Host Annmarie Caño speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

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Clay Walker is a senior lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University. In this episode of EmpowerED to Lead, he shares how developing academic literacy skills is critical to success. He also reveals why it's better to listen to understand than to respond, and shares how his pursuits outside of the classroom help him stay in the moment professionally.

About Clay Walker

Clay Walker is a senior lecturer in the English department at Wayne State University. He teaches general education writing courses in addition to developmental writing for the APEX Summer Bridge program. Walker's research focuses on how literacy can support personal, institutional and social change.

Transcript

Annmarie Caño:
Welcome to EmpowerED to Lead, a Wayne State University podcast for academic leaders who are committed to empowering their community to succeed. I'm your host, Annmarie Cano, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Faculty Success at Wayne State. In this podcast, we'll explore the personal journeys of academic leaders, both current and emerging, to learn more about how they've developed their careers. We'll speak with faculty and staff about their work and how they have empowered themselves and others along the way. By doing this, we hope to empower listeners like you as you continue on your leadership path.

Today, we're speaking with Dr. Clay Walker, Senior Lecturer in the English Department and Chair of the AAUP-AFT Local 6075 Lecture Steering Committee. Dr. Walker teaches general knowledge education writing courses including basic writing and intermediate writing and developmental writing for the APEX Summer Bridge Program. Dr. Walker's research focuses on how literacy can support personal, institutional, and social change. As Chair of the Lecture Steering Committee, he has worked to raise awareness about lectures at Wayne State and address their concerns. Welcome to the podcast, Clay.

Clay Walker:
Thanks. Glad to be here.

Annmarie Caño:
What do you love most about your job?

Clay Walker:
Well, I think what I love most about my job is working with freshmen and both really the... My main teaching assignments tend to be English 1010, Basic Writing, which is required for students who don't meet the standards for the required basic writing course, English 1020. Also, in the intermediate writing courses, those lately tend to be more and more freshmen, often in their second semester after they finished 1020. What I like about this is, for me, there's a very big personal connection to teaching writing at this level.

When I went to college, I was not prepared. I failed six classes. I ended up leaving Michigan State without a degree. I would blow off gen ed courses. I would do great in my major courses. I'd get As, but I'd blow off my gen ed courses, or just not go to classes. I was working too many jobs. I didn't know what college was. Came from a family where my mom didn't finish high school. My dad had a high school degree. I didn't really know anybody who went to college. But I lived in a school district where everyone was going to college so I sort of followed the drift, but I really had no idea what I was doing.

So I left, and I worked full time for a few years cooking, and at some point realized, "What am I doing with my life? This is not what I want to do." I went back to college, and it took me a couple of years really to figure out how to be successful. Maybe my last year and a half I was starting to get 4.0, which I really should've been doing the whole time, but it was an issue of preparedness and just not understanding how to be a student and how to do that work.

My interest in teaching writing comes a lot out of that. It also comes out of experience when I was cooking. And even when I was at grad school, I was cooking and working mostly with Mexicans. We would spend the shift mostly speaking in some versions of Spanish and English and in between. I had close friendships there. Just seeing their sort of like... helping people, friends of mine, access things they needed in society but couldn't because of language differences or education differences. And there was a wide range of people's fluency with English.

Those two things have always been important motivators for me in teaching writing and helping people get access to power and the sort of the role that writing and reading plays in accessing real social power, whether it's a degree, whether it's a... Whatever it is people want to do in their life, reading and writing are important. So in the basic writing courses, I talk a lot about how if you want to get a college degree, developing these academic literacy skills is critical to your success.

In intermediate writing course, I have students go out, and they observe what kinds of reading and writing are happening in the professional communities they want to join. We have some variety of medical school or nursing students are a lot of the students that I see in these courses. A lot of them will think, "Well, I'm going to be a nurse," or whatever, "and I'm not going to be researching." What they're always surprised to find is that, yes, there's reading, there's writing.

