For this post, I wanted to share a contradiction in my work that I’ve really struggled with. I got into the work that I do – managing education-related programs with a focus on US college/university physics departments – because I wanted future physics/STEM students to have better experiences in physics and related fields. As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I was lucky to have a fairly privileged upbringing which enabled me to pursue a career in physics and astronomy. One consequence (in my opinion) is that I have a responsibility to use my position to contribute to and to empower efforts that transform and redefine STEM so that STEM can be co-created by and for more diverse communities.
However, I’ve found that in my pursuit of a career to improve student experiences in physics/STEM, I now no longer directly interact with students. I had a few conversations about this contradiction with colleagues at the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network Conference in November 2022, and those conversations have continued to rattle around in my head. For those not familiar with POD, the organization’s primary audience are staff who work in centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) or similar structures in higher education. These centers often provide faculty development, e.g., workshops to encourage instructors to use evidence-based pedagogical practices in their classrooms.
In these conversations, many of us talked about wanting a career where we could have a larger impact on STEM education than what we could do as an individual instructor. Speaking for myself, I was always troubled by the thought that if I became a professor, I could do my best to make sure the students who were in my class had a good experience, but (1) that effort didn’t ensure my students wouldn’t receive messages of exclusion from other classes or settings and (2) it meant that the students I could impact would only be those who were “lucky” enough to be in my class. I wanted to do more.
Working at a CTL often means that staff do not have direct interactions with the students in their university. Instead, CTL staff often work with the faculty and instructors in workshops, books clubs, and other activities (sidebar: some of my colleagues are involved in “students as partners” projects, but that still seems to be fairly unique). By working with faculty and instructors, CTL staff have the potential to influence entire departments. Of course, individual professors can have a department-wide impact too. As a postdoc, I had the opportunity to co-chair a Committee on Inclusive Community in my school (large interdisciplinary department, in the context of the university I was at), and we were charged with finalizing and implementing a strategic plan for the whole school. I really enjoyed this work, but was frustrated by the fact that if I did become a professor, that kind of service work often isn’t “valued” in the same way as publications for tenure and promotion.
In my current position, I do get to focus on that kind of service work on a national scale. My job involves submitting proposals and managing programs that empower people at colleges and universities across the country to do things that improve their (physics) programs. Working at this “meta” level allows me to multiply the impact I can have, but it does mean I rarely interact with the students who are the heart of our motivation. I’ve found other outlets for that motivation by volunteering with education activities and events, but it still strikes me as incongruent that those interactions aren’t a more regular part of my work.
I will also add that in a couple of my projects, we have talked about how to solicit and incorporate the students’ perspective more directly. For example, when we do site visits to departments that we fund, we often schedule a meeting with only students to hear their input. So, the students aren’t completely missing, but in the conversations I had at that POD conference, we were all intrigued by how you “lose” some of those connections in order to increase your impact.
I don’t have a specific “call to action” in mind with this post, but I’d like to invite readers to engage in these conversations. How do we weigh increasing impact versus wanting specific activities (like working directly with students) to be a part of our work? How can we design projects to try to address and/or minimize the disconnect – but perhaps more fundamentally, should we? Do you find this trend in your own careers, and did it influence your choices in which career opportunities to pursue?