and researchers who also teach. I am increasingly aware of how unusual Washington & Lee is in this regard, especially among universities with accredited journalism and mass communications programs.
But no matter how dominant research may be in our careers, or for our university, we all care about making our classrooms more exciting and effective. Yet how often do we get together with department colleagues to talk about techniques of small-group cooperative learning, or multi-sensory instruction, or neurological research that shows the value of infusing emotion into the learning process? These are the sorts of things you don’t get from colleagues. We don’t have time for it during the school year, and it feels awkward to talk about good and bad teaching among colleagues who will be either judge or judged around promotion and tenure time.
No, you need to go away to summer camp for this. So why are there so few opportunities for the kind of teaching workshops I attended in Bloomington and Winter Park? I contacted officials from the two programs I was in, and as far as we could tell, these were the only such programs of their kind.
The one at Indiana University was co-sponsored by the Poynter Institute when I attended nearly 10 years ago. Poynter has since left the partnership. Two years ago, with flagging interest from the dean, the program went blank. But now, with that dean gone, the new assistant dean, Bonnie Brownlee, is charged with getting the Teaching Workshop re-launched next summer. As someone who attended the workshop herself back in 1981, Bonnie told me she was happy to re-energize the program and to encourage new faculty to participate. I wish her well in the endeavor, and urge you all to check it out for incoming or new faculty members who are making the leap from newsroom to classroom.
Even before my summer camp week at IU, I benefited from a generous fellowship to help seasoned journalists make that leap – the Freedom Forum Fellows fast-track Ph.D. program at UNC – Chapel Hill. But the Freedom Forum shut down that fellowship just as I was collapsing across the finish line. With that program dead, the IU summer camp stands alone – if it can get back on its feet.
Fifteen of us came to Ernie Pyle Hall that last week in June 2003, most of us with far more experience with newspapers and magazines than with syllabi and lesson plans. The cost was minimal, a few hundred dollars, which I assume was picked up for each of us, along with travel costs, by the sending universities. Our teachers were from IU’s journalism school and Poynter. As with any summer camp, we had fun. But what stayed with me was a sense of craft about teaching, a feeling that my teaching was something I could examine, adjust, fix, test, enjoy, and criticize. Teaching and learning became part of the same process. The lessons began more than a week before the workshop, with a how-to on writing a personal teaching-philosophy statement, and an assignment to write one. It concluded with a written critique of the videotape of a class lesson we gave on the last day.
The Summer Teaching and Learning Workshop at Rollins was different. It seemed a better approach to teacher because it was not just for journalism professors. In fact, the sponsoring consortium of private liberal arts colleges, the Associated Colleges of the South, has only one member college with a journalism program – W&L.
So I was sitting entranced in a dark classroom listening to an art-history professor talk about a painting projected onto a slide. Classroom discussion seemed so easy, at a fairly high intellectual level, with the classroom dark, and everyone looking at the same huge luminous image. I named that “Voice in the Dark,” and I’m still trying to find a way to bring it into a journalism-history class.
The heart of ACS’s Teaching and Learning Workshop is an exercise called video-microteaching, a seven-minute slice of a class with one professor teaching a group of four or five fellow participants. This is done over and over all week – three lessons from each of the four or five in each small group, guided by a couple of professors on staff. The videotape is viewed by the small group, followed by a discussion (also videotaped) that is gently confined to “I” statements about how the lesson felt to “me.” This keeps feedback from being judgmental or being sidetracked by intellectual discussions about content. “We’re trying to get that experiential evidence to teachers and let teachers decide what to do with that,” explained Barbara Lom, a biology professor at Davidson College who directs the program.
The workshop, which has moved to Trinity University in San Antonio, remains healthy, with a waiting list and member colleges eager to pay the $1,800 to send professors. But such programs are all too rare. The experience has stayed with me. The videotapes, though, are like the lanyards you made at summer camp and put deep in a trunk somewhere.