Jenn Shapland's blog

Workflowy in the digital classroom

Jenn Shapland — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 17:15:26 +0000

Author:

Jenn Shapland

Image Credit:

www.workflowy.com

To accommodate students who learn best when things are written out, rather than spoken, I use Workflowy to bring together the usually separate processes of teaching and tracking a class: daily lesson planning, real-time note taking, logging assignments and due dates, and creating a daily archive of class schedule and discussions. In other words, I use one platform—one set of notes—to plan my class each day; to provide a written schedule of each class day’s work and assignments; to display the current day’s plan on screen during class; to take notes on screen during discussions; and to provide students (and myself) with a day-by-day record of the entire semester accessible from the course website.

Workflowy’s list-making platform is suited to the classroom because of its utter minimalism. It displays only text, allows you to complete and hide items as you finish them, and provides an elegant, clear focal point for the class without requiring me to format or design a slideshow. It is image, color, and ad free, perhaps its greatest features.

I create bulleted, nested lists by date, add any number of headings and sub-sections in outline form, and paste in links to videos or other content that I plan to use during class. I can use and update the class Workflowy from any computer, tablet, or phone, which makes it easy to note a new idea for an upcoming class. Students can also access the list from anywhere, but are unable to edit it—they can hide or expand each day and item, but it’s a read-only version

In a way, it’s like having a collapsible/expandable chalkboard whose contents is archived. It’s not all that different from using a word processor to make the course schedule, but the ability to hide certain information—past days, the day’s homework—until the time when you want it shown helps immensely in keeping students focused on the task at hand. It’s also possible to show only a single item, if you want to provide a prompt, a quiz, or a set of questions for discussion without the distraction of the rest of the day’s work. The screen shots below give you a sense of how I use Workflowy to plan class and take notes on screen. Or, feel free to play around with the read-only version I make available to my students.

Real time note-taking:

Daily homework:

Great Minds Leave Academia

Jenn Shapland — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 21:20:33 +0000

Author:

Jenn Shapland

Image Credit:

Best D Industry

Correction: In response to a stream of contradictory emails that seek to clarify specific policies regarding graduate fellowships and insurance coverage, I have decided to remove all mention of said policies from the following post.

This post is not, explicitly, about visual rhetoric. It is, however, about the fact that I write for this blog, and it's about the institution that requires me to fulfill this responsibility (without pay), and it feels important to start talking about this stuff, instead of pretending that we do all of this for fun.

I’ve been having a rough couple of weeks in academia-land (I find that sometimes it helps if you call it “macadamia-land”). I started to make you a list of all the things that went down, but it was getting pretty screedy, and honestly who cares, so I’ll spare you. I did post a complaint on Facebook that launched a discussion among members of the department about our shared concerns—I’m hoping that a revolution is afoot.

But, while we continue to wait around for revolution (le sigh), I want to talk about the realities of academic life in this strange moment. Universities are churning out more degrees than ever, but being in a PhD program right now feels a little bit like being on a conveyer belt from which you will soon be catapulted. Into a brick wall. Anne Helen Peterson, a UT PhD alum in Media Studies, puts the problem this way: “‘academia is drunk’—not belligerent or irresponsible so much as single-sightedly focused on things that may or may not ultimately matter.” In an interview that went up on The Hairpin earlier this week, Peterson announced her new position as Features Writer at Buzzfeed (which yours truly may have once called the Comic Sans of websites). Despite my feelings about Buzzfeed’s typical content, Peterson's new gig sounds very promising, allowing her to incorporate research and cultural criticism into pop culture analysis—all good things, all things the internet could use. (If you’ve not yet read her stuff, give it a try. It’s fantastic.)

