Image Credit: “St. Joseph’s Hall” by Noel Radley
- While working at my computer last week, I heard the sound of knocking on the tall wooden door of my office in St. Joseph’s Hall. It was a fellow Lecturer in the English Department….just saying hello and exchanging the day’s update. Usually, I can disentangle my brain for a few minutes and have a conversation. But I wasn’t able, last week, to hide how I felt about being interrupted. I mumbled something about not being able to talk, and my colleague winced as she read the stress written across my face.
The experience made me think whether or not one should have an open door policy.
Door open means I can connect with students, vent with colleagues, laugh, tell stories, maybe even do important networking on curriculum and pedagogy.
But with the door closed, I become a 70 WPM, journal-reading and essay-grading machine, programmed to sort ‘Novell’ Inbox messages ad infinitum. (If the human-as-machine language resonates, consider reading the recent article from Inside Higher Ed, comparing human and robot graders.)
Image Credit: “St. Joseph’s Hallway” by Noel Radley
Door open feels involved and humanistic. Door closed feels, well, not quite human but as if life–and the demands of work–are manageable. The self-esteem and joy of submitting an article seem just within reach.
The idea of the open door/door closed is a start for thinking through the realities of the Teaching Scholar. For more on the term ‘Teaching Scholar,’ see the article where Santa Clara administrators recently defined best practices. As Nancy Unger and Diane Jonte-Pace note, there are “tensions” in realizing the Teaching Scholar model.
The most significant challenges come from the difficulties of maintaining a balance of teaching and scholarship in a climate of escalating demands and expectations concerning both the quality and quantity of research.
It is worth considering what are the different ways that lecturers and tenure-track faculty live out these tensions. How does it affect faculty community? It would be great if you our readers, and other blog writers, wrote back with problems, solutions, stories, you name it. Knock, knock, knock…
-Noel Radley, Lecturer, Department of English for Teaching Scholar