Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence CTSE Official CTSE Newsletter
Fall 2010
Vol. 7, No. 1
How to Become a Full Professor
It’s not as stressful as you might think.
Photo by Alexandra Zurhorst
Six years after receiving tenure, Hofstra faculty members can apply for promotion to full professor, a position that brings greater prestige, more clout, and a base salary increase of $5,000. Yet many associate professors delay applying – a delay that too often becomes permanent. For some, the task of assembling a portfolio and facing peer scrutiny, amid all their other professional and personal responsibilities, just seems too daunting. But fear not. “The stress associated with going up for tenure is not there when applying for promotion,” says Dr. Benny Barak, chair of the Department of Marketing and International Business. “If you don’t make it, you can apply again.” Dr. Barak was one of four full professors who spoke at a CTSE panel, “Preparing for Promotion,” in March. Supported by Provost Herman Berliner as part of a
Drs. Benny Barak, Marc Silver, and Joanne Willey, all full professors at Hofstra, share advice about applying for promotion at a CTSE workshop last spring.
“promotion initiative,” the panel was designed to encourage all associate professors to get back on the promotion track and provide guidance on how to do it.
In this issue How Bad is Wikipedia?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Putting Your Exams to the Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Films for Teaching: Resources and Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Academic Portfolios: Dos and Don’ts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Art Supplied. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Talking About Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Discipline in the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Classroom Lessons: Making Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Currently, of Hofstra’s 544 full-time faculty members, 183 are full professors and 217 are associate professors, about 80 of whom have been at the associate level for more than eight years. Dr. Barak assured faculty members that the process of applying for promotion to full professor “can be a collegial process in a way that going up for tenure, almost by definition, is limited.” To maximize collegiality, an associate professor considering a bid for promotion should first consult with the chair to make sure the bid will be supported. The professor should also talk to the other full professors in the department and make sure they are on board as well. Only full professors may serve on the DPC considering a promotion to full professor. continued on page 2
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How to Become a Full Professor A potential candidate who gets negative feedback can postpone applying until he or she can make a stronger case, thereby avoiding a situation in which colleagues have to say no. “Prior communication with colleagues in the department is vital,” says Dr. Barak.
As in a tenure bid, most departments weigh teaching most heavily. The candidate should present evidence of a six-year stretch of consistently strong teaching, including several peer observations by full professors. Ideally, these observations should take place over several semesters, so it helps to plan ahead. As for CTR scores, Dr. Barak says: “It’s incredibly important that you are within the average range of your department.” If your teaching is weak, colleagues are usually happy to let you sit in on their classes and learn from them. “It’s never the case that the way one is teaching is unchangeable,” says Dr. Barak.
Photo by Alexandra Zurhorst
Full professor Charles Smith encourages those applying for promotion to include the full range of their professional achievements in their portfolios.
If your department offers graduate classes, make a point of teaching them, Dr. Barak advises, to demonstrate that you are “senior faculty material.” Expectations for scholarship vary by department and are spelled out in each department’s tenure and promotion guidelines. Candidates for promotion to full professor may have more latitude in the type of scholarship than candidates for tenure. “Often once people get tenure, their research agenda shifts,” says Dr. Marc Silver, a full professor and chair of the Sociology Department. “They may shift to less certain, long-range projects that they put off when they were up for tenure.” Such projects may be considered more generously in a promotion bid than in a tenure bid. For example, in his department, Dr. Silver says, “applied work that is outside the realm of publication in traditional journals, such as writing technical reports and working with organizations, may be viewed positively in a promotion decision, whereas it might have been given short shrift in a tenure decision.” A faculty member who hasn’t published for a while should consider teaming up with a colleague, inside or outside the University. “A solo article can be very difficult for someone who hasn’t done research in a long time,” says Dr. Barak. If you are a strong writer, you might choose to collaborate with someone strong in research; if your research is solid, perhaps you need a teammate with impressive writing skills. Either way, you and your collaborator can push each other to complete the project. Dr. Charles Smith, a full professor of management, entrepreneurship and general business, reminds candidates to document all their professional achievements, not only traditional journal articles, in their application. For example, he says, he had a gap of a couple of years in journal publications but wrote a book during that time. You have to build your own case. “Don’t be shy about what you did,” agrees Dr. Joanne Willey, a full professor of biology. “Look back over the period since tenure and ask: How have I made myself indispensable to my department?” Perhaps you brought in external funding, for
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Using Wikipedia
example, or raised the profile of the department by editing a journal. Dr. Willey recalls how, in her year as a tenure designate, she found herself standing before a bored classroom of students one day and thought, “I can’t do this for the next 40 years.” She decided to introduce pedagogical innovations into her curricula, and these ultimately were an important component of her promotion portfolio.
This discussion led me to read two academic articles on the subject. One, by Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg (available at www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/ bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ 2830/2476), presents the findings from student focus group research and a 2009 survey of thousands of students at six U.S. colleges. More than half of the survey respondents were frequent Wikipedia users.
