Feature: The Fordham Graduate Digital Humanities Group

Good morning, happy Friday to you.
    As a blogger for the GSAS, and as a professor of an on-line English course this semester for the PCS, I have been especially aware and appreciative of how the digital age has been dynamically changing and influencing the institutions of higher education and graduate programs worldwide. In the spirit of this digital renaissance, I would like to introduce this blog's readers to the Fordham Graduate Digital Humanities Group. Officially recognized by the GSA as a Working Group, anyone in the GSAS can participate and benefit from the great work that this group does for the university!
   The GDH meets twice per month to learn and sustain a conversation about the development of digital technologies in the humanities disciplines. (Check out the Schedule page for info about future meetings and events!) The group focuses on graduate studies and professionalization issues, which is of particular interest to me personally and most Grad.Life blog readers! As the GDH's Wordpress blog says, "This group should be of special interest to students who are preparing for a professional academic career in the humanities, a career that most likely witll require digital fluency in regards to teaching, research, and publishing." This past week, the group led a workshop on digital pedagogy and discussed everything from practical issues (eg, paperless teaching, digital classroom tools) to the theoretical idea of defining the concept of "digital pedagogy." 
   Coming up for the group is a workshop open to all GSAS students entitled "You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence," to be held on November 7th, 2012. It will be led by Michael Mandiberg in the Flom Auditorium in the Walsh Library. The half-day event should prove to be extremely beneficial in giving GSAS students practical tools, ideas, and resources to help establish their on-line academic profiles and presences. (See this blog's post on the same topic from last semester!) 
   There's also a CFP sponsored by the GDH for the Fordham Graduate English Association Interdisciplinary Conference in March 2013. The conference is entitled "Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory," and the GDH's CFP provokes a fascinating cross-discipline question:  "Do digital platforms change the way we remember?" Already just from this one question, I find myself excited to attend this conference and this panel presentation -- and it may become a future topic for a post on Grad.Life! For now, check out the full CFP for details about the topic and format, because the deadline in November 15 -- you have plenty of time to get some ideas together and submit an abstract! (Upcoming post on this blog will also feature more about this wonderful interdisciplinary grad conference -- watch for more info or click on the link above to the conference homepage in the meantime!)
   Make sure to check out the group's blog and Facebook page (click "Like") for more information on this important and dynamic organization in the GSAS! 
   (While you are on FB, visit Grad.Life's page and click "like," too!)
   Until next time, Liza 

Graduate Education and the Preservation of Conversation

In a recent essay in The New York Times’ "Sunday Review," writer/ professor Sherry Turkle makes observations about our culture’s “flight from conversation.” She laments that, despite our technologically linked world, as we are only a text or chat or status away from sharing something, we “hide from one another, even as we constantly are connected to one another.” Her insights are sharp and valuable, as we should be striving to see how our technological advances have shaped and will shape the social and cultural world around us. Turkle’s hypothesizing offers much provocation about the way our culture’s social values will evolve and shift over time, especially in the spheres of behavior, learning, and education.

One fascinating thing Turkle says is that the “thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention.” Valuing our own control over where we focus our attention will surely have vast social consequences, especially in the area of learning.  If learning at a distance that we ourselves control becomes the norm, what will happen to learning itself? Will we stop being able to leap into someone else’s perspective, in order to understand a problem or see a solution in a better way? Will we stop paying attention to things that we might be drawn to unexpectedly? How will our privileging of the control of our attention change the way we learn, and change the way we think? Turkle's essay opens up this necessary dialogue. 

Another thing Turkle discusses is the way technological connections prevent us from learning how to be alone. “Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved,” she writes.  She worries that our habits of being only a click or a text away from sharing our thoughts will deplete our cultural ability to be alone, and as a result, everyone will be lonely, ironically creating a world more disconnected than ever before.  Turkle suggests, “Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.”

Turkle provokes thought on things like “Siri” which promise a simulation of companionship and compassion; she surmises that with technology we are “cleaning up human relationships” which are “messy and demanding.” But for a price – human relationships have a richness that the simulations, for obvious reasons, don't have. In the end, our flight from conversation represents a loss for humanity that will have ripple effects in all areas of human life.

As I read, it struck me that we often talk about the “academic conversation,” and I wondered how Turkle’s thoughts and ideas about technology’s influence on social conversations could be thought of in the context of academia. Conversations teach us patience, she proffers, while technological connection and exchanges speeds things up, but only by dumbing us down and removing complexity and true understanding. How will this dumbing down of our communication affect the kind of sustained conversations we aim to create and participate in within and across our academic disciplines?

