My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan Book Review

Collected below is the first part of my notes on reading My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student,a popular-ethnographic written report of undergraduates conducted at Northern Arizona University – anonymized as AnyU – in 2002 by Rebekah Nathan, the pseudonym of Cathy Small, a Professor of Anthropology at the same institution.

Maybe considering of confusion over its utilize of a adequately accessible and popular style of writing (a paperback edition was published by Penguin and, ironically, the second-hand copy I own once belonged to the Faculty Development Plan at Northern Arizona Academy itself), much of the reception of the volume initially focused on pseudo-scandalous issues relating to the anonymous identity of the author. The New YorkSunpublished an exposé earlier the volume had fifty-fifty been published, justified by the odd claim that 'university presses are geared more toward influencing academic debate than to seeking the publicity that anonymous works sometimes generate' (this faulty logic implies that scholarly publications can but influence academic debate if the identity of the author is known and that publications would only exist anonymous in gild to seek publicity, overlooking all the legitimate reasons why an scholarly publication might influence academic debatesprecisely considering it was anonymous). Other responses, such as this Within Higher Ed article, this Chronicle of Higher Teachingarticle and their readers comments below the line, and this Anthropological Review Database review, focused upon and oftentimes questioned the ideals of the inquiry itself, although as Kenny and Smillie (2015: 21) indicate out, ultimately 'Small-scale'due south study posed little risk for those she was observing.'

Surprisingly, less attention has been paid to the insights almost university educational activity and learning discovered by the research itself. Here, I'd link to summarize some of Small'south key findings and suggest a style of rethinking their continued relevance for understanding contemporary higher educational activity. This offset section will focus on how enquiry and pedagogy intersect in Small-scale's work, suggesting how her anthropological arroyo to "student culture" might provide useful insights for thinking well-nigh pedagogy and learning across all disciplines of college education.

i. Anthropologizing Pedagogy

One manner to arroyo Small'due south book is as an case of the relatively minor academic genre of disciplinary reflection that bridges the perceived gap between enquiry and teaching within college pedagogy. Equally I've previously mentioned in relation to Elaine Showalter'sEducation Literature, George Levine (2001: vii & 9) has described how the academic profession systematically divides our work as teachers and our work as scholars into separate domains and, because information technology 'rewards one one-half much more it does the other, even when both activities are done past the same faculty member', information technology is only 'after a faculty member has made a proper noun in research can he or she feel free to write about instruction.' For Levine (2001: 17), however, 'writing about teaching must become as a central to professional life as writing about Renaissance poetry, Derrida, Hegel, or popular civilisation.' To practise so, he proposes the development of a 'whole new genre that would make it possible to see discussions of teaching as integral to the evolution of knowledge,' transforming the practise of researchso that 'publication of essays nigh the didactics of literature [becomes] the norm, not the exception' (Levine 2001: 12).

When the literary theorist Elaine Showalter takes up the challenge of such writing in Teaching Literature, this division is bridged by approaching didactics and learning from the disciplinary perspective of her inquiry expertise, reconciling the two by thinking of literature as pedagogical and pedagogy as literary. For Showalter (2003: xi-12), this involves not only a transformation of research only a transformation of teaching as well: 'we should reconceive our pedagogy to make it as intellectually challenging as our research …reflecting upon the human relationship betwixt what nosotros teach and how we teach it, in new ways, and so that the same problems we deal with in our research, including performance and narrative, become part of the vocabulary.'

Similarly, Pocket-size's My Freshman Year might exist understood to bridge the professional division betwixt her own disciplinary research and teaching by choosing to accept the university itself and its student community equally the site for her anthropological research. As she notes in the preface to her volume, 'The idea for doing this research really gelled after I audited a couple of courses for my own continuing interest and instruction' (Nathan 2005: 9). The volume, every bit an example of Levine's new genre, therefore provides both an engaging, entry-level introduction to anthropology and suggestions for how all educators might transform their teaching based on the insights of her anthropological perspective.

ii. Professional person Student Civilization

While some might find Small'south anthropological insights – to develop 'affection and respect' not just for individual students but 'students as a grade' in order to recall 'the lesson of compassion' for all those 'at the other end of a professor's encouragement,' where 'sometimes nothing more instructor'south outreach pushes the balance' for those 'on the debate between giving upward and making more of an effort' (Nathan, 2005: 134-5) – too obvious or banal, these suggestion are tempered by her qualification that while there 'is no dubiety that special professors do make a divergence in the life of specific students …overall, I'd advise, educatee-teacher relationships play a relatively minor role in the experience of undergraduate life in a big university' and then consequently increased contact time between teachers and students will practise little to 'raise memory rates' (140).

Rather than relying on these 'inaccurate or idealized versions of what students are …student issues should [instead] exist analysed with a fuller understanding of how they are embedded in pupil culture' (141). And, Pocket-size suggests, gimmicky educatee culture is undergoing a number of substantial changes: whereas higher teaching might once accept been viewed equally a 'rite of passage …marked past severance from one'south normal condition, entrance into a "liminal" state where normal rules of lodge are lifted, and finally reintegrated into guild with a new status,' the transformative potential of such a "liminal" experience are increasingly threatened, she argues, when universities becomes 'and then immersed in the earth every bit information technology is that it can neither critique that world nor proposition an ideal vision of how else information technology might exist' or, every bit she puts it, 'when the earth is so much with them' (152; accent added).