Whether it’s consulting for a nonprofit or publishing an article, it is up to the applicant to spell out the effort that went into the work and its ultimate impact – how many times an article was cited, for instance, or what the work meant to the discipline. Portfolios should also include evidence of work in the pipeline. At the Zarb School, Dr. Barak says, faculty members have a tradition of using a plastic “bucket” with file folders (available from office supply stores) to save materials that might be useful for tenure or promotion bids – anything from CTR buff sheets to e-mails from students complimenting something the professor did in class. When the time comes to assemble a portfolio, the evidence of achievements is all in one place. Portfolios should also include annual evaluations from the chair, ideally indicating that the candidate is ready for promotion. Sometimes candidates also include letters from colleagues outside the University saying that the candidate’s application would be viewed favorably at their school. A faculty member with outstanding credentials, may, in unusual cases, apply for promotion after serving fewer than six years at the associate level. The CTSE has several free, confidential services available for faculty members preparing for promotion or tenure, including public speaking consultation, manuscript review, statistical support for research, and videotaping of teaching. For information on these services, see the CTSE home page at hofstra.edu/Faculty/ CTSE/index.html. To request help in any of these areas – or in an area of professional development not listed on the site – e-mail Dr. Susan Martin, director of the CTSE, at susan.martin@hofstra.edu.
Photo by John McKeith
Applications for promotion to full professor are judged in much the same way as tenure applications; the candidate puts together a portfolio documenting his or her accomplishments in the areas of teaching, scholarship and professional activity, and service. The only criterion considered for tenure that does not come into play when applying for full professor is the University’s long-term need for a faculty member in the candidate’s area of expertise, which, in tenure cases, is spelled out in the dean’s “fifth-year letter.”
From the Director
continued from page 1
Susan Lorde
Martin
Dear Colleagues, I have been reading an online conversation among faculty from all over the country about students’ use of Wikipedia. One professor reported that although he encouraged his students to use a variety of sources, including Wikipedia, for selecting a topic, he prohibited the citation of Wikipedia as a source in their research papers. Another professor reported that because all sources can contain error or bias, he allows students to cite Wikipedia. He argued that judging sources a priori to be more or less valid is “less like education and more like indoctrination.” A third offered that Wikipedia was good for starting research, but he would never use it as a direct source and does not permit his students to do so. He explained his reasoning by paraphrasing a Dilbert cartoon: Ratbert: “I am King of the Universe.” Dilbert: “Oh yeah. Prove it.” Ratbert: “Just check Wikipedia in about 15 minutes.”
The most common reason for using Wikipedia was to get started on topics with which they were unfamiliar; very few students reported using it near the end of their research. One student called Wikipedia a “presearch tool.” Most students said they did not tell their professors that they used Wikipedia. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were the students most likely to use Wikipedia, and students at four-year institutions were more likely to use it than students at two-year institutions. Overall, students used Wikipedia less than course readings, Google, scholarly research databases, and the Online Public Access Catalog. Most students indicated they knew they would have to substantiate Wikipedia information elsewhere. That article was encouraging to me because it suggested that students use Wikipedia the same way I do (although perhaps more often) and the way my colleagues do, one of whom has confessed that when he’s called by a reporter for a quote on his specialty, he says, “I’ll call you right back,” and checks Wikipedia before doing so. The second article, by Jason Miller and Hannah Murray in the St. John’s Law Review (available at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502759##), describes a process for deciding when it is and is not appropriate to cite Wikipedia. The article notes that Wikipedia is one of the 10 most trafficked Web sites in the
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world, visited by one-third of Americans annually. Although the Miller/Murray article is about the use of Wikipedia in court opinions, law review articles, and legal briefs, it provides tips that can help all types of students use Wikipedia in an academically sensible way. For example, Wikipedia is an appropriate source when the knowledge of the community at large is valuable as, perhaps, in ascertaining the most current meaning of a slang expression. It would be a less appropriate source for very specialized, technical or controversial information for which Wikipedia would not have a sufficient number of qualified reader/ editors. (However, as the authors note, according to an article in the journal Nature, the number of errors in Wikipedia was not significantly greater than the number in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.) All this information reminded me about the importance of giving students sufficient instruction in the “how” of doing research and citation, and of discussing the variety of sources available, including Wikipedia, and how to use them appropriately. Students should not think that Wikipedia has to be their own little secret, but they should also know that it, and many other sources, often cannot be relied on without corroboration. I wish you all a wonderful, productive fall semester. Susan Martin is director of the CTSE and the Cypres Family Distinguished Professor of Legal Studies in Business.
Alternatives to Lecture And All Shall Be Tested In my last missive in this space, I explored the advantages and disadvantages of two kinds of assessment, testing and performance assessment. Both kinds play a role in university education, I suggested, but professors might well remain cognizant of the pitfalls inherent in whatever kind of assessment they’re using. In what follows I’ll discuss strategies for maximizing the utility of testing, and next time around I’ll focus on performance assessment.
