On classic sociology; they don't write them like this any more

I'm reading Becker et al. (1961) The Boys in White; student culture in medical school. It's the first time I've actually read it. I have of course raided it before, searching the index for a gobbet of material to use for a particular purpose, but I've never had the time to get into it. It is after all over 450 pages, and even now I am not reading from beginning to end.

At one level I am disappointed--I got it out of the library in order to raid it yet again, for a blog post yet to appear on professional socialization as the hidden curriculum, in the light of a recent study of how medical students' empathy declines through medical school--and I couldn't find what I expected to find. But then... I began to read more leisurely, taking the book on its own terms rather than imposing my own imperious demands on it, and I rediscovered a lost genre.

From the Lynds' Middletown studies (1929 on) to Becker and co.'s own Making the Grade (1968) there is a whole seam of big, sprawling, accessible and humane case studies*, more like current anthropology than sociology, which may be theoretically "naive" to current researchers for whom fieldwork is a (not entirely) necessary obstacle on the shortest possible path between idea and rateable article for the REF score... **

I have no idea how these people pitched for the funding to do the research, but it certainly wasn't by predicting what they would find out before they started looking for it, as current researchers have to do writing their bids. They did "grounded theory" before Glaser and Strauss invented it (I suppose it could be argued that it only had to be formulated as a "theory" because it was then becoming necessary to legitimise proposals with a "theoretical", even "scientific" base).

But these works are rich. They are full of--often unnecessary, by current standards--transcribed interviews, and observational anecdotes. Some of the subjects become old friends--oh, here's Jackson again! Wasn't he complaining about not being able to see the actual surgery on his obs/gyn rotation?

What's happened? Partly this kind of common-sensical description has been taken over by a generation of academics scrabbling to be more "scientific" (or more likely more "post-modern" aka incomprehensible) than thou. Partly it has drifted into the realms of reportage: the rise of popular non-fiction has probably lowered the stock of accessible scholarly writing.

It's all moot. But we'll all be the poorer if it disappears in any form; and there was a lot to be said for academic rigour and a concern for balance.


* I'm sure someone will argue with these arbitrary chronological boundaries; I concede in advance that I can't be bothered to research the field properly. It's potentially a whole academic career...

** I'm referring to US studies, but the UK tradition is not to be sneezed at, see for an intro (if you can find it) Frankenberg R (1967) Communities in Britain London; Penguin. And belated thanks to Frankenberg for accepting my first (actually, only) respectable sociological article in 1971 when he edited the Sociological Review.

On learning by naming

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
          And to-day we have naming of parts.

Reed, Henry. "Naming of Parts." New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942)

(Do read the rest of this very funny, but also cutting and sometimes beautiful, long poem about the absurdity of war, from the link above.)

I was reminded of this as I drove back from another teaching observation this morning, (the same circumstances as this earlier one). I'm happy to report that the student is making good progress, but she is still stuck with another hopeless course. The Wolf Report on vocational qualifications makes no bones that the quality of many of those qualifications is dubious, they are not fit for purpose, and effectively deceive young people into believing that they are going to lead somewhere. What I observed this morning clearly met those criteria. It was a Level 3 National Diploma in "Sports Development and Football"--a spurious concoction of a curriculum, even by vocational education standards, clearly not well understood by students or even the tutor. (To be fair, I must concede that today's lesson on planning activity sessions for children did have some practical merit--despite being enirely classroom-based.)

Its recurrent theme was matching up all activities with "the" four Benefits of Exercise. Not three, not five, not twenty-two, but four. It appeared that these were so doctrinally significant that they had to be taught dogmatically; they could not be discussed and discovered. And then they had to be written down and incorporated into the (written) assignment. (Without attribution--despite this being Level 3, which is just one level below first-year undergraduate level, the question, "Who says?" was never raised. No wonder freshers are thrown by their university experience...)

And there was no Japonica in a garden outside, but it came to me as I drove back that I had sat in on a session about naming of parts. At this level, it appears (on the basis of the previous observation and class discussions) that most of the learning is about attaching an approved label to a concept or experience. Rather like the magical belief in the potency of naming as a means of gaining power over an object, the assumption is that to name is to know, and that is all that is needful.

At least in Reed's case, the naming was clear labelling of concrete objects, even if one of them "you have not got"...

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
          Which in our case we have not got.

On frameworks

I'm sure the stats facilities of Blogger could tell me how many people have dropped by this blog, once, and then moved on. I do it all the time, dipping into blogs via RSS feeds. The really interesting ones I subscribe to, but I have to admit that many of them (principally those thrown up by my "teaching+learning+college+practice+teach+reflect" search string) are full of pious jargon-ridden bulls**t. Usually immaculately referenced.

