Some Thoughts on Uber: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Professor Vijay Mehrotra in the School of Management discusses the concerns of highly automated and unfettered free markets for services and what he emphasizes with his students.

Vijay Mehrotra
Vijay Mehrotra

Uber in action feels like magic compared to the faith-based and stressful exercise of calling a dispatcher or trying to hail a cab especially here in San Francisco where there has always been a terrible shortage of traditional taxis. Beyond the convenience, I’m impressed and inspired by the way that several sophisticated technologies have been seamlessly stitched together by Uber. Among other things, the Uber experience depends on smartphone hardware and software, 21st century telecommunications infrastructure, increasingly sophisticated GPS systems, payment processing platforms, and good old email. The Uber platform – elegantly designed, smartly integrated – indeed makes the user feel empowered, lending some emotional truth to the company’s “everyone’s private driver” tagline.

So I am both joyful and amazed every time my Uber car pulls up. At the same time, there is so much about Uber that I intensely dislike. For starters, the company’s founder and CEO Travis Kalanick has a well-chronicled reputation for arrogance and misogyny. The company’s culture is known for its long hours, high pressure, lack of work/life balance, and utmost secrecy. None of this is unique to Uber, but there’s something about this particular San Francisco-based company that embodies the way that the tech industry and culture seems to have swallowed much of San Francisco almost overnight, with many of the diverse and creative people that inspired me to move here in the first place now priced out of an overheated real estate market that seems to be dominated by youngsters flush with tech dollars – all of whom seem to be constantly riding around in Uber cars.

As the company constantly expands, Uber’s reach extends far beyond its San Francisco Bay Area home base. Its basic approach is to thumb its nose at any/all local laws until eventually managing to get them changed in an Uber-friendly direction. As Tracey Lien wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times article, “It [Uber] punches itself into markets and spends big on advance teams, lawyers and lobbyists to fight opposition and gain a foothold in markets around the world.” Uber’s ambitions are vast, and its hiring of former Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe reflects the business importance of its constant combative campaigning.

Meanwhile, Uber drivers – the people who not only do the actual transporting of passengers but also are required to invest their own capital to purchase and operate the individually-owned vehicles that collectively comprise Uber’s fleet– are seeking to be treated as employees in California rather than independent contractors and have been granted the right to unionize in Seattle. Recently, Uber’s unilateral decisions to decrease its prices while also increasing its share of total revenues have led to sharp drops in income for its drivers. Its practices for screening the drivers in its network have also been under scrutiny, and its recent forays into the driverless cars suggest that they would rather not have to engage with any drivers at all.

Even though I teach in a business school, I don’t believe that highly automated and unfettered free markets for all kinds of services are inherently optimal. As Erik Sherman recently pointed out, there is “a systemic imbalance in favor of the company that can ignore or avoid regular conditions of doing business,” which sounds a lot like Uber when it enters a new market.

As a cautionary tale, consider Amazon.com. Today, Amazon accounts for more than 40% of all book sales and over 65% of all eBooks – and, not coincidentally, the number of independent bookstores is now more than 50% lower than it was when Amazon was founded.   As its share of overall book sales has ballooned, Amazon has taken advantage of its market power to aggressively push the terms of its agreements with book publishers dramatically in its own favor, and now has an outsize influence over how books get published and distributed. In fact, book distribution has from the outset been only a small part of Amazon’s vision. The real prize has been the access to reams of consumer data and the ability to analyze this data for fun and profit.

Thinking of companies like Amazon and Uber, the futurist Jaron Lanier has pointed out that “information supremacy for one company becomes, as a matter of course, a form of behavior modification for the rest of the world.” This is exactly why I talk frequently with my MBA students about the potential downside of concentrating too much power in too few online procurement and delivery channels, especially with the valuable proprietary customer data that comes with controlling all those transactions.

Yet there’s also no real case for defending the traditional taxi industry either, certainly not here in San Francisco and probably not in many other places. As Uber’s relentless expansion into new markets continues, expect to see more battles with local taxi companies and drivers – and more passengers getting on the Uber app.

Impact Factor: The Measure of a Journal

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Randy Souther, Gleeson librarian and editor of the open access journal Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, discusses Impact Factor and alternative journal metrics.

Randy Souther
Randy Souther, Gleeson librarian

When you need to rank the “quality,” “prestige,” or “impact” of a peer-reviewed journal, one name always comes to mind: The Impact Factor.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) has been around for decades—longer than any other journal metric, and has been widely used by faculty, researchers, students, librarians, and administrators to help decide where to publish, what to purchase, who to hire or promote, even whom to award grants. It’s a powerful metric, but few really understand how it works.

Impact factors are calculated each year in a product called Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The Impact Factor for a particular journal is the average number of citations received in the JCR year by articles published in the previous two years. If a journal’s Impact Factor was 18.5 in the 2015 JCR, that means that its articles published in 2013 and 2014 were cited, on average, 18.5 times each in 2015. In the absence of other quantitative means to measure journals, the Impact Factor was really quite revolutionary.