Looked at through the frame of education, the flight from conversation would wound our ability to see and understand different and new perspectives, a cornerstone of true forward thinking and learning. Turkle says, “In conversation we tend to one another.” To unpack this statement, she looks at the etymology of the word, which comes from the verbs that mean “to move, together,” and suggests that having a conversation is kinetic, and generates energy, and asks us to see things from perspectives other than our own. The loss of this sort of mobility in perspective, as well as these changes in social habits of expression that Turkle describes, will surely affect academia and scholarship in more ways than we can predict.

But what I want to suggest here, though, to contribute to these speculations, has to do with the way these changes may affect our perception of graduate school in a positive way.  My provocation here is that perhaps a benefit of these changes may be that the inherent value in a graduate education will become more visible -- will be thrown into sharp relief -- as this social and cultural lack that Turkle identifies persists and intensifies. 

From some advice given in The Chronicle by writers considering the cause and effects of the bleak academic job market for liberal arts and science Phds, it doesn’t always seem that a getting a graduate education from a arts and sciences school is a smart or practical decision. 

Yet, if we insist that graduate liberal arts education is built on meaningful exchanges of ideas between people, then perhaps it will become one of the only spaces in which the skill of sustaining a conversation – and by this I do mean an oral, face to face conversation, complete with eye contact, internalization, reflection, depth, and response – is still fostered, nurtured, and practiced. 

With no irony here or facetiousness here at all, I can see a way to look at graduate school  and graduate education as a location in which an insistence on conversations will continue to exist.  I offer this with all earnesty, and perhaps with a shade too much idealism. But perhaps a graduate school education will be a space in which the value in conversation, solitude, patience, messiness, demanding relationships, and mobility in perspectives will be preserved. And perhaps if we look at it as such, we may begin to understand the terms under which a graduate education in the arts and sciences is inherently worthwhile, despite the kinds of obstacles that exist for grads to becoming employed and earning a living. 

What do you think of the role of graduate education in the preservation of conversation? What do you think about our "Flight from Conversation" in terms of education, higher learning, and academic scholarship? I’d love to hear your sustained, intimate, genuine thoughts – even if it’s just in a post to Facebook or this blog. Perhaps then we can go get some coffee and discuss one on one! ;)

Professionalization: A Vital Part of Graduate Education

At the time when I applied to graduate school, I really didn’t know anything about living in the real world. Maybe undergraduate life was too disconnected from the real world to give me any inkling. Not that my undergrad years were easy and breezy – I had 3 campus jobs throughout my years at college, and no car, and no material luxuries. But there was very little discussion about what it meant to take your college degree out into the real world. For me as an English student, I think my undergraduate work allowed me to be swept up in the romance of literature and writing. I came from a working class family, but I guess somehow I believed that getting to college was already the pot at the end of the rainbow. 

In fact, all I really knew was that I loved books and literature and wanted to keep studying in that field, and that I thought I would love to be a professor in an English department one day. So after a year of working at an office job, I left corporate America and applied to English grad programs. I didn’t really have a plan; I thought I would figure it out as I went. Well, it turns out, according to most advice pieces in The Chronicle and elsewhere in blogs on the web, that I was all wrong --  I went to graduate school for all the wrong reasons, without having the proper means, and without a clearly mapped out career plan, all to my eventual detriment, apparently.

The “right reasons” to go to graduate school are, according to these advice-givers, to get a job. (Not because you "love" literature.) Job getting is the main objective. This, of course, makes very practical sense, but if you don’t know anything about the field, or about academic life and professionalization in general before you begin graduate school, then logically you’d have to learn about it when you get there. But do we, as graduate students, learn what we need to know about getting a job when we start graduate school? Wouldn’t it be a great idea if graduate school education from day one included in its curriculum – in fact, made mandatory in its curriculum – a practical course in professionalization in the field?

Now, for a minute, let’s compare and contrast Arts and Sciences graduate degrees to other forms of post-Bachelor degree education, thought of as “professional degrees,” such as JDs and MDs. Medical students have a clear path of professionalization built into their programs; law students, on the other hand, do not.  I’ve heard lawyers and law school graduates complain that law school has absolutely nothing to do with the practical, day-to-day job of being a lawyer. It seems absurd that such elaborate education systems would get built that do not directly feed into the job market that requires the degree.

It is the same with Arts and Sciences graduates – there is almost nothing that was required of me as a graduate student that pro-actively prepared me for the job market. Assignments and projects – and more precisely the A, A-, B+, B grading systems that went with these assignments – do nothing for students to prepare them for eventually getting a job in the field.

Here’s what I’m imagining: a mandatory professionalization curriculum that requires students to demonstrate and generate knowledge of the basic arc of an academic career, starting from someone’s first semester as a PHD student to – well basically the end of his or her life! This curriculum would provide information about the conventional path through graduate school as well as encourage students to explore how that arc can be modified and altered, inviting students to identify alternative career pathways and end-goals that can be reached when starting a program. The curriculum should ask students to outline possible career paths, and to research and become experts in the market, and to understand what the academic world is all about. In addition, spotlights should be put on the mechanisms of conferences, publications, committees, dissertation writing, applications, interviews, and self-identity within the field. 

