I've just received a rather dispiriting email from a really good student about her anxieties about the work she is drafting. Specifically, she is referring to Brookfield's "lenses" for curriculum evaluation, as I discussed them
here (see slide 5 in particular for my point). Her concern is whether she is using the labels correctly. Is she getting it
right?
It's dispiriting because she has missed the point, particularly in treating the lenses--the ideas--as
objects to be learned
about (rather as historical "facts" are) rather than as
tools* to be
used as appropriate, but otherwise to be set aside.
- The task is what matters. What tool do I need to do this?
- Rather than; I've got this tool. What can I do with it?
(I admit that the perspective switch is not always clear, and sometimes the second question is important.)
But it is my fault that she has walked away with this misapprehension, and
that is what is dispiriting. What we (those of us brought up as academics in particular) teach, defaults to being an
object. Whereas in many cases it should be a
tool.
And it is our academic context which has forced this distortion. We insist on accurate regurgitation of stuff out of context, and don't ask about its
utility and how it can be
used **. And (how ironic it is!) as teacher trainers in vocational education, in particular, our approach devalues that utilitarian/instrumental perspective which comes quite naturally to many of our students, and insists on "privileging" our "academic discourse".
All that is a bit heavy to put into an email response to an innocent enquiry. So what I wrote was (redacted):
Don't worry! As I understand Brookfield he holds no particular brief for the specific "lenses" he identified--still less for the labels he gives them. All he wants is for us to look at our work in several different ways, or put ourselves in the shoes of different "stakeholders" and see how it looks from their point of view--there is no definitive list of whose perspective/lens matters or (still less) is "best". Each lens has something different to offer, and they are all valuable. Sad to say, there are links to the pervasive discourse of ... er,
discourse....
He's arguing for what is now sometimes referred to as
360 degree evaluation/ appraisal/ feedback, although he goes beyond that in entertaining conflicting views.
- The most obvious is probably the "dumbing-down" argument--the popularising lens/perspective/value base wants ideas to be accessible to all, while the scholarly lens protests that they are being distorted and over-simplified. Or the employers' perspective --"I couldn't care less what they understand about what they are doing, as long as they do it right"-- versus the educationalists' --"they need to know what they are doing".
- There's a great argument rumbling at the moment, from Atul Gawande's piece on the Cheesecake Factory. He is arguing that medicine and surgery has a lot to learn from the fast food industry! Totally different traditions and lenses, but what a potentially fruitful argument.
The notion of
frame of reference is a variation on "lens".
...but does this kind of argument help a student make the shift*** between the forms of knowledge?
* I'm using the terms "object", "tool" and "frame", here.
Perkins (2010: video) uses "concept", "instrument" and "action" to mean something very similar--I'm presumptuous enough to think that my labels are clearer for someone coming to the ideas for the first time, but his much more thorough and learned exploration is well worth watching.
**It is not that one is better than the other, as a moment's thought will demonstrate. It is that we should have access to both (and more) perspectives, and be able to deploy and value them appropriately.
*** It is of course an
epistemological shift; but I now hear that, and
ontological, bandied about so much and so vaguely, that I am backing off from using the terms unless there is no alternative.
