On turning right in my old age?

I have to concede that since I am sort-of retired and no longer have a full-time academic post (for which many thanks), I am marginal to discussions about course policy, etc. But...

The other day I was attending a committee concerning the part-time post-16 teacher education programme which has been a major reference point of my teaching for the past 13 years. I was there just to speak to a particular agenda item, but...

As is the way of such meetings, it got into a seemingly interminable discussion, in this case on whether or not there should be a (probably secret) fall-back date beyond a formal  deadline whch would give tutors discretion to accept work which (at the end of the summer vacation, mind) students had not managed to submit on time.

There were several minutes of this, with various tinkering amendments being proposed, and an emerging consensus that some accommodation did have to be made for those students who for no other reason than their ineptness, disorganisation and bone-idleness could not get their work in, lest they have to repeat a module at their own expense. (There are already perfectly fair procedures for a generous range of legitimate excuses.)

At last I couldn't stand it any more and butted in with, "This is supposed to be a course for grown-ups!" To which one tutor replied with feeling, "But they're not! They may have grown-up bodies but that's as far as it goes!" I muttered back that if you treat them like kids they will act like kids...

What was going on behind this exchange?

• Regardless of the political/process issues behind my intervention, I was correct. The first of the explicit course values in the Handbook states:

...you, the students on this Programme, are competent adults, already acquainted with the field of work and study...

• And that used to go without saying--up to a couple of years ago when the programme was still voluntary. Now it is obligatory, and my fellow-tutors teach it in college settings where their students (who are also their colleagues) are required to get the qualification as a condition of their probationary period.
  
  
• So they are faced with with a great deal of management pressure to "whip" completion, for which trust to the maturity and self-discipline of the programme participants is not enough.
• These pressures are explored in more detail in this paper, now published as Hadfield P and Atherton J (2009) “Beyond compliance: accountability assessment and anxiety, and curricular structures to help students engage with troublesome knowledge” in C Rust (ed.) (2009) Improving Student Learning 16; Improving student learning through the curriculum Oxford; Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp 158-170
  
  
• So, or but, does this force a change in the course values? How should we balance pragmatism and principle? It's my belief that the course is not merely about attaining some specified "standard", (which is the term used by Lifelong Learning UK.) but about inculcating a commitment to self-motivated, self-authorised continuing improvement in practice based on... (it is so difficult to say all this without slipping into the devalued cliches of HR, or enormous pretentiousness.)
  
  
• There's another example. One of the items at the meeting was a document proposing a structured approach to tutorial discussions, which some fellow-tutors believe is too tick-boxing, too hand-holding, even patronising, but which will be greeted with great enthusiasm by Ofsted--the outfit which inspects these courses (among too many other tasks .)
  

OK--but all that is just part of an important but routine debate about how much standardisation both ensures minimum standards but militates against the achievement of excellence, isn't it?

Yes and no. We could take this in the direction of a discussion of the virtues and vices of neo-liberal and conservative positions on social policy and intervention, which is clearer in the US rather than here (see the health care debate over there).

But this is a more personal and more reflective blog. What does my reaction say about me? Have I changed? Am I just being a grumpy old man? (Sadly, Keith Waterhouse has just died. I could only aspire to the accolade of GOM had I his command of the language, honed over 60 years in the popular press...)

There is another side to this, which is about attitudes to failure, of all things.

The liberal (that is short-hand; this is "neo-liberalism". No-one admits to espousing it [just as no-one declares, "I'm a fascist!". Not the same thing of course.]) --the liberal approach is deeply uncomfortable with failure, because of its association with personal suffering, which is regarded as both bad and unproductive. The downside of liberalism is that removing "failure" from the discourse also removes "success"; if failure is not an option, or has no downside, "success" does not count for anything.

The conservative angle is more robust, and tends not only to accept failure but also to demand it as evidence of the legitimacy of the "contest". The fact that failure may be attributable to factors for which the person who suffers its consequences can in no way be held responsible such as ethnicity, gender, or economic recession may be ignored (until "bad things happen to good people [like us]" when someone else must be to blame...)

Although never a social worker, I spent 20 or so years training them. Social work (or at least its rhetoric--which is often conspicuously at variance with the views of experienced [or perhaps "burnt-out"] practitioners) is of course a great bastion of liberalism and the redemptive potential of everyone. However, yesterday's broadside by the director of a major children's charity, calling for more early adoptions suggests the possibility of a swing back towards conservatism...

I have to confess that pragmatically (rather than ideologically) I am becoming more conservative. I don't think that I see that efforts to "help" actually work, much of the time. What seems so obvious to people in government is much less clear to people on the ground. ...

As ever, I am rambling. This is my fourth attempt to finish this post, which testifies to the extent to which this issue of the meaning of personal responsibility underpins so many other perspectives, as well as the protean nature of the debate. I can't take the discussion any further at the moment; perhaps I can revisit it later when another case kicks my thinking further along.

On diversity and science fiction

A fascinating, and for once an encouraging, argument. Neurodiversity is not merely accepted but welcomed--argues the author--in the realms of SF fandom.

Is it as simple as to argue that if your preferred reading and viewing involves BEMs (out-dated acronym, I suspect--Bug-Eyed Monsters) you are both more comfortable with them, and more able to empathise with those who are "different" in real life? If that is the case, the implications for the school curriculum are considerable; but I suspect that it is a minor effect, certainly not enough to address identity angst among adolescents. The argument, after all, is more about self-selecting adult communities.

On kakistocracy

"Kakistocracy". Wonderful word! I confess I have only just come across it, via the linked post, although Google has almost 29,000 links.

It means "government by the worst", and the very existence of the label rings bells for many of my acquaintance. The linked article takes a quite tightly-defined approach to its examination. I am not as academically constrained.

The Peter Principle (Peter and Hull, 1968) asserts that "in  a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". This was expanded by the Dilbert Principle (Adams, 1995) that "leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow.” (Apologies for being lazy and using Wikipedia links. But both sources are humorous in intent. Correspondence to reality is a bonus...)

It's not as simple as that in reality. Let's look briefly at some variations.

• My first serious job in education (apart from short-term locum posts in primary schools) was at the erstwhile Salford Technical College, in the Department of Business Studies and Management, headed by a certain G. H. in 1967. GH was a short balding tubby man with a comb-over who wore braces and his underpants outside his shirt. (All the previous information is factually true. I accept no responsibility for any contribution it may make to the formulation of a stereotypical image in your mind, however accurate that may be.)
  
  George (sorry!) was both incompetent and very successful. Under his leadership the department had grown from four to forty permanent full-time staff in six years, and student enrolments had increased to more than match that growth.
  
  In my previous job I had been introduced to the idea of the "sick leader". This seems an abstruse idea of no real importance, but it stuck in my mind because of its resonance with the wounded Fisher King in the Grail romances. Yes, that is indeed how my mind worked in those days...
  
  I did not make the connection until Tom M turned up after a couple of years as head of the marketing section. I don't know why he confided in me, but after six months he said, "GH is useless. If I'm to make anything of this section, it's entirely up to me. Unfortunately he'll get most of the credit." So he built up the section, both in spite of and because of the boss's incompetence. That is the genius of "sick leadership". It is of course risky...

• I have perforce followed the career of another of my bosses. Without going into too much detail, this person left under a cloud. Nevertheless, their career path was upwards, and s/he re-emerged  as a Dean at another university where I was working, proceeding to adopt exactly the same tactics as had failed so spectacularly in his/her previous post but one.
  

There seems to be an invisible watershed somewhere in college and university hierarchies such that below it, incompetence leads to marginalisation and even dismissal (although it appears the route to that can be tortuous if this NY Times article is to be believed), but above it, it leads to being "kicked upstairs". And, in a kind of corporate cognitive dissonant denial, institutions and their leaders refuse to acknowledge what a disastrous appointment they have made, and provide effusive references to push the culprit even further up the ladder.

But where is that line drawn? And how do you know when you are above it?

Is there something about the culture of universities which makes them particularly susceptible to this pattern? After all, the two kinds of organisation cited in the linked article as fostering kakistocracy were Italian universities--and the Mafia.

On choirs and communities

(The link may not work outside the UK.)

