Students as Consumers

On the WPA-L list recently there was a discussion of a situation that arose at one of the list members' institutions where an adjunct writing instructor had simply disappeared shortly before the end of the semester, leaving no paper trail (grades, notes, or actual graded papers) that would enable the WPA to construct realistic grades for the students. A wide-ranging discussion ensued not only concerning what should be done with the students--make them take the class again (higher administrators' approach on that campus)? make them write another paper and base their final grade on how well they do on it? give them all Bs, or even As?--but also on expectations, realistic and otherwise, that students bring to a college education, and how we should feel about and react to those expectations.

Keith Rhodes, WPA at Grand Valley State University, protested the idea of giving everybody a B or an A: "I'm not getting the idea that a grade should come from paying money and doing time." Brian Donohue-Lynch, professor of anthropology and sociology at Quinebaug Valley Community College, agreed, in theory, but noted that in practice "unfortunately this is a big part of the problem here. We deal, ultimately, in opaque 'grades' rather than in any evidence of actual student learning; ultimately, students get these grades once they have spent so many hours in class/homework. And this is institutionalized in our institutional records system at the core of our programs--we give grades on transcripts, in relation to how many hours (credit hours, Carnegie Units) students spend in class."

Keith replied:

I'm reminded of a a quip I used to use to some effect with TQM-in-education advocates: we have to remember that college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get. The "customers" supposedly bought access to abilities. Being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz. Eventually, they'll figure that out.

To repeat myself for clarity, they bought an education, not a grade. The fact that they have to participate to get what they actually bought is an inescapable part of the deal. Giving away free grades to cover for a failure to deliver the actual product would not be analogous to anything we would call good business practice as to any normal product.

Students aren't tidily customers. It's an incomplete metaphor that we're all better off complicating.

Right, but surely the punchline in "college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get" depends on our assumptions about the exact nature of that educational "product." If the product is critical thinking, say--our own idealistic notion--then yes, students by and large resist "getting" the product we think we're selling them. If the product is a degree, however--made up of a major and a minor, made up of credit hours with grades attached to them, as our students tend to think--then they are going to be extremely angry if they pay their money and put in their time and effort and don't get the product they paid for.

I wonder too about Keith's notion that "being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz." I'm guessing he's alluding to the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz where the "professor" gives the Tinman a heart-shaped clock, the Lion a badge of courage, and the Scarecrow a diploma--instead of "the real thing," namely, an actual heart, actual courage, or an actual brain. But that scene seems to me a little more complicated than he's suggesting. The binary "certificates instead of the real thing" implies that there is nothing real about the feeling Dorothy's three friends have that they've gained something of what they need. It implies that snake oil is snake oil and can't have even the slightest placebo effect. Does a student with a college diploma and the feeling that s/he's learned something really take nothing "real" away from an institution of higher learning?

Or, to put that in terms of The Wizard of Oz, doesn't the feeling the three friends have that they've gained something valuable at the end come from the fact that they have gained in heart, courage, and brains along the way, and the symbolic "certificates" that the professor gives them only yields them an outward sign of what they've already gained, and thereby some "professional" self-esteem?

And our students: isn't the difference between a "dumb"/"ignorant" student and a "bright"/"learned" student often largely a matter of self-esteem, so that the former keeps undermining his own learning by convincing herself that it's not happening, and the latter keeps learning no matter what's going on in class because she's convinced that it is happening?

Or, more cynically: isn't one of the most important lessons our students learn at college how to take orders, follow instructions, cope with boredom, sit quietly for hours every day doing mindless make-work and pretending to learn? Isn't this in fact their most important skill for cubicle work?

In other words, I guess, I'm suggesting that the "certificate instead of the real thing" binary Keith Rhodes offers excludes worlds of really important learning in the middle.

Paul Turpin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Senior Fellow at The Jacoby Center for Public Service & Civic Leadership (University of the Pacific), added an important rethinking of the student-as-consumer metaphor:

The student as consumer metaphor, I believe, is a bad one, not because it is an economic metaphor but because it is the wrong economic metaphor. While we do in fact have monetary and contractual relations with students, they are not *consumers* of learning; they are *investors*. Moreover, they are a particular type of investor -- partners -- which requires them to participate in the activities and responsibilities of education in their own persons. The fiduciary (faithfulness) obligations in the fiscal and contractual relationship between faculty and students go both directions, as befits a partnership, even though students are limited partners in relation to faculty.

