Teaching graduate seminars

[jerseyjay]

My graduate program (in history) was organized in this way.

I have to say that I really hated graduate school, and such classes did not help. I did not see the point, I felt I never had enough time to do the readings, and I went through the motions (34 graduate credits) until I could transfer to a British university and just write my thesis. The people who spoke the most in my graduate seminars were the people who seemed to know the least, and have the least insights, and were the most concerned with their careers and less concerned with the study of history itself.

It was only later, when I began teaching, that I saw the point of these classes. First of all, that you really are not supposed to do all the reading, but learn to get by with a small amount of reading but be able to sound knowledgable about it anyway. Second, being a professor requires teaching classes on subjects that are relatively far outside your speciality and you have to have basic knowledge about the field and the ability to sound like you know what you are doing. Third, a large part of research requires fitting in your research into a broader picture of the field.

So what I am saying is, I probably would have appreciated these seminars much more if this had been spelt out to me. Yes, I suppose that is the job of either an advisor or your cohort, but it seems that this type of socialization has not happened. So maybe it could work to be as explicit as possible: the point of this program is to prepare you not only to know a whole bunch of stuff, but to be socialized to approach the subject like professional academics. This means that you should do enough of the reading to understand what it is and be able to talk about it in class. It is okay if you don't want to do this, but then you might want to reconsider your choice of career.

[dr_codex]

My graduate program (in history) was organized in this way.

I have to say that I really hated graduate school, and such classes did not help. I did not see the point, I felt I never had enough time to do the readings, and I went through the motions (34 graduate credits) until I could transfer to a British university and just write my thesis. The people who spoke the most in my graduate seminars were the people who seemed to know the least, and have the least insights, and were the most concerned with their careers and less concerned with the study of history itself.

It was only later, when I began teaching, that I saw the point of these classes. First of all, that you really are not supposed to do all the reading, but learn to get by with a small amount of reading but be able to sound knowledgable about it anyway. Second, being a professor requires teaching classes on subjects that are relatively far outside your speciality and you have to have basic knowledge about the field and the ability to sound like you know what you are doing. Third, a large part of research requires fitting in your research into a broader picture of the field.

So what I am saying is, I probably would have appreciated these seminars much more if this had been spelt out to me. Yes, I suppose that is the job of either an advisor or your cohort, but it seems that this type of socialization has not happened. So maybe it could work to be as explicit as possible: the point of this program is to prepare you not only to know a whole bunch of stuff, but to be socialized to approach the subject like professional academics. This means that you should do enough of the reading to understand what it is and be able to talk about it in class. It is okay if you don't want to do this, but then you might want to reconsider your choice of career.

While I'd nitpick (because that's what we do), I'd agree with huge chunks of this post.

[Caracal]

Agree with a lot of what Jerseyjay said. I would add that whenever people talk about grad school in the humnities, I'm amazed how much experiences and expectations vary, not just by discipline, but by program. What classes are expected to be, how they work, what relationships with faculty members are like, there are huge differences. I also know from talking with people who teach grad students that there are big differences between top ten programs and everywhere else. Some of this is about admission standards, I'm sure, but it is also about funding. Because of the way the market works, a lot of people who end up teaching grad students at a lower ranked school where students don't have guaranteed funding, themselves had 4 or  5 years of funding at a top ten program in their field.

[Henri de Tonti]

I think it is a part of a global phenomenon. I teach in the social sciences in a non-US university in a graduate program that draws students from all over the world. I tried the "do the readings and we will discuss them" approach when I first started teaching over here (ca. nine years ago), and it didn't work. As in I would start with 20 students the first week and end up with 2. My colleagues do the student presentation route, and my understanding is that students hate it and say they learn very little, but there is no escaping it because everybody but me does it.

I now lecture over readings, interspersed with conducting class discussions and breaking students into small groups to consider questions related to the readings. My seminars are now generally full to oversubscribed. Students vary in ability from pretty good (Fulbright scholars included) to meh.They all need lots of hand holding on a bunch of stuff.  I think they learn something, at least enough to be able to learn more on their own. They definitely would not be able to survive in the sink or swim grad school environment that I experienced 35 years ago.