The Times called this BBC2 series, the first episode of which aired tonight (that's a verb I never thought I would use in real life), "engrossing and life-enhancing". It's about a talented and engaging choirmaster, Gareth Malone (who--despite his achievements, looks hardly old enough to have left school. You know you are getting old when the choirmasters start looking young...) starting apparently from scratch to build a community choir in a run-down suburb "ten miles north of London". I'm sure the back-story is more complicated and manipulated than the programme suggests, but for once that doesn't matter very much.

Community singing is a powerful activity. It was a powerful component in the Reformation, as the tradition of communal hymn-singing involved the congregation in the liturgy. Methodism, as a Protestant denomination, was built as much on the hymns of Charles Wesley as on the preaching of his brother John. In a secular context, sponsored community singing arose as a way of encouraging community involvement between the world wars. Not to mention its role in the Nuremberg rallies... "Powerful" is independent of "good/bad".

It has declined in recent years, it appears. I'm not sure what has happened to singing in school assemblies, which used to provide daily--if much derided--training in singing hymns and songs in unison, but as the programme points out, it survives only (for non-church-goers) in the raucous bellowing of the football terraces. A few years ago, one of our students suddenly died in his mid-thirties, in the middle of his course. His funeral was an impressive event. It was held in a small church in the middle of nowhere, but it was overflowing with mourners. But the singing of the two quite traditional hymns was sadly execrable--no-one of his generation seemed to know how to do it any more. In this programme, this decline seems to serve as a proxy for an overall decline in "community spirit".  

Here singing together is being enlisted as a form of community development, and the programme (to date) makes a very good case for it. Unfortunately it succumbs in some measure to the cult of personality. And that suggests (later episodes may, I hope, prove me wrong) that the benefits follow from the charismatic leadership of Gareth Malone.

The initial impetus may be his (and the BBC's). When someone presents themselves on your doorstep saying "I want to set up a choir!", the presence of a camera crew does hint that this is not merely a personal whim. My own research experience testifies to the impact of sound recorders--let alone video cameras--on the scene.

I don't in any way wish to detract from the BBC story. But I would like to set another, equally encouraging, story alongside it.

A standard exercise on our teacher education course, as on many others, is "micro-teaching". There are many variants, but essentially a student has to teach a short and focused topic or skill for a few minutes to his or her peers or perhaps to an imported group of learners. The lesson is then critiqued first by the "teacher", then by their peers, and finally by the tutor.

(Names may have been changed in the following account, but since it is wholly positive, this is merely a gesture to preserve the putative anonymity of a student whom I have not been able to contact to clear her permission... I hope you are now thoroughly confused.)

Sharon teaches business studies. I don't know the background but I suspect that confronted with the micro-teaching exercise she wondered what kind of free-standing topic she could tackle in 20 minutes. She decided to do something completely different (always a good sign!)

She sings in a gospel choir at her church. As far as I know she does not conduct or train it. But she undertook, in 20 minutes, to get the rest of the class to sing a chorus in  four-part harmony. And she did it. It was a little ragged, admittedly, but it was an impressive performance given the constraints. Apart from the participants, the only audience was me.

A few months on, we had our intensive residential block, leavened by elective sessions, offered by participants on the basis of their distinctive skills. Sharon agreed (rather than volunteered; such was the nature of the event) to do a 90-minute elective workshop for whoever turned up, on gospel ensemble singing. A dozen or so people turned up.

The conclusion of the block was a plenary presentation of findings from the subject-specific Interest Groups. Electives were side-shows, not featured. But my colleague directing the whole event was approached by a student--not Sharon--asking for a chance to perform before the whole 160-member group. He, of course, agreed.

They performed "Lean on me" in four-part harmony. And got a standing ovation. After 90 minutes from scratch (OK, they may have practised surreptitiously behind the bike sheds...) Sharon was gratified but (my inference) a little bewildered. She did not fully grasp what she had unleashed. She never set out to teach anything as powerful...

I can think of at least six plonking banal morals from this story---but none are as potent as the story itself.

On another overview of on-line education. Are the geeks backing off?

A few days ago I drew attention to a report from the US Department of Education on on-line learning.

I should have waited, because now there is an interesting parallel report from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities / Sloan National Commission on On-line Learning.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry introduces his piece thus;

They worry about the quality of online courses, say teaching them takes more effort, and grouse about insufficient support. Yet large numbers of professors still put in the time to teach online. And despite the broad suspicion about quality, a majority of faculty members have recommended online courses to students.

That is the complicated picture that emerges in "The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning," part of a two-volume national study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities—Sloan National Commission on Online Learning. ...

The major survey of public colleges and universities found that 70 percent of all faculty members believe the learning outcomes of online courses to be either inferior or somewhat inferior, compared with face-to-face instruction.

Professors with online experience are less pessimistic. Among those who have taught or developed an online course, the majority rated the medium's effectiveness as being as good as or better than face to face. But in a potentially controversial finding, even among professors who have taught online, fully 48 percent feel it is either inferior or somewhat inferior.

And for those hooked on the hard stuff, here is a discussion of attending a virtual conference in Second Life.

Rather more polemically, Mark Bauerlein draws attention to the impoverished nature of on-line and mediated communication in the WSJ. Read the comments, too. (And incidentally he mentions the recent death of Edward T Hall, anthropologist and author of "The Hidden Dimension"--on cultural aspects of the management of physical space--and "The Silent Language", to which Bauerlein refers. Hall was 95; his website has not yet caught up with his death.*)

It's all interesting in its own right, but most encouraging is the more considered and balanced evaluation of technology-based teaching and learning which is emerging. The Second Life example particularly is a comment on the former geek rhetoric, "We can, therefore we should". Instead, there is a more realistic question about the added value of doing stuff on-line (and the added costs).

But there is also an issue about whether people like us are really equipped to comment on what the student experience might be. They, it is argued, are "digital natives" who have grown up with all this technology and to whom it is totally transparent and natural. We did not, so we shouldn't project our own reservations onto them...

---

* Oh dear--I can't resist. The question of who will up-date one's website with news of one's death is a new problem. But it is not as exotic as the question concerning, it appears, some American evangelicals who believe in the Rapture (Google it if you are not into eschatology), when Jesus will return and true believers will be taken into heaven, leaving the rest of us behind. The problem is, who is going to look after the dog? No worries! Rapture Pet Care has it sorted. A dedicated band of atheists will...

On resources on lecturing

I'm still sort of doing other things at the moment, but expect to be blogging more regularly in the next week or so. In the meantime here is a great compilation page on lecturing which should provide more than enough links to keep you going!

On an overview of on-line education (in the USA)

Brainstorm - Is It Time to Get on Board With Online Education? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The U.S. Department of Education has conducted a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of on-line education. (For those not familiar with the jargon "K-12" refers to compulsory education [Kindergarten to 12th Grade]).

The picture is far from as clear as advocates of on-line systems claim, but it is an important start.

On celebrating contradictions; in memoriam Jerry Cohen.

Read his obituary. But then listen and enjoy and reflect on this podcast; this is an enactment of intellectual integrity. And wit.

See also here.

On professional boundaries in a digital world

Two things.

I did dip my toe into social networking waters, but backed off because regardless of professional boundaries, the nature of the job is to expose oneself to at least hundreds of other people. Facebook does not understand information management in that sense--but there is no particular reason why it should. Note to those who want to use a Facebook/MySpace, etc. presence as a substitute VLE (generally a Good Idea)--do check identities and information control.

But technologically this post was a test. I read other blogs through Google Reader, which reliably feeds new material from selected sources onto a single page, from which I can if I wish go to the source with just one click. As of today, I can also publish with one click a copy of what I read to my own blog. It's quick and convenient but ... OK. I don't have to use it and I shan't.

On signage (off-topic)

Perhaps this article does make some points about visual literacy which impact on learning, but that is not the reason for recommending it--it is simply very interesting. Oh--it's about the origins of "isotype" signs (you know, that more or less standard range of graphic signs for WCs and "No Smoking" etc. which are so ubiquitous, and their implementation by the National Parks Service in the US.

On social work training

'Degrees in social work are viewed as being "difficult to fail" - a reputation that is unacceptable, a select committee of MPs has said.'

