I have a goal for myself of reading one academic book a month outside of my regular research. It’s more challenging than I would have thought to find the time to just read one chapter here and there, but it’s good to know what’s going on in the world of geography.
This month, I read David Wilson’s Chicago’s Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs. Let me say first that I highly recommend reading the work of people in your own department: you can just hear them saying the words that are on the page, and you also get to know them better through their writing.
I’ve written my own book about Chicago, and I always love reading others’ takes on one of the most well-studied cities in the world. Wilson’s perspective is from a part of the city that academics don’t often see: the residents of the South Side and their participation in urban life through the blues clubs for which the city is famous. These clubs are under threat, however, from the “redevelopment machine” and the ways in which it draws on those clubs as authentic local culture while bringing in the forces of gentrification to eventually tear them down or commodify them into an “authentic” experience for outsiders rather than a vital community resource.
I really enjoyed the chapters that put forth an ethnography of blues clubs, because they clearly showed the internal trade-offs and the push-pull nature of gentrification at the level of the establishment. Club owners try to bring in different kinds of music or more expensive drinks to attract a more upscale clientele. Club patrons recognize this as a business strategy, but they also resent and sometimes push back against the perception that this place that’s so important to them is trying to change. One of Wilson’s main contributions with this book is to illustrate how gentrification operates through commercial establishments, not just changes in housing stock, and I think it’s worth reading for that alone.
When David was doing the ethnographic work for this book, I remember him telling me about making the two-hour-plus drive home to Urbana from these clubs very, very late at night, not to mention the time it took to just hang out in order to gain the trust of the people he was studying. Judging from the book, I would say it was worth it!
When I was an assistant professor, I started tracking how many hours I worked per week. I started this to make sure I was spending enough time on what I was “supposed to.” (And because my spouse and I had already been tracking our work and housework hours to make sure my long commute in California was adequately compensated, but that’s for another post.) I don’t know that it made me change my habits at all, but it seemed to average about 40 hours per week during the school year and 20 hours per week in the summer.
After I was tenured, I kept keeping track out of habit, but then decided at some point to stop. And then after becoming a full professor, I felt like I was doing no research at all compared to teaching and my new service responsibilities. So this fall, I got a nifty time-tracking app set up, and I’ve been keeping track of everything I do.
I have five broad categories: Research, Teaching, Administration, E-mail, and Community (departmental coffee hour, colloquium, etc). I broke out e-mail because I wanted to see how much time it specifically took, not just reading messages but dealing with their contents. I averaged 43 hours of work a week in the fall semester, broken down like this:
That’s not bad, right? Research is almost a third of my time, teaching is over a third of my time, and everything else is a little under a third. I mean, research is the only thing that’s important as far as The System is concerned, so that piece of the pie should be much bigger. But overall, it looks pretty balanced.
However. When I record my hours, I break them down into specific activities: meetings, classes, large service commitments like being on the university’s climate action plan team, grant writing, etc. When we look at that pie chart, it’s a little different:
Half of the admin came from chairing our tenure track job search. That’s understandable, and I’d gladly do it again (if only because it meant we were hiring again!). Teaching is almost entirely my two undergraduate classes (of which the team-taught one was almost exactly half the hours of the other one), plus meeting with grad students and working on my transportation geography textbook.
The real shocker was research. About 70% of the time I had marked as research was traveling to or attending conferences. I went to three: Regional Studies Association in Montreal; Transport, Traffic, and Mobility in Paris; and the West Lakes Regional Meeting of the AAG in Cedar Falls, IA. Which means a tiny 1% of my time went to data analysis, 2% went to grantwriting (and that was more than normal, since I’m on sabbatical next year and was applying for a lot of fellowships), and 3% went to reading books and articles in my field. A measly 3% went to writing, which again, is the only thing besides grantwriting that really matters according to R1 university standards.
So what am I going to do with this information? Well, since my role in our job search is largely done, that will free up about 4 hours a week. E-mail didn’t take up as much time as I feared. Teaching will take much more time, since my grad seminar will require a lot of hours of reading and grading. I only have one conference in the spring, although since the AAG takes up a whole week, I’m expecting the conference hours will be about half of what they were in the fall. Now, that’s not all directly transferable to additional hours for other things: I’m not going to replace my 26-hour journey to Paris with 26 hours of writing, for example.
