Historian Ben Goossen has a fascinating blog post up at Anabaptist Historians  about Abraham Esau, one of the leaders of Nazi Germany’s nuclear energy program. Esau was charged with–twice–war crimes involving his participation in the plundering of an electronics company in the Netherland.

Despite being called an unrepentant Nazi by his fellow scientists, Esau was embraced by Mennonites after World War II. Folks from MCC, including the academic dean of Bethel College, supported his release from prison, and he was welcomed back into Mennonite society, in part because of his translation of The Story of the Mennonites. The respectability of Mennonites helped him “rehabilitate” his image, while his status as a scientist was something that Mennonites could boast of. As Goosen writes, “Denominational connections outweighed even known Nazi collaboration.”

Which raises a larger question, one that Goosen explores in much of his work:

Mennonites in North America, Europe, and around the globe might reflect on this history of perpetration and denial. Why is it that European Mennonites like Esau found collaboration with Hitler’s genocidal regime so easy and desirable? How could North American Mennonites then so breezily cover for their coreligionists, without raising serious concerns about crimes they might have committed? Abraham Esau’s case may require special soul-searching, given his direct and significant role in the Nazi war machine, as well as his broader impact on the global rise of nuclear weapons.

Rebecca

Friends in the Pittsburgh area–come out for a good, hard, encouraging conversation.

Please share the invitation with friends who you think might be interested.

Not in Pittsburgh? Invite me to where you are!

I find the Teaching Statement/Teaching Philosophy one of the hardest pieces of writing ever. I’ve never written one that I found to be really satisfactory, nor have I read many that have impressed me. I think this is a problem inherent in the genre: a teaching statement is to be a short (1 page, single spaced) narrative that connects your philosophy of teaching to the precise practices that you employ in the classroom. It’s not supposed to be general or trite, but, it also can’t scare away a hiring committee by setting goals that are too lofty, couldn’t be supported at the limited resources you’ll receive, or will make other teachers look like they’re underperforming. Also, it is somehow both supposed to be rooted in thoughtful, establish pedagogy (“best practices,” “evidence-based”) and also has to distinguish you from other applicants. You somehow have to be passionate without saying that you’re passionate (trite) and innovative without being demanding (and thus draining limited funds). Oh, and no matter what, you’ll ultimately have to fall in line with the folks over in Assessment, so don’t suggest things that won’t fly with them.

So, where does that leave you? You are aiming for something:

short: Just 1-2 pages if you are applying for a job, maybe 3-4 if you are up for tenure or review

first person in a voice that is consistent with your other materials: This should be as well-written as every other document you submit; unlike some of those, it will be in the first person, but it’s not excessively personal. It is still (despite being sometimes called a “Teaching Philosophy”) more of an argument, where you deliver a claim and back it up with proof.

disciplinary: What happens in a chem lab is different than what happens in a social work practicum or a discussion-based literature class. Think about the courses you will be teaching as described in the job call and focus your writing on those courses.

that delivers an argument and is also concrete: State the “philosophy” part in one sentence. Think of it like a thesis statement. Then, deliver a few specific pieces of evidence that you live out that philosophy. Give an illustrative example of a classroom interaction, describe a challenge that you surmounted in teaching, or talk about a successful assignment; deliver this as evidence that your actual teaching aligns with your stated philosophy. Need help generating ideas? Consider these questions:

• What do I think is the purpose of higher education?
• What was my best day of teaching? What happened to make it so good?
• What is a method that I find helps my students engage deeply?
• What do you expect students to get out of your classes? Are there skills or themes that aren’t unique to a single class but that appear in many of your classes?
• What assignment has produced great student work?
• What motivates me as a teacher?
• What metaphors describe my teaching?

The challenge of being specific is that there are all kinds of factors that shape our teaching that are out of our control, but we have to pretend, in a teaching statement, that they aren’t there. Ever teach in a classroom where the desks weren’t what you needed them to be? Perhaps they were bolted to the floor, so you couldn’t arrange the room to allow for discussions in which they could see each their classmates’ faces, or students were seated auditorium-style, with desks on different levels, so you weren’t able to have them get into small groups. Maybe you taught in a classroom without a ceiling in it, so any small group discussion quickly become very, very loud, or maybe the tech was so unreliable as to be useless. Maybe you had too many students to get to know them personally or assign work that would require extensive guidance or feedback in all your classes. These are the real conditions of teaching, but no one wants to hear about them. I’m not advocating lying, but teaching statements invite a kind of ignoring of real circumstances.

