Adjunct Faculty Development and Iranian Paradoxes

Today I attended a morning workshop on how to support part-time faculty . Everybody there was very concerned about helping part time faculty, and the nature of the help they could give seemed to depend greatly on how much money they had. One university in Georgia had 90% attendance at their part-time faculty orientation because that is where they handed out the computers and phones. Computers and phones! No wonder people came to their events: they got a computer and a phone! Other people required attendance, others paid from $250 to $800 for attending a series of workshops. Some took a certification model, and others created adjunct faculty teaching awards. There were a lot of ideas. Here are the one I think we can do:

Get the adjunct email list updated. MOST IMPORTANT.
From this list, update adjunct bb site
Make sure they get all invitations to everything
Record all FDC presentations and figure out how to stream them
At orientation (which should be recorded)
Basic classroom gift pack: markers, erasers, IFATS, student evaluation forms
College relations cute things
Have a student panel
Have an adjunct panel
Consider an adjunct teaching award and years of service pin for a spring adjunct appreciation reception. Hard copy invitation
Have speaker, have "bright idea" award, have a door prize of a teaching book

Keep a database of all FDC attendees
See if we can do an entry FDC survey for new hires
Consider an adjunct advisory council that means with the dean once a semester

In the afternoon, I walked around St. Louis. The arch is always amazing.


The park is a beautiful green space there on the edge of the mighty Missouri River, which, in and of itself, is a flat fast moving chunk of muddy water, but majestic in the way a big piece of water can be. But the arch looming over it in all its shiny metal reflectiveness is just so sublimely cool.

There was also this curious little fellow up on the corner of a building.

Evidently this is Bevo the fox, the mascot of the non-alcoholic beverage that Anheuser-Busch brewed during prohibition. He is awfully cute and ever so cheery with his mug of non-alcoholic beverage while he chews on a leg of chicken.

At dinner, we also chewed on legs of chicken and then had apple pie with carmel topping for dessert. Yum: I photographed it on my phone, but I don't have the connector cord to put that photo here for you. However, it was rather prosaic. I will remember my real camera for tomorrow's awards banquet which should have an exotic dessert. Nevertheless, quotidian as the apple pie was, it was quite delicious.

During dinner I sat next to a guy from Iran who was here on sabbatical studying learning and teaching centers for his university in Tehran. I asked how many women were in his classes. "Oh," he said, "50 or 60% of my students are women."
"Oh," I asked disingenuously and already knowing the answer, but wanting him to say it anyway, "What kind of work do they do when they graduate from university? Is there much work for women with degrees in higher education?"
He replied, "No, there is not much work for women with degrees, but they agree that they will be better mothers if they are well educated. We will have a very smart generation of children since so many of our women have an advanced education."
I smiled and nodded, but, unwilling to let it go said, "It seems like with higher education being more available to more people, there will be a big change in Iran over the next 10 or twenty years."
"Oh, yes," he agreed enthusiastically, "But the conservative forces of the government are getting stricter, and we will see if they are able to squash this movement. People don't agree with them, but they do stir up a minority. I guess they don't read much history because this tactic never works."
He was really very cheery about the whole situation. Of course, he was in St. Louis eating apple pie, so he could afford to be cheery.

Finally, at the end of dinner, the president of POD spoke. He focused on the fact that the POD network is more important now that finances and support for higher ed are both getting smaller. He talked about how networks are about the strength of the connections. He made us think-pair-share about how POD could make strong connections in our networks. Those who had phones who could do it, tweeted their answers to #pod10, and those who could not tweet, wrote their ideas on scraps of paper to turn in. These suggestions will all turn up on the networking websites:
http://sites.google.com/site/podnetwork
and
http://tinyurl.com/wikipodia.

Tomorrow, how to effectively publicize a teaching and learning center and Shoes at Pod.