Occasionally I come across sites like this one, or Don Clark's. I'm impressed by the amount of study and thought and experimentation which have gone into Don's ADDIE model. I wish I could be as systematic and organised. I wish I could bring together such an eclectic range of reading as does the author of the other linked site (although it does feel like a required assignment).

A while ago, I was trying to put something together on planning for teaching, and I made some effort to research the topic. Every textbook has something to say about it, and indeed the first pages I wrote for my main site were about how to do it. (You can see it is ancient--I still believed in "learning styles" then!)

In higher education, the most popular approach seems to be Biggs' "constructive alignment" (and here). But see David Jones' blog for a dissenting view-- I'm in awe of his scholarship, too. I'm just not convinced by any of them.

I don't believe anyone actually works like this; that they proceed step by step through a planning checklist or algorithm and eventually end up with a lesson plane or scheme of work of impeccable provenance which they actually implement (other than when they are being observed for assessment or inspection purposes, of course).

If I try to do that, I come up with something which is deeply boring and/or superficial, and I find myself back-tracking to change earlier stages in order to come up with something I can actually see myself teaching.
Which is a little embarrassing, because I teach this stuff!

And that's another problem, because students keep pressing me for a clear planning procedure.

So I was relieved to come across this (sort of) confession by Dan Ariely. It's not about teaching as such (but it is about how he teaches a subject in response to those demands), it's about marketing, but there are similarities of simplistic prescriptions;



Ariely's full blog posts with comments is here.

(Er--just don't tell my poor students who have to jump through these irrelevant hoops, particularly as they are submitting their final assessments! Although, to be fair, some of the simpler stuff can be justified on the basis of scaffolding, at the start of a career.)

On "Toy Stories"

Simply the most entertaining hour of TV for (in my limited experience) years. It does take an hour to watch, it's unashamedly "boys' toys", and probably inaccessible outside the UK, but enjoy!

On academic inhibition

A few days ago I wrote quite a long post about teamwork, nearly posted it, and then didn't, cut a large chunk and reinstated some of it, and then finally posted it yesterday and immediately had second thoughts...

It made no mention of teams in other contexts, of sports teams for example. (Because I know nothing about them.) It did not discuss Belbin on management teams (often misapplied and contestable as it is). The list of what is missing is endless.

It is also highly self-indulgent; much of it is about team membership in my own not-very-exciting career, and there is little reason to suppose that anyone else will be interested in that. At least I had the decency to put that beyond a jump break.

Why am I bothered? Even to the extent of boring stiff my few readers with this kind of meta-reflection? After all, the blogosphere is precisely a place where people notoriously pontificate about stuff they known nothing about, make stuff up, are unremittingly egocentric. There are no rules about citing evidence for assertions and claims, there is no requirement to confine oneself to relevant argument, or to keep within one's realm of knowledge and competence.

But those qualities are precisely those I bang on about all the time as an academic, and seek to instil in students. And it is their absence which leads me to be cautious about accepting students citing from the web in general and the blogosphere in particular...

And I have internalised them rather too much, to the extent of discounting the value of any other kind of writing, particularly on my own part. Even to the extent of gradually ceasing to voice opinions on anything on which I am not an expert--hence, on practically anything at all.

I'm planning a book; working title, "The Secret Life of the Classroom". It's proceeding rapidly. Backwards. It's not original research, but intended to be research-based and I suppose scholarly but accessible. It will be based on material I have taught for years--but the further I get with planning, the further away I am from actually starting, because in order to be credible I realise how much more work I need to do and how much I don't know.

Still, I have the time, I hope. So watch this space in a year or two, or five...

On a team

I was in prison the other day (just visiting for a teaching observation).

My student and I were just beginning our post-session discussion when one of his colleagues knocked on the classroom door to remind him that the morning team meeting would begin in a couple of minutes. He asked whether I wanted to attend. I wasn't sure it would be appropriate, because I was an outsider, but I needed an escort to get back to the gatehouse and no-one would be available until after the meeting, so I acquiesced.

I was so pleased I did. It only took ten minutes, and nothing exciting happened; some nagging about locking doors (of course), some reporting back on "incidents" last week which some people may not have known about, with a clarification of reporting procedures...

There were a dozen or so people present, most of them standing up, in the dingy outer office. About four or five people spoke in response to the chair's invitation for anything to share.The "manager" was not even there (and I'm sure she's not happy with her formal label--she was a student of ours several years ago) but it all happened regardless. I have no idea whether anyone took notes. I hope not, because there is nothing more toxic to teamworking than having an eye to an audit trail.