Does every peer-reviewed journal get an Impact Factor? No. In fact, the majority of peer-reviewed journals are not even tracked in JCR. How many does JCR cover? In 2016, it covers 11,365 peer-reviewed journals, but surprisingly does not include journals from humanities fields.

Question: based on their Impact Factors, which of these peer-reviewed journals is the most prestigious?

JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
Impact Factor: 37.684

Academy of Management Journal
Impact Factor: 6.233

Acta Mathematica
Impact Factor: 3.719

Philosophical Review
Impact Factor: none

The answer is “All of them!” Each is among the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in its respective field.

The problem is that Journal Impact Factors cannot be compared across fields, or even across sub-disciplines of the same field, because every field or sub-discipline has a unique citation behavior. Remember: the Impact Factor is measuring the frequency of citations in peer-reviewed journals. In some fields, particularly in the sciences, the scholarship is heavily journal article-based, publication is frequent, and reference lists are very long—a recipe for high Impact Factors. In other fields, particularly in social sciences and humanities, scholarship may be more book-based, with less frequent publication, and shorter reference lists—which may contribute to lower Impact Factors. The Impact Factor takes none of this into account, and unfortunately, neither do some people who are responsible for hiring, promoting, or granting—three activities where consideration of Impact Factors is wholly inappropriate.

It is crucial to understand that the Impact Factor is a metric that applies to journals only. It has nothing to say about individual articles. And it has nothing to say about individual authors. Remember JAMA, with its impressive Impact Factor of 37?—meaning an average of 37 cites per article, etc. In reality, 20-40% of the articles in JAMA are never cited, but a handful of highly-cited articles skews the average.

More problematic is that the Impact Factor is very susceptible to manipulation, and unscrupulous journal editors, or scrupulous journal editors, manipulate it regularly. The Impact Factor calculation allows citations from non-peer-reviewed articles to add to the citation count, but these same articles are ignored in calculating the average. An editor hence, could write a brief non-peer-reviewed editorial for each issue of their journal and cite their recent articles in it, creating an artificial Impact Factor increase.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to the Impact Factor which attempt to rectify its most serious issues. I’ll highlight three: IPP, SNIP, and SJR.

IPP or Impact Per Publication

This is the closest equivalent to the Impact Factor, and uses essentially the same calculation but with the following differences.

  • Only peer-reviewed articles can contribute citations to the calculation, which makes manipulation much more difficult. No more editorial inflation.
  • It covers more than 21,000 peer-reviewed journals compared to Impact Factor’s 11,000.
  • It covers humanities fields!
  • It uses a 3-year window instead of 2, which may be a better compromise between fast-moving and slower-moving fields.
  • The raw data is freely available to examine, which is not the case with Impact Factor.

SNIP or Source Normalized Impact per Paper

This is a more complex metric that takes the IPP calculations and normalizes the results to account for the different citation behaviors of different fields and sub-disciplines. The same advantages of IPP apply, plus:

  • You can now reasonably compare SNIP scores between journals in different sub-disciplines or even entirely different fields.

SJR or SCImago Journal Rank

Another complex metric, SJR attempts to measure actual prestige. Citations are not treated equally. A citation from a high-prestige journal is worth more than a citation from a low-prestige journal. The same advantages of IPP and SNIP apply.

Let’s go back now and look at our four example journals:

JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
Impact Factor: 37.684
IPP: 21.835
SNIP: 9.152
SJR: 6.44

Academy of Management Journal
Impact Factor: 6.233
IPP: 6.991
SNIP: 3.938
SJR: 10.317

Acta Mathematica
Impact Factor: 3.719
IPP: 3.191
SNIP: 4.026
SJR: 8.021

Philosophical Review
Impact Factor: none
IPP: 1.325
SNIP: 3.097
SJR: 3.062

Now Philosophical Review is accorded due respect, and suddenly Academy of Management Journal, in some measures, seems to be as good as if not “better” than JAMA.

The Impact Factor was designed with the sciences in mind, and it tends to work best with many of those fields. If the Impact Factor helps you to find quality journals, then by all means, use it. But I would recommend taking a cue from the humanities: If there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, surely there’s more than one way to measure a journal.

Resources: 

Look up a Journal’s IPP, SNIP, and SJR in the library’s Scopus database. These metrics are also freely available on the Journal Metrics website.

Frequently Asked Questions about Journal Metrics like Impact Factor, IPP, SNIP and SJR

Raw Data for IPP, SNIP, and SJR

The library does not subscribe to Journal Citation Reports (source of the Impact Factor). The nearest access is at the publicly-accessible UCSF library, which is a pleasant walk south of USF across Golden Gate Park. Impact Factors are frequently displayed on journal websites as well.