As I wrote several years ago;

When I taught on social work courses, on which the majority of other tutors were former social workers, they were often exemplary tutors. They brought all their professional skills to bear in counselling and supporting students, and were enormously sensitive to their difficulties and any form of discrimination to which they might potentially be subject. Also true to their professional background, they acted as advocates for their "clients". So it was that our assessment boards were interminable affairs, as tutors produced reams of evidence of extenuating circumstances to argue that students who had failed, or failed to submit work, should proceed to the next year of the course, or be granted extensions to produce the required work for completion.

[Note; I left social work education fifteen years ago. I have confirmed in the last six months that in at least three not untypical programmes, nothing has changed in this respect.]

Recently [2001, but this is the same borough in which the Baby Peter case happened], the Director of Social Services for the London Borough of Haringey admitted to the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié (a child killed by her aunt and partner who were supposed to be looking after her) that some of her staff had not read the Departmental policies and procedures on child abuse because, although qualified, they could not read very well. [Primary Source reference here see pp 77-78]*

This pre-dates the introduction of the degree-level qualification for social work, but even then it was at what we would now regard as NQF (National Qualifications Framework) Level 5 (i.e. two years of university-level education)

As someone said (sorry, despite my usual academic pedantry, I can't reference this);

"I'm all for students being supported and being given the benefit of the doubt, as long as my doctor/dentist/airline pilot/plumber didn't learn that way!"

I was criticised severely for telling the students at the start of the course that I was not so much interested in their welfare as in the welfare of their future clients.

The problem with "supporting" students is that in many — probably most — cases it does not work. It merely defers their ultimate failure: or of course it results in collusion between the staff and their incapable students to "dumb down" the course so that they do pass, with a devalued qualification which potentially costs employers a great deal of money to compensate for, and in some cases costs livelihoods and lives.

I wrote that explicitly to provoke debate, and get beyond the bland edu-pap regurgitated by "trainee" teachers. So I added a caveat distancing myself from the sentiment.

I withdraw the caveat.

* Lets get it from the horse's mouth: this is the relevant transcript from the Climbie enquiry:

MR GARNHAM: How are you going to achieve this? I ask because Mary Richardson told us that some staff had a real difficulty with the written word, that guidance -- and we have seen this time and time again -- guidance is not always followed or even read, so how are you going to make these improvements? Do you agree with Ms Richardson by the way?

16 MS BRISTOW: I believe any large organisation you will always have some staff with literacy problems and I think one of the difficulties in our society is it is very hard for people to admit to that. There is a social stigma attached to admitting difficulty with literacy or numeracy.

22 MR GARNHAM: Difficulty with literacy and numeracy is a problem in trained social workers, is it?

24 MS BRISTOW: I believe that does in some cases occur.

On "write-only" documents again

I did write about this earlier, on 16 October 06 to be precise, but it's worth a re-visit.

I met a couple of former colleagues in a bookshop this afternoon, and after a few moments of obligatory skirmishing about the intellectual street-cred of the items in one's basket. [Note; the sole copy of Slavoj Zizek's (sorry, can't be bothered with the accents) latest hardback has continued to sit there, face out, for at least six weeks...] Sorry, after those few ritual moments, we caught up on the state of play at the factory (aka university) and what happened to some course proposals we had been involved in validating.

One of them had participated in the validation of an earlier version of a course which I largely wrote and which of course never recruited or ran. I knew it was fairly unlikely it would ever see the light of day, so I sprinkled the documentation with "easter eggs" as programmers call them--hidden gems which are only revealed to the dedicated few who really dig into the program. Of course no-one ever noticed

I think she was a little taken aback that I could be so cavalier with the university's sacrosanct quality assurance procedures.

Yet another example (to set alongside the collected works of Slavoj Zizek) of documents whose sole virtue is their existence. Perhaps we could try simply pasting "lorem ispum..." into required forms and seeing if anyone ever notices...

On Coffield's latest

Frank Coffield has done it again. All you ever wanted to know about learning and teaching but were too cool to ask is a counterpart to Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority. As before it is available as a free download from Learning and Skills Network Publications. While the former pamphlet was addressed to college managers, this one is aimed at actual students, and based on conversations with a range of them on courses in further education.

It's arrived too late to go into the essential reading section of our course handbook, but we shall plug it hard.

On the liminal step...

An excellent reflection on the experience of stepping up from being a junior doctor to a "middle-grade" registrar, fully aware of the increasing responsibility and the change in sense of identity.

On PowerPoint yet again

(Only available to UK readers) PowerPoint features strongly (well, prominently, at least) in this edition of "Word of Mouth" on BBC Radio Four which should be available for a week, shortly. It covers an army officer talking about how dangerous it is as a tool of miscommunication (shades of Edward Tufte), and Richard Mayer discussing cognitive load and how it affects learning (too complicated for a simple link--but I may manage a page on it some time) as well PowerPoint Karaoke at a pub in Leeds. The latter has some mention of how it might be used to help people to develop their presentation skills; it consists of simply asking participants, out of the blue, to give a talk around a PP presentation about something they know nothing about and have never seen before.

On spending time

This has got very little to do with teaching or learning. It's just fascinating, that's all. It's an interactive graph of how different categories of Americans spent their days in 2008.

On wire-walking and beyond...

On 7 August 1974, Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the (then) World Trade Center. He did so with no authority or sponsorship (and the financial backing remains unclear).

(Is the above plagiarised? Discuss in the light of the link from the heading.)

I have just watched this extraordinary film.

Its impact is largely based on the equally extraordinary variation between the practitioner's (Petit's) account, and that of spectators.

The spectator question is "Is he going to fall off?" (Spoiler; he didn't, otherwise he could not have contributed to this film.) For the participants or practitioners the question just does not arise. He spent 45 minutes on the wire and crossed and re-crossed eight times.

The point of this observation? It's a very vivid illustration of how the acquisition of a skill is capable of completely transforming a person. It would be nonsensical to listen to the Proms to see if you can catch out a player producing a note out of tune. Their performance concerns are utterly different, as a result of course of thousands of hours of practice. Richard Sennett, in his rambling and ultimately disappointing "The Craftsman" (2008), pronounces on what is becoming the received wisdom, that it takes 10,000 hours to produce a craftsman.

Random reflections;

• At what cost? Ten thousand hours which could have been spent doing something other than practising an instrument, or training on a track or walking on a wire. What kind of person would the craftsman have become without that obsessionalism?
  
  
• And related to that, it is not surprising that the craftsman does not just do something differently from everyone else; he or she now is different, and thinks of her- or himself differently.
  
  
• If it takes that long, and always has done, why are we so obsessed with doing it faster? It's just pushing on an automatically closing door. It takes an enormous amount of wasted energy.
  
  
• And as Sennett moots; can we afford it any longer? A few years ago there was a TV series called "Faking it", in which participants were given about three weeks to be transformed into passable imitators of a DJ, a hairdresser, a chef or such-like. Is that the paradigm for vocational education to come?
  

On how to write a research paper

From Andrew Gelman (picked up on the Marginal Revolution blog). Very sound and clear advice.

The order is rather different from that which I suggest for writing a dissertation here. That is because Gelman's approach suits writing up a paper after the research has been completed, and is about communicating it effectively. Students doing dissertations are often writing concurrently with undertaking the work, and the structure of the article should provide some scaffolding of that process. Having said that, I acknowledge that "writing up" often does not work that way.

On Gurkhas and Gramsci and...

Joanna Lumley's campaign (and she is the first to point out that she is just the media figurehead of a very serious and researched campaign behind the scenes) to grant the right to UK residence for former soldiers in the British army has rightly been celebrated.

But recently there has been newspaper correspondence and features in radio news (the sources are not particularly critical to the argument and I have finally given up after an hour of trying to cite them directly--sorry!) suggesting that while the opportunity to come to the UK was great for the former soldiers and their families themselves... what would be the impact on the communities they left behind?

It has been argued that former soldiers (and their pensions) have been critical to the (relative) prosperity of some communities in Nepal. It has not merely (merely?) been that the regular income from former soldiers' families have helped to sustain a wider family, and indeed by sustaining local trade, a whole community. It is that the presence of elders with a wide experience of the world has been an important asset to those often isolated communities.

For them to leave for the UK would be to deprive those villages of an incalculable resource, it has been claimed.

My view is that there are separate issues here. This is not a legitimate argument against the right of former soldiers to live in the country they were prepared to die for. The relationship of the Gurkhas to the British army goes far beyond that of "mercenaries", which would normally characterise nationals of one country enlisted in the armed forces of another.