I was the outsider, and stayed physically on the periphery. But I felt totally at home.

It may be that working as a teacher, in a prison, focuses one's thinking on the clash of educational and custodial values.  (Although it does occur to me that these meetings may be part of the standard operating procedure and that the prison officers on the wings do the same thing... I don't know enough to have a view on that.)

But what really struck me was the sense of team membership. Interdependence counts in an uncertain environment (although in practice of course prison education is much less hassled than in any open environment). It's the culture I have spent most of my working life in, and although not a demonstrably sociable person, it's one I value enormously.

And it is almost totally absent in most teaching in higher education*. (Big generalisation, carefully qualified, and of course not properly evidenced... B-?) It exists in research teams, sometimes very powerfully, but not much in respect of  teaching.

I think there is probably more of a sense of being a team amongst staff teaching on a professionally-- rather than academically--oriented programme. The modules of a professional programme are jigsaw pieces rather than free-standing units**, and (apart from notorious instances where the staff are at vicious loggerheads with each other) the staff need consciously to work together. Numbers of students and of staff are probably more manageable, too.

On academic programmes, particularly those such as humanities where there are few prerequisites, the structure (and options) of the course typically follow the individual interests of the faculty. ("Fred's retired, so we'll have to drop 'Origins of the novel' this year, but Gabby needs some hours, and so we could offer 'Queer theory and early 20th century poetry' instead...")

Academe has an ambivalent relationship with teamwork. It's both a highly individualistic environment and highly mutually dependent (and the extent depends a lot on the discipline--the more equipment you need, the more you have to depend on each other). But it's a tremendous and yet little explored resource.

Incidentally, real Teamworking has absolutely no connection at all with what Human Resources departments think it is, with their obscene expenditure on external "team-building" consultants whose only impact is to unite the potential "team" in visceral hatred of HR and probably management in general. It has to be a bottom-up phenomenon (and of course as such it can--for better or for worse--interfere with top-down initiatives) but when it comes together it is transformative.

On living in a different world

1. A little while ago I was helping my son to do some basic DIY involving screws. He's coming up for 30, and I was amazed to find him muttering to himself the the mantra; "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" to ensure he screwed them in correctly.
2. Last year, at a study day for our in-service vocational teaching students about threshold concepts, the engineering special interest group suggested that "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" was an important threshold concept for their students to acquire. 
3. Just now, confronted with a rather odd mixer tap (faucet) in the bathroom where I am staying, and trying to balance the flows, I found myself having to use it, too. (There were two tap heads mounted horizontally opposing each other at the base of a common outlet pipe.)

But where has it come from? Why do students of 16+ years have to be taught it? Isn't it just more complicated than the metaphor we have "always" used--clockwise and anti-clockwise? Yes it is, but I've just realised that these students grew up in a digital era. I read somewhere in the last few days the claim that 60% of people check the time on their mobiles, even after they have just looked at their watches. That struck me as rubbish, but it does suggest that the analogue clock face is no longer the universal trope it once was. (Hey! I finally used that word! Probably never again.)

On the police getting younger...

...but not so young they need to be nannied like this?

Just what goes through the so-called "minds" of the people who devise this rubbish? And do they give a thought to what message it sends to rank-and-file officers about how their seniors view them?

On a prediction come true...

Harold Camping's response to the failure of his eschatological prediction of the "rapture" (pardon my ignorance, but this is a term which appears only to been used in the past ten or so years, associated with the amazingly/bizarrely successful "Left Behind" series of novels) is exactly as might have been predicted by Festinger et al.

But Mr. Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Saturday was “an invisible judgment day” in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.

“We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning,” he said. “May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment.”

(source here: retrieved 25 May 2011; my emphasis)

But what strikes me most forcibly is that he took the "spiritual/non-empirical" way out. He took the Pauline (Paul-eye-ne) option. Jesus was open to empirical claims and tests. The most important was that he would rise from the dead: even Paul took this on board ( I Cor. 15:14), but it remains unclear about what this meant/means. Jesus claimed a gospel of liberation:

he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised... (Luke 4:18 [AV]) 

But there was precious little evidence of it happening (not his fault: I remember a vox pop interview in South Africa at the time of the first free elections, and the interviewee, who had been queuing for hours to vote, being asked what she expected from the ANC and Nelson Mandela. She recited a long list of perfectly reasonable but utopian aspirations. How long would all this take? asked the interviewer. "I'll grant them three months.")