focused: Remember that this is short, so you don’t have time to address every worthwhile question. Instead, focus on a single theme. Look at the job call, the departmental mission statement, and the university’s mission or vision statement. Take the key words there and think about how your teaching aligns with them. For example, are you applying for a position at a public serving university where a high percent of students are Pell grant eligible? Teaching there is different from teaching at a private school with a large endowment. Show that you understand the scope of the job and value what the university values in teaching by focusing your statement on these concerns.

carefully crafted: The committee asked for this because they want it. If you don’t develop a thoughtful response to their question, you signal to them not only that you don’t care about teaching (which may or may not be true) but that you don’t care to be evaluated on your teaching. If you are applying to a teaching-focused position, that’s a bad move, but it also makes a terrible impression if you are applying for a job a research-intensive university. Your potential future colleagues have probably already had to deal with faculty who think they are above teaching, and that creates problems for them, forcing more mentoring, more teaching, and more cleaning up teaching-related messes on them. Show that you’re ready to carry your teaching weight by taking this seriously.

connected to your research: Do you conduct research on teaching? Teach about the stuff you research? Bring in guest speakers you know through your research? Assign students work that requires them to conduct primary research? Do you help students conduct research or publish it?

warm but not gushy, humble but not clueless: You know a lot about teaching, but you don’t know everything. Signal humility by talking about how your teaching has improved over time, your willingness to/history of participating in teaching forums or book clubs or mentoring programs, and speaking about your students in positive ways. Especially if you are a woman, avoid the words passionate and care about students, but also recognize that if you are a woman, you’ll be judged more harshly for failing to address the emotional needs of students. (This is just one reason why I’d like to see the Teaching Statement disappear as an application requirement.) In fact, get rid of all your verys and reallys and emotional words like delighted. I know that this totally sucks, because sometimes you are very excited about teaching, and sometimes it is a total pleasure to work with students, so taking these out undermines authenticity. But authenticity here is a performance, not, like, actual authenticity. No one wants to hear how the REAL you feels about teaching (I would like to assign more writing in my sciences, but the students at my university need more support than I can give them to make real improvement, so I’ve focused my energies on skills where I’ve found that they can make faster progress, like reading scholarly sources.); they want a you that is peppy but not obnoxious, smart but not so full of “the famous new methods”* that you’re going to want to revamp the whole curriculum.

My teaching philosophy changes according to the job that the teaching philosophy needs to do for me. I don’t consider that to be inconsistent; rather, I think it speaks to my ability to be flexible in my approach to teaching–that is, I am student focused, so my teaching philosophy is informed by the students I have in front of me. That is different in a private religious college compared to a regional school serving mostly first generation students from lower class families.

For my current position, at a mid-sized state school with a diverse and generally poorer student population, my focal statement (the thesis) is that higher education isn’t just merely about personal transformation for students but about changing their whole family tree–and thus about changing their communities. From there, I list ways that I teach to do this. It’s a teaching statement that won’t likely appeal to those who see higher ed as preparation for the “21st century workforce” or an individualist endeavor of self-improvement. But it is true to my vision of what higher education, at its best, does and why public higher education, in particular, is necessary for communities to flourish and democracy to thrive.

While I think my teaching statement is a good reflection of my values and approach to teaching, I don’t think its perfect, and I’m not sure that perfection is possible with these things. You don’t really know your audience, and the generic expectations are a bit undefined. In researching this blog post, I found a lot of conflicting advice from different but all reputable sources, yet I found little actual scholarship on teaching statements. What I see as the vital question–Does a teaching statement accurately reflect the kind of teaching a person does?–seems to be of no interest to researchers. We seem to assume that being good at writing a teaching statements is equivalent to being good at being a teacher, but that relationship isn’t proven at all–and, presumably, lots of the lousy teachers we know got their jobs based, at least in part, on decent teaching statements.

Above, Professor X from the X-Men, who probably never needed to write a Teaching Statement. 

If we, as scholars, haven’t given attention to that question, which is the question that asks Is it worthwhile to require these? Do they tell us anything helpful?, then I’m not convinced that we take them seriously in hiring and promotion. And yet here we are, writing them. I suspect that’s because teaching statements can be a way to rule a candidate out rather than rule on one, which makes the work of a committee easier. We rule ourselves out when we decide not to apply for jobs that require them, saving the hiring committee the hassle of reading our application, and we get ruled out of we trip over unknown preferences in our committee, preferences that might not really matter in the classroom but that people hold on to dearly. You mention how important you think it is for students to read Shakespeare and the anti-canonist ax you; you mention that you craft your syllabi so that women are overrepresented among the authors read and the resident meninist vetoes you. Since you can’t know what these folks want, you are only risking alienating them, which pushes writers to be ever more vague or stick with the least offensive suggestions. (I say this knowing that I’d exclude a candidate from the pool of applicants if they talked about learning styles, but given that this theory has been so debunked, I think that’s fair.) Being risk averse makes sense when the risk–not getting the job, not getting tenure–are so high. But it also makes these documents pretty useless, I suspect, as evidence of our actual practices about teaching.

