January 2021: Higher Education Needs Real Teachers
It seems like no one ever questions the quality of teaching in higher education.
-Dr. Langston Clark
Higher Education Needs New Teachers
September 1st, 2020 marked a milestone in my career as I was awarded tenure one year early. Despite being thankful for the many colleagues, mentors, mentees, and students who have supported my development as a scholar, I find myself existentially perplexed. Five years of training and writing about Black and Brown teachers convinced me that the “Academy” is subtly anti-student, anti-education, and anti-community. Reflecting upon my graduate training at PWIs (Predominantly White Institutions), I was told that in my pre-tenure years I should limit my service, mentoring, and teaching to focus on research. My mind was imprinted with the slogan “publish or perish”. Fortunately, by the end of my first year at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), I began to realize that the PWI approach to working in higher education is bullshit (BS). As a teacher educator at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) that serves mostly first generation and/or transfer students, I believe the PWI approach to higher education exploits students, their families, and communities who expect my best effort as a faculty member committed to teaching! The truth is that students are not going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt so that faculty members can do research. Therefore, I, like all faculty members with teaching loads, am morally obligated to produce excellence in teaching.
While debates about the value of college education have become prominent in political pandering, the promise of free college and student loan forgiveness were campaign slogans adopted many presidential candidates. But is free college worth it if faculty member are incompetent teachers? It seems like no one ever questions the quality of teaching in higher education. Presumably, college faculty teach far more complex materials than a kindergarten teacher, but for a kindergarten teacher to remain a teacher they must earn some type of teaching credential and endure ongoing professional development. Kindergarten through about 3rd grade are the years where schools teach children the basic concepts of reading and writing, but they are also designed to teach you how to be a student. This means that most college students have more years of training to be a student than faculty members have for being a teacher. Most faculty would not send their five-year-old to a school where the kindergarten teacher was not trained how to teach, so why do we find it acceptable for the physics professor to not be trained how to teach? The hypocrisy of many faculty is that we complain about whiny entitled students but have never been trained how to teach. Perhaps college faculty are the ones who operate with entitlement by thinking that we are qualified to teach when many of us have never been trained to do so.
So, what do we do? How do we make a change in the quality of teaching in higher education?
Regardless of discipline, if faculty do not establish formal training to increase the quality of our teaching, I fear that higher education will become more like secondary education, dictated to by state mandates and standards, which would be a serious threat to academic freedom. As such, I believe that academics should begin integrating some form of teacher education for graduate students who are interested in working in higher education. This could be a combination of course offerings at the masters and doctoral levels as well as seminars provided to graduate students and early career faculty at conferences. This would not only increase the value of going to conferences for graduate students but would increase the quality and integrity of the “Academy’s” duty to teach students.