Reading her interview, I couldn’t help but think of all the incredibly intelligent people I know who have earned graduate degrees—MAs or MFAs or PhDs, or some combination thereof—who have left academia for other work. Some of these people work in archives or libraries; others, like Peterson, write or teach for other venues; some become yoga teachers or massage therapists or postal workers; and many (most) take high-paying jobs at tech companies. I’m starting to feel a great sense of loss here. The best minds of my generation do not work in the university system. Stop for a second and think about what that means. 1

In part, this exodus is due to what Peterson expresses so adroitly when asked about pursuing a degree in a “fully-funded program” (which the UT English department purports to be): “'fully funded’ is a myth,” she says,

especially at state schools, even “state Ivies” like the University of Texas. You have a salary, but that salary just about pays your rent, and then you get nickeled-and-dimed for all sorts of fees, insurance, buying food that’s not rice, and somehow surviving the summer, when you’re not getting paid but are expected to do scholarship and research.

Sing it, sister.

In an attempt to redirect my rage, I decided to add up the hours I work for UT and compare it to my salary. During an average week, I work six hours in the DWRL, teach for three hours, hold three scheduled office hours, spend at least fifteen hours answering program-related and student email (most of these are program related), and spend fifteen to twenty mostly blessed hours on my writing, research, fellowship applications, &c. Some weeks we have to add at least three hours in for writing a viz post, like this here. That’s means that in an average work-week of 42-50 hours, I’m paid between $6 and $7.50 per hour. I could make more money working fewer hours at most shift jobs (7-11 pays $10 an hour, e.g.). So it’s no wonder that flocks of intelligent people are seeking work elsewhere. Despite the fact that the university could not function without our insanely cheap labor—especially that of English grad students, who teach ALL the university's basic comp classes, plus TA its one required literature class—our work is simply not valued. None of it. And for some reason, as long as we're in the program, we're not supposed to say anything about it.

Many people have written about the plight of underfunded, overworked graduate students, but there’s often the assumption that the people writing about this aren’t at the good programs, or they shouldn’t be in grad school, or they’ve betrayed the monastic code of scholarly life, or good riddance! we don’t need more professors, anyway!—somehow, it’s easy to disassociate yourself from the exploitative reality in which you take part. (Isn't this what most of us spend all our time working to critique?)

So. All of that is the dreary side of things. But here’s the part that’s hopeful. Peterson writes that this movement of intellectuals—by which I mean people who have had, if nothing else, a few years to research and read and think really hard about the world that we live in—could create new models for teaching and dialogue outside the elitist, patriarchal, anti-feminist, often discriminatory, increasingly corporate university campus.

The collapse of the PhD market, combined with the rise of digital publishing, has ironically yielded an exquisite, flourishing community of public intellectuals—people who write for places like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, sure, but also those who write for places like Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, n+1, Avidly, and, of course, The Awl and The Hairpin. As more and more people with PhD behind their names find themselves in situations similar to mine, we’ve been forced to radically reconsider what we thought “teaching” and “dialogue” looks like. But I think that might ultimately be for the best?

I like to think that she’s right. I love it, actually. Because the internet can respond with much greater alacrity to issues of urgency than a bureaucracy that operates slow-as-molasses. But I’m suspicious, too, because, as a brilliant colleague just put it, there’s only so much money you can make on the internet. And this ties into another topic on my mind lately, that of undervaluing intellectual and critical work. Again, none of this is news, people have talked about it for ages, but I think, just maybe, it might be coming to a head.

Either that or, four years in, I’m simply at my wits end. This week I am, in the words of my own grandmother, “so mad I could spit.” The problem for me is that I love teaching. I love writing. I think it’s hugely important and it’s work I feel cut out to do. I don’t want or plan to leave academia. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining all the ways it could be better, that it could function more fairly and effectively.

What do you think? What do you envision for the future of higher education? How can we imagine new platforms for conversation and critique?

1. And what does it say about the people who stick around? Is that why newly-tenured faculty get so condemnatory when anyone gets a job outside the hallowed halls (I refer specifically to the backlash against Peterson this week—it's been ugly, even from members of my department) because the more critical thinkers at large outside the university, the less powerful the institution becomes? Let's call that a hypothesis.

