In Loco Parentis?
Did I Foretell A Trend?
I belong to some pretty ‘fun’ social media groups for academics and lecturers. They discuss real issues; course design, delivery styles, student interaction, and student “issues”. My crazy insomnia keeps me up most nights, and these groups being a tad more ‘North American centric” give me plenty of entertaining fodder to keep me company in my sleepless mode.
As I reflect on their
discussions (and they are good discussions) and my own lecturing experience (both
online and off) over the past close to three decades, it draws me towards a
single conclusion about the enhanced “neediness” of students, and not just
because of the pandemic.
Friends and colleagues
who teach way more than me also have commented on that particular trajectory. They
regularly highlight issues and behaviours that, even ten years prior, would not
have emerged in the classroom, and most certainly, not in the lecture hall.
But that’s ok; it’s
all part of the territory; to adapt and refine our education strategy to help
develop new cohorts of students.
So, I was certainly
drawn to the following commentary over lunch, that compares the ‘new professor’
with the ‘new mom’ role; alluding to some very obvious parallels. Not so much
about the students per se, but the very real skills we as lecturers
(professors) require to handle our everyday teaching in the age of Zoom. And
perhaps, not just for the ‘new’ professor too, eh?
The irony though, in
1999, I wrote a paper on this in relation to international students; exploring
the role that we as lecturers absorb when students thousands of miles away from
home enter our sphere.
Did I foretell a
trend?
#TheThirdDegree #HigherEducation #TertiaryTeaching #TheNewProfessor
Being
a new professor is a lot like being a mom (opinion) (insidehighered.com)
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