Those are integral to really any job that you're going to do with a college degree. The question is what kinds of reading and writing practices? Helping students learn about that and find success in their life and the role that learning reading and writing and strengthening their abilities with different types of reading and writing plays in that success is important.

Annmarie Caño:
I like what you said about reading and writing is keys to power and mobility and being able to achieve the goals that you want no matter what field you're in. Then there's critical thinking and being able to not just sequence the words but also put things into a logical sequence and making those logical turns of a phrase to get you to the next level. I wonder when you are in school the first time as an undergrad, how did your instructors make that connection between, "Hey, what you're learning in class is connected to some bigger dream you may have?"

Clay Walker:
I don't remember any moments like that for me. I don't think I was aware of that until I returned to school as an older adult in my 20s, and I think-

Annmarie Caño:
But it sounds like that's one of the connections you're helping people make right now.

Clay Walker:
Yeah, it's something I definitely talk about explicitly and in different ways. There's this success in college orientation. There's careers, your life goals orientation. And I asked students directly, I ask them to think about, "Why are you here?" And I try to highlight for them that, Wayne State's an important... It might seem like to a lot of our students like this is just another school or it gets overshadowed by Michigan and Michigan State in the broader culture of Michigan.

But I point out to them that you're at a top university, one of the best places in the world to get an education. I don't know if you realize that, but you need to think about why are you here and what are you doing? I did not have that awareness. But I also take other approaches too. In the apex course, we talk a lot about language and language difference. And this is an issue that my field is dealing with too, the racist underpinnings of dominant and academic discourse.

And for many of our students, this is a problem because the kinds of language they grew up using is very different than the kinds of languages they need to be able to use to demonstrate success. So they might have smart things to say, but they're not always perceived as smart. If they're wrapped in the discourse that's... If it's black English or if you know they are a working-class student, which is how I came into it and finding whatever the kinds of languages used at home, how does that connect to the language that's the language of power?

And so in the apex courses, we work to think about what are those differences and how do you deal with those differences? There's different answers. Some people say, let go of that home connection because you need to have this public identity in this public role. Other people say that you need to actively resist and challenge the systems of domination and language. And so I asked those students to think about that and to recognize that for all of us, this is not a neutral space they're entering, and it's a contested space. And they're trying to navigate that to get a degree, or to do something with their life or to maybe to change their material conditions in their life, or to experience some kind of personal growth. But it's through language.

Annmarie Caño:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And what you're saying is resonating with my own experience too. I was also working-class and English was my parents' second language as adults. And so when they were teaching us English, we were not learning proper English in the home. So when I entered college and I was surrounded by people whose parents and grandparents went to college, who spoke in a different way with different cadences and a different vocabulary, I felt like I really didn't have the confidence to speak up in class, that I couldn't compare to them.

And it was really a worry for me. And I really clammed up in those situations. I learned really how to write not so much in undergrad but in graduate school. And even now, sometimes I think, "I don't sound as eloquent as this other person who comes from a highly educated background." So when you say it's a very highly contested space, I don't know if I've ever thought about it in that way. And then you have to choose, right? How to express yourself. Do you express yourself in this acquired way or in the way that you feel more familiar with at home?

Clay Walker:
It seems that way.

Annmarie Caño:
Yeah. But other people don't have to choose. Right? So, people who already have that background, they don't need to make that choice.

Clay Walker:
Yeah. I felt that I had to choose, and I've long felt like my move towards academia and academic language and embracing this way of using language, created space between me and my parents in some ways. And my ability to talk and connect with them has fundamentally changed since then. And that's as a white man, and I still have privileges that are baked into that experience that some of our students don't have. For some students, the move to white academic English, there's might be more at stake.

And so I think it's important for... I try to help students just start to think about that as they start out. And because I mostly work with them in those first couple of semesters. So start to think about that and be aware of it. And hopefully, that leads to their ability to make decisions, principled decisions, or think about the connection to their home language.

Annmarie Caño:
And for faculty who don't teach writing and composition but are teaching topics that requires writing or even public speaking, these are concerns that they should also share, right?

