Some Thoughts About Teaching Evaluation

It's been a long break between posts.  I've been caught up in the mayhem of end of semester panicked emails from students and then.... marking, marking and more marking!  Amongst all of this the students' evaluation of teaching are also released.  I generally perform OK with student evaluations - not brilliantly - I tend to polarise students, in that they either rate my teaching very highly or very lowly, giving me a solid statistically 'average' score overall.  Student evaluations, while undoubtedly flawed, are very valuable to my career.  Firstly, they are as close as I get to genuine feedback on my work and secondly, good results in student evaluation help me to secure work in future semesters.  Around my school it's a known trend that student evaluations of tutors and evaluations of the unit go hand in hand, therefore unit coordinators tend to look for tutors with good scores.  I have learned a lot from students' evaluations about my teaching over the years, once I have recovered from the initial shock of some of the more abrasive remarks.  I have also seen good friends completely demoralised by the hurtful comments students write under the safety net of anonymity (she writes as an anonymous blogger).  If we have to provide feedback and grades to our students face to face, why can't their feedback be provided in the same manner?

While I can't rigorously ground the argument I am about to present, anecdotally, I suggest that student evaluations may impact how critically we mark students' work.  For the majority of students the only method for them to evaluate their education is by the grades they receive - the better the grades they attain the better they feel about the quality of their education.  Therefore, I think, there is an undercurrent here to dish out better grades in order to receive better teaching evaluation scores.  I am always made aware of this when I work with first time tutors who grade students' work so harshly.  Although it does also take a while for new tutors to understand the university can't simulate the complexities of practice and therefore students can't respond and produce the same level of work.    

As a tutor I receive plenty of feedback throughout the semester informally, through conversations and emails with students.  These conversations are frank and helpful to my developing teaching style.  The problem with the anonymous student survey is that a student who has hardly attended a class can use teaching evaluation forms as recourse for a grade they are unhappy with, rather than discussing the mark face to face.  My suggestion is that teaching evaluations shouldn't be anonymous.  I do value students' feedback on my teaching but I think the manner in which it is delivered is unfair to teaching staff.  David Holmberg wrote about the pain of student evaluations in an article titled 'Student Evaluations' in the New York Times magazine in 2007.  He wrote:

"A journalist-professor friend who is less than enamored of teaching caustically refers to them [student evaluations] as 'customer service.'  Translation:  He has been burned by his students.  But his larger meaning is that higher education..... is increasingly market driven and by his jaded reckoning a student and his parents are not markedly different from Harry the Striving Suburbanite roaming the aisles of Home Depot"

I think this is a fairly uneven criticism of evaluation systems (although I know many who would agree with Holmberg).  I think his comments on the market driven premise to teaching evaluation are spot on.  On that note, I wanted to finish this post with a quote by Chris Hedges on education. 

                   

Uni Casual Survey Results

The National Tertiary Education Union survey results on Casual Teaching and Research Staff 2012 are now available online.  I think NTEU and Uni Casual have put together a great publication from the survey results that highlight a number of issues for casual higher ed workers in Australia.  The summary of the results written by Jeannie Rea outline that casual staff experience stress as a result their insecure employment, work significantly more hours than they are paid to and lack sufficient access to resources to assist them in their role.  All of these points I have written about throughout the short history of this blog.  On the one hand I find this almost comforting and re-affirming that my experience is the normal, on the other hand I'm disappointed that universities are unable to provide adequate, basic conditions for their casual staff.

The stress associated with insecure work I have briefly touched on previously through the Howe Inquiry and perhaps I will write more on this next week.  I have also written about the impact of technology on managing contact time with students.  In the survey results over 80% of respondents (p.9) responded to emails or received calls on their own equipment after their contract had ended and they were no longer receiving payment.  Unfortunately, I have recently found myself being very selective about which student emails I will respond to, so that I can manage my time.  I recently received an email from a student who was disputing a grade and in the midst of replying to the email I was told I had to move from the one hotdesk that is shared between sessional teaching staff, casual research staff and one administration staff.  I'm not sure how many casual academics work in my school but we are a school of over 1000 students, so there's quite a number of casual staff and, frankly, one computer to share between all of us just doesn't cut it.  I asked for some more time to reply to my email, as it was from a Maters student who needed their mark clarified as soon as possible and was offered a computer in the student labs!!  I explained that this a totally inappropriate proposition for me to respond to a confidential email from a student whilst surrounded by students - eventually, I was allowed to finish my email.

Out of all the points raised by the casual staff survey, I personally think the lack of access to resources is the most pertinent.  If I was provided with adequate resources it would probably save me considerable time in performing my job - it would most likely reduce and simplify some of the out of hours work we are expected to do.  About 90% of my personal internet data usage is for my work at the university along with the majority of the usage of my phone and personal computer.  This problem could so easily be addressed if universities could simply provide access to phones, computers, internet, photocopying, printing and scanning freely and easily.  Access to these resources would seem like basic rights to an employee, wouldn't it?  According to the survey only around 50% (p.8) of respondents had access to space for student consultation, a phone and/or a computer.  This could be a relatively easy way for universities to improve conditions for their casual staff.         

