On an academic's job description

A friend and colleague has just been told that as a course leader, it is his job to make sure the accountants have set up a project accounting system for a particular course event.

Over coffee, he went over his responsibilities for the course. It is now his job to;

• write the course advertisements, brochure and prospectus entry
• tell marketing where and when to place the advertisements
• respond to prospective student enquiries
• invite suitable students to interview
• interview them
• manage the course induction (across nine centres)
• co-ordinate staffing
• manage quality assurance procedures
• set the agenda for and chair course boards
• respond to any student complaints and manage that procedure
  
• run staff development sessions for colleagues in the associate centres
• liaise with the professional validating body, which includes
• re-designing the programme to comply with their new standards
• preparing the documentation for university validation
• co-ordinating that validation across all the centres
• writing new course handbooks;
• oversee the assessment procedures
• set work
• mark work
• moderate work
• liaise with external examiners
• visit centres to ensure consistency of teaching observations
  
• ensure all assessment data is entered onto the system
• check the accounting procedures and ensure the budget is balanced (although he is not trusted with authorising expenditure)
  
• attend graduation
• provide references for former students

In other words he has to do everything.

Except for one thing.

The university has decided not to run a cohort in the university itself any more.

So he doesn't get to teach on it.

On nostalgia—or serendipity, or something.

I enjoyed it, too! Serendipitously, clicking on "next blog" occasionally yields some gems.

BUT! Is the act of clicking through random "next blogs" worth it, on the off chance there may be something worthwhile among the dross (and this blog may well be among the dross)?

In parallel, how does one evaluate the truth-value of a list like this? I hate to be a spoil-sport, but I grew up in the '50s, and we were terrified by the spectre of polio... Perhaps our parents would have kept us at home if they had access to ways to to entertain us there.

What is happening? de Zengotita, T (2007) Mediated; how the media shape the world around you London; Bloomsbury has produced an exasperatingly (and certainly deliberately) ill-referenced rant about this.

I've changed my mind. I'm not going to ask you what you think. You can do that for yourself.

Or can you?

On "slow blogging"

This is a thoughtful post about how blogging to students works as a process of reflection and learning. (OK, it is occasionally a bit pretentious if your background is not in the humanities, but hey! she knows it!)

On academic pomposity

I've just received one of those "message undeliverable" emails which tells me the system could not deliver my posting to whom I never sent anything anyway. But I was intrigued by the address in the message history, so I went there; and this is what I found;

• "The Dog Trainer's Journal is being moved to the International Institute for Applied Companion Animal Behavior and expanded to include other companion animals. The new journal will remain the same in most respects but be attached to an established and respected institution. The new journal will be called The Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behavior (JACAB). Please visit the IIACAB web site and check out the journal page.

My dog is not impressed.

On good vibes, for once.

(Note that the site linked to is being revised, so the link will not work for long--and it's boring, in any case)

I am just back from a couple of days with about 60 National Teaching Fellows, in York. Many thanks to everyone in the Association of NTFs responsible for organising the event, which struck just the right balance between structure and flexibility, for me. We met up and compared notes. That's all. That's all?

The delight was that;

• the bitching (insofar as there was any at all), was a very low level undercurrent; OK, we all knew how privileged we were to be NTFs (but not merely "privileged", everyone except me clearly deserved the honour!) but even so it was delightfully odd to be at a meeting of academics who were so positive.
• there was a real sense of collegiality, of sharing and mutual support.
  
• and hence of wanting to go on and do even greater things!
  

Why? Because in a world/arena/sector/whatever increasingly characterised by sticks—accountability, micro-management, performance-related pay—there was evidence that carrots work. People who had been rewarded for their achievements were meeting to conspire to build on those achievements. There was no "resting on laurels". Prior success was and is an incentive for later success...

I've posted a couple of positive items in the past month; that may take me over the threshold for Pollyanna syndrome. I'd better get myself tested!

On Edu-Babble

I caught this feature (early part of the programme) on Radio 4 last night and again today. Very salutary!

Incidentally, the QCA's definition of "scaffolding" is not, as I understand it, the same as Bruner's use of the term.

But the item did present a challenge; perhaps I should re-write all this current validation documentation in plain English, with no jargon whatever. Would it then be longer or shorter?

On some advice on learning

I'd really like some feedback on this reply I gave to a correspondent a few minutes ago. We had exchanged emails a few months ago as he sought a study strategy for a technology course he was doing. His message this time suggested that my advice had been helpful on that occasion. Now he has moved on to a different part of the course, with a higher science and maths content, and once again he felt he was floundering. Was he just "bad at" this stuff?

"You have stumbled on something which many people (including some researchers) believe to be the case; that some people are "naturals" for maths and others aren't, (See http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/multiple.htm ) and some people handle technical stuff better or worse than "artistic" stuff (http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/converge.htm)

However, it is not as clear-cut as may at first appear, and although I can't "prove" it, I suspect that this is partly a matter of how abstract ideas appear to be. In the old days of photography before everything went automatic and even digital, we were recommended to "bracket" our exposures. Work out the recommended exposure, take a shot at that setting, and then also take one with the lens one stop more open and one stop more closed. All of us have levels of abstraction with which we are comfortable (and maths tends to be very abstract). On the whole storytellers (very concrete) are not great analytical philosophers or mathematicians (very abstract) and vice versa (OK, Sartre was one exception...). But we can still engage effectively with other levels on either side of our comfort zone.

The problem is that maths etc. tends to be taught at one level (and possibly tested at a slightly more concrete level). If you can't work with the level at which it is being taught, move down (not academically but concretely) and ask yourself to generate examples of how all this works out in practice; or move up, and look for the underlying patterns, of which the stuff you have been taught is just one instance.