Clay Walker:
Yeah.

Annmarie Caño:
So it's something that students also need to be aware of and to put a name on like, "Why am I feeling this discomfort and how do I work through this? Or how do I use this discomfort to claim something for my future?" But also thinking about how does it affect my identity? And for the instructors to be thinking about this as well.

Clay Walker:
It's not just writing, but it's also... I mean, how we speak orally and how we use language. There's the connection between the two. And so one example that I often use with students that I think gets to it quickly is mine's. Some people say mine's, this first possessive. And of all the possessive pronouns... the standard version is mine. Whose car is that? It's mine.

But the other pronouns end with S. It's yours, it's his, it's hers, it's ours, it's theirs. So mine's generalizes this rule, this S at the end of these possessive pronouns. But it gets wrapped up in attitudes about, well, that sounds ignorant or uneducated. We have these strong feelings if you're using a version of language that isn't the right one. And those attitudes seep in. They sort of leak into our added feelings about what kind of person you are.

And so being aware that, I mean, that's a logical generalization of a rule. I think that my sense and I talk about with students, is I think it comes from... and I don't know the scholarship on this if there is any. But my sense is that it comes from people of color, and it's by experience it's primarily used by working-class people of color.

I actually first heard it in teaching community college classes, but lots of students here... I ask about, in some of my classes, maybe 40% of the students use it. But there's lots of things like that that, these little things that sort of ping our attention. And they bring up feelings and attitudes that sometimes maybe limit our perception of the quality of their ideas or thoughts.

Annmarie Caño:
Not to mention accents. When I was in college, I had a very thick Long Island accent, and someone asked me if that was my real accent because it sounded so ignorant. I remember I just didn't have a response for that. I was so shocked, and we were all at the same college. We all got in there, but this person was basically saying, "You sound too ignorant to be here."

And I don't have a record of me changing my accent. But it was during college that I lost that accent, and I think it was probably purposeful on some level. I didn't want to sound ignorant. I want to sound like a smart person. I want people to respect me. And I have recordings from when I was very young. And, boy, it was a really thick accent. But that just shows you how people's perceptions can affect you as well and [crosstalk 00:14:10] change your behavior.

Clay Walker:
That's interesting.

Annmarie Caño:
So let me ask you about your other role on the Steering Committee for lectures and the AAUP AFT. Tell me more about that. What do you like about that job?

Clay Walker:
I think what I like about the job is just meeting with people across the university who are in a role similar as mine and just learning about what's similar, what's different in these positions. In some ways, they're positions that are... they've kind of been retrofitted to adapt to just the changing landscape of universities. And Wayne State is by no means unique in its role of full-time contingent faculty.

And so lecturers, our job is primarily teaching and service, but a lot of us are wrapped up in... I mean, we're in touch with scholarship, which you have to be to teach at an institution like Wayne State. But then we also have a variety of different... sometimes those service roles start to look like administrative roles. And we're involved in student groups and just a really wide range of work sort of life situations.

So what's interesting to me, as someone who my scholarship and my work, I'm intrinsically oriented towards teaching, I've always known I was going to be a teacher. I don't think I knew until I got to graduate school, I'd be teaching higher ed. But that's where I'm at. So teaching is important, and it's an important part of what lecturers do and helping. And I think that's, sort of the way I see lecturers is, universities have changed, where we have more and more people who are... Increasingly these faculty roles are just doing research, especially in the sciences over the last few years, 10 years or so.

A rise in people who are primarily teaching as lecturers here, and then people who are increasingly doing service and admin roles. And so this notion of the faculty member at a research-intensive university who was doing research, teaching, and service, that's kind of changed. And teaching matters more and more for places like Wayne State than it did 20-30 years ago. And so the success of our students is even more important now than it was. And lecturers play a big role in that.

So what I like about the lecturer standing committee is learning about what different people do and how they are similar and different. The goal is really to figure out how we can strengthen these positions because there was no master plan to create lecturer positions. As the funding for the universities change, and as roles have changed for tenured faculty, these positions have emerged. They play an important role. So figuring out how to support these people is important.

