Tutorials have seen an increase this year from the standard 12 enrollment count to 14 to 15 students in each tutorial, and faculty are concerned over the increased demands that will fall on tutorial professors as a result.
In addition to the advisees they take on in their department, tutorial professors advise the students in their class until they declare a major. Some of this year’s tutorial professors have set aside an additional hour to an hour and a half for advising meetings with tutorial students.
“[Advising duties] do take more time, but I don’t think my attention to those students is diminished,” said Carolyn Jacobson, professor of English. “I would really resist the idea that the quality of education is lower, it just means that I’m spending more time with students and less time with other things that I might be doing.”
In addition to increased enrollment, there are also fewer tutorials being taught this year. During the previous two years, 35 tutorials were taught, while this year there are only 32.
This decrease can be attributed to “midsummer resignations or people’s life situations suddenly making it so that they couldn’t teach tutorial,” according to Jacobson.
In spite of faculty concerns regarding tutorials, current tutorial professors have mentioned some positives in response to the increased enrollments.
Phillip Jones, professor and humanities librarian, is teaching his third tutorial at Grinnell this semester. Increased enrollment allows for “two more eyes and ears and minds in the room, or sets of them anyway,” according to Jones. “It enhances the diversity of opinions or points of view, points of origin. The tutorial that I’m teaching is kind of Iowa-based. It’s a place-based study, so it’s relevant.”
“Because I know there’s a couple more students in the class, things need to run a little more smoothly,” Jones said, referring to the additional preparation required so that higher enrollments won’t hinder the pace of learning. “So that’s just another couple steps to make sure that our processes are clear.”
One strategy that Jones plans to utilize more in this tutorial is peer review. “[Peer review] would be my strategy, to have students help one another, probably a little more than I would have had them previously,” said Jones.
While tutorials are generally kept on the smaller side, teaching large classes and adapting to change are not new experiences for these professors.
“Fluctuating class sizes is not unprecedented, and we are always dealing with adjusting other things to accommodate more students in a class,” said Jacobson.
This past year, advising at Grinnell has been a major point of discussion. Joyce Stern, dean of student success and academic advising and Andrea Tracy, associate dean for student academic life, co-led the “Mapping the Advising Ecosystem” project, designed to gain a better idea of which departments and faculty members advise students and to identify the ways that advising takes place across college departments.
Belinda Backous, assistant dean for academic success and interim registrar, wrote in an email to The S&B, “The mapping project was the first of three phases of the Quality Initiative on Academic Advising. A quality initiative is a three-year project that always follows the re-accreditation process.” She also wrote that “the data that came from the mapping project was descriptive — it did not call attention to anything related to numbers or comparisons.” Instead, the data displays who is doing advising work on campus and describes what that advising looks like across different departments. The next two phases will consist of collecting feedback from the campus community, and then implementing improvements based on that feedback. This project is a part of the Quality Initiative, a central component of the re-accreditation process with the Higher Learning Commission.
Nick Phillips, current associate dean of curriculum and academic programs, said that he did not know whether the College has data on the potential connection between the faculty advising workload and this year’s tutorial enrollments. “I think anecdotally, you could look at professors who are carrying 20, 40, 60 major advisees and ask a very legitimate question: how do they teach tutorial?” Phillips said.