They do, though, signal to the university that the department cares about teaching, even if the department does not actually care about teaching. I mean, they are much easier to trot out as evidence that We Care about Students than things like a robust teaching portfolio with sample syllabi and assignments and graded student work. So, you’re doing a favor to your future department when you write them, which is a good start to getting that job.

Rebecca

*My teaching philosophy is probably closer to Althusser than Freire. Here is the French philosopher in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus“:

I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as ‘natural’, indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago.

A colleague caught me writing the other day at a time when they felt, perhaps, I should be doing something else. Attending a child’s rehearsal or athletic practice, I guess, or making something from Pinterest for an upcoming holiday or polishing the baseboards.

“You are so productive,” they said tentatively, and it wasn’t a compliment. “Do your children get enough–”

“Role models?” I interrupted. “Inspiration?”

As a reminder, even more of Karl Marx’s children would have starved to death while he wrote Capital  if it hadn’t been for Engels. My benign neglect–let’s call it, opportunities for independence–is well within reason.

Which is one reason why this post circulating on social media the last week or so irked me:

It continues the lie that in order to be productive in academia, you have to sacrifice your personal life. We have to resist making that true by holding our institutions in check and preventing them from making ever increasing demands on our time. We have to ask, with each new demand, “What, specifically, would you like me to stop doing in order to do this?” We have to make it the norm that we don’t work round the clock.

We have to make sure that our personal lives are protected–whether that means resisting the pressure to go to every conference, giving up entire months of weekends each year, or resisting the pressure to allow our students to call us by our first names (unless we want them to).

It means resisting a culture of “wellness” and “self-care” that places responsibility for a culture of overwork on us an individual; instead, we must press for the unionization of labor in higher ed. It also means saying hell no to healthcare plans that punish people with higher premiums if they don’t meet “wellness” requirements set by insurers.

And it means writing, unapologetically.

To be clear: there are times (years and sometimes more than one of them in a row) when “academic productivity” may not be the goal, when other things–adjusting to parenthood, caring for an ill child, spending time with a dying parent, seeking breast cancer treatment–are the priorities. Those aren’t always choices we would like to make; sometimes, life makes them for us. Sometimes we can turn use them as opportunities to develop our virtues, but there isn’t always a silver lining.

But to say, in a blanket way, that writing is at odds with a good personal life is just a lie. In my experience, they go hand-in-hand: when I’m writing, I like the other parts of my life even better. Indeed, I think it’s often academics who aren’t writing who are the miserable ones. Instead of writing (which is hard, I know!), they avoid it by generating little dramas, prolonging meetings unnecessarily, implying that writing takes away from teaching (another version of the lie above), or, perhaps worst of all, creating unnecessary paperwork for the rest of us. If they’d just write, they wouldn’t have time for such nonsense, but since they aren’t writing, they have to justify their non-writing by being judgmental cranks. (If it is helpful, feel free to print this post out using the department printer and “forget” to pick it up.)

If you saw the post above this week and it left you feeling defeated, don’t be. It’s possible to be a happy writer and to have a happy life. If you want to know how I do it, check out the AGT monthly writing challenge, which starts the first Sunday of each month. The best part about it is being with other writers who recognize that writing is hard and that we’re happier when we’re doing it.

Rebecca

No good guys here.

Above, mourners at George H.W. Bush’s funeral include all the living former presidents and their wives, plus Donald and Melania Trump.

This photo represents so much grief to me. So much death.

6,979 soldiers killed in the Global War on Terror.

383 soldiers dead in the Gulf War.

Smaller numbers of military casualties almost too numerous too count under Carter, Bush I and II, Clinton, and Obama.

And the bigger numbers:

200,000 indigenous people dead and 1.5 million more displaced in Guatemala in a genocide that began during Carter’s term; under his leadership, the US failed to sanction Guatemala as the nation began a campaign of terror against peasants. We supplied training for military leaders, and tanks from Israel, subsidized with US war money, were used in the violence there.

Approximately 200,000 people in East Timor were slaughtered while Carter’s administration provided funding and weapons to the Suharto regime, whose atrocities were well-documented

More than 600 Namibians in a refugee camp killed by a South African airstrike in Angola, and Jimmy Carter refused to call for sanctions against South Africa (still an apartheid nation at the time) in the UN

Afghanistan destroyed–and ready to embrace the Taliban as an alternative to western warfare–after the US fomented rebellion against Soviet forces there under Carter. (Oh, and one of the men we trained to fight the Soviets was Osama bin Laden. So this grief is not foreign. This photo reminds me of the lives lost on September 11, too.)