If you can't deliver what you have promised--promise even more, but in less specific terms...Or those further removed from testable reality... Until no-one can tell whether or not you can deliver.... Prophets and politicians and perhaps pedagogues all do it.

Sometimes--not at all often, I hope--it's the best thing to do. Better than setting yourself up to repeat the same error five months down the line.

On the rapture--or not...

There's a good piece here on the possibility that the promised eschatological event won't happen.

As it points out, end-of-the-world scenarios have been fruitful research material for social psychologists since the mid-50s. And I have no doubt that there are dozens of research teams already busy this time around.

I've tried to apply the research on cognitive dissonance to less cataclysmic learning situations here.

See you Sunday! Perhaps.

On something completely different; Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

dir Jacques Demy (1964). Imdb entry here. Open Culture comment here.



Enjoy!

On the next step beyond wikipedia

Students are routinely warned not to cite wikipedia as a source in their work. However, sometimes it is the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of a subject--if only one could drill down to its sources (some good pages do reference them, but many don't) and evaluate them. They are not as transient as a wikipedia page, and they can be cited (if authoritative enough).

That facility is on its way. A new site--still in beta--seems to have adapted a similar technology to that used in Turnitin (plagiarism detection software) to find phrases and sentences in a Wikipedia article which also appear elsewhere on the web, to highlight and show the resemblances in a pop-up window, and to display the source information as a link so you can go there and check it out. Amazing! Semantic search is effectively here.

The team have not yet incorporated all of Wikipedia, which it why it is still in beta, but it can only get more useful.



I have a few anxieties about what this might do to some desk research--it just pushes the issue of evaluation further back, in that you still have to evaluate the source material rather than the secondary wiki article, but you do still have to evaluate it.

It may encourage a student in a hurry simply to read (and even quote and attribute) a single sentence from a primary source and never read enough of it to get a useful overview, or appreciate the significance of that sentence within an overall argument or body of evidence.

But used with care, it has potential...

Thanks to Amy Cavender at ProfHacker for the tip--read her take at the link.

On the theory and practice of the right to be heard...

I've just been watching Newsnight and a discussion of the privacy/freedom of the press/injunctions issue. The participants were a well-known actor, a lawyer, a magazine editor, and a "former escort"*

Much of the discussion concerned how rich men were able to exploit the present legal provision to cover up their discreditable activities, often to the oppression of others involved who were prohibited from telling their stories.

The discussion was articulate and cut-and-thrust, good TV. For three of the four participants. The chair, Emily Maitlis, did a great job trying to ensure that the former escort had her say. She (the guest) made her points well, but she was out of her depth when the discussion took off, and just sat waiting to be invited to join in.

(And substantively she had the most nuanced case to argue...)


Three confident and assertive professionals in their (more or less) natural habitat. And one not. And her non-participation said more about whose interests are really being served than any of the points being made verbally by the others.


Watch it on iPlayer until 20 May, here.


* All respect to the woman who was prepared to appear on the programme;
(her name appeared on screen so anonymity is not an issue, just irrelevant.) I'm sure it was not a trivial act.

On e-text books

The heading link is to an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr, on the limitations of the Kindle & co. e-readers as vehicles for text-books.

On the death of OWK

I'd normally just link to this page from "shared items", but this is worth a direct mention!

Not just because it's an exemplary spoof, but also because of what it says about how news is routinely mediated. (Click in the top-right corner for the original story.)

Thanks to Boing-Boing for the link.

On managerialism

Fred Inglis in the Times Higher Education this week:

The language of managerialism, as the immortal parodies written every week for these pages by Laurie Taylor assure us, is a language in which it is impossible to tell the truth.

(A fine line and point--even if he is lauding Leavis.)

On not strutting

This is silly at one (or several) levels. I looked for a forum or comment stream to post it to, but didn't find one, so it's here.... (Oh! missed this!)

I am a great fan of The West Wing; a candidate for the greatest ever TV drama series.

The real world counterpart of their situation room is a little less dramatic, but recognisable:

The decision not to release the pictures of bin Laden's corpse is explained here with another take here.

Or, as Leo McGarry put it in Series 2, ep. 8 in a different context: "We do not strut. Ever".

More deconstruction of the photo here. I'm not going to mention all the photoshopped crap out there.

On dividing up groups (and other tools)

Being practical for once; a ProfHacker article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a free US on-line magazine) drew my attention to Malcolm Sparrow's Excel-based tool for creating small groups from large classes taking into account several variables called the GRumbler.