Precarious Precariat

I have to admit up until a few weeks ago I had never come across the word precariat.  This term might be associated with the low skilled workers, but if you were to ask any casual or sessional academic at Australian universities, they would probably also classify their employment situation as precarious.  Considering most casual and sessional academics require at the very minimum an undergraduate degree, most likely though, a postgraduate qualification or in the process of completing one, the precariat then extends to highly skilled workers as well.  The precariat is you and me.  Is the sessional academic a precariat by choice or as a result of the way in which universities employ us?

The NTEU estimates that 40.2% of the Australian tertiary workforce are currently employed on a casual basis.  This has increased only gradually since 1996 when 34.1% of the tertiary workforce were casual employees.  A publication on teaching in my profession (being architecture) estimates that this figure is much lower, for our particular discipline, at between 24% - 29% although this publication suggests that this is quite high in comparison to other courses that are affiliated with professional organisations.  Australian courses in architecture, in particular, have experienced a constant increase in student numbers from around 1124 students nationwide in 1988 to 4248 students in 2008.  Why then am I tutoring courses that are increasingly cutback?  Why do students have less contact time with me as a tutor than I did with my tutors when I was part of a much smaller cohort?    

Students are aware of the raw deal they are encountering in their studies due to ongoing staff cutbacks at Australian universities. Today, students protested at the University of Sydney.  If students are standing up to the universities - why aren't the staff?  The casual academics who are directly affected and the permanent staff who can't justly employ tutors or research assistants because they will wait weeks for appointment or payment.  I described this situation to a Human Resources Manager for a consultancy firm at a social outing on the weekend and they couldn't fathom that I would wait up to eight weeks to be paid by my employer.  There are serious conditions of employment that the university is freely breaching here.  Moreso, is the unpaid time that universities can squeeze out of the precariat as Professor Guy Standing writes, "The precariat do excessive labour, including taking on several jobs at the same time or doing more unacknowledged 'work for labour' necessary to find or maintain a job,"

 On a final note, the precariat suffers wholly from employment insecurity, it impacts on all spheres of life.  If the federal government is calling for uncapped university courses who will tutor all of these students - the precariat?  Shouldn't this be a case for increased security for casual and sessional academics? 
       
' describe the precariat as those who feel their lives and identities are disjointed, who cannot build careers or incorporate leisure into their lives in sustainable, meaningful ways. Youth, women, those with disabilities and migrants are most affected, but almost everybody is at risk.'  Professor Guy Standing

Let the assessment stress begin!

I've been marking furiously over the last couple of weeks, it hasn't been so bad, the good thing about tutoring subjects over a couple of years is that you get very efficient at marking.  You know exactly what you're looking for, you know the content inside out, and it's easy to make value judgements on the quality of the students' work.  Although I feel for my colleagues who are teaching subjects for the first time around, some of them take three times as long to mark the same amount of work and will still only be paid for the one or two hours allocated for marking.  Of course the stress associated with assessment is mostly an issue for the students.

It is very difficult to see students struggle with their workloads, but there are those wonderful moments when you can help a student overcome their struggles and successfully submit their assessment.  Sometimes you can build a relationship with a student and its easy to work through their problems, however there are students who you can't help out.  They're usually the students that have been absent throughout the semester, struggling at home - maybe for very legitimate reasons they haven't been able to attend class - and now that it's come to the crunch, they turn up to a tutorial and melt down.  With these students I never know how to help them.  I don't know how they've been coping with the content, I don't know their situation at uni or outside of uni, I just don't know them.  This means you and the student enter into this awkward conversation where they want to tell you an elaborate personal story about their situation, even though you're mostly strangers, and you have to try to digest this information in relation to their assessment.  Even worse are the emails from students who are stressed about their assessment and confess to having never attended class (generally these emails make me incensed!  I have to wait a while to respond to them)- how do you respond to these emails?

Last Friday I had one student attend their first class, a tutorial in which assessment was due, and the student burst into uncontrollable tears.  I spent about an hour with the student to talk through how to strategise their work for the next piece of assessment.  There are those standard processes you go through, suggesting the student go to counseling, apply for extensions and make sure they communicate their problems as soon as they arise and not let it build up.  Although these responses all seem very cold and not very sympathetic to the student.  Basically I'm ill-equipped to handle these situations - I've had no training on how to help students handle these stresses, especially when I don't know them well at all.  The other thing this issue brings up is the value of face to face teaching.  I couldn't find any literature on how more contact hours might alleviate the stress of uni - but I think it would be an interesting study.                      

Overload and the fear of saying no.

