That’s right, folks, I am on a mission (cue the Mission Impossible music)! That mission is to stamp out the use (and particularly, the overuse) of acronyms at DePaul. All of higher education is plagued with this issue, but DePaul, in particular, seems very fond of its acronyms. Why say the college of liberal arts and social sciences when you could say LAS? Public Relations and Advertising is so many syllables and PRAD is just one! It’s easy to see the genesis of this practice and even why it is so widespread. So what’s the problem? Does being pro-number make me anti-letter? No, my issue with acronyms is akin to my problem with the overuse of jargon. The problem is that these acronyms might not mean very much to those outside of your inner circles. Referring to CSH’s MENP program in NRSG will be perfectly clear to some and gibberish to most. The problem is that as we strive for more and stronger collaborations across our colleges, departments, programs, and courses at DePaul, acronyms will become more problematic. These acronyms, which were very clear in our department’s faculty meeting, might as well be a foreign language to the faculty we’re working with in a different college. They can also be overwhelming to new faculty, staff, and students who are adjusting to so many new things when they start at DePaul. It’s like everyone knows the secret handshake…and if you don’t, do you belong here?

So, will I accomplish my mission? Definitely not. In fact, this isn’t even the first time I’ve written a blog post about this topic; somewhere (I assume in a dungeon with a lot of spiders and dust) there is a blog post from shortly after I started at DePaul where I wrote about how overwhelmed I felt by the overuse of acronyms here. Those of you who have hung on to this point might be wondering, what’s the point? If you’re certainly not going to achieve your mission, why write about this at all? For that matter, why am I wasting my time reading this – it doesn’t seem to have much to do with instructional design and development… I’m getting there, I promise.

The fact is that acronyms work quite well in some situations; spelling out (verbally or in writing) long names of colleges, programs, and concepts can be cumbersome and, when you are working with a group of people to whom the acronyms are known and understood, using acronyms actually makes a lot of sense. However, the use of acronyms privileges the “in group,” those people who have more experience or time with a particular topic, field, etc. and this has important implications for groups we really care about! Students from under-represented groups in higher education are far less likely to have exposure to academic lingo and acronyms than students who grew up in a household where both parents went to college. These are students who may already feel out of place at DePaul for a variety of other reasons (the other students don’t seem to look like me, seem to have more resources than I do, don’t recognize my cultural practices, everyone else seems to know what to do without help and I am always the only one asking, etc.). 

I admit this has been a long build-up for a rather short pay out, but what this means for your instruction, is that you need to be aware that this might be an issue for some, or sometimes many, of your students. As an instructor, you can combat this by being thoughtful about your use of acronyms. Do not assume that because an acronym is familiar to you that it will be familiar to your students. Any time you use an acronym in your instruction, be very critical. Is it helping by creating a shortcut to a concept that you are certain your students are already very familiar with or is it creating a shortcut for you that could make your students feel like they might not belong in your classroom? A few concrete tips:

Never use an acronym to introduce something that is brand new to your students – even if it is a very common acronym in your field. Like we do in our scholarly publications, spell out the acronym first (and teach students the letters your field uses as shorthand) before you start using it in your lectures or classroom materials. In effect, you have to teach your students what the secret handshake is before you start using it. Doing this will help your students to feel empowered. This is a way you can very intentionally invite students into your field and its unique ways of describing things. 

Be aware that new or transfer students will likely not be familiar with DePaul’s acronyms for academic buildings (eg. SAC) or colleges (eg. CDM) and be careful to define the meanings of these acronyms when you have members of these populations in your classroom.