Advocate Online

We in the faculty of the Sage Colleges—small private sector colleges in Albany and Troy, New York—have been organizing for two-and-a-half years. It's been a long march!

Sick of administrative encroachments on faculty rights, we responded by forming the Sage Faculty Association, affiliating with NEA, and launching a campaign to become a full-fledged faculty union. In just three weeks, over two-thirds of our full-time faculty signed collective bargaining authorization cards.

Twenty-two grueling days of hearings before Region 3 of the National Labor Relations Board followed, as we tried to establish our right to collective bargaining. Then came seven months of waiting. Finally, last July, Region 3 ruled against us. We appealed to the national NLRB office, but in early November this appeal was rejected.

The SFA union drive has run up against a legal brick wall: The 1980 Supreme Court Yeshiva University decision. In this decision, the Court held that the faculty members at Yeshiva were managers and thereby ineligible for collective bargaining protection under the National Labor Relations Act.

This notorious decision has been used repeatedly over the last 21 years to derail private college faculty union organizing efforts. As a result, few faculty unions exist in the private sector today.

So collective bargaining is off the SFA agenda—for now. We are disappointed, but by no means devastated.

From the beginning we understood that beating Yeshiva was a long shot. We always emphasized a two-track approach: vigorously organizing and advocating on faculty issues, as we pursued collective bargaining recognition.

We've been able to rapidly bounce back from the legal setback and are now working to reform the undemocratic faculty governance system at Sage.

We are also building a statewide network of solidarity among private sector faculty activists regardless of their union or organizational affiliations and are transforming the SFA into a formal, non-collective bargaining local of the NEA.

Yes, there is life after Yeshiva; the SFA is here to stay! In the present conservative climate, we believe that an energetic, nonbargaining NEA local, broadly linked to faculty activists at other schools, will be a very effective model for private college faculty organizing.

Andor Skotnes teaches history at the Sage Colleges, writes on recent U.S. social movements, and is co-chair of the Sage Faculty Association (www.sfa.insidecrew.org).

I'd like to say!

Leora Baron (August Thriving) persuasively described the important instructional challenge of helping today's students learn to locate, evaluate, and use information.

One set of guiding principles that can be used successfully to teach students information literacy while learning important course content can be found on the Internet.

"Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible" is available at: www.21learn.org/arch/articles/ brown_seely.html.

Some strategies we've found to be effective in teaching information literacy skills in a discipline-based course-in partnership with a university librarian-include:

• formulating a series of authentic tasks or problems requiring students to locate accurate and current information;
• modeling alternative ways a relative expert, in contrast to a neophyte, might approach each problem;
• demonstrating in class or in the library the use of specific information search strategies, processes, and tools while students observe and evaluate the results; and
• providing a series of structured and sequenced follow-up opportunities for students to practice their own information search skills assisted by expert coaching.

—Jim Eison
University of South Florida