But in the everyday world of university education, professors typically do not shoulder the burdens of hardcore psychometrics. Professors often cook up tests to determine how much students have learned about this or that (when they’re not using prefab test banks!). So even if we aren’t concerned on a daily basis with pointy-headed issues of validity and reliability, it makes sense to consider some fundamentals of test construction. The most common test vehicle is the venerable multiple choice item, where a question or statement (a “stem”) is followed by a correct response (a “key”) and three erroneous responses (“distractors”). Try to choose distractors that seem plausible, or result from characteristic patterns of errors; for example, if the correct answer results from adding two numbers, a good distractor subtracts one from the other, or multiplies
Some 5,500 titles from Films for the Humanities and Sciences are now available online, thanks to a new database called Films on Demand.
them. It can be entertaining to write distractors, in my experience, but not because I want students to fall for them; I root for students to succeed, but they ought to unambiguously demonstrate a high level of achievement along the way. Some multiple choice items simply test fact recall. How many steps in the Krebs Cycle are there? No one’s saying this item is satanic, but a student might have no clue about the Krebs Cycle and still get the item right – a false positive, or Type I error. Hence, better multiple choice items press students to apply knowledge or analyze something (in other words, demonstrate a deeper understanding). Here’s one: A man’s prior experience traveling to several countries has contributed to his success as a geography teacher. According to Raymond Cattell, this is an example of which aspect of intelligence? A = Distributed; B = Crystallized; C = Cumulative; D = Fluid. (The answer is B.) In this case students must apply their knowledge of Cattell’s theory to a scenario written in the stem. A correct answer does not guarantee that the student has a whizbang grasp of Cattell’s theory, but this item is much less likely to result in a false positive. Yes, the “higher order” item produces a 25 percent false-positive rate, but consider this: students who don’t really understand the Krebs Cycle but recall the number of steps will nail the fact-recall item 100 percent of the time. When writing multiple choice items, never impose a pattern concerning which letter (A, B, C, or D) has the correct answer – keep it random. Online random number generators do the trick, if you like that sort of thing. Remind students that no such pattern exists; just because the last three items had a correct answer of “C” does not mean the next one can’t also. This is a common trap for test takers of all sorts. Students often find short answer items highly challenging (read: complaint4
Bruce
Torff
To get to the database, just log on to the Hofstra portal, go to the library, select “research databases,” and look for “Films on Demand.” Once inside the database, you can search by topic for relevant segments of films and documentaries; if you create a free account, you can even create playlists of your favorite segments. Assign the playlists for students to view at home prior to a class discussion, or stream them in class. (Streaming works better over cable than on a wireless network.)
provoking), but that’s no reason to eschew them – you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. In essence, a shortanswer item has a stem (as in a multiple choice item), but instead of a key and three distractors, there’s a blank space in which students write in a response. Short answer items are not especially useful for psychometricians, but they can be handy for professors.
Although the Films on Demand search engine is not perfect, a searchable PDF of all available titles can be found on the Hofstra Film and Media Library homepage at hofstra.edu/library/libaxn/libaxn_ media.html. The film library also has some 7,000 DVDs and VHS tapes professors can borrow or put on reserve for students to view at workstations or small screening rooms in the basement of Memorial Hall.
As you design your test, choose a total number of items that students can complete in half or three-quarters of a class period. Overloading students creates measurement “noise” by conflating stamina with achievement.
At a recent CTSE workshop, Sarah McClesky, head of access services for the Axinn Library, reminded faculty of copyright restrictions on the use of films. Although professors are free to show a movie in class because of a face-to-face teaching exemption from copyright law prohibitions, it is illegal to load an entire copyrighted video onto Blackboard. “Reasonable and limited portions” of a
Once you have a test put together, take steps to evaluate it. Solicit feedback from carefully selected students (i.e., ones who don’t simply want your class to be easier!). Look at the distribution of scores. Any test on which all (or most) students do extremely well, or very poorly, by definition renders an ineffective assessment. Tests need “headroom” such that the bestperforming students in the room do not get all the points. At the same time, a test that is too difficult is demoralizing – and will likely deflate your rapport with students. A bell-shaped distribution of scores is desirable, although that does NOT mean you need to “grade on a curve” (i.e., use the bell to give a few students an A, many a C, and a few an F). Seeking a favorable continued on page 5
And All Shall Be Tested distribution is one thing; using it to give some students unflattering grades no matter how well they scored or how hard they worked is something else. Personally, I don’t favor grading on a curve as such; if all students earn an A, that’s what all should receive – and ditto for F. Analyze student responses on each item. Items that are too easy should be replaced. Conversely, items that the entire class
Sarah McClesky, head of access services for the Axinn Library, can help faculty decide what portion of a film they can post on Blackboard without violating copyright restrictions.
work can be posted on Blackboard; for help deciding what is reasonable, or obtaining streaming rights, contact
Photo by Erin Furman
In professional psychometrics (the science and art of measuring intellectual traits, capacities, and processes), researchers go to great lengths to evaluate the validity and reliability of assessment instruments. For example, the fabled SAT, the most frequently taken exam in the known universe, is continuously re-evaluated as psychometricians assess how well it does what it purports to do: determine testtakers’ readiness for college. (Interesting aside: SAT once stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, and later became the Scholastic Assessment Test – from the department of redundancy department – but now SAT is an acronym that stands for nothing, and the exam is called the SAT Reasoning Test. No kidding.)