In simple terms, students do not buy a commodity, product, or even a service in their classes (though they do in the bookstore, cafeteria, and residence hall). What tuition pays for is the right to undertake a course of study with someone who both teaches and certifies their command of the knowledge, practices, or skills in a class, a disciplinary major, and so on. The most student-friendly version of this explanation I've heard is "College is like a health club. You pay your fees and can use it or not, as you please; we keep the money in either case." Even this analogy has its limits (because health clubs provide services like access to equipment and training but do not evaluate their customers), but students can understand the idea that the user has to do the workout to get the benefits.

The certification that gets expressed in grades, transcripts, and degrees are forms of testimony of our judgments of students' their relative level of achievement, or to use another economic metaphor, judgments of their development of educational capital.

The choice of metaphor matters because the consumption metaphor leads toward a logic of what consumers can and should expect in a market, particularly with respect to the quality & price of the commodities available to them. Students come in feeling like they should be able to shop for courses and that they should pass because they show up, because it's "paid for"; parents paying tuition feel like they should be treated like customers -- as in "the customer is always right", "give the customer what she wants", and similar commercial sentiments that lead in the direction that "paying for a degree" comes to be taken literally.

What counts as accountability to a consumer differs from that to an investor, above all in the developmental expectations in each case. Consumption is nearly always immediate; investment develops more slowly, not just across a semester, but across a major and a course of college study. Remaining caught up in the consumer metaphor increases our difficulties in making the case for broader and more holistic forms of assessing educational development. Clarifying what can be talked about in consumer terms and what should be talked about in investment terms -- and especially partnership -- is crucial to resisting the tendency to frame education as a simple consumer market.

Paul's metaphor is helpful in other ways as well. It helps us ask the difficult questions about higher education today. For example, if I'm paying for a gym membership so I can get into shape, and I don't go, but keep paying my membership fee, that's my prerogative (and also my loss). If on the other hand I go three times a week, and enjoy it, and benefit from it, but they keep jacking up the membership fees to pay for services not strictly related to fitness (at least my fitness), like sinking millions of dollars into sponsoring sports teams and building luxury dormitories, I may gradually become disaffected, and decide that I'm better off buying my own elliptical trainer and some free weights, or watching a fitness program on TV and doing exercises in my living room.

In order to lure students-as-customers to become their consumers, to buy their products--however we define those products, the main thing in this model is tuition dollars--institutions of higher learning have been expanding their expenditures on bells and whistles that are perceived as attractive to "students" but may only be attractive to a certain fairly small segment of the possible entering freshman class, and that have the effect of making a college education much more expensive, so expensive that fewer and fewer families can afford it. There are equations of intangibles like prestige into which winning seasons and bowl games in football figure that are too complex for the mind of an English professor to work out, but people around here are predicting that our victory in the Cotton Bowl this year will translate into increased donations and enrollments--and yet I can't help but feel that these equations are ultimately unsustainable. How important is it, really, for our universities and colleges to fund farm teams for the NFL and the NBA? A winning football season like we had this past fall more than repays Houston Nutt's $1.9 million annual salary; but successive losing seasons did not repay Ed Orgeron's $1.3 million annual salary, and not everybody in the country can have a winning season.

Meanwhile, the legislatures and general public love our football games and despise the research we do, and blame high tuition on faculty research, which in fact brings in more money in indirect costs than many football programs do, and the call goes out to put universities on starvation diets and force us lazy professors to teach four or five courses a semester (because what other possible value can the student-as-consumer expect for his or her money?).

Something's got to change. And it's almost certainly already changing, all around us, as our current situation becomes more and more untenable, and alternatives like the University of Phoenix spring up like weeds. But that's a subject for another post.

Creepy Treehouses

Routledge has just published a book entitled Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture, by Ana M. Martínez Alemán, chair of educational administration and higher education at Boston College, and Katherine Lynk Wartman, who is resident director at Simmons College and working on a doctorate at Boston College. The two of them studied student attitudes toward and use of Facebook, and reached some interesting conclusions about faculty and administrators (especially student affairs people) friending students for academic or student-life purposes. In yesterday's edition of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik interviewed Alemán about their findings, including their recommendation that faculty members not friend students:

What does it mean for a faculty member to “friend” a student or accept a friend request from a student? Do the norms and rules of real-world student-faculty relationships fit the world of Facebook campus culture? Students may feel undue pressure and intimidation given the power that the faculty has over students. Unlike the majority of their relationships with friends, the pre-existing, real life faculty-student relationship is not a peer relationship. Students may feel intimidated or obligated to engage in an online social network relationship with a faculty member simply because they recognize the authority and power resident in the faculty. Students may feel powerless to refuse the online invitation, and despite privacy controls, college users can feel that their community boundary has been breeched. My advice: don’t friend students and don’t accept their invitation to be in their network. A code of Facebook ethics for faculty currently exists on the site and I would recommend that faculty review it.