So I am all for these ex-servicemen having the right to come and live in the UK.
I do hope that they will not exercise it.

Why? Because these men are what Gramsci called the "organic intellectuals" of their communities. They are the embedded "wise men" (factually they are all men). I have no idea how they feel about their obligations to their communities versus their opportunities abroad, which may well--as in the case of their military service--include remittances home. But their contribution will, I'm sure, not have been merely economic.

I'm not going on about this purely concerning the Gurkhas. Their case illustrates a more general principle about the naive promotion of "social mobility" as a political good. In particular it touches on government policies of promoting proportional targets for participation in higher education...

Mrs Gaskell, for example, (Mary Barton, 1848; North and South, 1854) makes much of the importance of autodidacts (self-taught scholars) in sustaining impoverished communities. In her day, those people could not escape their birth community. There was no social mobility. The minimal up-side of the situation was that the efforts of some very resourceful people were contained and employed in the interests of their home communities.

Once social mobility comes into the picture, there is a route out for these "community leaders" (as we might now term them--but only for some reason if they belong to an ethnic minority). And they go. And leave the less talented or committed or enterprising behind, to form an underclass. Michael Young had an inkling of this in "The Rise of the Meritocracy" (1958).

Does that mean we should not widen participation or promote social mobility? No, but...

On underlying rules

A friend has just passed on this. It's not unique, because English is an easy target, but it is fun:

English Is Weird

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Then shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England .
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends
and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down,
in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?

In my usual curmudgeonly puritanical spirit of not permitting anything to be merely "fun", it strikes me that this is a fascinating exercise in exploring the seemingly nonsensical rules which govern the language. You could set it as an exercise for linguistics...

Yes, it is a pain to learn all these arbitrary expressions (and I have great respect for people using English as an Additional Language [EAL, if you are collecting acronyms]) but;

• I'm not a great linguist, but all five languages I have tackled--I don't claim to have "learned" them--include for example tables of irregular verbs. (Sorry! Those tables are actually the product of our attempts to systematise living language in order to teach it.)
  
  
• English is more of a mess than other languages simply because it incorporates borrowings from so many of them.
  
  
• So it makes really good sense to look beneath the surface and consider why--for example--some words form plurals with "-s" and some with "-n" as in the first verse. To see this as totally arbitrary (as the verse implies--but why not?) is to deprive the learner of an organising device which may facilitate memorisation. Etymology does not always help (I am frequently baffled by the derivations of words at A Word A Day, which is a fascinating daily service I would commend to everyone) but it does at least suggest that there are some underlying rules to seemingly discrete results.
  

So what is the moral? (These posts are I fear drifting in the direction of the prescriptive and moralistic. I'll address that later.) Just that it is ultimately more productive (and even, heaven help us, "efficient") to learn the underlying rules from which specific instances are derived, than to learn those instances discretely.

Or you can just enjoy the verse. (No, it's not a poem; but that is another story...)

(Acknowledgements to the original author of the verse; if anyone can claim copyright I'll happily post acknowledgement or remove this post.)

On re-thinking technology in the classroom

An eminently sensible piece on the constructive use of technology in class, to support real interaction and effective teaching rather than to substitute for them.

On the death of a teacher man

Frank McCourt has died aged 78. Best known for his memoir of poverty in Ireland "Angela's Ashes" (1996), he was a high school teacher in New York by profession--although "profession" does not have quite the right ring about it. As the linked piece shows, he was an inspirational teacher, and there is an enormous amount to learn from the third volume of his memoirs, "Teacher Man" (2005). Not everyone could teach his way, of course; the book is far from a prescription--but it is the story of how he discovered his own way of teaching, and at that level it is a model of reflection and a guide.

As the piece quotes;

Instead of teaching, I told stories.

Anything to keep them quiet and in their seats.

They thought I was teaching.

I thought I was teaching.

I was learning.

On losing the plot

OK. So how come people have managed to learn enough to produce today's society and culture, however imperfect?

On being able to speak

I've no idea whether I can make this nuanced point. So--if you go no further, just watch this. It's President Obama's speech to the centenary conference of the NAACP.

It's 37 minutes long, so if you haven't got that much time start at 25 minutes. That is when he both makes his critical substantive points and displays his rhetorical genius which is amplified by his audience...



On that final twelve minutes: who else could say that? (That also goes for the Cairo speech, and the Ghana speech.)

This is not a political point (of course it is a political matter about which I have decided feelings, but that is not the angle from which I am addressing it). It is a variation on the old soap-opera line, "You tell him. He'll take it from you!" Never before has there been an unassailable figure who could make those points to that community. (Obama is not totally unassailable in the eyes of some hard-liners--he is not of slave-stock to put it crudely--so notice how he enlists Michelle in his argument.

I'm fascinated by multiple levels of communication and how they interact. Several years ago I wrote a brief note on this but my investigations ran into the sand.

A few days ago I came across a very indirect but potentially fruitful lead. If your thinking is twisted enough to make similar connections, do get in touch! If note, I hope that at least you have listened to a magnificent speech. (Apart from the sound/video sync, that is. How can state-of-the-art crews and kit get that wrong?)

On TED talks

Sometimes TED offends my prissy academic sensibilities, but always the talks stimulate and excite and provoke... No point in trying to describe it, just go to the TED site ... and please call in again if you ever come back!

On Autism and Academe

Tyler Cowen, an economist, has an original take on the autistic spectrum, suggesting that some of its features may be positive, particularly in the context of academe;

The relevance of the autism spectrum for higher education isn't just about particular individuals on the autistic spectrum. The very nature of higher education shows how much we, often without knowing it, hold up autistic cognitive profiles as a partial educational ideal. In "special needs" education, there is plenty of effort to teach the skills of the nonautistic to the autistic, but in the regular classroom we are often doing the opposite.

He further suggests that similar arguments may be made for other forms of neurodiversity, including dyslexia and ADHD.

A propos dyslexia, I have also been reading Maryanne Wolf's excellent
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008); she quotes;

neuropsychologist Andrew Ellis who declared that whatever dyslexia turns out to be, "it is not a reading disorder."

and one can see clearly what he and she mean.

On the function of academia

According to economist Robin Hanson, that is. Contestable but an interesting angle!

On abysmal teaching

(Apologies to people outside the UK who may not be able to access this link.)

A few days ago I watched this very interesting and mildly disturbing programme about a Muslim school for girls in the UK. You can watch the whole thing at the title link above, for the next month.

But that is not what this post is about. Follow the link and look at a few seconds eleven minutes in, immediately after the marker for the first commercial break:

Teacher: Aisha, you haven't got your uniform again today [...] Right! Can you get your English exercise books out, please?

Right. OK. It's a new topic, for this new half-term. And as we normally do for a new topic, write, "Accents and Dialects". Would you do that, please?

Aaaargh! This has got nothing to do with this being a Muslim school (or has it? Read on...) It's just awful practice.

What is the sub-text, ably communicated by the teacher? He has framed the new content in a few seconds:

This is part of the required syllabus. It is "out there". I have no idea why we have to teach this stuff. It exists only in the minds of academics and bureaucrats (and possibly a few politicians who get into such detail--but that is really my gloss). So I have to teach it. Perhaps you have to learn it, but between us we can reduce it to memorisation.

Hey! Why do you have to tell them it is "a new topic" which we treat "as we normally do"? Pupils don't think in those terms, and there is no reason why they should.

Dialects and accents? With a class like this, what fun you can have with family stories and anecdotes, and bilingual households... No. All that is immediately set aside in the interests of a desiccated (and, I bet, simplistically wrong) account to reproduce only for assessment purposes.

It is not simply that this approach is calculatedly super-meta-boring, although that is indictment enough (and just consider how much can be conveyed in 15 seconds!). It is what lies behind that...

(And here I qualify a little. I am not bothered about offending people who disagree with me. That's OK and I'll be delighted if they respond. But I do not want to generate more heat than light, and I am venturing into unfamiliar territory---so please offer constructive and informative responses for others to read in the unlikely event that anyone does respond!)

The example we saw was--assuming it was representative and not set up for the filming to condense an hour or more of exploration of experience--not merely miserable practice, but also indicative of a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the role of the learner, and what counts as "learning".It suggests that

• knowledge is something which belongs to other people; powerful people who prescribe it for the rest of us...