Films for Class: Resources and Rules
by BRUCE TORFF
Sarah.E.McCleskey@hofstra.edu. For technical help excerpting and posting video segments, contact fcshelp@hofstra.edu.
continued from page 4
misses should be reconsidered; they may be worded unclearly or tap knowledge not well covered in the curriculum. You don’t need to be a professional psychometrician to write good tests and have fun doing it. And the feedback you receive from test results can help you refashion your teaching to get better results in the future. As Karl Popper wrote, “good tests kill flawed theories” – in this case, 5
theories about what kind of teaching works well for our students. Bruce Torff is professor of curriculum and teaching, director of the Doctoral Program in Learning and Teaching in the School of Education, Health and Human Services, and pedagogical research consultant for the CTSE.
Assembling a Better Academic Portfolio
Peter Seldin and J. Elizabeth Miller have worked with 200 deans and chairs at public and private institutions to arrive at a template for a successful academic portfolio. Here, adapted from their book The Academic Portfolio, are some items you should consider including in your portfolio: Teaching: • Courses taught – names, level, enrollment • Teaching philosophy • Courses you’ve written or revised, and why • Select syllabi and other course material • Activities to improve teaching • Student evaluations • Peer evaluations Research: • Description of your research • Statement from peers and administrators on its importance • Samples of books, journal articles, and creative works, with a complete listing in the appendix • Grants obtained • Positions on editorial boards and in professional societies • Sample of conference presentations, exhibits, etc. • Graduate supervision Service: • Sample of committee work and positions served • Student advising, junior faculty mentoring, and service learning • Participation in community groups
ARTstor offers more than a million images for use in lectures and research.
Here are a few of his suggestions: DO house the portfolio in a three-ring binder and use tabs with typed labels to divide sections. DO include a 14- to 19-page narrative, including: the purpose of the portfolio (1/2 page), teaching accomplishments (5-6 pages), scholarship (5-6 pages), service (2-3 pages), and achievements and goals you still hope to achieve (1-2 pages). DO put your work in context. Instead of just listing your accomplishments, explain why you undertook the work, how it supports the discipline and the University, its significance, and how it was received (e.g., citations, awards received, etc.). DO cross-reference every claim in the narrative to hard evidence in the appendix. For instance, if you claim in the narrative that your teaching scores were in the 1.52.3 range, cross-reference the claim to the pages in the appendix with all your CTR scores. If your narrative has a brief summary of your most important articles, cross-reference the summary to the actual articles in the appendix. DO describe your research and its relevance in terms that someone outside your field can understand. DO make your portfolio easy to read. Use a table of contents. Break up your narrative with crossheads, bullets, or tables. Number pages. Divide the appendix into five or six sections, separated with tabs; type the labels. DO remember that the people reading your portfolio are overworked and busy. Call attention to the most important information in your portfolio. You may even include a brief cover letter that lists the key accomplishments as bullet points; after each item, include the page in the narrative and appendix where more information on this accomplishment can be found. DON’T be afraid to ask for help. Ask your chair what information he or she expects to see in the portfolio. Read your department’s tenure guidelines as well as those in the Faculty Policy Series. Ask a colleague of
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Photo by Erin Furman
What Goes in a Portfolio?
by Sarah McCleskey
Dr. Peter Seldin, co-author of the book The Academic Portfolio, estimates it takes 15 to 20 hours to build a strong portfolio.
higher rank to show you his or her successful portfolio. DON’T throw in the kitchen sink. Be selective in what you include. You don’t have to include every comment a colleague has written about you, or the complete text of every article you’ve ever written. Explain why you have selected the pieces you have, then offer to provide the complete set on request – or provide a box of supplementary material in case the personnel committee needs to check anything.
ARTstor is a digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. Available through the Axinn Library research databases, ARTstor is composed of images from museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates. Images represent a wide variety of subject areas, from architecture and religion to anthropology and world history.
Searching and Browsing Two search modes provide flexibility in searching for images in ARTstor. A keyword search searches all data fields for every image in the digital library. The advanced search helps limit or filter a search by field, dates, collection, classification, or geography. Another way to discover ARTstor content is by browsing. Three browse options are available. Browsing by collection allows you to view all the collections in ARTstor; each collection is subdivided by categories
based on the content of the collection. Browsing by classification subdivides the ARTstor digital library into 16 broad classifications, for example, “architecture and city planning,” “decorative arts,” “drawings and watercolors,” “maps, charts and graphs,” and “graphic design and illustration.” Browsing by geography allows you to focus on works created by an artist from a specific country or, in the case of architecture, the location of the work.
Organizing Images As you find images that interest you, ARTstor offers the ability to save them into groups that you can organize, share, print, or present. Image groups are accessible from anywhere you can log in to ARTstor (on or off campus). The ARTstor personal collections feature allows instructors to post their personal digital images alongside images from the ARTstor Digital Library. These images can then be shared with others at Hofstra by adding them to image groups in shared folders.
