The following accounts do not provide evidence of teaching excellence because the term “excellence,” which is often used within higher education, but rarely defined beyond “innovative” or “advanced” or “sure, we value teaching too,” does not accurately and effectively describe what is significant, important, or meaningful about my teaching practices and experiences—especially what is meaningful outside of the context of proving how awesome of a teacher I am so that someone will hire me or promote me or give me that grant that I want. These are valuable reasons for documenting teaching practices, but they are not what I want to do here and they are not the only reasons for documenting practices. Plus, looking for “evidence of teaching excellence” in my teaching materials is not nearly as fun or troublemaking as scouring them for evidence of teaching…
Inventory of Evidence
Beside/s: “Excellence” functions as an undefined buzzword that is frequently included in job advertisements, like, “candidate must show evidence of teaching excellence”, or used in the name of teaching resource centers on campuses across the U.S., like, Cornell Center for Teaching Excellence or Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence (just two of many centers that popped up on the first page of my google search). But, it’s lack of definition and the assumption that everyone already knows what it means so why bother defining it?!, conceals what it has frequently come to mean in the current climate of colleges and universities-as-businesses: teaching excellence = good customer reviews student evaluations + more butts in seats who graduate and get high paying jobs. It also conceals what is frequently driving the need to measure teaching excellence at an institution: a desire to prove, in easily demonstrable and quantifiable ways, how much smarter, more cutting-edge, more innovative, and just better are faculty members here at Fancy Research One University are than yours are at Not-as-Fancy Research One University.
Continue Reading: Evidence of Teaching…Trouble
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