• Learners are empty vessels whose own experience is of no value, whose only salvation (exam grades) lies in ingesting this external body of knowledge
  

This is in short Freire's "banking" model of education.

And this dogmatic model does fit with the epistemology of revelation, adopted by Christians of many persuasions and some Jews as well as Muslims. The truth/valid knowledge is "out there" (pace. X Files.) It is represented in inerrant and incontestable texts, and in some traditions they have to be learnt by heart. The most extreme examples may be the madrassahs where not only is the Qur'an the only item on the curriculum, but it is learnt by heart in Arabic even when the pupils do not speak that language.

As Karen Armstrong comments historically rather than religiously;

... in all pre-modern societies, including that of agrarian Europe, education was designed to preserve what had already been achieved and to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the individual, which could undermine the stability of a community that had no means of integrating or exploiting fresh insights. In the madrasahs, for example, pupils learned old texts and commentaries by heart, and the teaching consisted of a word-by-word explication of a standard textbook. Public disputations between scholars took it for granted that one of the debaters was right and the other wrong. There was no idea, in the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing the clash of two opposing positions to build a new synthesis.

Armstrong K (2001) Islam: a short history London: Phoenix (pp. 87-88).

The programme never got into the issue of attitudes to knowledge, and the fit with the pedagogies adopted. Pity.

On referencing--again!

This harks back to an earlier post, to which Alec Gill, the author of the linked article, responded.

If you haven't got time to read his piece, the argument is for the simplification of referencing, and a straightforward way of doing it, by citing the form or medium of the material immediately after the date. The comments refine the ideas, leading to a constructive discussion.

I have great sympathy with the argument. Indeed, my only dispute is with the assumption that there is any prospect of achieving a standard format through rational discussion. That assumes that rational criteria such as clarity and usability actually count for much in this field.

Sadly they don't. The arcane variations in referencing practice owe more to turf wars between academic tribes or even competing journals than they do to anything sensible. And once a discipline or a professional association or a journal pins its colours to the mast of a particular style, negotiations become about face and power before mere utility.

Academe--we kid ourselves--is where the rational and the sensible reigns. Sorry.

On implicit values

There is no better opportunity than the enforced leisure of a ten-hour wait in an airport to reflect on the conference we (two collaborators and I) have just attended.

The theme of this year's STLHE conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick was "Between the Tides"; quite appropriate considering that it took place not far (by Canadian standards) from the Bay of Fundy, home to the "highest tides in the world" according to its website. So it looked at negotiating the countervailing influences and pressures to which higher education--particularly in Canada--is subject.

Generally speaking conference "themes" are meaningless. They are cast so widely and blandly as to say nothing which might possibly discourage any attendance or any papers, so they say nothing at all. This one was different, and was structured around four dilemmas, explored principally of course in the Canadian context, but of much wider applicability.

They were;

• disciplinary education vs. liberal education


• physical environment vs. virtual environment


• curricular learning vs. extra-curricular learning


• institutional/professional autonomy vs. public accountability

I'm not going to go into them directly, but simply to point out that once you start exploring constructs such as these it almost inevitably leads back to the values implicit in them (cf. the "laddering" method in personal construct theory), and the theme of making explicit what is already implicit--so that it can be explored and debated--cropped up time and again in the papers I attended.

It was even there in our own, on "Safe teaching, risky learning?" in which we encouraged participants (it is the tradition to be quite participatory) to explore risk-taking in teaching, in a risk-averse "quality"-obsessed HE culture. (It is even worse in FE.)

What was encouraging was the extent to which such discourses and debates were readily accepted by the conference membership. The hegemony of utilitarian and neo-liberal discourse is being challenged; at least in Canada, at the chalk-face. ("PowerPoint" [blah] -face does not have quite the same ring...)

But what was challenging was to realise that what I had thought of as my stock-in-trade for many years, having grown old teaching social work, is now being being taken up and explored in many more disciplines, via many more frameworks. Instead of people wanting to impose an ethical or political framework on what are seen as basically technical issues such as curriculum design and the adoption of models of learning or even of student attributes---instead of that, there is a new recognition that those issues were never merely technical. They always contained (in several senses) implicit values, and perhaps the choice of technical means ought to follow the value-based ends?

What are these values? What are the frameworks? Hey, work out some answers. There are lots of potential ones!

On live blogging

Content aside; is this the public emergence of a new medium? If so, how do we evaluate it?

Thanks to the Browser for putting me on to this!

On absence

Apologies for lack of activity. I'm away at a conference, and can't get my Linux netbook to connect; this is posted on a borrowed machine. And anyway, there are more interesting things to do at the moment;

To everything there is a season
and a time for every purpose under heaven...

A time to blog,
and a time to refrain from blogging...

(Ecclesiastes 3 [amended], from memory) ...

I hope to post on some themes from the event later this week.

On British Orwellian discourse on education

Thanks Laurie, for this piece which concisely guts an important report, and also provides some material for a paper Peter and I are giving next week which is not yet written. There's always time on the plane!

On creative cooking beyond recipes

As regular (?) readers will know, I sometimes use cooking skills and knowledge as a paradigm for exploring learning and the acquisition of competence and even expertise. So I am a sucker for anything which holds out a hope beyond Richard Sennett's ten thousand hours in a kitchen. (His account of culinary craft is one of the weirder parts of a sadly unfocused book.)

Indeed, following a recipe is a low level of skill. Thank goodness it can be acquired relatively easily, because otherwise we would eat less well than we routinely do. Tweaking or glossing a recipe may come next--improvising in the absence of some ingredients, spicing up a little... Then there is substitution--either of ingredients or of cooking methods. It's a bit tough if we grill it; let's try roasting more gently for longer. And eventually, there is invention based on deep understanding of how ingredients interact. We can all invent randomly (I remember a dish Pete Eggins and I cooked one evening in hall in 1965. It was based on a Katherine Whitehorn recipe, I think, for fish in a tomato sauce. It so happened that none of the ingredients matched the recipe precisely---wrong fish, wrong sauce, wrong method, but hey!...

It was revolting. Even as students we threw it away!

Knowing the underlying principle matters. Whether this guy's emphasis on ratios is the key, I doubt. But getting beyond the concrete is indeed what facilitates systematic progress.

On referencing re-visited

This may be a little self-serving in the light of my post here, but the system really does need an overhaul.

On failing to heal myself

It is a salutary experience to find oneself in the position which irritates one in others. I suspect that as I get older the experience will get more frequent. However, the present stimulus is quite specific and probably shared by anyone who reads this.

I have bought a new machine (have you noticed that those of us in the know don't talk about "computers" any more? Just as "technology" is now synonymous with "digital technology", so "machine" [with the conspicuous exception of the washing machine, which is alien territory to any self-respecting {?} geek] is now synonymous with computer. (Real geeks took this a stage further many years ago when they started referring to computers as Unix "boxes"...)

Sorry! I almost ran out of nested parentheses there...

We know how much of a hassle it is to break in a new machine. Indeed "break in" seems ever more appropriate a phrase. In the old days, almost ten years ago, computers just out of the womb, sorry box, were passive beasts waiting to be guided. Now they are more like yapping puppies wanting to be "helpful" and to mould your practice to their demands...

There is also a rite of passage, in which one is obliged to go mouse in hand to seek guidance from a sage in India, whose eminently sensible guidance will both humiliate you and also prove to be useless. [I have to confess here,that I was, if not actually rude, a little peremptory, with the lady in the call-centre when she suggested I should contact the ISP... But she did check further and she did find the solution and she did ring back with it--and it did work! So many thanks to Dell customer service, and I did email my appreciation, too.]

All that is normal, and it is a reasonable hassle.

What I don't find as reasonable is the extent to which standard software (i.e. MS Office) has been "upgraded" while I have merely been using it. For a few months I have been wrestling with .docx documents which would not open in Word, until I found the patch. But only in the past few days have I confronted the "improved" version, with its "ribbon" etc. That is not the problem. I am sure new users will soon find it intuitive, and bemoan its passing when it is replaced. I am equally sure that the interface is the product of serious research with user labs and focus groups and tracking of the use of actual facilities...