I'm not sure where that "code of Facebook ethics for faculty" is; I ran searches for "faculty" and "ethics" on the Facebook help page and got no hits. If anyone can direct me to it, I'd love to see it!

Alemán also makes an interesting prediction:

SNS [social-networking sites] will become an instructional tool soon. Facebook has already partnered with a course management system; some faculty have begun to use Facebook groups to foster peer learning, conduct group projects, etc. Computer mediated communication technologies have already made it necessary for academic faculty to modify or simply transfer traditional modes and norms of real-life academic and pedagogical communication online. It’s just a matter of time before we see a SNS as a “classroom” experience.

The commenters on the IHE page have tended to disagree somewhat with both the recommendation and the prediction. "Associate Prof at State U" writes:

Definitely don’t “friend” a student, but I do think it is different if a student asks to friend you. In an informal poll, most of my students have said that they feel rejected if a faculty doesn’t accept their friend request, and I have students communicate with me through Facebook who have never come by office hours or emailed (it is somehow less risky to initiate contact with a prof on Facebook). I also have students to whom I am professionally close but who have not “friended” me, and I respect that choice to maintain personal privacy as well. Once students graduate, it is a great way to keep in touch as they move around and change email addresses.

Just remember that if faculty have student friends, they have to keep their pages far more professional and neutral than a normal Facebook page; student friends can see all of our materials, too!

And "W" adds:

I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.

That way my friends and I can have our friendly, and sometimes silly banter back and forth, and comment on each others pictures, and my students can still use Facebook to contact me if they want. And joining Facebook means you can set up (and control!) your own groups for courses etc.

The director of "discovery advising" at Virginia Commonwealth University agrees, calling it unnecessarily "'old headed' to think sustaining fairly antiquated rules of professor/student relationships should prevent faculty from engaging their student population in these spaces." This commenter adds: "An overwhelming majority of my advisees are positively giddy that I’m accessible to them in these spaces—our trust-based relationship is strengthened making them more apt to accept my counsel and advice," and "the typical student appreciates a little irreverence from the experts who are their educators. They desire no less expertise from us mind you, just an appreciation of that fact that we’re also human beings." Also: "After having spent the better portion of four years utilizing this valuable tool, I’d like to suggest that we’ll not be able to truly encourage buy-in from the student population unless we 'friend' them in these spaces first."

Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral Inc, notes that "There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends," especially building your own applications. His company has done so, and their app allows instructors to "send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends."

Staton also challenges Alemán's claim that Facebook is going to become a course-management system soon:

I contest Aleman’s statement that Facebook will be an instructional tool, and the statement that Facebook has partnered with a Course Management System is false.

Facebook does not partner with application developers. ClassTop, Cramster, and my company Inigral were all early movers to provide LMS features as a Facebook application. Blackboard’s vaporware was late to the game, ClassTop’s app CourseFeed is better and interfaces with Blackboard through their API.

As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.
However, students and instructors are VERY interested in using Facebook as a kind of “ice breaker,” as a tool that can accelerate a sense of community and belonging amongst classmates and the wider campus in general. That’s why we moved our efforts from our Courses app to our Lifecylce Engagement Platform “Schools on Facebook.”

Facebook, as far as I’m concerned, will always be a tool to predict, accelerate, and maintain real world relationships. If you don’t fit within that paradigm, you won’t get much traction.

I like this a lot. Facebook is a great place for maintaining real-world relationships, and while teaching is a real-world relationship also, it's an inherently hierarchical one, and students resist letting those hierarchies leach over into their facebooking. Two of my first-year writing students have friended me after the semester was over and grades had been delivered and viewed, and I confirmed both of them, though I have to admit I wondered what they wanted from me, why they were even interested in friending me--and neither one has ever sent me a msg or gift or written on my wall. Maybe five or six of my former students have friended me after graduation, which I think is quite nice--it's good to be able to keep up with them in their new jobs and cities and even relationships. And I'm quite happy to be Facebook friends with many of the grad students and adjunct instructors who teach in our FYW program. Even though I'm their boss, which might make a Facebook friendship with them a creepy treehouse, they're also my colleagues.