Hidden Stories in My Cluttered Office

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Christine Yeh, Professor of Education and Psychology, considers the objects, notes, and items in her office and how the clutter reveals special relationships and different kinds of hidden and unfinished stories.

Christine Yeh's drawer

In my desk, I have a catchall drawer with a random collection of objects, some necessary—a pair of black shoes, bags of “healthy” snacks—and others perhaps confusing things—a small hand-carved boat from Samoa, a marble from El Salvador, and an intricate weaving made of scrap paper and yarn. These “confusing” and rather unacademic items each have a story connected to it, but I often wonder if I have gone too far in contributing to the chaos of my daily life.

When I moved into a new office last summer, I seized the opportunity to purge my space of boxes of forgotten files, old data, and things that do not fit into any obvious work related category (think a pile of heart shaped rocks in a bowl). I Googled photos of “Zen office spaces” and studied Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and paid particular attention to her thoughts on office cleaning. She offered the following insights and directions on how to create a space free of clutter:

  • Hold each book in your hand, and if it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it, keep it. Otherwise, it must go.
  • If you think you’ll read a book “one day,” discard it.
  • If an item doesn’t spark joy for you, but is necessary to get work done, you may keep it.
  • Discard all paper unless in use, is needed for a limited period of time, or must be kept indefinitely.

I contemplated the hundreds of pages and papers that could justifiably be recycled according to her rules. These included my 9 years of ideas brainstorms, and sketches kept in colorful Japanese notebooks, ethnographic notes and memos from my international research travel journals, and personally revealing artwork from past students exploring their identities and culture on paper. My most meaningful keepsake is the partially completed picture book drawn on scrap paper by a 5th grade boy in Western Samoa, depicting the story of how he lost his family in the 2010 tsunami. He gave me this precious book because I was the first person in more than a year to ask him to share his story. He left the last few pages blank—unfinished—because his future was still unsure.

As I inspected my belongings, I realized that much of my clutter included different kinds of unfinished stories—blank pages that serve as a reminder of the work that is yet to be done, experienced, or imagined. My scribbles and sketches comprise urgent notes to self, fights I have yet to fight, and emotional rants about inequity that hold me accountable. I also wondered if I am particularly drawn to works in progress rather than the finished, printed, or framed final pieces as they are glimpses of the creative process and moments of possibilities. Where do these unfinished, incomplete, in progress stories, doodles, and projects fit into Kondo’s rules about what to keep?

I could also not let go of many objects in my secret drawer because they are symbols of connections I have made that inspire me to be the best version of my self. I find these items are especially grounding when I am feeling overwhelmed by the busy work of academia. It occurred to me that perhaps in our creative and scholarly work, our criteria for what to keep and what to toss includes Kondo’s ideas but may extend beyond whether or not an object “sparks joy” or has use and I came up with my own guiding questions for creating an inspiring office space.

  • Does the object inspire you?
  • Does it tell part of an important story in your history?
  • Does it symbolize a critical aspect of your multiple identities?
  • Does it highlight a journey or process you are experiencing?
  • Does it serve as a reminder of your vision for your work?

When I began cleansing my office according to Kondo’s rule, I picked up each book to see if it would “spark joy” as she requires in her philosophy. But as I held each book, joy was not the predominant feeling. Rather, I thought about the books that were difficult, intense, and heart-wrenching. These were books that were painfully transformative in my thinking about justice. Seeing these books on my shelf (organized by color to spark joy) provided historical evidence of my evolving identity as a researcher. As I flipped through the pages, I was reminded of why I entered academia in the first place. I was reminded of conversations I had with friends and colleagues. I contemplated and grappled with ideas about equity, and I felt deeply inspired.

I also tried to organize my papers and notebooks using my new rules around organizing for inspiration. I appreciated reading through pages of my writing in notebooks –snapshots of urgent ideas and passions for my work. Sadly, many of these reflections and raw emotions remain hidden in these journals as they are regularly deleted from my manuscripts by journal editors during the review process because they are not seen as “scholarly.” Keeping them nearby feels refreshingly humanizing as they hold me accountable to my vision and to the communities I partner with.

Prehistoric bird sculpture
Prehistoric woodfired stoneware bird by Simon Levin on quarter sawn oak.
Photo credit: Estella Pabonan

Kondo believes that if something does not spark joy, then you must get rid of it. Similarly, I repeatedly asked myself, “Does this inspire me?” as I went through each object in my cluttered space. Finding inspiration is unique to the individual, but I did find that the guiding questions I listed above helped me make decisions about what to cleanse. For example, the art featured in my office are mostly photographs, paintings, drawings, and sculptures from people I am close to—a prehistoric wood-fired stoneware bird head mounted on a thick piece of oak wood envisioned and created by a potter friend? Definitely keep. Scribbled note in Chinese from a second grade student I taught in Nan’ao village in Taiwan? Keep. Old handouts from meetings, workshops, and schedules? Recycle.