Modest's ain immersion into student culture at AnyU provides some perspective on the ways in which, according to her, universities take get so immersed in the world that it is difficult to go detached from the normal rules of guild and enter this liminal state:

'The data suggested and then that, compared to students a couple of decades ago, today'due south public higher students are both studying a little less and socializing less. What, then, are they doing with their "extra" time? Co-ordinate to my local sample, students were outset and foremost working jobs, both inside and outside the academy …more than half of my sample had a wage-paying chore, working from 6 to over twenty-five hours, with a median of fifteen hours, every calendar week …Nationally, full-time students worked an average of ten hours per week [according to the NSSE survey] …By the time they are seniors, 88 percent of students volition be working either on or off campus' (130)

Co-ordinate to Pocket-sized's research, 'Students work jobs non merely for their tuition but for a lifestyle to which all accept grown accustomed – with the upshot that there are fewer hours for academics and more need for easy As and homework shortcuts' (141). In other words, contemporary 'student culture' has, like many parts of wider American guild, become dominated not only by the demands of nowadays or future working life but the expectations of a consumer civilization that stands in opposition to the very notion of a 'educatee culture,' idealized in terms of a scholarly or learning community. Equally Pocket-sized writes, 'students with "stuff" have no use for many community facilities and activities because they accept resources of their own' (141).

This has an impact not only upon the time spent on activities other than learning, such every bit individualized modes of consuming and waged and voluntary piece of work, but also transforms the activeness of learning itself: students become more efficient pastworking at beingness "students".Although academic staff constantly preach the virtues of "fourth dimension direction" to students, this direction of fourth dimension is entirely a one-mode expectation: it is students that must adapt to the multiple and uncoordinated teaching schedules, assignment deadlines and office hours of individual academics and of departmental or university programs. 'The key to managing time was not, as higher officials suggested, fugitive wasted minutes by turning yourself into an agent of your day planner. Neither was information technology severely curtailing your leisure or quitting your paying job. Rather,' Small writes, 'it was controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors, and limiting workload' (110-113). Thus 'a kind of Spartan efficiency …[a] kind of strategic corner-cut is part of what students learn in higher,' such that while skipping reading, omitting preparation, cutting writing fourth dimension, cramming and even cheating results in bottom quality work, this is strategically employed to make fourth dimension for higher priority activities, less as a result of individual student choices than of the pressures and expectations of the wider globe (121-3).

This instrumental efficiency too applies to the professionalization of student work itself:

'At one university-sponsored presentation for freshman, the speaker brash us to sit in the "reverse T" (the center of the room or front row), in the professor'south field of vision …Perhaps their outlook explains the national data, which shows that, as students continue through their undergraduate years, they non only ask more than questions in class simply as well report speaking to teachers more than outside of class. Although one could attribute this difference to increased involvement in classes or improved cocky-conviction, I remember information technology is at least partially explained past the advice proffered past successful students …about creating and using relationships with professors …[that] fits nicely with a careerist cultural outlook that privileges grades and degrees' (118)

As John Marsh has commented, 'Nathan'southward anthropological subjects – students – described their academic work, their professors, and themselves …in disturbingly like ways to what I know of how workers described their jobs, their bosses, and themselves' and 'Nathan comments that "several of the undergraduates whom I as a fellow student admired virtually cast professor-student relations as a rough facsimile of the boss-worker relationship". 'We take heard much talk – and most of us have recoiled from it – of students as consumers, but,' Marsh therefore asks, 'might students be workers?' Marsh therefore insists that, precisely every bit homo upper-case letter, students are – along with those who teach them – co-workers of themselves. Much of this seems right, peculiarly the way information technology emphasizes the professionalizing of learning as one of many competing activities all subsumed nether the unity of piece of work: a reflection of the domination of abstruse labour. There is a danger, however, that this obscures Small's broader indicate: that student learning has become work-like precisely in order to arrange the necessary time for (present and grooming for future waged) work, i.e. precisely because itisn'twork.

In the adjacent section, I want to discuss the implication of this argument for agreement the fragmentation of student culture more than more often than not. In particular, I want to connect Minor's ain inquiry with the technological emergence of social media and suggest how attempts to promote arcadian learning communities reflect an anxiety over such fragmentation that inevitably founder when confronted withreal"social networks".

Works Referenced

Gershman, Jacob. 2005. 'On the Trail of an Undercover Professor'.New York Sunday. http://www.nysun.com/new-york/on-the-trail-of-an-undercover-professor/18869/

Jaschik, Scott. 2005. 'Surreptitious Freshman'.Inside Higher Ed.https://world wide web.insidehighered.com/news/2005/07/13/frosh

Kenny, Michael G. and Smillie, Kirsten. 2015. Stories of Culture and Place: An Introduction to Anthropology. North York, Academy of Toronto Press.

Lawless, Robert. 2005. Review ofMy Freshman Year.Anthropology Review Database.http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=2810

Levine, George. 2001. 'The Two Nations'.Pedagogy 1.1.

Marsh, Josh. 2006. 'Thinking About Students as Workers'.Inside College Ed.https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/12/11/thinking-about-students-workers

Nathan, Rebekah, 2005. 'An Anthropologist Goes Nether Comprehend'.The Chronicle of Higher Educational activity. http://www.relate.com/commodity/An-Anthropologist-Goes-Nether/26796

Nathan, Rebekah, 2005.My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. London, Penguin Books.

Showalter, Elaine. 2003.Teaching Literature. Malden, MA., Oxford and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell.

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Source: https://benjaminpedagogy.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/rebekah-nathans-my-freshman-year-part-1/

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