Ensuring Graduate Programs Include Formal Instruction in Teaching: IHE article

[polly_mer]

Online conversation shines a spotlight on graduate programs that teach students how to teach

The article starts with "Most Ph.D.s go on to teach in some way, even if they don't want or land teaching positions: they find jobs that require them to communicate their work to the public, for example, or to colleagues within an organization." which reminds of the main argument of Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe.  The message for undergraduate degrees is strong on the need for communication skills, regardless of major.  To equate those necessary communication skills with formal education in pedagogy is to sell short both what formally-educated teachers do and the aspects of communication that aren't formal classroom teaching.

The whole article seems really dated to me with a focus on increasing the number of classes that graduate students take to prepare them even more for the jobs that don't exist.  While nods are made to fields that aren't English, the article seems to lack the awareness that only 10% of the ~55k doctoral degrees awarded every year in the US are in the humanities and arts. 

The NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates indicate that several STEM fields have a relative minority of PhD recipients in TT/T academic positions:

life and health sciences: 23%
math and CS: 33%
psychology and social sciences: 30%
engineering: 16%
physical and earth sciences: 19%

Reference: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/03/first-us-private-sector-employs-nearly-many-phds-schools-do

However, it's worth mentioning again that those 5500 new PhD recipients in the arts and humanities are not really the problem contributing to adjunctification in those fields.

The 800k annual new master's degree recipients in the US are much more a contributing factor.  Much verbiage has been written about what a small percentage of the graduate degrees go to the humanities and arts.  However, 4% of 800k is about 50k new master's recipients every year, which is problematic if "everyone" thinks of themselves as a teacher when only 150k humanities faculty jobs of any type (full-time, part-time, 2-year and 4-year institutions) existed in 2015.

Thus, encouraging even more people in oversubscribed fields to get additional education to think of themselves as teachers first to compete even more fiercely for a decreasing number of jobs seems like accelerating an implosion.  Other higher education communities I frequent that have a STEM focus are much more interested in graduate soft skills like teamwork to deliverable deadlines, entrepreneurship, and developing business-awareness because that's what our graduate recipients will be doing.

[Caracal]

I'm mostly in agreement about pedagogy. It also seems strange to assert that people in PHD programs aren't being taught how to communicate their ideas. Most of my graduate training in various ways, was exactly about that.

You could be right about masters degree holders, but it is very hard to know. At least in my field, I couldn't find any kind of census of masters degree recipients. The AHA has done studies where they try to track down people who get PHDs and figure out where they are employed, but nobody ever seems to have done that with masters recipients. The problem is that while the vast majority of people who get PHDs in the humanities at least start their programs hoping to get tenure track teaching jobs, the motivations of people in masters programs are a lot more varied. It includes significant numbers of people who:
1. Are employed in secondary education, or hope to be, and want the degree to increase their pay, as a credential, or to broaden their expertise.
2. Go into some specialized MA that is geared towards public engagement rather than academia.
3. Are in some sort of joint program BA program where they take an extra year and get the MA
4. Are just picking up the MA on the way towards a PHD, or as a consolation prize if they get ejected from a doctoral program
5. Are getting an MA in order to be able to get into a higher ranked doctoral program, or to decide if they want to do that.
6. Want to teach at a 2 year school, or in some form of non tenure track employment
7. Are just pursuing the degree out of personal interest, or activism without it being directly tied to career plans.

I've also never found good statistics on adjuncts, so I'm not sure we know how many of these people do end up adjunct teaching. If anybody knows of any studies, I'd love to see them.
5.

[Bede the Vulnerable]

I'm mostly in agreement about pedagogy. It also seems strange to assert that people in PHD programs aren't being taught how to communicate their ideas. Most of my graduate training in various ways, was exactly about that.

One of the most useful things that I learned from my doktovater was that communicating with peers is not the same thing as communicating with 18 year old kiddos who know very little about the topic of the course.  We had zero formal training in teaching.  The department that I'm in now has a teaching course that is required of all doctoral students in their first year.  They are all on fellowship for the first year, so they'll have had this class before they TA.  A big improvement over the desultory approach that my program had. 

[Caracal]

I'm mostly in agreement about pedagogy. It also seems strange to assert that people in PHD programs aren't being taught how to communicate their ideas. Most of my graduate training in various ways, was exactly about that.

One of the most useful things that I learned from my doktovater was that communicating with peers is not the same thing as communicating with 18 year old kiddos who know very little about the topic of the course.  We had zero formal training in teaching.  The department that I'm in now has a teaching course that is required of all doctoral students in their first year.  They are all on fellowship for the first year, so they'll have had this class before they TA.  A big improvement over the desultory approach that my program had.

I think the biggest problem with the lack of training in teaching I had was that, as a result, nobody told me I might suck at teaching the first time I did it. I'm not totally convinced a course before I did any teaching would have helped with the skills that much, but it might have normalized failure a bit.

[ciao_yall]

I'm mostly in agreement about pedagogy. It also seems strange to assert that people in PHD programs aren't being taught how to communicate their ideas. Most of my graduate training in various ways, was exactly about that.

One of the most useful things that I learned from my doktovater was that communicating with peers is not the same thing as communicating with 18 year old kiddos who know very little about the topic of the course.  We had zero formal training in teaching.  The department that I'm in now has a teaching course that is required of all doctoral students in their first year.  They are all on fellowship for the first year, so they'll have had this class before they TA.  A big improvement over the desultory approach that my program had.

And, being a student in a class trying to get your participation points is not the same as leading a discussion, eliciting ideas from students who may not be comfortable with sharing ideas, and managing arguments.

Kind of like being promoted to manager. Your job is no longer to make yourself successful. Your job is now to make other people successful.