You have to be professional enough about your teaching that you prepare responsibly when you're teaching outside the zone, though.
I had the experience during the pandemic that I suspect a lot of parents of college-aged kids did, which was listening in on my child's courses in that crazy half-semester after spring break 2020. One class delighted me and made me feel good about the profession. One class depressed me because the underpaid adjunct at her research university just decided "fuck this noise, they're not paying me to design a whole new pedagogy" and sent the students some slidedecks and that was it. And then one professor enraged me because he was teaching the introductory philosophy survey. He was a very narrowly specialized philosopher of science and that's all he knew and thus all he taught. He didn't really care that he was supposed to be introducing Western philosophy as a whole--all of his lectures were "What did Aristotle think about science?" and "Kant: his scientific thought!" I had to really restrain myself the day that I was working on my own prep for Zoom lecture and I overheard him answering a question about what metaphysics was by saying "Oh, don't worry about metaphysics, it's not very important". That's not even a good answer for a philosopher of science! But it was mostly plain that he wasn't doing this as a kind of knowing attempt to slant the discipline towards his field, or out of intellectual chauvinism, it was that he literally didn't know squat about all the material he was leaving out and he didn't care. (Despite the fact that this was an introduction to the discipline and therefore he was costing his colleagues possible majors or future enrollments.)
The problem I think is that there isn't a price to pay in scholarship for being simple-minded in the way you describe when you're outside the bounds of your specialization with material that is actually relevant to your argument or claims, even though there should be. So the person who exerts themselves through teaching doesn't necessarily get recognized in their research community for having gotten out of their lane in useful ways.
Yeah, there's some courses where I feel very very comfortable and others where, the first time or two, I'm making investments in skills for the students and in substance for myself. If we had a 50-person political science faculty, for instance, we could offer all courses with uniform depth of preparation. We don't!
The notion of peer review of teaching would lead to a riot but it's telling where we think we need to have QC and where we don't.
I think it's yet another of the myriad failures of conventional assessment approaches--content review doesn't fit anywhere in there, and of course, when it's done in a highly regulated and institutionalized way, it's worse than not doing it. So we just cross our fingers and hope. Mostly I think our hopes are well-realized--this is a problem that comes from a very small proportion of teaching faculty. But given that we know that teaching well across the range of a discipline (and beyond) takes active exploration of areas of knowledge outside of a specialization, we do very little to ask that of faculty or reward them when they do it.
You have to be professional enough about your teaching that you prepare responsibly when you're teaching outside the zone, though.
I had the experience during the pandemic that I suspect a lot of parents of college-aged kids did, which was listening in on my child's courses in that crazy half-semester after spring break 2020. One class delighted me and made me feel good about the profession. One class depressed me because the underpaid adjunct at her research university just decided "fuck this noise, they're not paying me to design a whole new pedagogy" and sent the students some slidedecks and that was it. And then one professor enraged me because he was teaching the introductory philosophy survey. He was a very narrowly specialized philosopher of science and that's all he knew and thus all he taught. He didn't really care that he was supposed to be introducing Western philosophy as a whole--all of his lectures were "What did Aristotle think about science?" and "Kant: his scientific thought!" I had to really restrain myself the day that I was working on my own prep for Zoom lecture and I overheard him answering a question about what metaphysics was by saying "Oh, don't worry about metaphysics, it's not very important". That's not even a good answer for a philosopher of science! But it was mostly plain that he wasn't doing this as a kind of knowing attempt to slant the discipline towards his field, or out of intellectual chauvinism, it was that he literally didn't know squat about all the material he was leaving out and he didn't care. (Despite the fact that this was an introduction to the discipline and therefore he was costing his colleagues possible majors or future enrollments.)
The problem I think is that there isn't a price to pay in scholarship for being simple-minded in the way you describe when you're outside the bounds of your specialization with material that is actually relevant to your argument or claims, even though there should be. So the person who exerts themselves through teaching doesn't necessarily get recognized in their research community for having gotten out of their lane in useful ways.
OOOOOOOF. Those stories. OOOOF.
Yeah, there's some courses where I feel very very comfortable and others where, the first time or two, I'm making investments in skills for the students and in substance for myself. If we had a 50-person political science faculty, for instance, we could offer all courses with uniform depth of preparation. We don't!
The notion of peer review of teaching would lead to a riot but it's telling where we think we need to have QC and where we don't.
I think it's yet another of the myriad failures of conventional assessment approaches--content review doesn't fit anywhere in there, and of course, when it's done in a highly regulated and institutionalized way, it's worse than not doing it. So we just cross our fingers and hope. Mostly I think our hopes are well-realized--this is a problem that comes from a very small proportion of teaching faculty. But given that we know that teaching well across the range of a discipline (and beyond) takes active exploration of areas of knowledge outside of a specialization, we do very little to ask that of faculty or reward them when they do it.