Presenting images Image groups allow instructors to give online presentations using ARTstor Image A huge variety of images are available on ARTstor. Clockwise from top left: Chuba from the Qing dynasty; a coffee pot by 20th-century Czech designer Pavel Janàk; 16thcentury German Tournament Book. All images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
DON’T wait until the last minute. A portfolio that is too short, or thrown together too quickly, sends the message that you don’t care. Dr. Seldin, whose team has worked with more than 1,000 faculty members on their academic portfolios, estimates that it takes 15 to 20 hours of concentrated work to build a strong portfolio. DON’T let your completed portfolio languish. Date your portfolio and update it each year. For more advice, see The Academic Portfolio by Peter Seldin and J. Elizabeth Miller, Jossey-Bass (2009).
Photo by Alexandra Zurhorst
Whether you are putting together an academic portfolio for tenure or promotion, to apply for grant funding or to seek an award, certain principles apply. Peter Seldin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Management at Pace University and noted authority on academic portfolios, came to Hofstra last year to discuss the growing importance of portfolios in institutions of higher education (see CTSE Newsletter, spring 2010). In the spring, the CTSE invited him back to go over some specific advice for creating an effective portfolio.
Art Supplied
Viewer. This viewer allows for side-byside comparisons, on-the-fly zooming and panning, and the incorporation of personal collection images with ARTstor content.
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Jamie Primo, electronic services coordinator in the library, teaches faculty how to use a new art image database.
You may also use the presentation software of your choice: PowerPoint, Keynote, etc. You may export ARTstor images from the digital library for use in classroom presentations and other noncommercial, educational purposes, in the software of your choice. ARTstor has also developed the Offline Image Viewer (OIV), a tool for giving offline classroom presentations. OIV allows users to download much larger images from ARTstor, at up to 3200 pixels on the long side. Users may combine ARTstor images with their own content to create digital slide show presentations that feature side-by-side comparisons, zooming and panning, and the ability to customize text on the slides. ARTstor’s OIV enables instructors to give cogent classroom presentations using both high-resolution ARTstor images and local content without being connected to the Internet. For assistance using ARTstor and to obtain an instructor-level account, contact Jamie Primo, electronic services coordinator, Axinn Library, at (516) 463-4075 or Jamie.Primo@hofstra.edu. Sarah E. McCleskey is head of access services and acting director of the Film and Media Library at the Axinn Library.
Talking About Race
Discipline in the Classroom
by Michelle Hart
The Hofstra-Claflin exchange program energizes classroom discussions about race, religion and politics.
Hofstra’s Dr. Barbara Lekatsas and Claflin’s Dr. Ronald Neal shared their experiences at a March program co-sponsored by the Provost’s Office and the CTSE. Dr. Neal, an assistant professor of philosophy and religion, is a theologian whose work involves African-American theology, ethics, religion and politics, philosophical theology, and global Christianity. At Hofstra, Dr. Neal taught a class titled “Race, Religion, and Democracy,” in which he sought to engage students in discussions about race, religion and politics with both intellectual vigor and intellectual honesty. He came to realize there is no way to discuss race, religion, and politics without getting one’s hands dirty, he said. The class came hot on the heels of the 2008 presidential election and, in Neal’s own words, Obama’s presence as the newly elected president of the United States “stood as an invaluable teaching tool from beginning to end.” Obama, with his youthful charisma, symbolizes a cultural shift that American youth view as redemptive. On the last day of class, Dr. Neal showed When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary chronicling post-Katrina New Orleans. “I had originally planned to screen the movie and engage in a discussion about the film,” Dr. Neal said. “I had no clue it would be the most explosive day of the semester.” According to Dr. Neal, Hurricane Katrina exposed America’s underrepresented third world, America’s Haiti or Afghanistan, as well as our nation’s unwillingness to confront issues of race, class, and equality. After presenting his opinions on the matter
to the class, two female students, one black, one white, weighed in on what the professor said. The students went back and forth in an intense, but civil exchange. “This last day of classes will always go down as my favorite, most rewarding experience as a visiting professor here at Hofstra,” Dr. Neal said. Dr. Lekatsas, an associate professor of comparative literature and languages, found her semester at Claflin to be equally productive, if less explosive. A specialist in modern art and literary movements, Dr. Lekatsas found her way to Claflin through an exhibition she longed to bring to the university, Will Barnet and Bob Blackburn: An Artistic Friendship in Relief, which featured works by two of America’s leading printmakers from the collection of Wesley and Missy Cochran of LaGrange, Georgia. She was lecturing about the artists in August 2008 at the LaGrange Fine Arts Museum when the idea came to her of bringing the exhibition to Claflin. “Introducing the work of Barnet and Blackburn (white and African-American artists who shared a lifelong friendship and collaboration) to an audience of students and townspeople of LaGrange, went far beyond the aesthetic experience of seeing great art work,” she noted. “A cultural framework was created in a still fairly rural and predominantly white region of Georgia to present some of the finest work of African-American artists and to create an interactive space for diversity to occur in the most felicitous manner.” At Claflin, Dr. Lekatsas taught “Introduction to Literature,” to which she added a focus on literary movements, tackling works of Alice Walker, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane in the context of Realism, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes in terms of symbolism. She also asked students to write on specific works in the exhibition and relate them to the movement they were studying. 8
Photo by Chantal Heslop
A comparative literature professor from Hofstra and a religion professor from Claflin, a historically black college in South Carolina, traded places last year as part of an ongoing exchange program between the two universities.