Though the heart of my research is outside of my office and in local and international communities, I find I need to be very intentional about creating a space at work that attempts to reflect the collective voice of these relationships. After many iterations and attempts at office organization, I may not have achieved the sparse Zen office I originally thought I wanted, but I feel I have created a space of experimentation and inspiration. Like the blank pages of my precious picture book from Samoa, this new space has an openness to the possible stories that are yet to come.

Faculty Spotlight: Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales

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Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales’s research has been influenced by the U.S.-Mexico border, Bay Area, and Central Valley. During our discussion, we discussed undocumented students in higher education and the work establishing the Undocu-Ally workshop at the University of San Francisco.

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales

How did you first become interested in research?

My research is rooted in my upbringing and my political engagements around migration, young people, education, and border politics, and more broadly, racial politics in California. I grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border. I was in high school during an age of violence on the border and violence against migrants. That really shaped my political identity, my personal identity, my racial identity. When I came to graduate school, it only made sense that my research would be in conversation with those pieces of who I am.

What were some of the earlier political moments that shaped your interests?

I grew up in Chula Vista, which is just a few miles from the US-Mexico border. In the mid-90’s, there was a moment of scapegoating against immigrants—Proposition 187 tried to exclude undocumented residents of California from public services like public education and emergency medical services and Operation Gatekeeper developed a stronger, more lethal border fence. The racial undertones of those conversations are very explicit, and I don’t know if you can be a Chicano kid growing up in such close proximity to the US-Mexico border and not be aware of inequality and racism.

When I teach and when I speak, I often tell people that I’m a proud beneficiary of affirmative action, that I was admitted in the last class at UC Berkeley under affirmative action policies. Sometimes people say, “Oh, why are you selling yourself short? Why do you admit to something like that?” For me, it’s really a point of pride. There was something really significant about that moment in California when affirmative action policies were being questioned and ultimately legislated out. I landed on a college campus that was in the midst of major transformation, major social unrest, and student movements. My engagement in that work also shaped my trajectory academically.

How did this translate into your undergraduate and graduate studies?

As an undergraduate, I studied Ethnic Studies, Education, and Chicano Studies, and I found a passion in those disciplines. I ultimately decided to go back to graduate school. My dissertation work was about undocumented migrant students and, specifically, ways in which engagement around the Dream Act catalyzed broader political activism and the development of political consciousness. Now, my work is very interdisciplinary. I am in a School of Education, but I pull very explicitly from Ethnic Studies and Chicano Studies but also Anthropology, Sociology, and other fields.

What specifically pulled you to focus on undocumented students in higher education?

One piece of it was I wanted to look at social movements as a place where education “happens”, and undocumented students were leading the fight at that point. The other part was that I was working for a scholarship program advising underrepresented students of color on the UC Berkeley campus and learned about the unique challenges facing undocumented college students in the context of that work. I was working with these students, and I also had this connection to the ongoing struggles at the border and struggles around racism and xenophobia because of my own background and political work.

What is your current research about?

Currently, I study undocumented community college students in the Central Valley of California. There have been significant legislative changes in California around undocumented students and access to higher education in the last several years. It’s really been the movement of undocumented young people who have made these changes possible. There is this emerging story about California being the national model for service for undocumented students, but I think there’s a danger in telling and propagating that narrative about California as the national model because the reality is that not all students are benefitting from this legislation. I’m talking to undocumented students who qualify for the California Dream Act and are getting significant tuition assistance but who are living in such deep poverty that they can’t afford the bus ticket to school. Or they can’t afford not to work the two hours that they would be in class because their family depends on the wages that would be lost if they went to school instead. If we are actually going to situate California as a national model for servicing and supporting the educational trajectories of undocumented students, then we need to position political economy at the center of that analysis. We need to complicate the conversations around who undocumented students are, what they look like, what kind of work they’re doing, and what kind of barriers they’re confronting.

The access to higher education story is a very specific story within this broader conversation. I think we need to be able to situate it appropriately and connect it to these broader struggles in service of bringing about a more just immigration policy.

What originally drew you to USF?

I wasn’t always positive that I was going to be in academia, but I wanted to be in a place where socially engaged, social justice research was welcomed, and I also wanted to be in a place where teaching was valued. Both of those things led me to USF. When a position opened in Higher Education Student Affairs, I was really excited about it because I had all this practical experience in student affairs and it was in an institutional environment where social justice, racial justice, immigrant rights are things that are talked about explicitly. I have really amazing colleagues that made me feel at home right away.

What work you have done through the USF task force?

