Teaching and learning in an age of precarity: toward a pedagogy of the transitory

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Notes

1 A 2015–2016 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) report found only 8% of faculty on the tenure-track (Shulman et al. 2016, p. 14). Legislative actions to limit tenure, such as those adopted in Wisconsin in 2015 and recently proposed in Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, threaten to further erode tenure. State legislatures have aimed at weakening tenure by making it easier to eliminate faculty positions when eliminating programs or majors, and/or by changing post-tenure review processes. For details on both approaches, see: Jaschik (2018) and Flaherty (2017).

2 For a sense of how English departments are addressing casualization, see Bérubé and Ruth (2015).

3 For a study on the professional development needs of teachers with master’s degrees who teach at two-year institutions, see Cunningham (2018).

4 See further discussion of how casualization discourages faculty participation in shared governance, see Curnalia and Mermer (2018).

5 The studies the arbitrator cited include evidence that instructors’ race, gender, accent, age, and appearance skew student evaluations.

6 Such an inquiry might draw on the notion of a “hidden curriculum,” though “unofficial” and “hidden” may differ where the latter is defined as “unintentional.”

7 The more mechanical teaching becomes, the easier it is to automate it.

8 Harney and Moten refer to these as “maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” (p. 30).

9 A 2012 National Student Clearinghouse study, for instance, found that one-third of all students change institutions before earning a degree, a finding that suggests that, for many, the college experience bears a greater resemblance to contingency than to a tenured career.