Do students text while you’re lecturing? Surf the Internet? Talk incessantly?
Hofstra literature professor Barbara Lekatsas spent last year at Claflin University, a historically black college in South Carolina, while Claflin religion professor Ronald Neal taught here at Hofstra.
Most of the university, as well as members of the community, attended the exhibition she brought to Claflin’s Arthur Rose Museum. It was for her “a dream realized.” Dr. Lekatsas went to Claflin in the spirit of adventure and threw herself into the life of the university in areas where she had something to offer, whether it was in helping with grants, lecturing on topics like Surrealism, or participating in an International Poetry Festival. “In return, it seemed the whole university participated and collaborated with me, encouraging me to be a visionary,” Dr. Lekatsas said. The exchange program with Claflin is one of many Hofstra programs aimed at increasing diversity in the classroom. “The University has long had a commitment to diversity,” Provost Herman Berliner noted. Hofstra was the first college in the country to be fully accessible to students with physical disabilities. Its NOAH program became a template for the Higher Education Opportunity Program for New York state. According to Provost Berliner, Hofstra has an increasingly diverse student body, as well as an enhanced commitment to foreign languages and cultural studies. Except for NYU and Columbia, Hofstra offers courses in more foreign languages — from every major region of the world — than any other college or university in the New York City region. Most recently, the University has revamped its comprehensive affirmative action policy; the new policy is currently going through the University governance process. Michelle Hart is a junior print journalism major at Hofstra.
According to Jennifer Mone, deputy general counsel at Hofstra, universities may have a duty to provide students with a “nurturing learning environment,” and this gives professors the right – and responsibility – to control disruptive behavior in their classes. Failure to act against disruptions could result in liability, Ms. Mone added. As a professor, you can define upfront what constitutes disruptive behavior. The University Senate recently passed an amendment to the Faculty Policy Series that allows faculty to remove seriously or repeatedly disruptive students from the classroom for the class period or, for the most serious cases, permanently from the course. (Such an action must be reported within 24 hours to the chair, dean, provost, and Center for University Advisement, and an appeal process is available to students.)
by David Salazar
The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) does not prevent faculty from disclosing unsafe behavior by students to appropriate offices such as Student Counseling Services or Public Safety. However, Ms. Mone advises faculty not to disclose such information through e-mail. Most cases of classroom discipline don’t have to snowball into legal issues, of course. At a CTSE workshop on discipline in the classroom, Bruce Torff, professor of curriculum and teaching, shared some tips for controlling unruly students. First, he noted, it is essential to acknowledge the regrettable fact that students are adolescents and that, therefore, some misbehavior is to be expected. That does not mean condoning disruptive behavior. Dr. Torff suggested that the rules must be set from the outset of the term. Among the many tools he employs to avoid disruptive behavior is proximity – walking around the room next to students because they are less likely to get off task if they know the teacher is nearby. When talking to disruptive students, he changes his tone depending on the response he gets from them. First he will simply “call for compliance” (“May I speak, please?”). If there is no respect for the request, he will name the student and make the request once more with firm tone (“Joe, may I speak?”). If the problem persists he will command the student to stop (“Joe, you must stop talking now.”). As a final request, he will “state the consequences of continued noncompliance” (“If you don’t stop talking, I will have to remove you from the room.”). Other ideas that emerged from the workshop include: v Have students place cell phones on the floor at the start of class. v Let students know what they stand to gain from following the rules. v Tell students at the beginning of the semester that if a student uses a cell
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Jennifer Mone, deputy general counsel at Hofstra, says faculty may have a legal responsibility to control overly disruptive students.
phone or surfs the Web during class, the student will be marked absent, since his or her attention was not in class. v In a computer classroom, lock the students’ computers while lecturing, or let them know that you can view their screens on your computer. v Keep students involved with frequent hands-on exercises. v Take advantage of the CTSE’s free, confidential programs to strengthen your classroom management skills. These include videotaping your classes, nonevaluative observation of your class by someone outside your department, or arranging for you to sit in on classes of a more experienced teacher. For more information, e-mail CTSE Director Susan Martin at susan.martin@hofstra.edu. David Salazar is a senior print journalism major at Hofstra.
Classroom Lessons by Andrea S. Libresco Only Connect … Across Disciplines, Time and Space
Andrea S.
