professional topics

The academic job market is famously difficult to navigate. Ironically, the decrease in job opportunities has prompted an increase in the number of materials required by each application—cover letters, CVs, recommendations, dissertation abstracts, research statements, teaching statements, diversity statements—all of which must be customized for each institution to which a candidate is applying. Yet, in spite of these challenges, there are still job openings each year and there are still success stories of people being hired for these positions. While no longer a guarantee, the only way to attain a full-time position in academia is to apply for one.

Classroom spaces and working environments speak volumes about how institutions conceive of teaching, learning and research, and whether they invest in collaboration. In many ways, institutions remain fixated on the front of the classroom, on the teacher as the “sage on the stage” rather than having faculty experts serve as “guides on the side,” “advanced organizers,” and “resources” for helping students foster their own learning. Individual offices silo faculty from one another, while graduate student and adjunct offices often offer fewer desks than bodies that use them. This long-held standard is changing somewhat, but slowly.

Call for Proposals: Journal of New Librarianship, "New Generation of Librarianship"

The Journal of New Librarianship ( http://www.newlibs.org/ ) seeks short columns (500 to 1000 words) that explore, examine, and discuss issues surrounding the New Generation of Librarianship. 

Capstones are an established part of undergraduate curricula. Often a requirement in degree programs, these investigative and research-based projects stress relevance and practicality. They are, thus, often promoted as necessities; they demand critical thinking, clear analytic writing, methodological application, and for those projects collaborative in their structure, teamwork and negotiation. Capstones encourage inventive and imaginative thought, reinforcing activities we associate with what we might call the ideal “humanist” – philosophically and ethically engaged, socially aware, and community minded.

Papers addressing the difficulties of students for whom academia is foreign, considered in terms of the student’s alienation, psychological unpreparedness, underdeveloped perspective, etc. How can such students be incorporated into academia, and thereby into work (and life broadly) made accessible by education? Alternatively, should we seek such incorporation, or instead reimagine and change academia, and how? Institutions have implemented a variety of assimilation and retention strategies, some with better records than others. Some programs engage students individually, whereas others emphasize building communities; some strategies focus on key first-year courses, such as introductory writing.