On the acceptability of originality, criticality and context.

I came to university with a history--at least in my mind; probably no-one else ever noticed. I failed O level English Literature (now GCSE, and apparently almost impossible actually to fail). I passed on a re-sit. But as far as I can reconstruct, given that the whole assessment process was inaccessible to scrutiny in 1960, I rose to the challenge of some question about Wordsworth (whom I hated at that time with a passion worthy of himself) by referring to Aldous Huxley's speculations* about the neurological or even pharmaceutical roots of Wordsworth's vision;

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,

Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ll.1-4

Fifty years on, I think the marker was probably right! Chris Woodhead (a marmite figure if ever there was one!) has periodically made the point in his columns that schools are not about encouraging originality--pupils do not know enough at that age to make useful original contributions to anything; and even Diana Laurillard  argues that in science in particular, school and undergraduate study can be no more than an initiation into what is already known. (I think she concedes that an undergraduate final dissertation may perhaps occasionally have a touch of originality.) But of course by the time one embarks on a doctorate, the rubics will require "an original contribution to knowledge".

I've just caught up with two of Jim Hamlyn's recent posts; here and here.** The pedantry of the marker is mind-boggling, of course, but for me Jim's experience also poses the question of why he or she should find Jim's independent-mindedness so objectionable (even perhaps threatening) as to put in the considerable effort
required to nit-pick so obsessively. After all, this is a post-graduate course, and Jim's own discipline (art) is one which values and encourages creativity and originality and (critically) critical thinking, as this post of his demonstrates, so he can be trusted to have a handle on those values and attributes.

So where does the energy come from to set out so comprehensively to miss the point and to inhibit learning? After all, the marker could just have let things ride, and the outcome would almost certainly have been better on all fronts. I suspect that it has something to do with "the notion that the less meaningful a belief, the greater the passion and dogmatism with which it is held. This was observed by Swift (the war between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians in Gulliver's Travels, 1726, ch. IV) so it's not exactly original, and of course as in that story, it is religious disputes which spring to mind as the most obvious examples." I'm quoting myself here, from another post on 3 March 09.

That also fits with points I made at about the same time about referencing, and the other day about the "fetishization of citation". All these "technical" issues are no more than proxies for valuable knowledge which works--and you know you are in trouble when the proxies are elevated above the substance, or you stop seeing the wood for the trees.

Returning to Graham Gibbs' keynote; one of his opening slides was a quotation (I didn't make a note from whom) to the effect that "there are just a few factors which make a difference in teaching, and we know what they are." He explicitly denied that was the case, although of course such a contention is the foundation of teaching development programmes; it is an article of faith which tutors on such programmes must believe, otherwise they would not be able to carry on "delivering" them.

I admit that I am having something of a crisis of faith. Gibbs' account of the variability of student experience and the importance of context, and even Hattie's acceptance that "everything works" (in some measure) (2009: 1) accord much more closely with my experience than practically anything in the teacher education literature. Also at the conference, Ray Land recycled to great effect a lecture from a few years ago when he stood in for a keynote speaker who got stuck in France; he took us on a tour of the changing context of education and students' lives, and concluded that current models of the university were being superceded.

When teacher educators start behaving like Jim's (and Sean's) examples, and many others, we have to conclude that the implicit deficiency model is flawed, because we do not have the authority to which we pretend. So perhaps it is time to see the lecturer as the expert in teaching in his or her context as well as a subject expert, and the role of the teacher educator as no more than a consultant to the practitioner.

In practice I think that is what I have been doing for years... Of course, it screws up conventional approaches to assessment, but that's OK.

*  Huxley A The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Harper; various editions 1954-2004
** Of course I'm well aware that I'm accepting Jim's account as legitimate, and the whole story--but I have no reason not to, and this is the start of a meditation rather than an adjudication.

On the "fetishization of citation"

Thursday's keynote at ISSoTL10 was by Jude Carroll, whom I met for the first time face-to-face after scores of email exchanges. She is best known for her work on dealing with plagiarism, of course, but in this case she was addressing issues around a transcultural approach to curriculum issues.

I was delighted to hear her inveigh against the "fetishization of citation". I've also touched on this issue here. Jude went so far as to say that this obsession with "correct" referencing was a phenomenon of the last ten years, and implied that it was symptomatic of a crisis of confidence on the part of academics in their own authority in a post-modern world. It's not so much an issue in the STEM* world, where there are real, objective and positivistic criteria for judging ideas. Like, "does it work?" If it does, who invented it is a matter for the historians and the (patent) lawyers.

Moreover, it is an approach which devalues the contribution and opinion of the student herself. Jude's piece suggested to me (she may well have said something like this, but I don't want to put words in her mouth), in the context of the internationalisation of the curriculum, an inability to handle the different ways in which prior knowledge is or may be dealt with by students of different backgrounds and from different disciplines.

She played with the manner in which direct quotations from other scholars had been used in presentations within this very conference.

Which set me thinking about the concurrent sessions I attended, and the ways in which such scholarly material had been incorporated and used. I caricature slightly when I say there was in a number of them a ritual obeisance to the literature, as part of what was frequently explicitly identified as a "literature review" section (many papers followed the traditional pattern of a published research paper or dissertation). Nothing wrong with that, except that in Perkins' term, the knowledge was often "inert". Not much was done with it. It was introduced in order to confer academic respectability on the session and then--with some notable exceptions, of course--it just lay there...

I think I detect that this is becoming ever more common, possibly because of search engines; it is so easy, with basic search skills, to go straight to an article in a peer-reviewed journal which bears in some measure on your subject. It will probably be a contribution to a discussion, in your own discipline, and very up-to-date. And it will probably say very little of interest, or ever have been heard of by anyone else. Your session may be the only citation it will ever get!

I actually made a note of several promising leads, and since getting back I have followed up some of them, to my disappointment.

I would have been much more interested in people making use of some "golden oldies" (my preferred strategy because I was always too lazy and too easily bored, and too busy, to keep up with new stuff unless someone used it or recommended it); or illuminating their arguments from parallels outside the immediate confines of their own disciplines.

In a "soft" discipline like "education", it is all too easy to build foundations merely on successive bundles of reeds, rather than rocks. But one may feel the need to be seen to be imitating academics in harder disciplines.



* Science. Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

On the Screaming of Participants

I wasn't cheered up for long. Follow the links in this post--and his suggestion about using it as an intro to a lecture on the dark side of Milgram. (Do remember he also started the six degrees of Kevin Bacon stuff.)