Resigning from Professional Education, Totally and Finally

Withdrawal from all professional education affiliations-heck, the abandonment of the teaching profession itself, of which I persisted in trying to make my life’s work for forty years, was immediately precipitated by this most recent replication of supervisory censure.

My approach to college course construction, an obligation of every professor regardless of rank, has been through an idiosyncratic internalization of ideas formal education and teaching experience has provided me.  Thus was the course construction of the communication/media course I was given to teach this past semester (Fall 2013 at Fordham University).  It was premised on judgment developed from nearly forty years cultivating the deepest understanding of Human and Technological Communication processes and their affects on individuals, cultures and societies and of learning theory, pedagogy and practice in Experiential Learning, Project Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method and Developmental Lesson Planning across levels of schooling from junior high to college, especially the collegiate. Well, as become usual since 2006, the exercise of professional judgment upset a small number of young adults who had difficulty adjusting to my course construction and who complained up the chain of command to the effect that I was called on the carpet for exercising this acumen and required to implement a “course correction” in the methods and the substance of the course I was given to instruct.  I was to move away from a multi-instructional strategy to a single one: from my synthesis of Experiential, Project Based, Cooperative, Socratic to the common narrowest understanding of instruction which the education profession calls textbook-lecture teaching.  I was, also, to move away from a targeted content far better calculated for longer than single course memory retention to the customary widest definition of content aligned with other faculty's course construction which is forgotten once tested.   Further, I was to halt project based writing in favor of test based writing to assess learning.  More, I was to abandon re-teaching even when assessment said otherwise. Naturally, I obeyed and by so doing I destroyed each and every learning objective I devised for the course and I became a poorer teacher for it.  But, the changes satisfied the complaining students as they got to do as they expected to be doing:  working the system to generate “A's” without having to be intellectually challenged, without having to grapple with ideas and concepts to cognitively and emotionally grow.  And the changes satisfied the powers that be as they did not have to deal with any further student complaints.

Dr. David Linton, when working for him as a Dean at Marymount Manhattan in 2006, said I possessed an articulate rebelliousness. That, indeed, flattered my profound desire to see and to project myself aligned with the great Irish rebels and with the equally great European and American tradition of free thinkers and non-conformists. But the reality is that all I was about, all I am about, is putting in the service of the field of Communication/Media Studies education-and in the service of whatever subject area at whatever schooling level I was privileged to instruct-the pedagogical judgment that narrowed focused content study through a mix of Experiential Learning, Project Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method, Developmental Lesson Planning and personal student responsibility for learning engagement have the best chance of information retention well beyond the immediate schooling need to demonstrate learning and, especially, to move college students away from the learned helplessness of the elementary-high school years to a self-actualization of the collegiate, from the infantilization of conventional primary and secondary teaching/learning toward the empowered adult of whole cognitive developed higher education. So, yes, I have ends in mind other than the specific content mastery of the course.

If there is anything authentically different from conventional collegiate exercise in my judgments, it is that as much as possible I pare content down to basic concepts on which learning is centered rather than saturate content learning with the broadest range of scholarship fact-the usual, especially, for collegiate academic courses-and I employ a mix of instructional strategies within the same course and, frequently, within the same class period giving students an array of means by which to acquire the content of the course and providing students an authentic responsibility to accept or reject the conditions of inclusion in each class and in the course as a whole along with the consequences of their decisions. I take as given that this is the first exposure to these conditions and to these methods for students, especially for Freshmen, and I fully recognize the adjustment difficulty visited upon them, particularly on those holding expectations that they will be doing the same thing they have been doing for almost all of their schooling lives; thus, I incorporate personal support into each course, prominently among which is individual, one on one instructional/counseling sessions during and outside office hours.

This time around, I did not get the chance to be articulate, to explain, justify and argue the specifics of course construction. In fact, what was student complaint was given validation by all supervision without even a cursory chat with me to ascertain its authenticity. Experience has made it clear that there may be academic freedom for others but not for me. So, that’s it: stick a fork in me and pop me out of the oven, I’m done. I have always done the best for each young adult I was given the privilege of teaching, even those who complain. But, the conditions of employment whereby I am forbidden to use my considerable professional judgment, and where I am being forced to employ pedagogical methods which even the colleges in which I’ve taught hold workshops and seminars to persuade faculty to greatly move away from, i.e., textbook teaching and learning through lecture and testing, have become intolerable. If being rebellious means I will not accept having to implement the least effective pedagogy just to stay employed as an adjunct, just to not upset, not to differently challenge, any student then, I am a rebel. Unfortunately, the consequence of being a rebel is to be marginalized and equally to marginalize oneself. So, on the margins of education I am to return.

But, you know, there were plenty of hints along the way that I should be looking elsewhere to earn a living and plenty of opportunities for me to move on. And, at times I took the hint.  But when whatever other I did did not work out I rapidly flew back into education as I have always believed teaching is where the best of me works for the best of others.