Libresco
Classroom Lessons highlights examples of excellent teaching by our Hofstra colleagues. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who had both logic and magic in their teaching. After all, without logic, no one will be persuaded; without magic, no one will care. I like E.M. Forster’s take on this in Howard’s End: “Only connect the prose and the passion … Live in fragments no longer.” While the epigraph suggests a positive imperative for making connections, also implied are the difficulties in doing so; and, within Forster’s novels, his characters struggle mightily to make connections across class, race and gender lines. I’ve been thinking a lot about the magic of making connections in our teaching. Of course we want to connect the passion and prose of our subjects to our students’ lives, but it is not a foregone conclusion that we will be successful. Sometimes our passion about an important work does not translate well into our students’ frames of reference; sometimes the divide seems too great to cross. Observing Dr. Lauren Kozol deliver her lecture on The Tempest to 250 students in the team-taught Culture & Expression (C & E) course, a requirement for all students in Hofstra University Honors College, I have seen a teacher conquer this
Before she even began speaking, her PowerPoint slide of a 1916 John William Waterhouse painting, “The Tempest,” set the tone for a presentation that would connect art, music and poetry from different continents to Shakespeare’s play. When Professor Kozol began her lecture, she asked students to: Close your eyes and imagine this: You, Prince of Naples, have just been through a violent storm on the high seas. Your boat was wrecked, your father drowned, or so you believe, and you alone are washed ashore on this strange island. You sit on the bank and begin to weep for your loss. And then, all of a sudden you hear music, music that seems to be created by the air itself, music that creeps by you on the waters “allaying” as Ferdinand says, “both their fury” and your “passion/ with its sweet air,” and notice the double meaning here – both a musical tune and the substance we breathe, and both associated with our favorite spirit – Ariel. She then played the first of several pieces of music that she would use in her talk. Notice what Professor Kozol did in the opening of her lecture. She connected students to their imaginations and to a character who has experienced a great loss. In addition, she introduced the playfulness of language to which she wanted her students’ ears attuned. And she cued her students to pay attention to the music of the play – both the actual music and the music of the language Shakespeare uses.
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The emphasis on music was no accident, as one of the two songs that Professor Kozol used at the beginning of her talk contained the metaphor that guided her entire presentation. The dirge that Ariel sings informs Ferdinand that “Alonso’s corpse lies at the bottom of the ocean where it is undergoing a ‘sea-change’; that is, bone is becoming coral and eyes are becoming pearls.” Professor Kozol pointed out that, while the song presents a lie (Alonso has not drowned), this falsehood turns out to be metaphorically true, for, “In The Tempest, Alonso, along with many of the other characters, will suffer a ‘sea change’; that is, their tempest-tossed journey will open for them the possibilities of transformation.” Professor Kozol emphasized how rich the play is, in that it has spawned 46 operas or semi-operas, a Beethoven piano sonata, paintings, movies (from Forbidden Planet to The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus), poetry by Browning, Eliot, and Auden, and Caribbean and African writers who “appropriated the play and changed the work, using it as one of the tools or weapons, if you will, to fight colonialism and change the world.” Much of Professor Kozol’s lecture focused on the various sea changes that influenced the creation of the play, those within the play itself, and those that have followed as interpretations or appropriations of the drama in modern times. Professor Kozol connected to a prior lecture by Professor Rebecca Slitt, another professor in the C & E program, who talked about the history that made this drama possible: “the ascendancy of James I to the throne and the nervous energy created by having a leader like Queen Elizabeth who had no heir; the ideas of thinkers like Montaigne about nature and culture, and of course, the age of exploration, the beginning of colonization of the new world, and the encounter with people of different cultures, habits and languages.”
The Renaissance magician is a scholar. There was little distinction at the time between what we consider to be pseudosciences – alchemy and astrology – and those we consider to be real science. People in the Renaissance, as we do today, believed that through study and discipline you could gain knowledge and power. Certainly, Professor Kozol also highlighted the sea change that occurs in Prospero in the play. She and Professor Slitt acted out the scene that is the climax of the play (V.i.1-57), where Prospero must decide which part of himself will win out – the angry, vengeful man or the noble, forgiving one. Prospero ultimately decides that, “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” He finds true power, not in studying his books of magic, at a distance from the fallible world, but in forgiveness and engagement with that world, inhabited by all-too-human beings. The final sea change that Professor Kozol emphasized was in the criticism and uses of the play. She directed students’ attention to the fact that, “The Tempest was written at the beginning of colonization,” and that, “fairly recently, in the Caribbean and Africa, we have seen the end of that same project.” Thus, she encouraged students to decide how they feel about the portrayal of the character of Caliban – whether they understand him as “the body, a part of the self we must all acknowledge, or … as an islander with a right … to the island,” whether Caliban’s curses are an example of “some natures upon which nurture will never stick” or whether students might decide that “it is a good thing that Caliban can fight back with his curses.” Professor Kozol also encouraged students to pay attention to all of Caliban’s language, not only his curses, as Shakespeare also gives him poetry that expresses “his attunement to the island itself – to its beauty and its music. And this again may
reflect the natural man, as seen by Montaigne, who is closer to nature and to the music it produces.” Professor Kozol detailed the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s and the sea change they produced in the analysis of the play and its rewritings by Caribbean authors. She spoke of Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “Learning to Curse,” and other literary critics who suggest that the arrival of the European, Prospero, damages not only the native, Caliban, but also the European himself, “by turning him into a tyrant.” Professor Kozol noted the one thing that, among the many languages and cultures of the Caribbean, all of the colonized freedom fighters had in common: ... a colonial education that included reading The Tempest. And so, the play became a kind of currency with which to talk about Colonialism and work on the struggle between colonizer and colonized. Ngugi wa’Thiongo, a Kenyan writer, said, at one point, that without The Tempest and the images of Caliban and Prospero, there might have been a violent revolution in South Africa. In the ’50s, an important text was written by O. Mannoni called Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. This posits that there is both a “Prospero” and a “Caliban complex” in psychology. In short, Professor Kozol took her students on a journey through time and space to connect them to thinking by people of other cultures with other frames of reference. At the very end of Professor Kozol’s lecture, she allowed one of these post-colonial writers to have the final word. As she put it, “I began with Ariel, so I want to end with Caliban’s voice … and the amazing and unintended revolutionary
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Photo by Alexandra Kurhorst
divide. Professor Kozol connected with her students by channeling her passion for The Tempest into a thoughtful lecture that made myriad connections across disciplines, time and space.
