{"id":1194,"date":"2012-03-23T09:32:52","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T16:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2012-04-25T09:51:20","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:51:20","slug":"training-grad-students-for-a-new-scholarly-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/training-grad-students-for-a-new-scholarly-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"Training grad students for a new scholarly landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s what I just said about graduate student training at a workshop (with Daniel Chamberlain, Mary Francis, Tara McPherson, Leslie Mitchner, and Patrice Petro) on “the changing profession” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting:<\/em><\/p>\n

As we watch the academy change around us, I think it\u2019s becoming clear to us that the way we prepare grad students has some inadequacies. We talk about preparing them for the job market, but I think we\u2019re all aware that calling this crisis a “market” \u2014 implying that there\u2019s some basic equity between supply and demand \u2014 is becoming increasingly perverse. I know you\u2019ve seen good, smart, hardworking people washed up on the rocks. I know I have.<\/p>\n

What can we do, as the ground shifts underneath us, to prepare these people whom we care so much about? By now, it should be obvious that it is no longer humane or sufficient to tell ourselves that our best students will get jobs. This is a fiction that helps us sleep at night.<\/p>\n

But neither is it humane or sufficient to simply despair. So I offer four suggestions:<\/p>\n

We need to get serious about tracking statistics about our students once they graduate. What kind of labor are they doing, how secure is it, where is it happening? Entering students need to be able to make better-informed decisions about the programs they choose.<\/p>\n

We need to start seeing that caring about our grad students requires caring about the issue of adjuncts and other casualized labor in the academy. We need to see that this is part of mentoring, too.<\/p>\n

We need to start countenancing the possibility that not all students will want to be professors. I want to be careful here, because I know not all students will want to follow a path like mine. But you might be surprised at how many grad students are quietly curious about other kinds of jobs. We need to help graduate students see that these paths are OK, too, and part of helping them to see this is visibly taking seriously the intellectual labor of other academic professionals in our orbit \u2014 the librarians, archivists, technologists and others.<\/p>\n

Finally, I would like to see a reconsideration of methodological training for our students. Students are highly aware that they need different kinds of skills \u2014 digital skills, collaborative skills, administrative skills, budgeting skills \u2014 and we should see it as our job to meet these needs. For reference, I offer the example of the Praxis Program<\/a>, at the University of Virginia, where graduate students work in teams alongside developers and administrators to accomplish projects collectively.<\/p>\n

I know you\u2019re here because you care about your students, and I know we\u2019ve all been doing everything we can to prepare them for this new landscape. What I hope to say, more than anything, is that truly advocating for grad students requires understanding and intervening in the larger academic ecosystem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s what I just said about graduate student training at a workshop (with Daniel Chamberlain, Mary Francis, Tara McPherson, Leslie Mitchner, and Patrice Petro) on “the changing profession” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting: As we watch the academy change around us, I think it\u2019s becoming clear to us that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[243,242,123,245,246,169,244],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","tag-alternative-education","tag-curriculum-and-instruction","tag-education","tag-graduate-education","tag-graduate-reform","tag-scholarly-communication","tag-society-for-cinema-and-media-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1218,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}