What I don't know about, and would like to hear from commenters about, is the use of Facebook groups for teaching purposes. I know at least one instructor in our program has used it that way, apparently with good results. My guess is that, following Michael Staton's provisos, (a) it's a good way to minimize the hierarchical gap between teachers and students, but also (b) it only works if that gap has already been minimized in class, and the Facebook interface is set up in ways that don't inadvertently accentuate the hierarchy.

In Defense of Buzzwords

Lake Superior State University has just published its annual List of Words to be Banished for overuse:

• green


• carbon footprint or carbon offset


• maverick


• first dude


• bailout


• Wall Street/Main Street


• -monkey


• <3 (heart or love)


• icon or iconic


• game-changer


• staycation


• desperate search


• not so much


• winner of five nominations


• it's that time of year again

And I agree that some of these can get annoying. Watching the presidential debates and reading the punditry about them, I got thoroughly sick of "maverick," the "Wall Street/Main Street" divide, and Joe the Plumber. But I'd like to lodge a small protest against the kind of thinking that would ban these and other such words--especially insofar as that mindset inspires first-year writing instructors to mark their students down for using them.

First off, let's differentiate a little. "Not so much" is a trendy phrase, which will die out on its own, though not, of course, before millions overuse it some more. Same with the habit of adding -monkey to nouns to make them funnier, like love-monkey. "Staycation" is a totally different kettle of fish, a cutesy nonce word that I would associate with Madison Avenue if it didn't so overwhelmingly have the heartlands written all over it. "Game-changer" seems to me a really useful new concept that should survive. While "maverick" was unquestionably tainted by partisan association with John McCain and Sarah Palin, it is a useful concept that has been around a long time and will be around for decades to come. The distinction between Wall Street and Main Street took on special relevance and urgency in the debates over the $700 billion bailout (how else would you refer to it, LSSU norns?), but it refers to popular synecdoches for the investment banking industry and small-town America, two segments of American culture that are invested with enormous symbolic and emotional capital. So the distinction was overused in political rhetoric for a few months, and we all got tired of hearing it bandied about; that's a reason to ban the terms? And "carbon footprint" may be a buzzword that we hear a lot lately, but doesn't hearing it frequently also constantly remind us that we should be doing more to save energy and reduce emissions?

The larger point to make for first-year writing classrooms, though, is that buzzwords are good things for students to know and use in their writing. The latest trendy words and phrases are "trendy" in the sense that they are being used by the discourse community. They are the godterms, to use Kenneth Burke's word, by which the community organizes reality in the present. Using them signals the speaker's or writer's belonging, his or her inclusion in the community. Knowing them and being able to use them correctly is a form of communicative literacy. Rather than banning them, we should be encouraging our students to compile lists of them themselves, and use them in their papers.

Of course there are students who write well without buzzwords--those who pay close enough attention to the ways the discourse community uses language to enter into conversation through more complex communicative channels. In a sense, in fact, this is the unstated goal of projects like the LSSU word bans: to move sophisticated writers and speakers to this next level. But most of our first-year writers are not sophisticated enough to manage that kind of conversation--not, I suggest, because they're stupid or lazy or illiterate, but because they're young. They haven't been exposed to adult discourse long enough to have mastered it in complex ways.

There are also students who use buzzwords in order not to have to think complexly about a subject--a habit that we should take seriously enough to push on in effective ways. But there are two points to remember there: first, that using buzzwords as conceptual shorthand for huge complex issues (and thus not really thinking about those issues) is typical of pundits and politicians too, seasoned adult professionals, not just 18-year-olds, so we should cut our FYW students some slack if they do it too; and second, that this sort of usage in a draft is an excellent occasion for discussion. "What did you mean here by 'green'?" "Uh, well, you know, green. Like, I don't know, green." "So what does 'green' mean?" "I can't really describe it, exactly." "Environmentally friendly?" "Yeah. That's it." "Is everything that's green environmentally friendly?" "Uh, sure. I don't know." "Golf courses are green. Are they environmentally friendly?"

And so on. Not quite knowing what the word means, but knowing that it's an important word that intelligent adults use when speaking of the environment, is a critical part of our FYW students' transition to membership in the discourse community. And our job is to help them make that transition. It's not to vent our own annoyances at the overuse of certain trendy words.