No, the problem is that the "legacy" provision is limited to a contemptuous tolerance for files sired by previous versions. Not only can I not configure the packages to simulate the look and feel of earlier versions (whose incremental changes may have been irritating, but not disorienting) ---------but I can't even erase this version, and buy--for good money--the 2003 version. Or even Word 2 for Windows 3.1; apart from some table alignment and indexing facilities which I use twice a year for quite specific tasks, I've noticed little practical improvement since then...

Of course I do know about OpenOffice; it is fantastic and v3 is even better. I have tended to use it only on this little Linux netbook on which I am writing this, but perhaps I shall have to adopt it as the default for all my relevant work. (Yes, I do know about OpenDocument formats, but I'm not very interested...)

Which gets me to the point. It's not about the software. The day before the Dell machine arrived I foolishly allowed liveUpdate to trash this Linux netbook and experience similar feelings as I reinstalled everything and dealt with all the configuration and driver and ... issues.

It's about handling change, and loss (if only the loss of a few hours which could have been spent more productively). Actually, that is about us as users-----but hey, you designers and producers could be a little less pushy sometimes!

On a taste of reality

Community Colleges in the States are rather different from Further Education in the UK. I don't know enough, nor do you have time enough, to explain the differences. But as this post shows, there is often an assumption that they are second-class institutions.

Far from it. The linked page shows just the same passion as Fred Flower's "Language in Education"--a plea to value changing lives rather than mining academe--which is to blame for where I am now.

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.)

On the Naming of Parts

The Beeb is celebrating poetry this month. And replying to a correspondent (about teaching outdoors) reminded me of this wonderful poem by Henry Reed--funny, wistful and in the later parts, surreal.

So I looked it up and found it on this superb labour-of-love website--a model of its kind. It's really cheered me up!

On clickers

A good overview of a promising technology to enhance large lecture teaching; but as ever 80% of the functionality can be addressed by giving students coloured cards to wave. It could not be simpler.

• Think of the maximum number of alternatives you might want in a multiple-choice quiz. Four? Somehow issue each of your students with four different coloured cards. Say, red, yellow, green, blue.
• Now you can stop your lecture at any point and pose a quiz, to check understanding of a particular point. Just put up a slide wutlipleith the multiple-choice answers, each associated with a particular colour. On your mark get everyone to show... you can take it from there.
• But red and green in particular have strong connotations... You can use them to monitor understanding of points you have made--or prior understanding. All that is needed is a verbal cue. "Have you got that? If you're pretty sure, show green and I'll move on. If you are a bit 'iffy' show amber and I'll check out where the problems are. If you haven't a clue, show red and I'll go over it again..."
  

Since I don't commonly lecture to large groups, I had largely experienced this "technology" as a member of the audience, and only used it as a lecturer for demo purposes. A few weeks ago a colleague and I were team-teaching a group of about 400 students, and we used the technique. We had planned to use it just two or three times. But the feedback was so vivid and immediate and the students took to it so well, we used it much more than that. You could see clusters of students who had problems, for example, so it was possible to go to them and find out the specific issue. On a couple of occasions there were students waving red cards without being prompted; they didn't understand and it was much easier to do that than to speak up about in a group of 400.

Clickers are more flexible, and they are remarkably cheap (especially if each student buys their own and uses it over their college career and then sells it on...) But bits of cardboard? Must be the biggest ever return on investment in educational technology!

And of course I would be remiss not to acknowledge and thank Phil Race, who has refined the use of cardboard and post-it notes to a fine art, as a minor gloss on a great career. I'm delighted to hear that he is continuing his assocation with Leeds Met in an emeritus capacity.

On a new approach to defining a threshold concept

A threshold concept is that piece of information in the plot of a film, which crops up just as the over-priced bucket of fizzy drink takes its toll and compels a temporary absence, such that without the information the plot makes no sense.

Either that, or the plot of "Star Trek" made no sense either way.

On re-launching the sites part 1

It's the big finale, folks!

The funding runs out at the end of this academic year, and so I have embarked on a real root-and-branch up-date of the sites, so I don't have as much to do when no-one is paying. I think I have dealt with the "learning" site, and I have up-loaded it back to the server in the last few minutes. I'm sure I have missed something; in that case please let me know.

I'll start on the "teaching" side in a day or two (given that I do have something which passes for a life, besides this). That site is bigger but less complicated. And then I'll move on to "Doceo", which has had a partial re-vamp already.

And of course I shall carry on without external funding (and my gratitude to the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme of the Higher Education Academy for supporting this for the last five years--it was not meant to go on so long, but they have been really supportive and understanding), although I may have to resort to carrying Adsence or similar. Hey, don't let Susi know, but I can probably afford it in any case---and she might even contribute to keep me out form under her feet...

I'll notify the next stages via the blog, too.

On training child abusers

OK. The heading is a little dramatic, and I have no direct involvement with the Irish situation. Nor have I read the whole report. But I was involved in training "residential child care officers" in the '70s.

From 1975 to 79 I was the tutor-in-charge of the largest Certificate in the Residential Care of Children and Young People (CRCCYP) course in England. It was based in a College of Technology (up-market college of further education which in this case eventually became part of a university) and validated--very loosely by present standards--by the then Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, predecessor of...who cares?

• Incidentally, I had no direct experience at all of practice in residential child care or any kind of residential social work, or indeed of any kind of social work beyond some volunteering at university.
• but I did have a first degree in European Studies and a Master's in Religious Studies
• and a sociological interest in "total institutions"...
• and a year's introduction to the psychoanalytic approach to group relations
  
• and I and the team of tutors, were really proud of the intensive educational and vocational programme we offered
  

Why mention all this? Because of what it suggests about the disconnection between the training--and probably the inspection--and the practice of care.

• Some of the people I trained---and licensed to practise---were later prosecuted for abusing children in their care. (I find myself seeking to exculpate the course by claiming, "merely" physically, not sexually. As if that mitigated anything.)
• Some of the practice placements we used were later shown to be the settings of abuse. The details are not always public (nor I admit are all the allegations tested), but it appears that in some cases "therapeutic" was a cover for "abusive" activity. (I am being scrupulous here. In the absence of evidence, both descriptors go in quotes. But New Barns, one of the establishments identified in the linked article below, was regarded as one of our very best student placements.)
• One of the external examiners for the course was later convicted of child sexual abuse. (See here.) I became a friend of his; he stayed with me rather than go to a hotel when he came up for examiners' meetings (even that would be frowned upon now). We discussed how unjustly he had been treated in various ways for admitting to being gay. Above all I remember to my shame commiserating with him over the abuse he had received (including excrement through his letter-box, he said) over an item he wrote for his column in Social Work Today entitled "Sex and the Residential Social Worker" in which he argued for an end to the absolute prohibition of sexual relations between staff and residents--spinning it to imply that he was referring to establishments for morally and mentally competent adults with physical disabilities...
  

This is 30-year-old history. I am not trying to re-open old wounds. (That may indeed be a just and worthwhile project, but it is a different one.)

But I am not surprised that the Irish authorities in those day were so easily deceived by the abusers. I was certainly even more naive than other people in my position. I cringe now to think that only once, out of more than 300 students with whom I worked, did it even occur to me that he or she might be a premeditating abuser. (I did confront that person over his failure to obtain parental consent for a planned "expedition" with children. I never saw him again... but there was no evidence to pursue it further.)

Later, in 1979, trying to set up a crisis intervention project for young people at odds with their families, using volunteers, I was challenged by a Director of Social Services; "How are you going to guarantee that your volunteers do not abuse the young people?" Strange question. Well, they want to help, not hurt, don't they? And besides, this is a Christian project... How can you be so negative and suspicious? Pathetic response.

Ireland in the '70s was quite different from the rather-frayed Celtic Tiger of just yesterday. If we failed to see what was beneath our noses in secular social services in England, how much more likely was that in an Irish Republic in thrall to the Catholic church?

Now, of course, much is different. Fear of abuse has unsurprisingly become an obsession, to the detriment of some of the best practice of thirty years ago. Sadly, those abusive practitioners not only destroyed directly many young lives, but they also destroyed any notion of trust within the system. So that the possibility of rebuilding hope for those children who have already been abused is severely limited; for every school or children's home which dares physically to touch them, there are many which do not.