And another part of it is understanding how their role as lecturers... How did they get here? And it's complicated. You got to graduate school, I think, and you don't necessarily know what you're getting into, and then you end up with a job, hopefully, or you don't.

Annmarie Caño:
Hopefully.

Clay Walker:
But hopefully, you do. But the road there, for my situation, my goal was to go out and do a national job search, get a tenure track job. But I got divorced at the same time. And so I have kids, and so I'm rooted in this area. And so I was lucky that I happen to have a lecture job when I finished the Ph.D. And so I was fortunate in that way, but it's a job that I also had to learn to embrace and to rethink what my professional career is. What does research look for me now?

Annmarie Caño:
Right.

Clay Walker:
And helping people sort of figure out how they can flourish. Because there's lots of different ways you can be a lecturer. I think that's another important part for me is just figuring out what people are doing, and how can we help them be better at that sort of role, which is outside of the tenure track research world?

Annmarie Caño:
Right, and I think part of the national conversation is trying to figure out how we value people in these roles and the role itself, and how do we take away the contingency feel? How do we make this feel more like a stable job that will last for several years? And then also, like you said, how to support lecturers and say, "This is a viable career track." And also that they convey that within the departments and the schools and colleges.

As a onetime lecture myself, I think I was two out of 40 faculty who was a lecturer. And certain people treated me as an equal and others saw me as not as equal. So how do you develop a culture within the departments and the units where everybody has an important role to play regardless of what the title is?

Clay Walker:
There are many challenges in dealing with these issues. Some of our colleagues entered in their tenure positions in a very different academic world. The university is a world of ranking ourselves and each other, and lecturers fall into a place in that. But I think that these aren't post-docs. They're not stepping stone positions. Many of our departments, my department, lecturers are a third of the department, and sometimes it's more.

And many of our colleagues, lecturer colleagues have been here for 20-30 years, and have as good of a CV as anybody else and have had impressive accomplishments in creative or scholarly work or in teaching. They play integral roles to the success of the university. Dealing with the contingency issue, we're at a moment I think of recognizing that this is a moment where how universities work is changing, and lecturers... There is a need for people who specialize in teaching, and so how can we position them to serve the university?

I think dealing with this contingency issue is also about strengthening issues like academic governance, providing people with academic freedom that isn't guaranteed when you've got a two or three-year contract that depends on your relationship with a chair or a dean that could compromise what you are able to do. And that weakens, I think, the quality of what we can offer at the university in general. So I think there's a lot at stake for everyone, not just the individual lecturers but for the entire community.

Annmarie Caño:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So before we started recording today, we were talking about things we do outside of work that feed our work and feed our souls. And you mentioned drawing and painting. I wonder if you'd be willing to share with listeners about what that does for you.

Clay Walker:
So I started painting when I was divorced. It was really a coping, I think, strategy for me. I started taking art classes, and I wasn't good at photography, but I started drawing and realized I can draw, which was a real surprise to myself, and I was pretty good and I enjoyed it. And I was way more successful than I thought I was going to be. I was taking the classes as part of the tuition benefit for faculty. And initially thought, "Well, maybe I'll get a BFA in photography."

But then as I started doing more of the required drawing classes and the painting, it was just deeply fulfilling and I just felt like, "Why haven't I been doing this my whole life?" I still do it. I think the phase where I was taking a lot of classes is over. I didn't finish the degree program, but I've reached a point where I can paint on my own and continue to develop myself.

But, for me, what I like most is [inaudible 00:22:28] painting. Going out with everything, finding... go to a site, spend an hour or so finding a scene, finding something that resonates. And then I'll spend three, four or five hours painting that thing. Just this practice of being in a moment and struggling with the materials and what I'm seeing and just being in touch with my observations. And just trying to create forms and colors and lines and things that create a feeling.