Using Meditation in the (Digital) Classroom

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 17:49:40 +0000

Author:

Jenn Shapland

Image Credit:

David Lynch Foundation

I decided to bring meditation practice into my Rhetoric and Writing class against the firm advice of nearly everyone I’d talked to about it. Most of my friends and colleagues said it sounded like a nice idea, but, “would you really want to be that teacher?” In other words, they wondered if my students would take me seriously. These are sensible concerns, but, in the curious and compensatorily over-confident spirit of teaching this class for the first time—and in a digital classroom to boot—I went for it anyway.

Each Monday and Wednesday, for the first few minutes of class, I lead the group of fourteen undergraduates through a mindfulness meditation. I base it on a practice called the Three-Minute Breathing Space. Basically, students sit in silence, eyes closed, and I ask them to focus their attention on their breathing. I vary it week to week, but usually I suggest that they become aware of the state of their physical body, their thoughts, and their current emotions. Sometimes I use the ambient noise in the room—it’s a windowless, basement classroom equipped with about thirty Mac desktops and a projector, so it has an audible hum—and draw their attention to the sounds and other background conditions that they might usually ignore. Often I refer to specifics that seem relevant on the day: the weather, the energy level in the room, the time in the semester, or even the week’s workload. It’s different every time, and some days, when I feel especially in need of a minute to collect myself before teaching a class, I play a recorded mindfulness meditation over the classroom speakers and join them.

Meditation has become an integral part of my life over the last few months. I find it helpful for overcoming anxiety, improving concentration, and finding a deliberate, accepting approach to daily experience. Because it’s been so useful to me, I thought it would be a good tool for my students to have as they approach their own anxieties about writing. I did a little research before the fall semester and discovered that mindfulness meditation has been proven to raise exam scores and improve concentration and focus in high school students, and it is used more and more frequently to create calm, attentive classroom environments. Many professors have begun to incorporate what's called contemplative pedagogy into their innovative teaching practices at the college level to encourage creativity and reduce stress. Not only that, but David Lynch is a huge fan; the image above, from his foundation's website, illustrates how unexpected it might look to have students close their eyes and sit still during class. But, recalling how exhausted and overwhelmed I tended to be during college, I figured if nothing else meditation couldn’t hurt my group of sophomores and juniors.

So far, I’ve been impressed with the results. I notice a marked difference in the way students engage with me and with one another on days when we start class by meditating. They look at me when I speak. They look at one another when they speak. The few times we haven’t meditated, the class has felt especially inattentive to me—many of them unsubtly check their phones under the table or just zone out. The omnipresent smart phone phenomenon is especially perplexing to me as an instructor in a digital classroom. It seems baldy contradictory to prohibit their access to technology when I’m also encouraging its use and promoting digital resources throughout the semester.

During one meditation, I decided to try calling their attention to their phones. As an example of feelings they might currently be experiencing, I brought up that persistent, gnawing sense of distress—mental, physical, and emotional—that they might feel when they can’t easily see or access their phones, even for the few minutes that their eyes are closed to meditate. I mentioned that they didn’t need to change this feeling, or judge it, but simply notice it if it was there. That day, not a single person in class picked up their phone for the full seventy-five minutes. I didn’t ask them not to, but calling their awareness to their own reliance on it seemed to pose some sort of challenge to them.

I’ll readily admit that this is an ongoing experiment. Teaching a class for the first time is experimental in myriad ways. I look forward to getting some mid-semester feedback from the students to hear if our daily meditation sessions are something they like or find useful. But, for now, I’m pleased with the conscientious quality of attention I have in class.

If you’re interested in using mindfulness meditation in the classroom, UT’s Center for Mental Health has a number of great resources and classes available in person and online (they offer recorded meditations online here). In addition to theirs, I like to use this downloadable set of recordings from UCLA. For my part, I’m going to continue thinking about ways that meditation can enhance learning, even though to some it might not seem like a “productive” use of time—I have a feeling that deep investments in the myth of incessant productivity (perhaps a result of late capitalist anxieties and the ensuing impact of corporate approaches to learning on the college campus?) are at the root of these unsubstantiated suspicions.