A few notes on beginning as a teacher in higher education

  1. Take advantage of university resources. This means going to workshops hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning (or whatever they call it where you end up). Pedagogy is a distinct area of academic practice, and one that very smart people have thought long and hard about! Draw on their wisdom and practical advice rather than re-inventing the wheel for yourself. Also, there are some great books out there that can really help you along. I quite like David Gooblar’s The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching and Kevin Gannon’s “Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto.” Also, bell hooks has some excellent books about teaching community, critical thinking, and education as the practice of freedom.

  2. Understand what a teaching load translates to in terms of hours per week. Faculty time allocation has been studied at length by education researchers and the results are grim (at least to my mind—the idea of working 60 hours per week is abhorrent and we should be doing everything we can to change structures that incentivize this kind of overwork). Anyways: I teach a 3/3, meaning three courses every semester. Each course is 2 hours and 40 minutes in the classroom per week, meaning 8 hours total across the three courses. Each course requires at minimum 3 hours of prep per week, often 4 or more. This means that teaching and course prep takes up somewhere between 17-24 hours per week, and that doesn’t even factor in grading and office hours. In other words, if I let it, teaching can easily comprise between 66-75% of my workweek.

  3. Lesson plans might seem a bit corny, but they are essential. They don’t need to be hugely detailed, but without one, your sessions will be chaotic and leave you feeling drained.

  4. Build in review throughout, ideally every class session, at the beginning. There are other things you can do to bring students into the room as well! (Again, people have thought a lot about these things—use their insights)

  5. Model good scholarly craft and study habits. Ideally build these into the syllabus and/or assignments. Skills are just as important as content. Encouraging and supporting students to learn to think anthropologically is as crucial as conveying content.

  6. Mix up the structure of your course sessions: don’t lecture 100% of the time (lecturing gets a bad rap, but it is an essential tool when used well), use varying discussion techniques (there are dozens of well-thought-out formats), watch YouTube videos, do close reads of key passages, use interactive tools such as PollEverywhere, go old school and use the chalk/dry-erase board.

  7. Take breaks! Most people can only pay attention for about 25 minutes at a time, so switching formats with a little break between keeps everyone fresh.

  8. Grading is largely unnecessary outside of contexts where there are right answers (e.g., math) or consequences (e.g., nursing). Your mileage may vary with this in large introductory courses, but I promise you, giving people completion grades for most assignments is worth it. The last thing you want to have happen is students barraging you with emails to quibble over the difference between a B+ and an A- eating into your writing time. Head that nonsense off at the pass if you can!

  9. Learn students’ names. Seems basic, but it really makes a difference. It will take a few weeks in courses with 40 or more students to get to know everyone, and in large classes it may be impossible, but make an effort.

  10. Recognize that the job market is absolutely dreadful at the moment. You know this, everyone talks about it, but you need to be cognizant of the reality of the situation. See the links below. The figures vary by field, but an extraordinarily low percentage of humanities and social sciences PhDs find themselves in tenure-track positions within the first five years after defending. What we’re talking about here is somewhere between 7-20%, or to make it more concrete, between 1 in 5 and 1 in 14. Translation: only one person in your cohort, probably. The numbers alone are scary, but they will not and indeed cannot prepare you for the psychological and emotional experience of multiple years on the job market from a position of precarity. From my experience: I was on the market for three cycles, beginning my final year of my PhD. The first cycle, I got nothing. Not a single long-list, much less an interview. Granted, that was 2019-20, when COVID-19 blew everything up, but I still spent the next year on the dole, freelancing, and sweating about my future. I was lucky to make it through 2020-21 without blowing through my savings. The second cycle, I got two bites (one postdoc interview and one postdoc offer) but not even a sniff at a faculty position. The third cycle, I got nothing until the end of May, i.e., well after I had already given up hope and begun my preparations to leave academia for good. My take-home message here: I got extremely lucky and it could easily have gone otherwise! Indeed, it was going that way, until the position I now have came up. Do not take anything for granted in this line of work!

References to follow up on job market realities

Anthropology and Archaeology
Nicholas Kawa et al. (2018) The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities. American Anthropologist
Lisa Overholtzer and Catherine L. Jalbert (2021) A “Leaky” Pipeline and Chilly Climate in Archaeology in Canada. American Antiquity
Jess Beck, Erik Gjesfjeld and Stephen Chrisomalis (2021) Prestige or Perish: Publishing Decisions in Academic Archaeology. American Antiquity
Justin Cramb et al. (2022) The Changing Profile of Tenure-Track Faculty in Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice
Robert J. Speakman et al. (2017) Choosing a path to the ancient world in a modern market: The reality of faculty jobs in Archaeology. American Antiquity

Higher Education as a whole
Higher Ed Crisis w/ Dennis Hogan (The Dig with Daniel Denvir)
Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, And Daniel T. Scott (2019) The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University
Daniel Bessner (2023) The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession. The New York Times Jan. 14
Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes, editors (2021) The Academic Jobs Crisis: A Forum. SHAFR Passport
L. Maren Wood (2019) Odds are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You For A Profession Outside Academe. CHE