The second sea change of which Professor Kozol spoke was related to the status of magic. Contrasting the magic in medieval literature, Professor Kozol pointed out that Prospero’s Renaissance magic comes from his books and learning:
Professor Lauren Kozol
meanings that can be found in re-imagining this ‘rich and strange’ play.” She read an excerpt of Kamau Brathwaite’s powerful, joyful poem, written in a lilting Caribbean dialect, that has Caliban writing to his mother on a newly bought computer, “usurping the master’s tool which, in this case, is the computer and ‘the curser’ to become the artist and magician himself ”: … Chip/in dis poem onto dis tab. let. Not fe dem/not fe dem De way caliban done but fe we fe a-we… Thus, by the end of the lecture, with her connections to works across time and space, Professor Kozol had done all that she could to facilitate a “sea change” in the way her students would interpret The Tempest and, one hopes, the other works – music, poetry, plays – with which they will come into contact, in the course and in their lives. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero gives up his magic. I feel confident that Professor Lauren Kozol never will. Andrea Libresco is associate professor of curriculum and teaching in the School of Education, Health and Human Services.
Current CTSE Members
CTSE Staff and Contact Information
Habib Ammari, Ph.D. (Computer Science), 2009-2012
Director Susan Lorde Martin, J.D. Cypres Family Distinguished Professor of Legal Studies in Business 208 Weller Hall Phone: (516) 463-5327 Fax: (516) 463-6505 E-mail: Susan.L.Martin@hofstra.edu
Margaret Burke, M.A. (Library Operations), 2009-2012 Debra Comer, Ph.D. (Management, Entrepreneurship, and General Business), 2010-2013 Gregory DeFreitas, Ph.D. (Economics), 2009-2012 Frank Gaughan, Ph.D. (Writing Studies and Composition), 2010-2013 Victoria Geyer, M.A. (Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations), 2010-2013 Kari Jensen, Ph.D. (Global Studies and Geography), 2010-2013 Elena Jurasaite-Harbison, Ph.D. (Curriculum and Teaching), 2009-2012 Nancy Kaplan, Ph.D. (Radio, TV, Film), 2009-2012 Linda Longmire, Ph.D. (Global Studies and Geography), 2009-2012 David Powell, Ph.D. (Romance Languages and Literatures), 2009-2012 Ronald Sarno, Ph.D. (Biology), 2009-2012 Andrew Spieler, Ph.D. (Finance), 2009-2012 Daniel Tinkelman, Ph.D. (Accounting, Taxation and Legal Studies in Business), 2008-2011 Kathleen Wallace, Ph.D. (Philosophy), 2010-2013 Boonghee Yoo, Ph.D. (Marketing and International Business), 2010-2013
Associate Director Carol Fletcher, M.A. Associate Professor of Journalism 403 New Academic Building Phone: (516) 463-6464 E-mail: Carol.T.Fletcher@hofstra.edu Senior Assistant Jeanne Racioppi, B.A. 200 West Library Wing Phone: (516) 463-6221 Fax: (516) 463-6505 E-mail: Jeanne.Racioppi@hofstra.edu English Editing Consultant Carol Porr, M.A. Adjunct Instructor of English Assistant Director, Composition Program 208 Calkins Hall Phone: (516) 463-5252 Fax: (516) 463-6505 E-mail: Carol.J.Porr@hofstra.edu
Pedagogical Research Consultant Bruce Torff, Ed.D. Professor of Curriculum and Teaching 128 Hagedorn Hall Phone: (516) 463-5803 Fax: (516) 463-6196 E-mail: Bruce.A.Torff@hofstra.edu Program Evaluator Marc Silver, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology 202F Davison Hall Phone: (516) 463-5645 Fax: (516) 463-6505 E-mail: Marc.L.Silver@hofstra.edu Public Speaking Consultant Cindy Rosenthal, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Teaching Fellow, School for University Studies 107 Roosevelt Hall Phone: (516) 463-4966 Fax: (516) 463-4822 E-mail: Cindy.D.Rosenthal@hofstra.edu Quantitative Analysis Consultant Michael Barnes, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology 101 Hauser Hall Phone: (516) 463-5179 Fax: (516) 463-6505 E-mail: Michael.J.Barnes@hofstra.edu
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