I tutor at the same school as where I studied.  Most of the lecturers know me well as when I was going through they were my tutors, so I have no problem with picking up subjects each semester to tutor.  My only problem is when I am overloaded and I have to say no to a job offer, I probably won't be offered that subject again.  I know, poor me, too many subjects to choose from.  But it happens every semester, the budgets come out too late and there is this scramble by lecturers for tutors, the phone rings the emails come in and you draw up a weekly timetable to work out your availability, prioritising those subjects you enjoy or have expertise in.  If I can't accept an offer to tutor I usually recommend a colleague, one from a long list, who are keen to tutor.  Of course, when I see this colleague at the end of the semester (they're probably still waiting to be paid and don't know how to get their password, staff card or access their email), they possess a slightly more cynical outlook towards tutoring, but if the offer comes up again next semester of course they'll say yes.  And this is the problem, how do you say no to tutoring offers without a convenient excuse of subject clash or lack of expertise?  I struggle with this and by this time of the semester (week 6/7) realise I am overloaded.  My fear is that if I say no to a subject, I will have less and less offers each semester and when tutoring is your staple income and that only comes in 26 weeks of the year, you need to feel certain that there will be work next year.  So I feel some pressure to say yes to every offer and agonise over the ones I say no to.

Somewhat like call centre workers who fear saying no to a shift in case they are never offered another shift.  Well, it's not as bad as it is for call centre workers, one of the stories that came out of the Howe Inquiry was from a call centre worker who witnessed other workers wetting themselves as they were too afraid to take toilet breaks.  So while it's not great being a casual worker in the tertiary sector, it could be so much much worse!  This inability to say no to work is not restricted to casual workers at universities either, I see lecturers involved with numerous projects, unable to keep up with their workload.  We have a host of academics at our university who pride themselves on waking up at between 3am and 4am to get through their workload.  When I was working in practice I was proud that I had reached the point in my career where I could negotiate reasonable timeframes and requests for work from employers and clients.  Now I'm back to the early days of my career, saying yes to everything, working seven days a week and limiting my social life.  I have no problem with that as I am the bottom rungs of the academic career ladder, my concern is that there is no cessation of this work ethic throughout the academic career track.  And for what?  Some profound research finding?

         

Day of Higher Ed

Today is the day of 'Higher Ed' a day for those involved with higher education to blog, tweet and post their higher education opinions and experiences.  I look forward to reading what amounts as a result of this activity.  I am learning so much from other people here in Australia and from overseas, especially the U.S..  My background is in architecture and I have limited knowledge in the fields of politics, governance and humanities.  I can only really comment on my own experiences and try to contextualise them... as best I can.  So blogging (and this is also my first blog) has provided this platform for me to connect with other people in higher education from Australia and abroad.  I am very grateful for these new connections and happily the spruik the potential of the day for 'Higher Ed'.

Pay and Hours Worked
This week's ponder is based on how sessional and casual academics are paid in Australia.  I tutored a theory subject today for two hours and was paid around $112 for each hour.  That sounds like a great rate, doesn't it?  But that pay rate covers my preparation, meetings, outside consultation with students, emails and (although it's not supposed to) marking.  On average I spend one to one and a half days on this subject, working out to about $22 per hour - about the equivalent of a fast food chain worker in Australia.  Now, coming from a background in architecture, I am not going to complain about low pay, it's all I've ever known!  My gripe here is about how we are paid.  Why aren't we paid in a way that represents the hours that we work instead of these ridiculous hourly rates?  There are a few reasons this concerns me, firstly because it is difficult to cry 'hard done by' when you are paid at this rate, which is in no way a representation of the work involved with tutoring a two hour class.  Mostly, though my concern is in the way that employment is measured in Australia, in that employment is measured by how many hours worked in a week and not the amount earned (which makes sense, I'm not arguing that it doesn't).  I currently work around 45 - 50 hours a week as a tutor, but I am only employed by my university for 9 hours a week.  This becomes an issue when applying for loans from banks and in means testing for welfare.  For example, if a woman employed in the manner that I currently am were to apply for the Australian government's maternity leave they wouldn't qualify.  The maternity leave scheme requires that the mother has worked for 330 hours over the last 10 months (that is working for just over one day a week).  Working these limited hours per week and only for the appointed period of between 7 and 13 weeks, someone like myself could not qualify, even though I work more hours than required to satisfy a full time week.  I am interested then in why we are paid in the way that we are and if it could be changed to more suitable model?            

Counting Myself Out of the Statistics

As with most tutors, I also work as a casual research assistant.  The project I am currently working on is an ARC linkage project looking at equity and diversity in my profession, especially in relation to gender and women.  I am in the middle of a task trying to count how many women are employed in my profession including researchers and academics.  It was decided last week that it would be too difficult to count casual academics in the statistics as universities tended to not effectively record their positions as their numbers are too great and constantly changing.  My heart sank at the realisation that firstly, universities do not warrant my contribution enough to keep a record of my position and that, secondly, I would fall outside of the statistics of my own profession after 10 years of contributing through my work and involvement with my professional community.  One of those moments where you realise you've made a poor career decision.