When I came to USF, I engaged in conversations on what support for undocumented students looks like here. There were many people on this campus who have been working to support undocumented students for many years but there was a new opportunity to try to coordinate it and bring it to the surface as critical work of the university community. I spoke with Mary Wardell, and she said, “Why don’t you start a task force?” To meet the needs of undocumented students at USF, we need data on how many students we have and what issues they struggle with.” We convened a task force of students, staff, and faculty across campus to collect data from undocumented students, and we made recommendations to the Provost Council about how USF can be a more hospitable environment to undocumented students.

Are you beginning to see some changes or implementations of those recommendations?

I’d like us to not only welcome undocumented students but engage in the broader public discourse and narrative around pushing for more just immigration policy, more comprehensive immigration reform. I also want to have real financial support for undocumented students, which will put the commitment to undocumented students in a structural, institutional grounded way.

There are a couple things that I’m proud of. One is that the task force worked together with the university web services to create a page on the USF website. We worked with the university to create a page on the website that not only has contact people and resources but also makes a very clear statement that says, “As a Jesuit university, we welcome all students.” That public statement of support is not only symbolically important, it’s also really meaningful in terms of student experience on this campus.

Also, last Spring we did an Undocu-Ally workshop. Faculty and staff across the campus could learn how they can serve undocumented students who may come to them whether that’s in the counseling and psychological services, in student advising, or in the classroom. We put out the call inviting people to attend a training that was facilitated by the head of the undocumented programming over at UC Berkeley. Because it was a really busy time of year, we were hoping we’d get 20 people to sign up for the workshop, and we had an overwhelming response from around 50 people and another 15 or 20 who said, “I really want to do this but I can’t make that date.” To me, it signified that there’s really an interest and a need on this campus for that educational work. People want to step up, and the faculty and staff want to integrate this into their work and live up to the mission of the university.

The CRASE OpEd Project

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At the end of Spring 2016 semester, 20 faculty members from each school and college participated in the CRASE OpEd Project where they developed ideas for public scholarship by considering evidence-based arguments that are timely and have public value. During the two day workshop, participants learned about establishing credibility, structures of op-eds, and tips on refining and pitching their ideas.

op-ed project

When writing an op-ed, academics must first understand that their communication goals and style for writing are different than they write for scholarly journals. On the first day, much of the discussion focused on ways of establishing credibility through evidence, being right versus effective, and how to engage in larger conversations. The goal of an op-ed is to speak about your knowledge to a general audience without jargon and get the reader to say, “Tell me more.” Unlike traditional academic writing, it is useful to bring in your personal experience because it connects you to the reader in a way that data can’t.

In the op-ed, there’s a common structure to develop your argument with evidence. Start with a news hook to establish the case for why your op-ed is important now. Common hooks include employing a current event, anniversary, holiday, trend, release of new data, something in popular culture, or highlighting news that should be news. Throughout the op-ed, utilize various types of evidence and anticipate bias from the audience that you want to reach. An important component is to include the technique known as a “To Be Sure,” which addresses potential counter arguments in such a way that it is acknowledged but then persuasively dismissed.  For example, validate the counterargument and trump it with something more urgent or provide a personal caveat. It’s important to create a space to address your opposition with respect and to treat the audience as morally intelligent. In the conclusion, include a call to action that is specific and doable.

Using these ideas, participants developed drafts of their op-eds, and on the second day, they received feedback from their peers. The OpEd Project provides detailed resources on their website including basic op-ed structure, tips for op-ed writing, how to pitch, and submission information for over 100 outlets.

Many of our participants are currently working on their op-eds for submission.  Monisha Bajaj, Associate Professor of Education, published “Community Walks: A Day of Learning for Schools” on Teaching Tolerance. Violet Cheung, Associate Professor of Psychology, was featured on MTV News “The Stakes: Raw Heart Podcast Part 3.” Christina Chong, Assistant Professor of Law, published “Is Hollywood Still an All-White Boys Club?” with the American Bar Association. Lisa de la Rue, Assistant Professor of Education, published the op-ed “Teen in police scandal is a victim, not a ‘sex worker’” in the San Francisco Chronicle. Professor of Law Alice Kaswan published “As court weighs clean power plan, rule’s approach could reduce carbon emissions, improve public health” on The Hill. Assistant Professor of Education, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales published “Democracy for Some, Not for All” on the Huffington Post. James Zarsadiaz, Assistant Professor of History, published “Why candidates should court Asian American voters” in the San Francisco Chronicle. Assistant Professor Desiree Zequera published “More than Nuance: Recognizing and Serving the Diversity of the Latina/o Community” on EdExcelencia Hispanic-Serving Institutions .

Four Steps for Writing about your Teaching Innovation

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Violet Cheung, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, outlines four steps that helped her to turn a teaching innovation into a publication.