About fifteen years ago, I was peripherally involved in giving evidence to an enquiry into the peremptory closure in the middle of the night of Oxendon House in Leighton Buzzard. (The link is about the only useful one I can find on the web, interestingly.) The reason for the action was claimed to be that members of staff had been giving young people massages to help them relax before bed, under the supervision of a fully-trained masseuse. The parliamentary written answer states;

the acting principal of the home has been arrested by the police and that four other members of staff have been suspended. Following advice from the social services inspectorate, the county council is conducting an investigation into allegations of inappropriate therapies and restraint techniques and the general culture of the home. Meanwhile the home has been closed, the children relocated and 45 members of staff have been given leave of absence.The social services inspectorate is continuing to monitor the situation.

All criminal charges were dropped. A subsequent inquiry (costing, I was told, £250,000) found no abuse or wrong-doing, although some practices were "capable of being misconstrued". But there was nothing to merit the precipitate closure, nothing to justify the relocation of children who were just in some cases finding the firsrt safe place in their lives, or blighting the careers of the staff. The Director of Social Services was the one who resigned.

I'm rambling. That's what happens. It is very difficult to retain focus or perspective. There's a deep desire for some simple angle. Sometimes the most difficult part of reflection is to acknowledge that there isn't one.

On going backwards!

Cheap point, but that is what happens when you give up on education to the extent of not having a government department for it.

On disputing "constructive alignment"

An interesting discussion of the limitations of Biggs' "constructive alignment" model for university teaching—which is referenced and outlined in the post. Briefly, Jones suggests that it leads to big top-down quality enhancement/staff development initiatives which just do not work. He proposes a more modest encouragement of "reflective alignment" which in effect says that if university teachers will just think more about what they are doing, they will not be able to resist improving it. This is in line with the Strivens article I have often drawn attention to.

On reprising Milgram

I think these replays are only available for a few days, so hurry!

Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments (1973) are part of the canon of classic psychological experiments, but that is not the reason to watch the final quarter-hour of this programme. It's what it is about. Unlike the re-creation of Zimbardo's prison experiment, which worked out very differently in the '90s from the '70s, this account suggests that not much has changed in the susceptibility of people to authoritative influence overriding their personal moral standards. "Suggests". I may have missed it, but much of the potency of the original experiment lay in the stats--in the proportion of people prepared to acquiesce under pressure--rather than in the individual cases, and I don't think we got any of that here. For all I know, they ran the protocol a thousand times to get the few conforming examples shown here...

On good advice

It's not particularly original but it can bear repeating many times—see this advice, primarily about conference preentations but also applicable to lectures, etc.

Thanks to Robert Cottrell on the Browser.

On feedback

Do read the linked column—and, as important, the comments.

The author (now a professor) has kept her former professor's annotation of an essay she wrote in her second year as an undergraduate. She reproduces them and her readers comment on them. It's fascinating, and also rather disconcerting to see how many ways the notes can be interpreted, as well as to consider whether that kind of feedback would be acceptable thirty years on.

On the personal touch

Just when it seems that everyone is going over the top for e-portfolios and that egregiously infantilising application, PebblePad — the Times Higher Education once again comes through with a feature on the distinctive feature of UK universities (albeit cast largely in the discourse of the "unique selling proposition"), namely personal contact between academics and students.

There ain't no substitute.

On communicating about risk

We have all heard about the imminent pandemic of swine flu.

But it has to be recognised that the media cannot be trusted, particularly because of how much they relish disaster scenarios, on all fronts. See Davies N (2009) Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media London; Vintage.

Which is not to say that it is not going to happen as predicted. But we are very bad at understanding risk; see Taleb N N (2008) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable London; Penguin.

The link is to a sensible and well-informed piece which points out the limited correlation of perceived and real risk.

Now wash your hands!

On the evolution of dumbing-down

There is a political/commercial side of the alleged process of dumbing-down--the pressure for greater "achievement" rates, etc. But there is also a logistical side, a trivial equivalent of the "banality of evil" demonstrated in the Eichmann trial... Just how does it work?

When I started to create my site on learning, I explicitly set out to address "An introduction to theories of learning for college, adult and professional education" I found that in order to discuss key ideas of assimilation and accommodation, I needed to mention Piaget. But he was primarily a developmental psychologist.

So he was interested in the unfolding potential of the child. I was concerned with its product in the adult, but I needed to sketch in a simplified account of his view of the developmental process, on another page, and just for completeness...

This has become the most viewed page on the site, much to my annoyance!

What happened? There is no agreed way to tag for academic level, on the web... Searchers have latched onto a much-distilled account of an idea, and reproduced it because it has been the most immediately comprehensible account. That was fine for my target audience for whom it was a side-show, but not to be presented as a definitive account.

And web-searchers do tend to stop at, and believe, the first few instances of the search result. But what has now begun to happen is that I am being approached by authors and publishers with requests to reproduce part of the page in text-books they are working on. So for some readers, this diluted version of Piaget's developmental sequence is acquiring an authority it certainly does not deserve, and I perhaps a reputation for over-simplification.

In my present revision I am inserting a caveat on the page, and I have also taken to declining some of the requests; I hope that helps.

On having fun with a gloomy Dane!

But since his great enemy was Hegel, how come he doesn't figure?

Thanks to the Browser

On reflection; the general embodied in the particular. Or is it?

OK, this has got little to do with learning and teaching; but it does illustrate the process of reflecting to disclose a general process embodied in a particular incident--and its limitations...

To set the scene, I've just changed my car; this is how I commented to a friend;

As the salesperson had warned, I was phoned this morning by a pleasant woman from their head office to check out some details. Quite unnecessary, but apparently part of their standard quality assurance procedure enjoined on them by their regulator (in this case, the Financial Services Agency, the self-same outfit which failed to regulate the banks...)

I'm sure there was some b***s****ing going on, but the call naturally became a sales pitch for something called "gap insurance". Not cheap travel insurance for a "gap year" back-packing, unfortunately. It is designed to cover the shortfall between what an insurance company would pay for a car written-off in an accident and the price one paid for it. £399 ($US 600) for three years. I politely declined. The caller then informed me that because of FSA rules, I would have to sign to the effect that I had been informed about the product but had declined it, before I could collect the car.

I explored this with her for several minutes. I deconstructed it as, "You are telling me that I cannot buy a car for cash, without explaining why I don't want a totally unnecessary financial product, solely because you have told me about it?" To her credit she agreed it was so, but she was only...

It did cross my mind to refuse to go through with the purchase on the grounds of more nannying micro-management of how we handle routine risks, but I concluded it would merely be a gesture which would rebound on no-one except us, since it probably now applies across the board. But it did feel like a small defeat...

On a new bubble?

Perhaps we shouldn't rely on on-line services to archive our stuff?

On Obscurantism

It's a delight to have this available on-line (the article dates from 1970). All academics should read it regularly!

Thanks to the Browser for the link; note that this is another dangerously time-wasting page, a more journalistic and political version of Arts and Letters Daily.

On not so much a job, more a way of life...

Friday—Good Friday—was a sort of second-class public holiday in the UK. (I leave aside the theological dimension.)

Nowadays I work part-time. Sorry. I get paid for working part-time. I was reminded of that yesterday by an email from my "line-manager"...

Digression! Times Higher Education this week has been themed on the interface* between academics and administrators, particularly this article.

However, she or he wrote:

I have checked with HR what happens about your hours and the public holidays. Apparently all public holidays have already been factored into your leave allowance. This means that if you normally work on a day that a public holiday falls then you have to take it off your annual leave allowance, but if you don't normally work that day then it does not affect your leave or hours. So, for example: If you are usually at work on Friday then that day has to come off your annual leave allowance. (My emphasis)

I don't have the kind of mind which wonders whether or not this is fair--and I am thankful that on the whole the system has played fair with me. So far.

No, my issue is rather different. When I worked "full-time" there was no real problem. (There could have been, of course. "Academic freedom" is an important area. But my current concern is much more trivial and domestic.)

Then, I was never not working. My wool-gathering while walking the dog ---was work. My boredom watching an over-hyped film ---was work. My attempts to re-create that Platonic souvlaki I had in Bristol of all places ---were work. My serendipitous encounter with an argument or quote in reading for pleasure in another discipline ---was work. You get the point.

• Remember, I work in "education", as opposed to, say, quantum physics, or the law of intellectual property, or archaeology. "Work" requires few specialised resources or equipment, at least in its early stages. And the boundaries of the discipline are notoriously fuzzy...
  