Then, aside from this curriculum addition, the assessment system in the existing courses needs to be totally changed in order to promote marketability. Getting an "A-" means nothing and will do nothing to help you get a job.  Instead, incorporate professionalization into the curriculum itself. Require us to submit papers to conferences, and to prepare articles for specific journals and CFP's.  Have those submissions (and acceptances) be the basis for grades and course fulfillment. Have mock mini-conferences within the seminar, or join forces with other seminars to have bigger mock conferences across the department. It is through these forums, rather than seminar papers alone, that students should be evaluated and critiqued and assessed, with an eye to marketability and credibility in the field. Sources and methodology should be scrutinized, and presentation skills, either oral or written, should be constructively critiqued, helping students to prepare to publish, speak at conferences, and complete the dissertation.

I believe that this vital part in the education of graduate students had been overlooked in the past because there was perhaps no real need for it, when the supply and demand for PhDs was more balanced. But I don’t see how it can continue to be overlooked.To be fair, many of my professors tried to incorporate elements of professional skills into coursework, but as a whole I think more can be done systematically to make a greater impact.

What do you guys think? What can we do to help transform what needs transforming insofar as embedding professionalization into curriculum?

grad school is hard

If you think coming to grad school means a straightforward path has been set before you, you're wrong. Pursuing your interest in grad school often creates more questions than answers and presents you with tasks that are as daunting as they are rewarding. Welcome to the maze of higher ed and pursuing your passion... 

When I was applying to Fordham, grad school seemed like an answer to my problems. I was tired of the 9 to 5 grind of full-time employment. I wanted more time to write and the freedom to work on my own projects. I missed the intellectual and creative community of college.

I couldn’t wait to be a student again. I figured the working world had been hard, and grad school would be easy. What could be more fulfilling and straightforward than studying what I had always had it in my heart to pursue?

Right?

While the labor of grad school will never be hard in the way many other types of labor in the working world can be, graduate study is challenging in its own respects. Grad school has pushed me intellectually, but also personally and emotionally. It has totally widened and complicated my vision of my life’s work in terms of art and scholarship.

The old cliché is true; I have found that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. It has been transformative to come to know the meaning of this adage intimately. I have felt increased drive and a heightened sense of urgency about my work and writing, as I grasp how much more I must learn and improve.

Beyond the drive and urgency, I have also felt panic. How do we deal with the knowledge of how far we are from where we hope to be? How do we stay encouraged and exhilarated, rather than daunted and overwhelmed? In many ways, I feel as if I am on the first page of an incredibly long final paper and I cannot see the end – except in this analogy, the paper is my life.

For me, the dilemma manifests itself particularly in terms of my writing. While I celebrate the strides I have made as a writer at Fordham, I feel fear sometimes, as well as hopefulness. As I have grown at Fordham, the errors and deficiencies in my work, as well as the strengths and aptitudes, have come into clearer focus.

I am thankful that grad school gives me the time, space, and guidance to improve.  I am aware of the gift of such an opportunity, and yet I can’t help but have a "gulp" moment when I think of the immensity of the task set before me.

Gulp.

This summer I started working on a memoir as part of a graduate tutorial in the English Master’s program. I have been writing a coming of age story about cultural difference, identity, and belonging. I have stretched myself this summer, venturing beyond my usual genre of fiction.  It has been exciting to see memoir writing emerge as a viable way for me to work, but the memoir writing hasn’t gotten any easier. The better I get at it, the harder it is.

Again, I say:

Gulp.

The great surprise (and it really shouldn’t have been a surprise since I knew the old cliché) of grad school is that work has not become any easier or simpler since I began working full-time as a student in my field. But growth is never easy or simple, is it?

I was reminded of this as I completed my tutorial (in London, where there was plenty to keep me reflecting on questions of difference and belonging). As I wrote, I waded through the seeming formlessness of my own memories; I fumbled for a structure to impose on the narrative of my past. I wondered how to organize feelings and images that are contiguous to me emotionally but not chronologically.

I felt lost, but I was moving forward, one way or another. And when I managed to set aside feelings of panic and intimidation, I felt the thrill that comes from progress, however partial.

Grad school is dynamic and daunting precisely because of this paradox. As our understanding deepens and our vision expands, the tasks before us become more rigorous. The amount of work multiplies as we become more adept to do it. Nothing is easier, but everything is richer. The process of discovery is constant and without end.

So far, Fordham has not provided me with an answer to anything. My coursework and independent study have brought me instead to a series of exciting beginnings, which is more than I bargained for. This is a good thing. So no gulp moment.

Did you get more than you bargained for when you applied to grad school? Was there an interest you expected to pursue straightforwardly? Was it more difficult than you imagined it would be? Have you been intimidated or invigorated by the challenge?