Awakening the Sleeping Lion: Economically Forced Instruction Changes

In our twenty-first century classrooms, we encounter students who share with one another a unique language that is critically different from ours, the teachers. This is especially problematic as the face of those teaching composition forcibly changes in reaction to a traumatic economic recession. Over the last twenty years, tenured and tenure-track faculty have removed themselves or have been removed from teaching first-year students across academic institutions.  This trend has been fodder for great debate within academia because many argue that tenured and tenure-track faculty should teaching in first-year classes; after all, they are the experts in their respective fields. 

 English departments have, until late, found themselves operating with a clearly divided faculty.  These departments have worked to slowly reintegrate a, largely uninterested, tenured and tenure-track faculty back into teaching first-year students.  However, most of this faculty is terribly unaware of and unprepared for the issues and needs surrounding the first-year millennial student.  Ideally, first-year program directors would like their tenured and tenure-track colleagues to participate in professional development, adopt the program curriculum, and have time to understand the population they will face in first-year classes prior to teaching.  Unfortunately, the economy forces this population with little preparation and no control back into the first-year class room where they must develop better practices that will work in situations now foreign to then.

Forced redistribution of classes will affect among all faculty will arguably change the departmental dynamics and moral.   More importantly, this forced instructional paradigm shifts will affect student learning in an already tense atmosphere because class size will increase as academic expectations increase.  Before instructors, returning to composition in the millennium after a long absence can begin teaching these young adults how to write well, they must first join their conversations, learning their language(s).  All too often, teachers in higher education hold expectations for their students that set up resistance; many expect students to perform and act like the teachers.  How will instructors who do not want to teach composition buy into a curriculum to which they have no connection?  How will their discipline specific expectations affect freshman or first year college students?  Such expectations often exclude rather than include, alienate rather than welcome, and hinder rather than nurture.  Will these instructors engage in the empathetic instruction necessary in the composition classroom, or will they baulk at the curriculum because they have no choice whether or not they teach writing? Only time will tell how students, faculty, departments and institutions will to our current economic disaster.  One point is a given: Our student will suffer the consequences.