So, much to the annoyance of my wife, who reckons that the boundary was always drawn in favour of "work", I just did not draw the boundary. The same issue is explored here by an academic in the US wondering what compulsory unpaid leave amounts to.

So, again, what does working "0.4" mean, for an academic? Two days a week? Yes, notionally. And I still have default days of attendance at the university, but now that the classes schedules for those days are over, they make no sense...

In the final analysis, "0.4" means 0.6 not at work. And that is hard work. It means gardening (it is not accidental that the civil service calls suspension, "gardening leave") or decorating or anything which precludes thinking... (and much as I dislike both activities, they don't work in that respect). Can't do it. So blow the whole thing. The role of academic, even in a spurious "discipline" like education, is not something one can pick up and put down; it is (for better or for worse) an identity. I am reminded of a point I made in a previous post;

(I asked Mr Lyward what he had asked the student ... to do. "DO?" he replied. "I don't want him to do anything. I want him to be." He would have stood no chance as a "practice teacher" nowadays.)

So am I "at work" as I write this?

* "themed on the interface" I really do have to congratulate myself on coining a truly vacuous example of management-speak which may well become a classic, going forward!

On gilding the lily

From a forum to which I apparently inadvertently subscribed;

"Have you considered using a site like Jing, to record student math problems such as an equation or formula. Students solve the equation on the smartboard, save the Jing video and then upload it to a wikispace or moodle."

Why? Where is there any demonstrable payoff in terms of learning for using such a convoluted process? Is it not just possible that this obsession with using technology will distract/detract from the mathematics?

I have unsubscribed.

On more in this vein

Following on from the previous post; I have been reading Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science (London; Fourth Estate, 2008, and see his blog here), and came across this quotation (I quote at greater length than Goldacre), which struck me as apposite;

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war [WW2] they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -- we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

from Feynman R (1986) "Cargo Cult Science; Caltech Commencement Address, 1974" in Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman; adventures of a curious character London; Unwin Paperbacks p.340

The extract in blue refers precisely to the "going through the motions of scholarship" I castigated earlier, but the overall quotation goes further. Feynman argues against the process of simply assembling evidence in support of a case, and this accords with a point I make in discussing the characteristics of M level writing;

Most people ... amass a great deal of material to support their argument: but at Master's level this is not enough. You need to test the argument. So you also need to amass evidence against it, and to take account of counter-arguments and alternative positions, discussing either why they are not applicable in this case, or why you find them inadequate, inappropriate or morally reprehensible.

I'll return to this in a future post I'm beginning to think about discussing the usefulness or otherwise of theory. (But the above point is the only time I will ever aspire to refer to my views in the same breath as those of Richard Feynman!)

Incidentally, Feynman has latched onto only the most obvious features of the cargo cults, which are rather more sophisticated than he allows for. See inter al. Worsley P (1970) The Trumpet shall sound: a study of Cargo cults in Melanesia London; Paladin which takes a broadly Marxist perspective...

On the shibboleth of Harvard referencing

A course with which I am associated has just received an external examiner's report. It has one general paragraph at the beginning--confirming the level of the course--and another short one at the end, deploring the little actual use made of theory, but the rest of the two pages is entirely given over to criticism of the standard of referencing in the sample of assessments, and to the failure of the markers to pick it up on each and every occasion.

The course leader and I, who are both external examiners in our own rights, frequently joke about referencing as a standby if one happens to be at a loss for something to say in a report; "If in doubt, you can always complain about the use of the Harvard system..." But this report was bordering on the obsessional.

I am something of a stickler for correct citation. I am frequently thanked by readers for the automatically generated references at the bottom of my web pages. But in the context of a professional course, I wonder whether colleagues do not sometimes lose sight of the wood for the trees. Note the qualification, "a professional course". One of the reasons cited by the examiner for the emphasis on correct referencing concerned the possibility that course participants might proceed to a higher level academic course where correct protocol would be obligatory, so better for them to learn to do it correctly now. Indeed, but... that applies to a limited number of students, whose referencing is usually OK anyway. The course in question is a professional course, undertaken by most students because it is now a condition of employment; some do happily get the bug (up to doctoral level, even), but the majority want their licence to practice and will be content with that.

So I am puzzled by this disproportionate attention paid to referencing. I am particularly puzzled by the insistence that it always be corrected. We emphasise the quality of feedback we give to our students, and we are keen that they should read it, discuss it with us in tutorial, and learn from it. And of course that will include correction of poor referencing practice, up to a point. What does obsessional attention to every detail of punctuation in a bibliography say about what we think is important about an essay or project? Indeed, what other aspect of marking should get less attention in order that this can get more? As I remember, the examiner suggested that work could even be referred until it was re-submitted with an immaculate list of references; what does that say about what is important?

(Incidentally, I have recently re-read Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger, which was first published in 1966, and I was interested to note that while she occasionally uses the name (date) flag within the text, she more frequently cites works as I have done hers, with full name and book title. Nor would her bibliography be acceptable to our external examiner. The Harvard system apparently originated in 1881--and is not referred to, according to Wikipedia [sorry!] in any of Harvard University library's web-pages. Not many people know that. But just when did it take over the world? It was not common practice in my undergraduate days.)

I suspect that referencing has become a shibboleth for ulterior reasons. It is one of the few respects in which a submission primarily on the practice of teaching can be "correct" or "incorrect", so it becomes where the academic credibility of the work resides when confidence has been lost in passing professional judgement. The Harvard system of course is correct/incorrect because it is a wholly artificial (but nevertheless sensible and effective) system. Practice is much more muddy.

The scholarship of teaching and learning is in danger of becoming the scholasticism of teaching and learning as its insights are overtaken by its proxies.

The examiner wants more evidence of theory being used. Why? I'm far from saying it should not be used. I do tend generally to agree with the examiner on this (after all that is what I teach), but we do need to go back to first principles and ask what the theory is for. Is its absence from our students' work evidence of their ignorance, or of the theory's irrelevance? (Usually, both, and other things, of course.)

I tell students at the start of one of my modules that we shall be exploring some fascinating ideas, but in the final analysis it does not matter whether or not they can attribute an idea to Bernstein, Bloom or Bruner, Pavlov, Piaget or Poppleton, any more than it matters whether a gardener can say who made his/her spade. It does matter what they do with it; whether they can use the essence of that idea to inform their practice. "Informs practice" is of course a very difficult criterion to assess. "Able to cite theorists in support of practice" is much easier.

At one of the institutions for which I act as an external examiner, I was struck by some tutor notes on the sample of assignments I received recently. (They were generally helpful notes, in the spirit of "feed-forward" [Race, 2005]) "You need to make more use of journal articles." Again, why? The implication seems to be that it is what proper academics do, and that is reason enough. No; articles are useful for what they say and how you can use that (or argue with it), not just because they are usually inaccessible, both in terms of finding them and reading them, so that the act of citing them is an indication of your academic dedication!

And since this has developed into a fairly substantial rant, I might as well include my incomprehension at the use of quotations in much academic writing. I shall now break my own rule and quote, but from myself;

Only use quotations when:

• the author has made a point particularly well, and probably more concisely than you could say it, or
• you are going on to discuss in detail what she or he has said at this particular point.

Do not use quotations simply as a way of proving that you have actually read the book or article!

(Atherton, 2008)

In short, it's about time we looked anew at some of our hallowed academic conventions, particularly in the context of professional learning; I suspect that they are symptoms of "mission creep". Under the guise of guaranteeing the legitimacy and authority of material submitted for assessment, they are actually directing attention to a sterile academic game, in which superficial and peripheral characteristics are being elevated in importance beyond personal critical thinking, reflection, argument and evidence of developing practice.

And as Mary Douglas implies--but does not directly argue--where ritual categories and acts are most fiercely defended, it is often precisely because of their lack of meaning in any objective sense. It is because of what belief in them says about the believers; that they are characterised as people who share these particular beliefs. Failing to share the belief is not simply being "wrong"; it is an act of heresy or treachery.

References

Atherton J S (2008) Doceo; Assignment Presentation Guidelines [On-line] UK. Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/academic/assignment_presentation.htm Accessed: 4 April 2009

Race, P (2005) Making Learning Happen London: Sage

oh, all right--you may after all want to read it;

Douglas M (1966) Purity and Danger; an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo London; Routledge and Kegan Paul