75.000 civilians dead–85% of them at the hands of the government–in the Salvadoran Civil War. Carter’s administration gave at least $5 million, plus training, to in aid to the government. Among those dead were priests working for piece, including Oscar Romero.

Note that Reagan, whose interference in Latin America is a direct cause of so much suffering today, isn’t even in this picture. 

Those seeking asylum in the US today are fleeing from violence that the US fomented in our fight against communism and the War on Drugs in Latin and South America. 

Approximately 200 Panamanian civilians were killed during the US invasion of Panama and Operation Just Cause under George H.W. Bush.

Estimates of civilian deaths during Desert Storm range from 2,300 to more than 3,600.

In the War on Terror, we have no idea how many dead, and we have no desire to know, because the number would be so shaming and would likely inspire more terrorism against the US. Maybe 4 million or more.

Plus under George H.W. Bush, military excursions into Liberia, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Herzegovinia, and Kuwait. Under Clinton, Bosnia, Somalia (where 18 Americans were killed, 1 was captured, and 73 were wounded), Macedonia, Haiti, Central African Republic, Kuwait, Albania, Congo, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia, East Timor, Serbia, and Kosovo–but, somehow, not Rwanda. Under George W. Bush, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Yemen, East Timor, Yemen, the Philippines, Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Haiti,  and, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Obama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Uganda, Jordan, Turkey, Mali, Syria, and Cameroon. Under Trump, we continue to maintain 1.3 million US troops abroad, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Kuwait, Syria, Poland, and South Korea.

And, of course, at home: those who died of complications related to HIV due to government inaction during the Reagan/Bush years. Mass incarceration under Clinton. Rising hate crimes under Trump.

Below, Pakistani protestors remind Americans of the link between US-led killing of civilians via drones and terrorism. US presidents could care about human rights of the world’s most vulnerable people. If not, they are responsible for understanding that violence breeds terrorism, not security.

When a president dies, we invoke how “complicated” the presidency is. True. And you probably have to be a bit of a narcissist who is disconnected from reality to be able to withstand the pressure of getting the job. But it’s not “complicated” to engage in warfare that takes civilian lives 90% of the time.

When we say “complicated,” it could just be that we mean, “I’m scared of thinking about a world in which the US would not be able to destroy the entire world. I’m afraid of the work it would take to create a more just world. I am so scared that I’d rather elect a future war criminal than to work for peace. I’d rather send my children off to war than have to make peace on their behalf.”

I’d trade four living American presidents for the millions of brown-skinned civilians whose deaths they caused. In an instant. Of course. And so would the millions of enemies we made worldwide through our violence.

Rebecca

It’s the first day of finals week, which means I am getting roughly 6 emails per second from students who have just realized that they missed some key piece of information that I have shared with them no fewer than 9 times: in the syllabus, on the quiz over the syllabus, in the video of my explaining the syllabus that they can re-watch any time, in the transcript of that video, in the assignment, in the rubric to the assignment, in the announcement I put into our learning management system reminding them of the assignment, in the follow-up all-class email I sent to the whole class reminding them of the information, and, finally, two hours before the assignment is due and when I see that they still haven’t done it, in the targeted email reminder to all students who still have turned it in.

Which is why I need this post from my friends at Teaching is Intellectual:

I will add to this my own “how to” strategy for not snapping back with “It’s on the syllabus!”

When a student asks a question that has been explained clearly elsewhere in the class, I write back with a variation of this:

Screenshot the spot in the directions/syllabus/rubric that you are confused about, then send me the screenshot with your question about it. That way, I can make sure we are looking at the same document and are on the same page when I answer your question. You can screenshot something on a Mac using Cmd+Shift+4; on a PC, use the snipping tool. Attach is here using the paperclip icon, or paste it directly in the email. 

Most of the time, when a student is reminded that they have all the skills they need to answer their own question, they do.Only sometimes do they have a real question. And sometimes they have discovered an inconsistency in the syllabus, which I, of course, want them to draw to my attention so I can fix it.

What is most common is that, in their question, they are asking, “Am I okay? Is this going to end well? Do I belong here? Can I do this?” They need my reminder–in the form of taking their question seriously but also in helping them remember that they can navigate college expectations without my direct intervention–that they are worthy of their place in the classroom.  That’s the real lesson they need to learn, and it’s my job, especially as a teacher at a public university serving mostly first-generation students, to teach it, even amid the busy-ness of finals.