Violet Cheung

Too often we think of teaching and research as two separate endeavors – the former is our job and the latter a creative outlet. A paradigm shift for me was the phrase “teaching innovation” and the realization that you are innovating when you develop a unique course or improve an existing course. We are accustomed to sharing our research in journals, but we often don’t think of writing about our teaching in journals. Major innovations should not be hidden but shared with peers. As Saera Khan writes in her blog post “Strategies for Turning your Teaching into Publication,” there are many journals that may be interested in publishing your innovations in teaching. This paradigm shift has proven personally fulfilling to me and my coauthor and has expanded my perspective on scholarship.

While I have to admit that I wasn’t prepared for the long process involved in publishing our teaching innovation, it was easier once I saw how to breakdown the process. An important part entailed making ideas explicit–first verbally and then in print. Below I outline four steps to write about your teaching innovation:

1. Adopt a problem-solution framework to articulate your innovation

If it is hard to think of yourself as an innovator, then trying thinking of yourself as a problem-solver. Chances are that the unique student population, the unique course materials, or the unique class size has presented challenges to you in your teaching. As a dedicated educator, you adapt your teaching to address many of these challenges. Little by little, semester by semester, you have drifted far away from the traditional delivery of the course, and now you may have an innovation in your hand. Ask yourself “What problem did I try to solve?” and “What is my solution?” Turn your answers into a short elevator speech so that you can succinctly describe the problem-solution pair.

2. Ask colleagues to affirm the value of your innovation

Share your elevator speech with a colleague in your department and/or with a colleague at a different institution to see if there is interest and an audience for your innovation. Watch their reactions. If they say, “I don’t see how your method is different” or “I see why it works at your institution but nowhere else” then you will need to continue to adapt. If the reactions are more positive, such as, “Can I try using your teaching method in my class?” or “Why didn’t I think of it?” then you know this may be an important contribution.

If you received positive feedback, then listen carefully to the comments from your future readers because they may be able to articulate the benefits of your innovation better than you can. There are two reasons for this. First, they have the buyer’s point of view whereas you have the seller’s point of view. Guess which is more appealing to journal editors? Second, your colleagues can tell you the first benefit that comes to mind whereas you may be thinking of multiple benefits. Sometimes it is not possible to write about all of them because each comes with its own set of literature, and your colleague’s opinion becomes important when you have to focus on one benefit.

3. Document the efficacy of your innovation

As you search for appropriate journals, it may make sense to look for the journal’s typical data reporting style. For example, in psychology and other social sciences, data collection methods may fall along the lines of quantitative vs. qualitative, subjective data vs. objective data, comparison between class sections of different instruction styles vs. comparison of the same class section from the start to the end of the semester. Understanding the journal’s expectations for data reporting will help you determine how much you’ll need to document the effectiveness/efficacy of your innovation.

4. Familiarize yourself with the teaching literature in your field

As you investigate different journal outlets, tag relevant articles and read them. At first, It may seem an arduous task to learn the jargons and major divisions in the literature, but this is important because you want to make sure you cite the relevant literature and frame the context for your teaching innovation. If you want to write about teaching in your field, it is your responsibility to know what has been published previously and situate your innovation within the existing literature.

While I worked through this process, I came to appreciate the connection between my teaching and research, and I have been able to participate in meaningful conversations with my colleagues about teaching innovations and how to get started in the publication process. Publishing your innovative teaching methods can be a valuable way to bring together your research and your teaching.

Faculty Spotlight: Angela Banks

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During our conversation, Angela Banks, Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Professions, shared her passion for patients and her research in cardiovascular disease. We discussed her Fulbright experience in Jordan, bringing stories of her patients into the classroom, and running her first marathon.

Angela Banks

 

How did you first become interested in research?

At a very young age, I knew that I wanted to become a registered nurse. I enjoyed taking care of people that were sick, and whenever my family members became ill, I embraced the idea of helping them get better. I have a PhD in the Philosophy of Nursing.

While I was completing my PhD at UCSF, we had to select a particular area of interest, and I chose cardiovascular disease. I became quite interested in this area because I had a couple of family members who died prematurely as a result of cardiovascular disease.

How did you decide to come to USF?

The USF Nursing Program has a wonderful reputation in the community, and it’s highly respected throughout the state of California. I heard about USF long before I decided to come here. It was my first and only choice. I decided that after I graduated I wanted to work at this university, and it was also the only place where I interviewed. I’ve been here for 11 years and experienced many challenges, but overall I really enjoy teaching and the wonderful opportunities it has to offer.

How do you bring your research into the classroom?

Well I teach pharmacology and pathophysiology, so the heart is a fundamental aspect of my research. When I talk about the heart, I also share my research findings with my students. I want my students to be informed and understand the importance of cardiovascular disease and become advocates for their family members and themselves should they become diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

Is there something in particular about working with the students and the program at USF that keeps you motivated?

