Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Preparing a Teaching Statement

Sometimes academic job advertisements ask you to submit a teaching statement or ‘evidence of teaching effectiveness’ (or something along those lines). These are two different things, which I’ll discuss presently. But first, one caveat for this post: I’ve never served on a job search committee where these documents have been reviewed, so I really only know them as a job applicant. So my understanding of them might be slightly flawed, but I think I have the general contours down…

Job letters usually include a paragraph about your general teaching principles and what courses you foresee yourself teaching in the near future. Teaching statements are meant to be a little more philosophical in their content, and abstract from the generalities of a job letter summary. But therein lies their danger: I’ve seen (and written my own) a fair number of teaching statements that are too philosophical. You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) write a paragraph about how you believe in the Socratic method and Paulo Freire. Rather, successful teaching statements are usually pragmatic: they show to your reader that you’ve actually spent time in the classroom, and have critical thoughts about how to capture the interest of students and can deal with common problems that arise. The statement should give your reader a clear sense of what your classrooms are actually like. Do you lecture a lot? Do you emphasize group work and collaboration or individual effort? Do you give students grading options, or is everyone expected to take multiple choice tests? The more time you spend teaching, the better your teaching statement will be, so it really helps to start teaching early — or to find ways to abstract from your experiences as a teaching assistant. If you’ve never done either, think critically about those classrooms that you’ve been in that have worked and those that haven’t; you might be able to put together a convincing sense of what your classroom would be like based on your prior experiences as a student.

In much the same way, syllabuses that have been taught versus syllabuses that are new proposals can be wildly different. For example, over the years, the Policy section of my syllabuses has expanded from one little paragraph on academic integrity to a page and a half of text about attendance, enrollment, contacting me, style preferences, etc. Some of this stuff you can only learn by teaching: five years into teaching, and I’ve added something to my classroom policies each year.

Which leads me to those requests for ‘evidence of teaching effectiveness’ or however it gets worded. These are usually much longer documents, and often include what you would put in a normal teaching statement, plus, as they say, some ‘evidence.’ This depends on you actually having taught, whether as a solo instructor or a teaching assistant. If you have evaluations, this is where you’ll summarize them, listing your overall ratings (usually just mentioning the highest brackets of evaluation, e.g. what percentage of students ranked you as excellent or very good?); it’s also helpful to include quotes from narrative evaluations of your teaching, highlighting both supportive and usefully critical comments. If you’ve taught the same class numerous times, one of the best things you can do is to show how you’ve improved over time — have your ratings gone up? have you changed the syllabus to address student concerns? But, ultimately, these kinds of documents should be tempered with some pragmatism. How much do you think a committee is interested in reading? A couple pages of teaching philosophy and evidence is probably enough; you might supplement it with a syllabus or two, especially if they’re well developed.

Just like everything in the application process, a sense of realism is important to embrace in these documents; you want to impress your reader with a sense of who you are and what your experiences have been. If you don’t get the chance to be a teaching assistant or to teach throughout your Ph.D. studies, try and teach at a local junior college; a little bit of experience teaching can make a huge difference in preparing these kinds of documents.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Book Manuscripts, Professionalization

Q: How Perfect Does a Book Manuscript Need to Be?

Here’s a question from a friend about finalizing a book manuscript:

My manuscript was reviewed about a year and a half ago by two people and I have a contract with an academic press. The editor has been super supportive, but I still know that anything can happen. So…the final version is supposedly due by December 31st for a final review. I have a full draft, though it still needs work and I am writing the introduction and conclusion. I have written three fully new chapters and everything else has undergone major editing. What I am wondering is: When you handed things in for the final review, how perfect was it?

It wasn’t perfect at all. It was done in the sense that everything that needed to be there was there — a couple new chapters, a new introduction and conclusion, lots of reformatting, etc. So in that sense it was done, and I was 90% okay with it going out for a second review. But I knew that it wasn’t as done as it could be, and I communicated that with my editor. He sent it out for review — back to one of the original reviewers — and she returned a really supportive final review. There were still some things she had problems with, so I made some changes — nothing so major as the transition between the first and second versions of the manuscript — and basically signed off on it being done. I prepared a letter outlining those changes, and then it was back to my editor who looked over those final changes and passed it on in the process.