It got me thinking about conferences, though. I did get some great things out of going to Paris, including getting to know people with whom I’m co-sponsoring sessions at AAG, learning about new books that are coming out, and motivating myself to make at least a little progress on my research. But is that worth the time? There’s a huge debate right now about academics flying to conferences in an era of climate change, which I’m pretty firmly ambivalent about but am getting very interested in the discourse. (Again, for another post.) What I learned from analyzing my hours like this is that there’s another aspect to deciding whether or not to attend a conference. We all have only so many hours in the week, and hours spent in transit or in paper sessions are hours we’re not working on our own research. Obviously, we get ideas from hearing other people’s work, including potential collaborations; I’m working on an article right now with someone that came about because we’ve attended multiple conferences together. But at least for an introvert like me, maybe I need to be more careful about the conferences I choose: what am I going to get out of going there in person? Is it worth my time?
Have you tracked your hours? Made modifications to your schedule as a result? Or do you not want to monitor yourself like that?
Eat less sugar. I’m not even talking cutting down on refined sugars by reading labels or switching sweeteners. I’m talking not buying candy or caramel corn and then eating the whole bag within a few days. If I don’t buy it, it won’t be around to eat.
More cross-training. Especially with the trouble I’ve been having with my calves and IT band, I can’t just run. Once a week biking indoors for now, along with regular yoga and daily foam rolling.
Write 20 minutes a day on my research. That’s such a minimal thing, but I wasn’t able to manage it last fall.
Especially for upper-division, discussion-based courses, it’s vital to have input from students on a regular basis in class. In the past, I’ve assessed participation in terms of perceived attendance, recorded attendance, perceived frequency of speaking in class, and quasi-recorded frequency of speaking in class. Obviously, these a) are subjective and prone to bias, b) favor outspoken students, and c) favor quantity over quality. As an introvert who had to force myself to speak up in class once every few weeks, I know that simple measures of participation won’t foster individual growth or make quieter students feel comfortable.
I read a Chronicle article (I think) over the summer about class participation and how hard it is to measure, but how important it can be for student learning. There was a link to a self-assessment rubric from the University of Kansas’s Center for Teaching Excellence (here) and a discussion of how to use it to grade participation. My co-instructor thought this was a fine idea, so with a few modifications, we handed it out at the beginning of the semester, asked students to fill it in, then scanned their responses and returned them. The idea was to have them set goals for themselves and then self-evaluate at the end.
Section of self-assessment rubric, modified from KU’s CTE. As a student, I would generally rate myself a 6 in this category.
What I like about this rubric is that it considers multiple dimensions to class participation. There’s preparing for class, as in doing the reading. (Bet you most people don’t think of that as participation per se, but it is.) There’s being active in small group discussions and the class as a whole, not only in terms of sharing your own ideas, but encouraging other students to share theirs. I added categories here for those who talk too much and don’t give others room to speak, and for those who engage with the material internally, even if they can’t get themselves to raise their hand. There’s also paying attention in class and not being distracted by texts or other browser tabs–maybe a more passive form of participation, but still vital. And finally, I added a category of participation outside of class, which meant contacting other students for notes, discussing topics after class, or coming to office hours.
Unfortunately, we kind of fell through on implementing this. It wasn’t until about 3/4 of the way through the semester that I realized we hadn’t been checking in with the class on how they were meeting their participation goals, and at that point, it wasn’t clear they would be able to make many adjustments. So we asked for a self-assessment at the end of the semester, which wasn’t done very consistently thanks to our late request, so we had to make do with what we had. But we did still get some good feedback from students on how they prepared for in-class participation by doing the readings to a greater extent than in previous classes, or how they talked about concepts with their friends outside of class even if they weren’t confident enough to speak up in discussion, or how they tried to encourage other, quieter students to share their thoughts.
So in Spring 2020, I’m going to try this again with both my upper-division undergrad/grad class and my graduate seminar, and we’ll see how it goes!