It may be overkill given generally smaller class sizes in the UK even on undergraduate programmes, but nevertheless a useful tool.

And while I'm at it, here are a few more conceivably useful tools I have come across recently--and given that I am a skinflint, they're all free (for Windows--some may have Mac or even Linux versions, but I haven't checked):

• Teach history, politics, social admin? Then take a look at Dipity. It's an on-line tool to create interactive timelines. At the moment the demo. on the homepage concerns (of course) the history of Al-Qa'eda, but if you have a story to tell and it has been covered on the web, you can see how effective it may be.
• If you ever need to create screen-shots or screen-casts, then the simplest way has to be Jing, from Techsmith. It sits unobtrusively on your screen ready to grab static images or movies of whatever is going on, from any package. Only reservation; if configured to autorun at startup, it can slow down the boot process.
• Concept-mapping? When planning teaching, particularly out of one's direct speciality, it's sometimes difficult to relate concepts and ideas and items of information to each other, to see where they fit, and what other material may be important to mention... That is where C-Link comes in. It's another on-line tool: in its basic configuration you simply enter two terms which can be found in a particular knowledge repository (to begin with, Wikipedia serves very well)
• This is a Jing capture (saved as .swf) of C-Link at work (sorry the sound is fuzzy, but it doesn't add anything) It's almost an instant syllabus/book outline/essay generator.
• And this:
  
  
• ...is a concept-map exported from the site, and imported into C-Map Tools; which is a concept-mapping package (of course), also free and available from here. Concept-mapping is not the same as mind-mapping, as you can probably tell from the image. C-map Tools is a powerful package, incorporating its own presentation-authoring package--if you can find it--but not particularly friendly, and it insists on storing your files where it wants, not where you want. Nevertheless it does things others can't. (The image was once again captured by Jing in screenshot mode and slightly edited and cropped.)

On a new(ish) approach to presentation

Just in passing: I'm probably late to the party, but I'm coming across more and more examples of an excellent approach to adding animation to talks.

It's associated particularly with RSA Animate: the latest example concerns a talk by Ken Robinson on changing educational paradigms.

...but Jorge Cham is also in on the act: see his take on the physics of dark matter, here.

For some reason it greatly appeals to me--I'd be interested in other examples (there are plenty of RSA animates on YouTube I know about) and information on the practical implementation. Is it done with something like SmoothDraw, perhaps? Apparently that is what Sal Khan uses for the Khan Academy clips (which are well done, for all my reservations about the pedagogy).

On "cognitive theft"

When I observe students teaching, one of the commonest issues to draw to their attention is the use of rhetorical questions--not in the sense in which a politician might use them in a speech, but in the much more mundane sense of asking the class (usually) or an individual (occasionally) an apparently straightforward question, but then answering it for them.

Partly, it appears, this arises because of fear of "dead air", as broadcasters call it. I would say "silence", but part of the fear is that it won't be silence--it will be filled with a cacophony of off-task chatter, and that may take previous minutes to settle again. There's also the self-doubt which comes from being unsure whether you have pitched the question at the right level, or whether indeed the class have learned anything which may enable them to answer it.

At one level, of course, the unintended effect of such practice is efficiently to train students not to bother to answer questions. After all, all they have to do is keep quiet and you will do it for them. Moreover, there is zero chance of being humiliated by getting the answer wrong, and only the most trivial chance of being challenged with a follow-up.

This post takes the matter further. The author argues that in relation to teaching maths at least, to deprive the student of the opportunity of answering (by doing it for her) is to commit "cognitive theft"--the denial of an opportunity to learn.

(The post includes an interesting video of a TEDx talk by Gary Stager around this issue. The tone is rather self-important, and of course school-focused, but excerpts would make a good discussion starter in class.)

The post goes on to discuss the maths teaching approach of Sal Khan (of the Khan Academy) who emphasises direct instruction in techniques to solve problems, and suggests that it comes close to cognitive theft, too. Khan's approach has attracted quite a lot of attention in the maths-teaching blogosphere, and there are some thoughtful posts on it here.

The issues posed go much wider than maths education and schools; from my own area of interest, instruction in algorithms to reach the right answer but without knowing why --in any field--is a way of faking an understanding of threshold concepts, and is ultimately self-limiting and another form of cognitive theft.

Update

Thanks to Jim Hamlyn; he thought he'd missed the boat because of my frivolous later post, it appears, but commented:

A post on cognitive theft disappeared into the ether and I'd just dug out a link especially. Och well, here it is anyway:

http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/2939#comment-3896

 ...on the Khan argument.