What kinds of changes have you adapted to as you’ve hit the road? What learning styles? needs? knowledge bases? values? technological savvy? language facility? language backgrounds? religious backgrounds? attitudes? In other words, how has geography changed your pedagogy?
Tina Kazan, Assistant Professor, Elmhurst College
Introduction — For this edition of “Being Adjuncts” we asked teachers to tell their stories of how they adjusted (or are trying to adjust) to a new student population. Like Nicolas Cage’s characters Donald and Charlie Kaufman in the film Adaptation, many of us find ourselves as conflicted twins—perhaps one moment like Donald, the twin who seems to adapt successfully as a novice screenwriter in Hollywood, while at other moments like Charlie, the twin who resists such adjustments and struggles hopelessly to maintain his values as he writes (ironically) an adaptation. Like the Kaufman twins, adjuncts, graduate students, and assistant professors have adapted to their students in innovative ways.[MORE]
Colin Irvine, Assistant Professor, Augsburg College; Former Adjunct Instructor, Marquette University
This was my first day on the job, and I was now officially “Dr. Irvine, Adjunct Instructor.” . . . My approach, my tone, and—most important—my mindset were completely inappropriate for the context in which I suddenly found myself. These were adults. This was a hotel room. And I was standing there talking as if I were speaking to first–year students in an English 001 course in an ordinary classroom full of ordinary students.[MORE]
Crystal McCage, Assistant Professor, Central Oregon Community College; Former Graduate Teaching Assistant, Texas Woman’s University; Former Adjunct Instructor, Community Colleges in the North Texas Area
I felt like I was really prepared for anything. . . . But when I landed my first full–time job in a small town in Oregon, I quickly learned that this transition would be unlike any other I had made before.[MORE]
Jessica Wierzbinski, M.A. Candidate, First–Year Composition Instructor, Wichita State University
Since my first, disastrous semester of teaching, I’ve made further adjustments to my expectations as well as to my teaching style. I’ve become more—disillusioned isn’t the right word—sensitive to my students’ druthers perhaps. They don’t want to try too hard to search for meaning in a work they’re mistrustful of in the first place. That’s understandable.[MORE]
Anne Richards, Ph.D. Candidate, First–Year Composition Instructor, Iowa State University
By recovering my own “forgotten” cultural history as a result of working with first–year multicultural writing students, I have realized that even as a middle–class, Midwestern, educated, straight, Caucasian woman, I am nonetheless destined not only to have a fluid sense of my own identity but to represent very different things to different people.[MORE]
Lei Lani Michel, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington–Seattle; Former Adjunct Instructor, Louisiana Colleges
I myself was intimidated by the complexity of the readings and only half–joked to colleagues that I would probably fail my own class. How did I adapt when I felt that I was not grasping all of the arguments I was teaching? Humility. Honesty. Humor. [MORE]
Tina Kazan, Assistant Professor, Elmhurst College
Epilogue: Keep the Dialogue Going — Whether we teach adults in hotel conference rooms or multicultural students in Iowa, these essays reinforce Colin Irvine’s observation that “there is no traditional, customary, or conventional college or university, and there are no ordinary, customary, or conventional students.” Without any givens, we must adapt and create. [MORE]
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