Because of my many years working in the intensive care unit and also the emergency room, I have had an opportunity to bring those life experiences to the classroom. It brings the classroom alive. Students remember the stories that I tell them, the stories about my patients—how I advocated for my patients, how I advocated for their family members, and how they can do the same thing. I always say to them, you are the next generation of nurses. I’m just happy that I’m able to play a significant role in making you an excellent nurse. So when you graduate from this university you will have the necessary skills to care for people in the clinical setting or the community. One of these days you may have the opportunity to take care of me, or my loved ones and I want you to be well prepared for that responsibility.

What are the questions you’ve been thinking about recently?

I’m interested in cardiovascular disease and its impact on the female population. There are a lot of people that might not be aware of the fact that cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of all women. It’s actually the number one killer of all Americans—men and women—but it really does impact the female population considerably more. With my dissertation, I was specifically concerned about the African American population because, even though all women as well as men in the US are impacted by this disease, it has a significantly higher consequence on the African American population. I wanted to better understand why people wait to go to the hospital when they experience signs and symptoms associated with heart disease.

What leads to these delays and disproportionate impact?

From my research, when African Americans experience cardiac signs and symptoms, they wait to see if the symptoms will disappear. Many of them are wondering if these signs and symptoms are associated with something that’s not cardiac in origin. Several people experience denial, and believe that their signs and symptoms are related to something less serious, especially the female population because women do not necessarily experience cardiac symptoms in the same way that men do. Many healthcare providers, especially male physicians are reluctant to diagnose women with cardiovascular disease even though they present to the emergency room with the classic signs and symptoms. Physicians tend to attribute the symptoms that women are having to a condition that’s less serious compared to men experiencing the same symptoms when they arrive at the hospital.

You spent some time doing research in Jordan. What brought you to the Middle East?

I was in Jordan as a Fulbright Scholar, and it was a wonderful experience. I wanted to visit a place where the language, the religion, and the culture were very different from my own, so I specifically selected Jordan. I had a lot of fear associated with the Middle East, and if you listen to the media, most people would be frightened to travel to the Middle East. I wanted to branch out to a different part of the world, and it was one of the best decisions that I have ever made for my personal and intellectual growth.

How did your research collaborations work?

At the Jordan University of Science and Technology, you really needed to be fluent in Arabic in order to conduct research, and Arabic is a very difficult language to learn. So I collaborated with professors who spoke fluent English. For instance, there was a professor who was doing some interesting work on diabetes, which is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, so we worked together and were successful in publishing a manuscript.

The professors also had their graduate students collect data, and then together we would analyze the data and write up the analyses. There was a tremendous amount of collaboration across disciplines, which is something I haven’t had the opportunity to do at USF. I would love to have the opportunity to work with professors across disciplines at USF, because we can learn from each other and disseminate the information to a broader audience.

I look forward to the opportunity of collaborating with my colleagues here at USF, specifically individuals who have an interest in how culture, and racial prejudice intersect with my area of research. I am currently working on a project dealing with culture, and oppression in the African American population who is suffering with heart failure.

How has your research impacted you individually?

I’m very conscious about my health, and I’m very much aware of the risk factors that will increase the chances of me developing heart disease—I try to eat a balanced diet and exercise as often as I can.

In Jordan, I actually ran my very first marathon for my students at the university. It was never my plan to run a marathon, but the whole purpose was to raise money for my students because in the Middle East students rarely have the funds to purchase books. They will usually purchase one book and make copies for all of their classmates, so I wanted to assist my students in paying tuition and buying books. Even though I didn’t raise a lot of money, all the money was donated to the university, and my students and colleagues were impressed. I encouraged people to run with me, but very few people in the Middle East run. Most people in the Middle East who run marathons are foreigners from other countries, the US being one of them.

I decided because I’m getting older and it’s such a burden on your body—that constant jarring when you’re running—so I decided to take up swimming. So now I swim because that’s the type of exercise that I can actually do for the rest of my life.

It seems like you’re always working on this goal of learning more, focusing on the community, and disseminating the information. Do you have a large goal for your research?

It’s a work in progress. If we can just get people to the hospital when they experience signs and symptoms associated with cardiovascular disease, that would be phenomenal because so many people, not just African American but also individuals from other ethnic groups, delay in getting to the hospital. When it comes to the cardiac muscle, time is very important because the longer you wait, the more damage you actually do to the heart muscle. If someone is aware of this knowledge about cardiovascular disease, it places them in a much better position to advocate for themselves and their family members.

How do you inform people about your research?

I’ve tried to reach the African American community, and educate women in general. In April, I spoke to a group of over 250 women about heart disease and shared the classic signs and symptoms. It is so important that they advocate for themselves if they go to the doctor, and if they feel like they might be experiencing symptoms associated with cardiovascular disease. It is important to get the physician to listen to them and not dismiss their concerns. A lot of it is education, but I’ve also found that even with educating people, it may not necessarily change behavior. So we still have a lot of work to do.

