tenure file – Radio Blackbird Illustrations

Don’t ask the expert!

Tineke — Mon, 15 May 2023 19:08:21 +0000

One of the core philosophies in my teaching was to move away from single-use or disposable assignments, and move to something more durable. Let’s face it: students create too many essays that disappear into a digital drawer at the end of the semester, never to be seen again. Their labour gets a grade, but it doesn’t do anything to change the world. What if I tell you that it could? (At least a small piece of the world?) I wrote about that on my teaching blog. I also knew that in my narrative statement for tenure, I had to explain to my colleagues why I chose to have students create textbooks for fellow students. Can’t I, as the expert in the room, do this better, because I actually know the topics? Here’s the main reason why I trusted my students to do a better job:

Why experts may be a bit too much for a beginner

Sure, I know the content, but I don’t remember anymore what it is like to be new to all of East Asian history. An undergraduate student is perfectly positioned to bridge that gap. (Also check out Adam Grant‘s piece in the NYT.) And of course: students are experts in knowing what a student needs from a textbook, much more so than I am. So I let them write the textbooks for China’s Magical Creatures (and where to find them) and Korean History, and their successors in the course used those chapters as their starter kits before diving into primary and scholarly sources. And then they get to write their own chapter, or improve our existing textbook. The third edition of China’s Magical Creatures is coming out soon!

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…

Tineke — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Even in my department I occasionally have had to explain that “No, me teaching the Shang dynasty is not playing on home terrain. That’s like a historian of nineteenth century Europe teaching about emperor Augustus and the Roman empire, mkay?” Feel free to replace that with a similar 1800-2000 year interval of your choice. Chinese history is long. Like… Reallllly long…

A timeline is an obvious solution to make that clear to a tenure committee consisting of people who don’t even do history. But if “my history” is that long and covers allegedly five thousand years (historians have issues with that claim), it’s a squeeze to fit it all in. One solution is to borrow the scroll format, like Along the River during the Qingming Festival. I felt I already was pushing the format of my file by including illustrations for a non-Art tenure case, so I let that go for now.

Squirrel to the rescue! He can unroll the timeline like a garden hose to its fullest extent for display purposes, and can reel it back in anytime to tidy it away. And while we’re at it, I might as well point out that any East Asian historian worth their salt at a SLAC (Small Liberal Arts College), ends up covering Japan and Korea as well. It does help to have a little hippo on hand to model the correct reaction, of course! This ended up being a full page in my file, because… East Asian history is really long, you know? And just to be clear, I highlighted my area of scholarly expertise in purple, although I will happily cover it all “from Yao to Mao” and beyond.

The top panel has become a very regular feature at the start of any premodern Chinese history class to orient us for the session that day, and I use little coloured pointers to indicate where exactly we are. Reusable, and fun: what more do we want out of tenure file products?

I imagine many students feel like William the Hippo when they first realize how much history we’ll cover in the average course.

William the Hippo

Tineke — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

In last Friday’s post, you may have noticed a little hippo in the right bottom corner, observing carefully how Squirrel compares the PRC/East Asia to the size of the US. Who’s that little fella? That’s William, the Muhlenberg College unofficial History Department mascot, lovingly borrowed from the Met Museum’s original plush version of the little Egyptian statue.

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William the Hippo, positively glowing!

William in the garden

Sparing you the convoluted backstory, he started as our morale booster during a summer writing group, then we considered appointing him department chair but apparently that wasn’t working out (we have a fab human department chair now). Instead he happily took up the position of mascot, brightening the department’s social media whenever we needed to mark our presence on Instagram or Twitter without showing our own faces. Even the College’s president has remarked on his media-savvy presence. And since the original plushie is mine, and I helped to design the social media strategy, of course I had to include him in my file so I could talk about this in the “Service” section. On Friday, you’ll get to see more of him!

Look at the size of that thing!

Tineke — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

How do you explain to your colleagues that your courses cover an area larger than the US (the main frame of reference), and a couple thousand years more than they usually do, even if they’re historians? My tenure committee itself included people from political science, chemistry, mathematics, film studies/English and more. My first concern was to convey the size of the region I teach. The True Size of It. Oh hang on… That one was easy: the handy-dandy website with that name helps you drag countries around and overlay them so the map projection doesn’t distort your idea of how big a country really is. Ok, but easy was not yet FUN and as I wrote last time, I wanted to inject some fun. Enter the squirrel:

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Squirrel puts the finishing touches on the composition

He’s just putting the finishing touches to the composition, overlaying PRC over the United States. Add some text in a standard comic book typeface, and voilà: there is an inviting illustration of the territory I cover in my courses. And Will you look at the size of that?!?! It actually is larger than the US! Who’d have thunk? Squirrel also got to show off his mind-bending map-comparison at the start of every China-course already, so this is definitely a “multi-use” illustration!

Oh, that little blue hippo? If you’re not already familiar with him, I’ll introduce him next week Monday! Until then, I’d love to hear how you convey scale in your courses. Leave a comment!

Squirrel’s choice

Tineke — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

The narrative or personal statement for a tenure file is not my favourite genre to write, for a lot of reasons. My coach and I decided I needed to find a way to inject some joy and larger purpose into the entire exercise since I do not respond well to pointless things –and the statement felt/feels like that to me. (I haz feelings about the tenure process in general, but here is not the place.) So… What could I do with my file that would leave me with something re-usable, if I had to create something from scratch anyway like that stupid statement? What could inject some joy? A few months earlier I had got back into drawing, and that gave me immense satisfaction. Was there any way…? Oh yes!

Turns out if I can put squirrels on it, I can reframe even writing a tenure statement as a (somewhat) fun task. QED:

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Squirrel makes a choice!

During our online era (2020-21) I offered exploration packs for my classes, and students told me they liked that: even when neither of the two options were something they really wanted, they could at least choose against something. I wrote a bit more about the how and why of this approach on my other blog. I opted here for an engaged and energetic European Red Squirrel who goes on an adventure, here choosing between two options for Shang dynasty history.

This squirrel also acted as the cover card for my tenure file’s Canvas course shell. And I can easily go into the drawing and write something else on the arrows to represent an active choice, so he is very re-useable. Where should he point next? Let me know in the comments!