And then it went to the proofreader… She identified other issues — vague sentences or confusing paragraphs — that I never would have caught no matter how long I worked on the manuscript. In fact, I would say that the longer I worked on it, the more I couldn’t see these sorts of problems: I became so concerned with the big picture that syntax and grammar went totally unnoticed. By the time it went through copy editing, it was finally done.

Which is all to say that it’s okay to send out a 90% complete manuscript; the reviewers and press staff will help get it across the finish line. And the book will be better entrusted to them, rather than constantly fretted over by its author.

You can read my whole adventure with the book manuscript here and here. The second one details everything that happened after the peer review process.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Dissertations, Professionalization

Planning a Dissertation: Articles or Book?

Here’s a question from a friend:

Just had an interesting conversation w/ my advisors where they gave me the option of writing 2 articles instead of a long dissertation. I would love to know your thoughts on this esp. since at some pt., like you, I’d like to write a book. Had a conversation w/ an editor at UofM Press and he said the book chapters look totally different than the dissertation chapters–everything gets rewritten/reorganized anyway. Thoughts?

I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years. I really tried to write my dissertation as a book manuscript, in part because my committee suggested that I approach it that way. I think it largely worked out, but the version I submitted as a dissertation and the one that’s finally being published as The Slumbering Masses are wildly different things. So I’m not sure that it needs to be as book-like as it was; and, in reality, it wasn’t very book like at all (since it had to be rewritten). I ended up having to do a lot of work to get it into an actual book manuscript, as I’ve talked about elsewhere; if I had just planned everything as articles and then revised them all into a book, it would have been as much or less work. It definitely wouldn’t have been more work…

I’ve mentioned before that one of the first things you should do with your dissertation is prepare a couple chapters for publication as articles. Approaching your dissertation as a set of articles really makes a lot of sense — it saves you from having to convert something from a chapter to an article, only to have to convert it to a chapter again later for the book. Instead, you just have the one article to chapter conversion (with eventual revisions). So writing a dissertation as articles can really save you a lot of time, and it can get you on the professionalization fast track. (I should also mention here that one of my chapters was written as an article that later appeared in Body & Society — it was the first thing I wrote and it took as long to appear in print as it did for me to finish the rest of the dissertation.)

Part of your thinking about this should really be shaped by the academic publishing market. Right now, due to state budget shortfalls, many university presses have cut back in their publishing plans, so they aren’t accepting as many books for publication. Meanwhile, there are more and more journals all the time, and they’re looking for content. So aiming for publishing a few articles while or shortly after dissertating makes tons of sense. And planning the whole dissertation as articles to be sent out for review is also really sensible. That being said, not all committees are up for it, and so it’s up to them as to what they’ll accept as a dissertation. A book will only be made better by publishing some articles and getting the feedback of people beyond your committee and immediate peers anyway…

The biggest thing to consider about what your dissertation should look like is this: what will you need to get tenure at the kind of institution you want to be at? The grim reality of being on the tenure track — or adjuncting while you wait for the tenure track — is that there isn’t a lot of time to conduct new research and to fabricate whole new pieces of writing. If you’re having a hard time writing even a couple articles as a graduate student, when your schedule is relatively free (although it might not feel that way), pursuing a tenure track job where the demands will be much greater is something you really need to consider. In addition to getting stuff published, there’s teaching, meetings, advising, and developing a new research project, which may include significant amounts of grant writing.

A dissertation should really provide you with a rough draft of everything you need for the next six or more years; it will be your archive for the foreseeable future. If 2 articles is enough to get tenure in your discipline and at the kind of institution you want to be at (and these are primarily liberal arts or second and third tier research universities), then that’s a sufficient dissertation; if you see yourself at a tier one research university, plan on many more articles plus, possibly, a book manuscript. If you write a short dissertation — only a couple articles — being on the tenure track might prove to be very stressful.

There’s a lot to think about in planning a dissertation, and building a significant archive of written material is the most important thing of all. So maybe not 2 articles, but maybe 6-8…