Strategies for Turning your Teaching into Publication

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Saera Khan,  professor in the Department of Psychology, shares different approaches to identifying your pedagogical strategy and how to turn it into a publication.

Saera Khan
Saera Khan,  professor in the Department of Psychology

Professors take pride in their high caliber teaching, and when we innovate in our teaching, our primary goal is to create unique and original curricula or techniques to maximize our students’ understanding and critical analysis of the material. However, our efforts and engagement in teaching need not be limited to the students in our classroom. Academic journals and conferences devoted to sharing pedagogical innovations, strategies, challenges, and best practices (to name a few) exist so that others may benefit.

Identify your Strategy

To help you get started in thinking about how to turn your teaching into a publication, we created this non-exhaustive list of potential categories of types of articles you may write on your curricular innovations:

  1. Innovative teaching strategies, exercises, or assignments. My colleague, Violet Cheung created an original teaching exercise to help advanced research methods students learn about the statistical concepts of reliability and subjective data. Together, we refined her technique and tested the utility of this exercise over several semesters of this course. We presented our findings at the Annual Teaching of Psychology Conference.
  2. Curriculum design. Department members may collaborate to create learning goals and outcomes for specific courses as well as the overall program structure. Programs may take on a unique philosophy or pedagogical approach when student populations are considered in the design. In this case, a specific course may not be the focus per se, but rather how courses are designed and sequenced in relation to each other to create a comprehensive program.
  3. Case studies and storytelling in teaching. A narrative approach may teach a concept far more powerfully than a lecture. When we cover depression and suicide in my general psychology course, I present the true story of a young woman whose struggles with mental illness ends in tragedy. The story also allows us to explore the complexities in working with young adults suffering from severe depression as well as the right to privacy between college-aged students and their families.
  4. Narratives or reflections on teaching a particular course, population, etc. Teaching articles need not be geared towards teaching students. Your article can be a meta essay exploring broader themes or concepts about your challenges or joys in teaching. For example, one of my colleagues is writing an article on teaching a course as a queer woman of color.
  5. Adapting your course or teaching to a specific population. As our student populations diversify, our pedagogical strategies may need adaptation to reach all our students. Share how your teaching has grown more inclusive to students’ needs. Several of my colleagues are writing articles on adapting their teaching to support a high number of international students in their classes.

Please note that not all ideas fit neatly into one category exclusively and that your idea may be worthy even if it does not fit any of these categories!

Choose a Journal

After going through this exercise, your next step is to target a journal within your discipline and research the requirements. The ACRL Instruction Section Research and Scholarship Committee has a list to help find journals devoted to teaching in general and specific discipline areas.

Three Questions to Evaluate Your Probability for Success

There are three questions you need to ask yourself to evaluate your chances for success.

  1. Ask yourself: how will you evaluate success? In other words, what forms of persuasion can you use that will convince the reader that your ideas are worth trying?
  2. What previous articles have been published in the journals you are interested in? This will give you an idea of whether or not your article is a good fit for the journal or addresses an unmet gap in your field.
  3. Do I need to collect data to show evidence of my teaching approach, curricular innovation, or of student learning? For some of you, collecting pre and post intervention data is advisable and it may even be required for some teaching journals. For others, collecting students’ feedback specifically on your technique or exercise is sufficient.

USF for Freedom: A Symposium on Refugees, Forced Migrants, and Human Security

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On May 23rd, over 100 people attended the USF for Freedom: A Symposium on Refugees, Forced Migrants, and Human Security where scholars, migrants, service providers, and activists discussed the current state of migration, refugee resettlement in the Bay Area, and local resources that are available. During the symposium and the reception, participants had an opportunity to connect with scholars and activists and learn about the latest developments.  This symposium was created and funded through the Interdisciplinary Action Grant sponsored by CRASE.

Missed the symposium? Check out the Storify from Annick T.R. Wibben and video of the symposium below.

Displacement and Human Security:

Relocation, Resettlement, and Human Security:

CRASE Academic Social Media for Faculty and Librarians

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CRASE hosted a workshop on Academic Social Media for Faculty and Librarians where CRASE Co-Directors Christine Yeh and Saera Khan provided a brief overview of ORCID, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate. 12 participants from the College of Arts and Sciences, School of Law, School of Nursing, School of Management, School of Education, and Gleeson Library had the opportunity to set up profile pages and learn the specific and unique features of each site. By the end of the workshop participants learned about how to disseminate their research, increase citations, and connect with researchers all around the world. Below are some quotes from participants.

“Great pace, very manageable tasks for the time frame. I learned about some new things – such as ORCID – and got to try some things I’d heard about (ResearchGate). We had enough time to work with the different tools.”

“Helpful combination of big picture overview of faculty social media sites, with hands-on step-by-step activities. Specific examples. Helpful dialogue with the participants, too.”