Editors’ Introduction

Holly Messitt, English and Elizabeth Wissinger, Social Science, Human Services & Criminal Justice

We’re going to start this introduction to Issue 31 of the Inquirer on a down note: with an August 26, 2024, article in the Wall Street Journal by Matt Barnum[i]. He declares: “Students are showing up to school in much of the country this week. Their teachers are already demoralized and exhausted.” The focus for this article is on K-12 teachers, but so many of us feel exactly the same way. The article goes on to explain, “In surveys and interviews, teachers are most often pointing to a startling rise in students’ mental-health challenges and misbehavior [many citing a rise in AI cheating] as the biggest drivers of burnout.” We as the editors can cite countless conversations with our colleagues here and at other colleges that say college and university professors are feeling the same squeeze. What are we to do?

As Hardaye Hansen and Michael McGee point out in the lead article here (they wrote a similar piece for the Inquirer #30), the mental health challenges of the pandemic years are still with us. But to judge from the piece Professors Hansen and McGee submitted for Inquirer #31, along with the other pieces to follow, our focus has shifted. We are clear-eyed about the challenges we face. This is a new post-pandemic landscape, a post-generative-AI landscape. We cannot follow the same playbook anymore. The glimmer we see is in finding new strategies and refitting old ones. And, at the same time, and just as important to fend off burnout, we need strategies for growing ourselves professionally. In the contributions to this year’s Inquirer, you will find suggestions and strategies for both our work with students and our care for our own careers.

Manya Steinkoler’s contribution, which stares down post-structuralist theory with wit and grace, uses theory to its best effect. What, she asks, if we use the mistakes we see students make as an entry point in understanding them more deeply, rather than as an occasion for despair? She sets us the challenge and then takes her own self up on it: “How can we be more welcoming of the uninvited guests—the typo, the error that speaks, of the students’ mis-understanding that is nevertheless, often an understanding? How can we be more inviting even of the…ignorance of students so that they don’t feel shame at our exasperation that risks closing them down even further?”

Oksana Sivkovich Fagin follows with another strategy for helping us see and hear our students more clearly: the supplemental instructor. Describing her own use of an SI, Oksana tells us, “The result of my experiment was significantly better class engagement and punctual assignment submissions compared to previous semesters. It became clear that having SI leaders in asynchronous classes was a winning strategy. The impact on student outcomes was undeniable.” Read her piece to find out different strategies she used to engage students using her SI leader.

Mira Zaman’s contribution breathes a bit of whimsy into the discussion, yet her point is no less serious. How many of us spend hours preparing our syllabi only to feel frustrated by students’ lack of attention to the information we’ve gathered there? She argues, “The traditional black-and-white syllabus model is far from user-friendly. Often, students don’t read syllabi for the same reasons that we don’t read terms and conditions, even though we know such documents contain important information. It’s far too much text, packaged in a way that over-stimulates the eye.” The solution, she argues, is a more engaging syllabus that is easy to create on Canva. Again, please go to her piece. It’s a treat to see the interactive solutions she has created to get students into her syllabi.

Mateo Sancho Cardiel did his own bit to shake things up a bit for us in this issue. When we expressed interest in the way he was using podcasting to engage his students, rather than write a long reflection for this issue, he invited us into the podcast room with him. What followed was a 30-minute discussion about bringing podcasting into the classroom. Mateo and Elizabeth reflect on the sociology classroom while Holly reflects on English and poetry. We had so much fun. We learned, and we walked away with AI-proof writing ideas!

Michelle Ronda and Lisa Rose begin our shift in focus for this issue. They are growing their careers in new directions by stepping out of Tribeca. Through a partnership with the John Jay College Institute of Justice and Opportunity, Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) Program, BMCC faculty are teaching students impacted by the criminal legal system at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The program engages justice-impacted students but, argue Michelle and Lisa, the program also offers personal growth for the faculty involved: “[Professors Ronda and Rose’s] firsthand experience of prison institutional life and relations with incarcerated students provides invaluable grounded knowledge that can inform their perspectives of criminal justice and that can be used to engage civil society in criminal justice debate and policy decision making.” Such is the personal, professional growth, but they go on: “For students who arrive to prison classrooms while incarcerated, combined classes provide a potentially transformative educational experience as they become peers with people whose life experiences are often quite different from their own. These courses also offer a window onto the society to which most, if not all incarcerated students will return, and provide important opportunities to inhabit an alternate role than that overshadowed/defined primarily by their status as ‘inmates.’”

In another piece that celebrates both professional development for faculty and student engagement, Shenique S. Thomas-Davis, Satenik Margaryan, and Brenda K. Vollman share their experiences taking a group of BMCC criminal justice majors to Washington, D.C. to participate in the Eastern Sociological Society’s (ESS) annual meeting. They describe the planning work, including grant writing and logistics, that had to be completed well before any student got on the bus to Washington. There was also the selection process and then guidance for students who had not before participated in such intensive professional development. “This work is truly a labor of love,” they write, “driven by a deep commitment to student success and professional and personal growth.”

Our next piece brings us to Nottingham, England. Jason Schneiderman reflects here on the personal and professional benefits, and challenges, of participating in a Fulbright scholarship award. The global and the personal collide for him: his initial award to teach in Russia was deferred because of the war in Ukraine. He made it to Nottingham for Fall 2023 and found himself immersed in the land of Lord Byron, Wordsworth, and the Shelleys. “I kept thinking,” he writes after seeing the Nottingham sky, “”Oh, now I understand Wordsworth.’” Not only was he surrounded by the scenery that created Wordsworth’s poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which Jason teaches often), and Lord Byron’s estate, but he created new social networks for himself and was able to work on a poetry manuscript and a book of essays.

In the final essay for this issue, Saatvik Ford talks about her experience giving professional interviews, both for television and print outlets, until she has landed a spot “on rotation” at NBC when they need to talk to a scientist. The piece is full of good advice like: “When I’ve done TV interviews, folks often tell me I look so natural & comfortable—but that is an act, which comes from preparation & practice! I might spend two hours preparing my materials for a five-minute TV spot.” And she tells us, when we spend that time preparing, “make sure you are practicing with words coming out of your mouth—in your head doesn’t count.”

Finally, Holly speaking here: I’m wishing Elizabeth a productive sabbatical for this year. If I know her as well as I think I do, I expect she will return to us having engaged in multiple new projects that will be fascinating to hear about! In the meantime, I’d like to welcome Hollis Glaser, who will be co-editing issue #32 with me this year.

[i] Barnum, Matt. “Teachers Are Burning Out on the Job” Wall Street Journal. 26 August 2024. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/teachers-america-burn-out-b2cc2a51?mod=djem10point Accessed 26 August 2024.

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