When I was in undergrad I can't think of a single instance I went to office hours. I think, maybe, once, I went looking for a professor's office in the rabbit warren that was East Carolina's GE building, to try and get a signature for a class override (back in the good old days where we also stood in line to register), got lost repeatedly and gave up.
However I spent a LOT of time in my theatre professors' offices during my undergrad. One professor had a sign that said "if my door is open I haven't gone far," a sign I have on my door. Other professors offices were off the scene or paint shop, so I was always walking in and out of it. I rarely went in NEEDING something, often it was the proximity- I walked past the door, it was open, I said hi, often these turned into larger conversations, and I felt comfortable talking to them about career stuff, classes, work, lots of things, so I did. I knew where to find them and knew they were available.
Yet I would not have characterized or classified my theatre professors in the same category as my other professors. Not just because they seemed more accessible, but also because we spoke the same language, pop culture references and later theatre ones. It was that they wore jeans, and a lot of black, and boots. They didn't have tattoos and piercings, but the other students in the department did, so it was still normalized.
"Office hours" are one of those higher ed topics that you can pretty much set your watch by, right up there with laptop bans and attendance policies. They get brought up, usually as people are prepping for new semesters, and you find a dump truck worth of posts, opinions, think pieces, for and against them. For office hours, a lot of the conversations focus on making sure students, especially first generation students, know what office hours are. Repeated so often they've become teaching folklore- students believe professors are just announcing when they are in their office. That professors schedule hours but then cancel, or just don't show up. Professors who treat students like crap when they DO show up. Like the snark, "It's in the syllabus" most of these examples of teaching folklore around office hours are represented in various memes, just Google them.
I survey my students regularly during the semester, usually every four weeks, about how they're doing, what they like, don't, need help with. The last few years I've asked if they come to office hours, and why or why not. A few years ago I started getting variations on a theme. Students started to routinely tell me that they didn't feel the need to come to office hours because I always answered their questions either through email or before/after class, or when they randomly stopped by. That they knew I was there for whatever they needed.
Sometimes colleagues ask me if students come to my office hours, and I relay this- that while a lot of students stop by and talk, I actually DON'T have a lot of students who come to office hours.
Today I woke up thinking that maybe focusing on "office hours" is the problem. With everything going on, that has gone on, office hours seems like something we should be rethinking. So let's go back to the basics. What is the purpose of office hours? First, they are dedicated times when the professor is available as a resource to students. To ask questions about content, to work through a paper, to talk through ideas. The second is for professors to be available for advising. This can mean the practical advising for next semester's classes, the more general career advising, what they can do to prepare, and conversations about the field. The third is often one that not all professors are comfortable with, acting as a tutor, help, for writing specifics. Going through a student's paper, revising and editing it, part more importantly, providing a model and teaching students so they can learn to do this on their own.
What is important for all of these things is that one, students know these things are available, and two, that students feel comfortable taking advantage of all these things. Given that so many of our students are older or returning students, juggling jobs and families, commuting, doesn't it make sense to focus instead on these things rather than the format they take? So if a student finds it easier to email me a draft, that I give feedback on, and then we set up a follow up Zoom for them to ask clarifying questions, isn't that what is important? If a student is shy and prefers to come see me in my office, where the toys and action figures make it less intimidating to talk their way up to what they want to ask, that's okay too.
Like a lot of things in education, it seems that the majority is in a rabid rush to reset all systems back to before the pandemic, without any reflection or consideration on how these systems failed our students, failed our faculty, and could be made better. Telling faculty (just like telling students) they have to do something X way because that's just how it's done is about compliance, not teaching, and not learning.
There are a lot of disappointments that accompany the grief, the loss, the abject despair of the last 15 months, but the fact that we KNOW, we saw PROOF, how these systems failed everyone, that we had this huge, once in a generation chance to do better, tear it down, build back better, and we're just--- choosing not to.
But I can only control my world- my office hours, my classes, my students' experiences.
I'm happy students know I'm available, that there is help if they need it. There are some things I want to continue to improve- while I'm glad students feel comfortable stopping by, I have noticed that a room full of students just hanging out is intimidating to other students coming by to get help or ask questions, especially when students IN the room, don't pick up on the cue to leave. There's a needle to thread there. There is also a needle to thread between there and supportive, and yet still having firm boundaries between professor/mentor/advisor and student.
This last year I moved into a new office before the fall that was bigger to help with social distancing during office hours. Then as test positivity rose I moved office hours online. This summer, I moved to a much smaller office but it's in the main office of our building, students can see me from the lobby, and anyone coming into the office will have someone there to help.
