Subvert the dominant paradigm: choose stewardship! (original) (raw)
Related papers
Education Sciences - Special Issue on Education for the Professions in Times of Change, 2019
CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International A steward of the discipline was originally defined as “someone who will creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application”. This construct was articulated to support and strengthen doctoral education. The purpose of this paper is to expand the construct of stewardship so that it can be applied to both scholars and non-academic practitioners, and can be initiated earlier than doctoral education. To accomplish and justify this, we describe a general developmental trajectory supporting cross-curriculum teaching for stewardship of a discipline as well as of a profession. We argue that the most important features of stewardship, comprising the public trust for the future of their discipline or profession, are obtainable by all practitioners, and are not limited to those who have completed doctoral training. The developmental trajectory is defined using the Mastery Rubric construct, which requires articulating the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to be targeted with a curriculum; recognizable stages of performance of these KSAs; and performance level descriptors of each KSA at each stage. Concrete KSAs of stewardship that can be taught and practiced throughout the career (professional or scholarly) were derived directly from the original definition. We used the European guild structure’s stages of Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master for the trajectory, and through a consensus-based standard setting exercise, created performance level descriptors featuring development of Bloom’s taxonometric cognitive abilities (see Appendix A) for each KSA. Together, these create the Mastery Rubric for Stewardship (MR-S). The MR-S articulates how stewardly behavior can be cultivated and documented for individuals in any disciplinary curriculum, whether research-intensive (preparing “scholars”) or professional (preparing members of a profession or more generally for the work force). We qualitatively assess the validity of the MR-S by examining its applicability to, and concordance with professional practice standards in three diverse disciplinary examples: (1) History; (2) Statistics and Data Science; and (3) Neurosciences. These domains differ dramatically in terms of content and methodologies, but students in each discipline could either continue on to doctoral training and scholarship, or utilize doctoral or pre-doctoral training in other professions. The MR-S is highly aligned with the practice standards of all three of these domains, suggesting that stewardship can be meaningfully cultivated and utilized by those working in or outside of academia, supporting the initiation of stewardship prior to doctoral training and for all students, not only those who will earn PhDs or be scholars first and foremost. The MR-S can be used for curriculum development or revision in order to purposefully promote stewardship at all levels of higher education and beyond. The MR-S renders features of professional stewardship accessible to all practitioners, enabling formal and informal, as well as self-directed, development and refinement of a professional identity.
Becoming a steward of data science
SocArXiv, 2019
CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license Citation: Tractenberg, RE. (2019, April 23). Becoming a steward of data science. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/j7h8t This article introduces the concept of the steward: the individual to whom the public, and other practitioners, can entrust the integrity of their field. The concept will be defined, particularly with respect to what about stewardship can be demonstrated by the practitioner so that others – including other stewards – can recognize this professional identity. Stewardship is an important aspect of professionalism, and although data science is a very new profession, its growth in terms of the number of practitioners should also include growth in the commitment to integrity in practice. Although an undergraduate program may seem early to begin understanding what this commitment means, and how to generate evidence of that commitment for yourself, those with a strong understanding of stewardship and how to recognize it will be better able to select jobs in contexts where this commitment to integrity is nurtured and valued. Learning about stewardship engages students in taking responsibility for their role in the profession, and so taking responsibility for the profession and the professional community. Once the construct is understood, learners can focus on the nature of the evidence they can compile - as well as the types of activities that can generate that kind of evidence- and on why this is meaningful over their career.
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 2022
Shared under CC BY-NC-ND license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 This material is sharable as long as the author is credited appropriately; no changes permitted in any way and no commercial use is permitted. A steward of the discipline was originally defined as an individual to whom “we can entrust the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field”, and more specifically, as “someone who will creatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application” [8]. Originally articulated for doctoral education, in 2019 the construct of stewardship was expanded so that it can also be applied to non-academic practitioners in any field, and can be initiated earlier than doctoral education [18]. In this paper, we apply this construct to the context of mathematics, and argue that even for those early in their training in mathematics, stewardly practice of mathematics can be introduced and practiced. Postsecondary and tertiary education in mathematics — for future mathematicians as well as those who will use math at work — can include curriculum-spanning training, and documented achievement in stewardship. Even before a formal ethical practice standard for mathematics is developed and deployed to help inculcate math students with a “tacit responsibility for the quality and integrity of their own work”, higher education can begin to shape student attitudes towards stewardly professional identities. Learning objectives to accomplish this are described, to assist math instructors in facilitating the recognition and acceptance of responsibility for the quality and integrity of their own work and that of colleagues in the practice of mathematics.
Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Carnegie Perspectives
Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, 2006
To direct attention to the expectations for leadership, integrity and responsibility of the doctorate, the author argues for the creation of a ritual ceremony of initiation for students entering doctoral education. Essay: In the first week of medical school at an initiation in front of family and friends that symbolizes entry into the profession, all new students receive a white laboratory coat, the standard "uniform" of a physician. In addition, they recite an oath committing themselves to the profession and its ethics, a powerful statement of the shared values and purpose of being a doctor. This "White Coat Ceremony" signals the beginning of the rigorous educational period that will eventually culminate in the conferral of the title "doctor." In this ritual moment, students shed old identities and begin to adopt the identity of "physician" that embodies new values, skills and knowledge. The ceremony is a tangible touchstone, reminding students throughout the many challenges they will face in their training of what it means to be a medical doctor.
Practicing What We Teach (and Research)
Organization & Environment, 2015
Colleagues and Other Dear Readers-an introductory note on this editorial: a couple of years ago, in an early editorial after J. Alberto Aragon-Correa and I officially became Co-Editors-in-Chief of this journal at the start of 2013, I provocatively titled that piece "Sustainability Management Academics: How's That Going?", implying that academic sustainability management as a profession is a challenging one. And, I mentioned, though barely so, that, in my opinion, one of the aspects of being a successful sustainability management academic, at least from a leadership standpoint, was practicing sustainability, not only in our professional but also in our personal lives. We each have the potential to influence many stakeholders beyond our official research, teaching, and service job responsibilities, including our family members, friends, neighbors, community residents, and even complete strangers whom we happen to meet in the course of our daily lives. A few years before that, I wrote an essay titled "Sustainable Living Beyond 9-to-5" (Starik, 2004) in which I humbly but more directly asserted that to be true to our profession of sustainability management, we needed to practice the principles of that profession outside of our jobs, and I suggested a number of ways some Academy of Management leaders (each associated with the Academy's Organizations and the Natural Environment, or ONE, Division whom I knew personally) were actually trying to do just that. This idea of "personal academic sustainability management" became painfully salient for yours truly when several months ago I accepted an open term (or "continuing") research faculty position with the University of Technology, Sydney, in downtown Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, necessitating a reassessment of all, and a relocation of most, of my worldly belongings from San Francisco, California, where I had been researching and teaching sustainability management at San Francisco State University. That cross-oceanic move inspired me to address this topic in my own personal/professional life in this issue's editorial. Happily, though, as the result of several trips outside Australia, I met two of my friends and veteran ONE colleagues (Kate Kearins and Eva Collins) in New Zealand, had great visits with them, and eventually asked Eva to join me in developing a collaborative guest editorial on the general issue of personal academic sustainability management. [Some of Kate's work was featured in an O&E issue in 2013 (Tregidga, Kearins, & Milne, 2013)]. So, after a brief introduction to the excellent articles in this
Reviving the Academy: Self-Centered to Student-Centered | Control to Concern
Education is a vital vehicle in our quest to move our civilization forward into a brighter, better and more sustainable tomorrow. With global conflict ever-present, and the assault on our resources, environment and people pervasive, it seems urgent for higher education to reconsider its purposes, its means, its outcomes and its efficacy. In a realm where increasingly dollars matter more than dignity, and progress & success are measured numerically more than experientially, it is easy to lose focus, abandon principles and confuse priorities. Today the academy often feels more comfortable, and seeks solace, in seeing students as consumers & customers, in assessing achievements through key performance indicators, in measuring worth through hard metrics, in gauging accomplishments through relative rankings, and in valuing bureaucratic management over inspired leadership. While such rationalistic approaches no doubt translate into apparent leaps forward in abilities to cope with complex systems, they deny other more qualitative levels of understanding and behaving that are arguably far more serious, significant and impactful. Many of the performance assessment mechanisms in place for faculty foster a climate of self-centredness, isolation and independence at the expense of studentcenteredness, community and collaboration. Rigid oversight, overbearing control and micromanagement commonly eclipse opportunities for the cultivation of thoughtfulness, respect, compassion and concern as fundamental drivers of the educational mission. The present paper argues that higher education would benefit through a vigorous, sensitive and sensible reassessment of priorities, principles and practices in light of an increasingly challenged, turbulent and troubling global milieu. In many ways a more balanced, responsible and sustainable tomorrow is dependent on a revived, revised, relevant and more potent academy.
Editors' Introduction: Righting the Ship
Pedagogy Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture, 2012
I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades-B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning-on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.