Jim Swike, adjunct instructor of history, received the 2023 FA Member Excellence Award for Adjunct Service.

Getting to know Jim Swike during the transition from Blackboard to Brightspace last summer and fall, I was struck by Jim’s commitment to doing all he could to help students experience an easier transition. He spent hours poring over his class websites and creating instructional support videos. Jim embraced the approach that greater preparation on his part not only would improve his students’ understanding of his classes but also would ease up on his workload once the fall semester got into full swing.

Jim’s dedication and work ethic led to him being selected for this year’s FA Member Excellence Award for Adjunct Service.

Q — For those who don’t know you, tell us a little about what brought you to SCCC.

A — I was in the banking world previously and doing employee training in technology for a number of years. That was back when managers had a full-time administrative assistant doing all of the memos and letters, etc., for you. Then with the widespread adoption of computers, Windows and Microsoft Office, we all started doing all of that typing ourselves, which led to more business trainings at work.

When St. John’s opened the Oakdale campus, I took a job as manager of faculty technology training, then they moved me to the Jamaica location. That led me to explore teaching as an adjunct. I earned my master’s in history in May 2012 and started with an adjunct position at St. John’s in new media the following fall semester. I was a full-time employee and teaching two classes as an adjunct. While there, I completed their training for teaching online and started doing that. With my background in technology training, naturally I enjoyed making my classes more engaging for students so that was a success.

I retired from St. John’s in June 2019, got a call from Lynn Liebert Marx at Grant and started teaching HIS101 at SCCC in fall 2019. Since then, I have taught classes in four modalities: fully online, fully on campus, real-time online and combined online. I am very comfortable with technology, so I enjoy them all.

Q — I know you to be very much an above-and-beyond person, both on campus and off campus. In the FA, we know that our adjunct colleagues do so much and we’re happy to highlight and celebrate that. Describe for our readers some of the good work you do.

A — On campus, as you know, adjuncts aren’t required to hold office hours but many of us do give students our extra time and attention outside of strict class hours. And I meet with students more on their time, necessarily on mine. For example, I don’t have set office hours, so I am constantly meeting with students on the fly each week, whether on campus or on Zoom.

Off campus, I’m always giving back to my community. I’ve been part of my local historical society for about a decade, including serving as vice president for a few years, as well as the Greater Sayville Civic Association, for which I was elected president in March. I’ve been involved with both for many years. We do a range of activities, from litter clean ups to helping with the summer festival, to addressing community concerns.

I stay involved in many ways. There was a recent Newsday story about a state plan to eliminate history, so I wrote a letter to the editor about why this is something we just cannot do. History is not the study of dates but the lives of our ancestors. We need to learn from their stories. Civic involvement is constant, and I think it’s important to show this to our students.

Q — Since your background is in teaching people how to integrate technology, what are some of your suggestions for how faculty at SCCC might embrace technology?

A — We really need everyone to more fully embrace technology. Things change so rapidly, and it feels like higher ed is playing catch up. Our students are changing; they are more comfortable with technology and they have different expectations from educators. Most have used Google Classroom for years, and most love and are good at taking in content through videos. We need to meet those expectations because students are who we are here for, after all. We cannot forget that: They are why we are even here.

Personally, for example, I know students email me every day, so I try to respond as quickly as I can. It’s really not a burden. You get in the habit of doing it, and if I get several questions about the same thing I know to go in to the Brightspace class website and fix the instructions to make things clearer. It’s usually just a clarification, not an enormous revision. And then guess what? After I do some of that fixing on my end, I will get fewer questions moving forward.

I encourage faculty by saying to get started, just do small steps. Just experiment with at least one thing each semester. One thing I did to free up on-campus class time for conversation, for example, is to stop explaining what happened at Kent State during class. I posted a video in the Discussions area for students to watch, then we have more time to more fully discuss what happened and why. Who doesn’t want more class time for discussion?

I also love using technology because we can bring in supplemental content that’s not in the textbook, but you know it’s important, relevant and engaging for your students. An example here is when covering the early Gilded Age, the early business world, we talk about how more Americans were working in cities—but then the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire broke out in the city. That’s not in the textbook, but I point them to electronic resources about it. It’s an excellent supplement, and students find it fascinating. Then I simply point to fire alarms and escape routes on walls of our classroom, which really drives it home. It’s great to use Brightspace to introduce historical facts or other course content they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Another example is that I created a PowerPoint about Titanic based on an exhibit I had visited, so we can talk about how it changed things in a good way, such as having sufficient lifeboats and no more steerage.

Q — You also wrote up a JEDI Resources: Colleagues Share page for us this year. Can you talk about that?

A — I wrote to share some advice about how to get students to consider things from a variety of perspectives but also to help make sure we are doing all we can to engage students. I see my role as making the stories that form our history as engaging as possible, but it is really important to get students to consider all perspectives. For example, I learned about American history from one very traditional specific angle but then the 1619 Project introduced new concepts that we need to consider as well.

One way I teach students to look at different perspectives is how I structure their research project. A lot of our students don’t have a solid handle on what research is about. So I have them pick a topic, locate two different books on that topic by two different authors and analyze how the two books differ. For example, there are over 15,000 books about Abraham Lincoln. Students ask, “Why do people keep writing about him? Don’t we know all the information already?” I show them how motivations differ for each author; it’s about the author’s perspective.

Students gain even more perspective because they write their research paper, turn that into a presentation, get feedback and then build that back into the final draft of their research paper. Now students not only see the differing perspectives of different authors but also the differing perspectives of their classmates and me—and they get to draw all of that together.

Some of them also really understand how perspectives change over time, which is another way to think about history.

Q — What does it mean to you to be involved with the FA? Why should everyone contribute to the union?

A — Over my many years of working with faculty, I’ve heard some say things like “I’ve had it with this class!” or “The students today are so frustrating!” As I said before, the students are why we are here, which is why the JEDI Institute focuses on teaching everyone to be less deficit minded and more equity minded when working with students.

As a union, we in the FA need to continue working to bring excellence into our work on campus because that translates directly to the students. My wife and daughter are both teachers, and we all work hard to support students every day. It is so important—even to the history of our country! I always say that when you wake up each day, yesterday is already history. It’s not an exaggeration to state that how we teach students today literally is shaping our nation of tomorrow.

The union plays an important role in helping to make sure students can do well. We need to get to know our students and what motivates them, meet them where they are and help guide them to wherever they are going next.