And so this practice, which is not really connected in any way directly to any of my professional work, it's still important to me. But there were ways that did connect to me. I think taking the classes as a college teacher was very interesting. And working, developing relationships with students as a student, it just changed for me just thinking about the experience of being a student. It was interesting for me to think about teaching a class from this... I don't know, this new perspective.

And just made me think about what I did. And in some ways, it changed how I also deal with students and teach issues in my own class. It's kind of a humbling experience when you're really looking at someone like, "I want to learn this thing that I don't know." I don't know. But it's still a big part of my life. What I currently do is on Mondays, I try to do half the day doing some scholarship stuff and then half the day painting in my little studio at home. And maybe I can sneak in a couple of days a week. But it's tough during the semester.

Annmarie Caño:
It sounds like it's not only a personally fulfilling or meaningful activity but that it's given you some other perspective. It's like real-world perspective taking, so you're not relying on when I was a student this many years ago, but when I was a student last week or last year, which is very different. Because as you were talking about with lecturers or the role of lecturers, college has changed a lot. And the students have changed. There's generational differences so to be that student does give you some new perspective. You can bring back into the class when you're the teacher.

Clay Walker:
Absolutely. And you have different relationships with these students and so different types of conversations that I will never have with my students because I'm the professor, I have the power. I'm grading. There's just a different thing. And so, yeah, I think being able to see who our students are from a different orientation is helpful. Because you're right. I think that's a really good point. It is different for everybody. I mean, so much has changed in our society since when any of us were undergrads. And I think it's easy for us to get caught in that pitfall. Look, when we were students... So many, social media, phones, none of that existed. And those are all big differences and there's just different realities. And I think that was an unexpected benefit for sure.

Annmarie Caño:
So what you're saying is all of us who have tuition benefits should take advantage and take a course every once in a while.

Clay Walker:
I think it's a good idea. The way I encourage people to think of it if you're interested in something. For me, it kind of turned into a hobby. But I also thought, "Well, I would love to go back to speaking French or reading French." That's something I haven't studied in forever and I that could do that or maybe Spanish. I don't know, there's lots of different... People could be interested in any number of things. So I don't really know of anybody who takes advantage of it from our position as faculty, but it's there.

Annmarie Caño:
Well, maybe we'll see more after this airs. So one of the last questions we typically ask guests is what does it mean to empower someone to lead?

Clay Walker:
The only way I can answer it is to think about how I help other people lead. My approach as a leader is I like to facilitate more than anything else. I try to encourage engagement and to get people to add their perspective, which requires listening and listening in a way that... not listening to respond, but listening to understand what someone's saying, which is difficult to do. Because it's very easy for us to listen and to start to think about what we want to say.

For me in my role as a leader in the Lecturer Steering Committee, a lot of it has been listening, trying to understand what's going on in people's worlds. And then try to help them think about, find ways that they can take another step, move... From wherever they're at, what's the next ring out that they can go to and how can I help them get there? Which is a lot like teaching, at least how I think of teaching.

So I think empowering people to lead, I think as a leader, I see my role as helping. How can I get other people engaged and involved in taking some kind of action? Whether it's taking action just in their professional life or talking to their colleagues or getting involved in our movement to address lecturers at the university formally. There's a variety of different ways that you can take another step. It just really depends on where you're at. And it also depends on what you're able to do or what you feel like you're able to do. And so helping people understand those or see those dimensions is a big part of it.

Annmarie Caño:
Clay, thanks so much for sharing your insights today. Where can our listeners find you online?

Clay Walker:
Yeah, so by email, clay.walker@wayne.edu. But then I'm also on Instagram and Twitter. My Instagram is really lately just my art stuff, and then Twitter, I talk about some academic stuff. I'm not too active on Twitter though. It's a place for me to read. But, anyway, I'm claykleigh at both of those places. It's C-L-A-Y-K-L-E-I-G-H. And that's both Instagram and Twitter.

Annmarie Caño:
Wonderful. Thanks so much, Clay.

Clay Walker:
Thank you.

Annmarie Caño:
We're glad to have you listening to EmpowerED to Lead. To learn more about our podcast, follow us on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.

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