“The elaborate and serious joke—an HR performance piece, if you will, that would also happen to have spectacular results if it actually worked—is the brainchild of Dalhousie University professor Kathleen Cawsey and three friends, a Gang of Four whose pointed (and hilarious) cover letter has become aCanadian media cause célèbre.”
Author Archives: alenabuis
the hidden curriculum
essential skills
On January 30th, 2014 Barack Obama spoke at a General Electric plant just outside Milwaukee. Commenting on the state of vocational education the US president proclaimed:
“A lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career, but I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” He continued on to say, “Nothing wrong with art history degree,” [sic]. I love art history. I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying, you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education, as long as you get the skills and training that you need.”
President Obama’s disparaging remarks speak to a broader concern about the role of education and employment (I can’t even remember how many times I was asked but what can you do with a degree in art history?”) And rightfully so his comments incited a response from groups such as the College Art Association (“Humanities graduates play leading roles in corporations,”) and individuals like Ann Collins Johns, an art historian at the University of Texas in Austin. Johns argued in response, that her classes challenge students to think, read, and write critically.
I know this controversy happened almost six months ago, but lately I have been thinking quite a bit about art history and transferable skills. I agree with Johns – the discipline does challenge students to think, read, and write, all very important skills in almost any profession. But what else are we explicitly or implicitly teaching when we are talking about 17th century Dutch paintings? Or the production of hooked rugs? Of any of the other fascinating topics covered by my colleagues? Upon further inspection, I have noticed that my classes incorporate all three of the critical skills identified by the Conference Board of Canada: “academic skills, personal management skills, and teamwork skills.”
Like Alverno College’s list of abilities developed in a liberal arts education, the viewing, critiquing, discussion, and writing of art improves student’s communication abilities, analytic capabilities, problem solving skills, judgment and decision-making, facility for social interaction, global perspectives, citizenship, and overwhelmingly their aesthetic responsiveness.
Similarly BCIT has produced a list of general skills that are valued by employers of their graduates. At the top of the list is problem solving and creative thinking skills. The others in descending order include: oral skills, interpersonal skills, teamwork and leadership skills, writing skills, reading skills, visual literacy, electronic office skills, and intercultural skills. These abilities are often taught as part of the “hidden curriculum” of art history.
In light of President Obama’s comments and a larger impression that an education in the humanities is less economically important (see the extensive discussion on STEM education) I think we owe it to our students to make these skills an explicit part of our curriculum. I want to emphasize to them that research projects not only improve their reading and writing skills and obviously their visual literacy, but also through connecting with librarians, meeting with curators, and increasingly accessing information in new ways they are developing their the interpersonal, team work, and leadership abilities, as well as electronic/computing skills. Furthermore many of the new ways art history is being taught fosters intercultural skills fostered through a critical exploration of the visual and material cultures around the world.
Note: This post is part of a larger assignment I submitted for PIPD 3210 discussing employability, essential skills in the classroom, and hidden curriculum agendas.
On Being Alt Academic (Part 1)
In a recent article featured in The Atlantic, Elizabth Segran asked “What Can You Do With A Humanities Ph.D. Anyway?” and found as the subtitle suggested that “The choice to leave academia does not have to mean life as a barista.” For the article she interviewed Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, who explained, “People who take their Ph.D.s into other realms are not necessarily being hired for their content expertise, but for their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments.” Segran concluded, “These skills, it turns out, are in high demand.”
And this is what I have found in the last year as I have explored what is now being called an “Alt-Academic” (#altac) career. While teaching a couple of art history classes at a local college means I haven’t entirely left academia behind, my current position at a credit union places me within the 75% of PhDs without a tenure track position (for more on this see Allison B. Sekuler Barbara Crow, and Robert B. Annan’s “Beyond Labs and Libraries: Career Pathways for Doctoral Students”).
In the last year of my doctoral degree I returned to a part-time job I had done before, working a few days a week at a local credit union. Not only did it bring in a bit of money to cover some of the expenses I had incurred while traveling for research, but it also brought me in contact with people, easing the isolation that often accompanies dissertation writing and most importantly reminded me that sometimes there are things more important than the exact translation of a illegible word in a seventeenth-century document.
During this time a former colleague approached me about coming to work for her, at the company’s head office, back-filling a medical leave. Although the position was temporary, she convinced me that it could (and would! See part 2 of this post next week) open doors in the future. So two months before submitting my dissertation, I accepted a full-time position. Crazy right? While many in my cohort were buckling down, on lock down in the library or sequestering themselves in hotel rooms trying to finish, I took on a brand new job I had no idea how to do. Or did I?
In “When PhDs realize they won’t be professors,” MacLean’s magazines latest contribution to the ongoing dialog on the fate of academics making the transition to the “real world,” Josh Dehaas claims “many graduate students aren’t getting the support they need to prepare for non-academic careers.” But what is stopping graduate students from honing these skills themselves? As a grad student I developed skills highly in demand in other industries. Some of my proudest accomplishments demanded close collaboration with other scholars (here is my shout out to Sarah E.K. Smith, one of the brightest, most generous academics in Canada), developed communication skills (everything from the actual writing of articles etc. to carefully worded emails to supervisors), taught me grant and proposal writing (the fine art of self-promotion and begging for money), involved networking (nothing is more awkward than conference receptions – typically the more you admire a person’s work, the more socially inept they turn out to be) and of course critical thinking (no explanation needed). Ultimately, defending my dissertation in a timely fashion was a major feat of project management.
What Can You Do With A Humanities PhD
What Can You Do With A Humanities PhD
‘Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, told me, “People who take their Ph.D.s into other realms are not necessarily being hired for their content expertise, but for their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments.” These skills, it turns out, are in high demand.’
#yesallwomen
When news of Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 200 Nigerian girls from a school in April, finally broke, the world was outraged. Opposed to the education of women, the group’s actions were viewed as misogynist extremism – an unimaginable, reprehensible and unacceptable act by a group of Islamic fundamentalists.
More recently a similar explosion of misogynistic extremism rocked the small town of Isla Vista. On Friday, May 23rd (ironically at the same time as a major feminist conference was being held in Toronto) 22-year old Elliot Rodger went on a massacre that left him and six others dead and seven more injured. Prior to his rampage, Elliot posted a video titled “Retribution” on YouTube, outlining in it how as “the true alpha male” he was going to “slaughter” all the “sluts” that had rejected him, saying “…you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.” Filmed in the front seat of his black BMW – that would later power his killing spree – and with palm trees and a golden California sun glowing in the background, Elliot was quite literally and figuratively speaking from a particularly privileged position of upper-middle class, masculine power.
In a similar manner to the ways in which the Boka Haram kidnapping incited the hastag #bringbackourgirls, after the Isla Vista massacre the #YesAllWomen started a polarized social media debate on the ways men feel entitled to women’s bodies. Comments included:
“I have a boyfriend” is the easiest way to get a man to leave you alone. Because he respects another man more than you. #yesallwomen
I’ve spent 19 yrs teaching my daughter how not to be raped. How long have you spent teaching your son not to rape? #yesallwomen
BC when my husband asks me to slow down when we walk together I realize he hasn’t spent his life avoiding street harassment #YesAllWomen
These tweets were all posted by women. One of the few in agreement by a man included:
The #yesallwomen hashtag is filled with hard, true, sad and angry things. I can empathise & try to understand & know I never entirely will.
Popular in this discussion has been the misquotation of Margaret Atwood, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Her full comment came in from a lecture given at the University of Waterloo on February 9, 1982, when she said:
“Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.
Apparently not much has changed in the last 32 years.
Big Berks 2014
This weekend I am participating in the 16th Berkshires Conference. Held at the University of Toronto (and the Art Gallery of Ontario!) this is the first year the conference is being held outside the United States. With the theme of “Histories on the Edge” over 2000 participants and 100 sponsors and university departments will be exploring issues as war-displaced, immigrant and migrating women; transgressive women; women and psychiatry; reproductive health; and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) histories.
“Big Berks” not only supports the telling of women’s histories but it also supports the work of women historians. Nearly eighty years ago a marginalized group of female professors participated in informal retreats in the Northeastern United States, that would come to be called the “Little Berks.” During the 1960s and 70s second-wave feminists reframed the gatherings as the Berkshire Conference or “Big Berks” – formal meetings that presented women’s histories and gender as legitimate subjects of historical inquiry, bridged gaps in scholarship and most importantly solidified women’s roles as respected academics.
In keeping with the conference theme of “critical edges – sharpening, de-centering, decolonizing histories,” the panel I have organized examines visual and material transculturations in various colonial projects on the margins of the early modern Dutch world. This investigation maps the cultural networks created, disrupted and adapted by the production and consumption of both biographical goods and also public commodities. With an attention to the materiality of the “things” made and exchanged at home and overseas, we will observe the translations in styles, changes in conventions and shifts in popular tastes that occurred as goods circulated through the international commerce first established by the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and Dutch West India Company (West Indische Compagnie or WIC), and continued through both official and other trade routes well into the eighteenth century.
In the first presentation Chi-ming Yang examines chinoiserie design books and lacquer and ceramic objects alongside the atlases to explore intersections between chinoiserie ornament and early modern ideas of race. Next Martha Chaiklin utilizes Dutch and Japanese trade documents and Japanese contemporary accounts to demonstrate how early modern trade greatly impacted the material culture of Japan fueling a consumer revolution. The last speaker Dawn Odell will examine a range of domestic goods related to dinner parties to demonstrate how the material culture of the home defined social status and gender relationships in seventeenth and eighteenth century Batavia. Finally, Benjamin Schmidt will comment on the implications for “things” made manifest on edges through “rough encounters [and] jagged conflicts as well as intimate exchanges”. While focusing on three different yet interrelated material histories on the edge of early modern trade networks, these papers contribute to a larger discussion focusing on the ways gender, race and class were conceived of as a result of new goods and also how these social, political economic and cultural shifts were reflected in visual and material cultures.
#BringBackOurGirls
Next time you think that feminism is no longer necessary, remember that there is a group of people out there who believe that women should not be educated. As Obama says, it is not an isolated issue, violent measures are being taken around the world to stop girls from learning. 65 million girls around the world are not in school.
“Give every girl on this planet the education that’s her birthright”. Michelle Obama.
184 Days…
184 days. That’s how long I went without being in “school”. When I finished my PhD last fall I thought I was done with school, but apparently I just couldn’t leave. #lifelonglearning, #continuousimprovement, #igetboredeasily
This week I enrolled in VCC’s Provincial Instructor Diploma Program. One of the assignments for my first class, PIDP 3100: Foundations of Adult Education is to create a blog, so here I am, blogging!
Alena M. Buis 