Most teachers in the U.S. have gone back to school by now, but I don't start teaching until Monday. This fall I'm teaching at two very different institutions: the large University of California campus where I also consult with faculty to improve their teaching, and a small private university where I'm an adjunct instructor in museum studies. It's my ninth year teaching at the university level, but I find the longer I stay within higher education, the more conflicted I feel about U.S. education in general and about higher education specifically.

Worse than conflicted, actually--I feel complicit in institutional failures to improve students' motivation and ability to learn.

I suspect I'm in this game for the long term, but it makes sense for someone at my age and stage of my career--university staff member and perpetual adjunct (vs. tenure track) instructor--to assess what exactly I'm contributing.

Factory farming of undergrads?

First, in my staff job, I consult with faculty to help them become more thoughtful about teaching undergraduates. That means being available to nearly 2,500 teaching faculty, plus thousands of graduate student teaching assistants. It feels overwhelming until I realize that my colleagues and I--a total of 2.5 consultants--work face-to-face with just over a thousand of these teachers every year, and 600-700 of those are new teaching assistants who show up only for orientation.

I wish more instructors would take advantage of our services, but graduate students and faculty alike tend to prioritize research over teaching. The result? Undergraduates get short shrift. This year my university will be offering its largest course to date, a 750-student biology course. (Our largest lecture hall holds only 500 people, but that's another story.)

This factory farming of students seems more ironic--or is it fitting?--in light of the fact that I work for a university famed for its technological innovations that have benefited large-scale agriculture.

Reasons for hope--and despair

Second, I teach a seminar in college teaching, mostly to graduate students and postdocs, but occasionally we have a junior faculty member sign up. My colleagues and I teach 3-4 sections of this course each year, with 20 students in each section. The course focuses on active teaching and learning methods. I'm grateful to have this opportunity to evangelize about best practices in teaching, particularly to science students who as undergraduates may have seen only two approaches to teaching: lecture and lab. We encourage them to craft courses, assignments, and assessment methods that allow students to develop both creative and critical thinking skills.

Teaching this seminar, and seeing the interest on students' faces in active learning, gives me hope for the next generation of college teachers and their students. But then I'll walk through a large academic building and not hear a single student voice, except during the 10 minutes between classes and during foreign-language classes. Undergraduates at this institution aren't being given sufficient opportunities to voice their own ideas. Coming as I did from an undergraduate experience where most of my classes had fewer than 25 students--and frequently had only 10-15--I feel at once sad and angry on behalf of these students.

Most of these students attended public middle schools and high schools in California during the era of high-stakes testing under the No Child Left Behind legislation. These students all ranked within the top 12.5% of their high school classes--which means they earned good grades and did very well on tests. This bubble-form testing culture continues for them in college, but they don't know how--or don't have the recourse or resources--to challenge this system.

A model that works

Meanwhile, in my third job, I teach museum studies in a graduate program at a small private university. The program admits 20 students per year, and students typically take two or three years to finish their master's degrees. My job this year involves teaching a first-year course in museum history and theory and then mentoring final-year students as they write their theses.

The students and faculty in this program--and perhaps it is unfair to compare undergraduate and graduate experiences, but I will--have forged a real community of learners and practitioners. I value very highly my inclusion in this community. The students in the program are motivated to learn and the faculty hold students accountable as writers and thinkers. Students who haven't yet produced B-level writing by the end of their first quarter are put on academic probation, and students who haven't achieved this milestone by the end of their first year are not allowed to continue in the program until their writing improves.

My undergraduate experience was similar to this graduate program. Professors sometimes knew my name on the first day of class--even though we had never been introduced. Faculty challenged us during in-class discussions and in writing assignments.

Today, it's rare for me to meet an undergraduate who comes to college able to write passably well, and even many graduate students in the humanities and social sciences--let alone the sciences--struggle with writing. These students haven't been challenged sufficiently as critical and creative thinkers, and they haven't been asked to write at a sufficient level.

As someone who considers herself a teacher of writing as well as of museum studies and college teaching, I feel overwhelmed. And because I draw my paycheck from an institution that lets many students earn degrees without being able to express a thought coherently in writing, I feel complicit.

Holding out hope for the next generation

I read widely about K-12 education in the hopes that some news will come of a generation of students who will show up prepared for college, as writers and thinkers. I am heartened by bloggers and writers on education who challenge broken systems and support innovation in the classroom.

Some series of posts on education that recently caught my eye:

Susan Harman and Deborah Meier's's post "How to Resist the Growing Threat to U.S. Education" introduces a series in Dissent Magazine:

In these pages, we intend to connect the dots between the many pieces of research and demonstrate that the educational crisis is not what the public has been led to think it is, that there is virtually no research that supports ongoing corporate and federal policies, that the media has been irresponsible and complicit in hiding the truth, that the proposed solutions are unsupported and dangerous, and that the devastating consequences we are now seeing are not “unintended.” To the contrary, these radical reforms were intended by a powerful, well-funded wing of the reform agenda to dismantle our public education system and replace it with precisely the kind of marketplace reforms that are by their nature untrustworthy and unaccountable. We hope these articles will mobilize policymakers and citizens to join us in resisting this attack on our public education system and democracy.

The New York Times ran a month of blog posts by a cross-section of pre-K through grade 12 educators beginning the school year: Lesson Plans.

BlogHer's own participation in the DonorsChoose.org Challenge has included a series of posts by contributing editors advocating for readers to fund a broad spectrum of projects in diverse contexts. I'm learning lots about the kinds of innovations happening on the front lines of education, and particularly in elementary and middle school classrooms. Definitely keep your eyes out for these posts, and consider contributing.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox.