Engagement in a profession

professors. The two were talking about the fact that they did not like teaching undergraduates and preferred to teach graduate students, and to do research. They were exchanging pointers on how to get out of undergraduate teaching. One of them was saying that he taught them badly: he reused his lecture notes and didn't try to put anything into it. And so the dean didn't make him teach that course very often. I found myself getting very angry at hearing this, but I couldn't quite under stand why it mattered to me what these guys did in their teaching. And then I realized that I had [formed a conviction] that pedagogy was fundamentally im portant, especially at the undergraduate level. At that moment, something in me said, T don't want to be like them.' It was then that I decided I would think about teaching at a small college. This event, described as a graduate school epiphany by an engineer who went on to become an outstanding teacher at an outstanding college, il lustrates the lack of support for taking undergraduate teaching seriously and aspiring to excellence in it. Yet isn't it worrisome that few college teachers would find the vignette surprising? Unfortunately it is not only university teaching where the central purpose of the profession appears to be compro mised. Physicians find themselves in creasingly in the role of administrators rather than healers, and lawyers com plain about not being able to serve cli ents with the personal attention they ex pected to be able to give when starting their careers. In most professions, prac titioners rarely spend more than a quar Jeanne Nakamura is research director of the Quality of Life Research Center and director of the GoodWork Project's research group at Clare mont Graduate University. The coeditor of Sup portive Frameworks for Youth Engagement (2001), she is currently leading research projects on the pursuit of good work in the American col lege and in mentoring

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• Targeted Comprehensive Induction for Urban Educators

  Lisa S Johnson•The New Educator•2011

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