Now, frankly, this specific advice may be total rubbish! But it still works! Because it is not the specific exercise, but as you say, your engagement with the material which makes the magic happen. I'm just saying, don't take it at face value as your teacher or the text book presented it; you can manipulate it and manage it as you will--and at the most basic level, you will find yourself remembering it, and being able to apply it.

I'll say no more!

On dumbing down---or not

I am prompted to write, tonight, by a chance hearing of a Radio 4 programme on "The Rise and Fall of the Hapsburgs" as I was going to bed. I'm not a great history buff, but the fact that such a prgramme could go out on one of the four major UK radio networks (albeit just before midnight) suggests that we are not yet totally dumbed down.

And then there is "In Our Time" (Thursdays, 0900-0945, Radio 4). Having tried several times to draft an encomium for this consistently brilliant programme, I can't encompass it. There is its reach and scope. The selection of articulate experts. Melvyn Bragg's chairing (having dropped all pretence of spontaneity; it is paradoxically more immediate). And the newsletter. This is an exemplar of radio at its very best.

But that is not all. Last week, I found myself showing an American friend around the tourist sites of Cambridge and central London. St John's College, King's College Chapel, Peterhouse... Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, the Manet to Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery... It was almost twenty years since I had last been to these places. The Abbey had not changed much (but, hey, it has been there for about 950 years!) but other places had changed, and not in the direction of "dumbing down". They were more accessible (physically, intellectually, socially) than they were, but they did not compromise their integrity. For once, without irony, I was simply impressed.

And! We went on the London Eye. It is not part of the intellectual and cultural heritage; it is too new for that. But it is a great tourist experience on its own terms, and it is also a brilliant feat of engineering.

And as we went, we listened to our fellow tourists. And perhaps the most gratifying and uplifting part of the tour was to hear how well-informed many of them were. OK, perhaps the groups were self-selecting (apart from the, many, school groups); rubber-neckers may not make it into the basement of the National Gallery. Even so... here were unapologetic "culture-vultures" seeking out the very best; and there were unapologetic elitist "providers" (I have no idea what to call the people who manage these sights/sites) who knew that you can't beat an original Picasso or van Gogh.

I spend too much of my life only engaging with the problems of people who are marginalised disenfranchised oppressed and exploited, if I have no time to raise my sights to what we aspire to for them. Moreover; how come I have stayed away from this for twenty years?

On Inclusive Learning

Yes, I know the connection between the title and the link is not self-evident, but the link is the source for most of the nonsense I have just been struggling with.

New readers start here: sexy but politically correct Svetlana Ukridge (a.k.a SVUK), daughter of crusty Llywellyn Ukridge (a.k.a. LLUK) is .... Sorry! There are new regulations afoot, from the aforesaid LLUK, governing teacher training for post-16 education in the UK (now known as the "Learning and Skills Sector"*) These have to be incorporated, at vast effort but no benefit, into existing teacher education** programmes, for the next academic year. Like every other university offering such programmes, mine is currently struggling to accommodate the new regulations and retain at the same time to retain some vestige of academic integrity.

* "Learning and Skills Sector"? Learning is a process; skills are achieved capacities to perform (albeit always improvable). How do they constitute a "sector"? OK, it means a part of the education system. But (assuming that one can thus yoke together such disparate concepts—sorry! Can't remember the right phrase; Helen Gardner on the metaphysical poets? If anyone reads this, please put me right.) but, what part of education is not about "learning and skills"?

** they think (as their "guidance" eloquently testifies) that one can "train" teachers. We know that trained teachers are useless, whereas educated ones...

The "guidance" notes are obsessed with "inclusive learning". I thought—naively—that I had escaped fatuous political correctness when I escaped from the gulag of social work education. Not so.

There is a whole unit called; "Curriculum development for inclusive practice". There are so-called "assessment criteria" like;

'Explain ways in which theories and principles of learning and communication can be applied to promote inclusive practice.

'Analyse how theories, principles and models of inclusive curriculum design and development are used to inform own practice and the provision in own specialist area.

I'm not sure what these actually mean; I certainly do not know what would count as satisfactory evidence for their achievement, but beyond that...

What does "inclusive learning" mean? The phrase originates from the Tomlinson Report of 1996 (for which I have great respect);

'By "inclusive learning", therefore, we mean the greatest degree of match or fit between the individual learners' requirements and the provision that is made for them.'

OK. Remember that the report was specifically about students with learning difficulties and disabilities. It proposed that in contrast to the usual approach, of defining the course according to the requirements of the subject and the level, and then providing support to help students with disabilities could attain that level; the "inclusive curriculum" should be designed around the "individual learners' requirements".

That is fair enough, in the "special needs" area. But most students in PCE do not have "special" needs in that sense. This is the politically-correct tail wagging the dog, and to elevate it into the major principle underpinning the education of all future teachers in the post-16 sector is stupid.

• either it brings the teacher education process into disrepute (the more likely and less damaging result) or
• heaven help us—people may believe it! What will that do to our confidence in our plumbers, chefs, care staff... ?
  

On academic game-playing

A former colleague and student, having moved jobs, is now undertaking a "teacher training" course at his new institution, and sent me a draft of one of his essays. I have changed some details of my response to anonymise it, but retain the argument:


What a joy to read!

We have corresponded, you have sat in my sessions and you have participated in them (not necessarily the same thing), but I have never actually read any of your stuff, apart from emails.

Did you choose this topic? Was it up to you to suggest it, or a choice from a list? I suspect it is the former. Much as I enjoyed the TV adaptation of the Delderfield novels--I confess I didn't read the primary source-- there is something of a mismatch between the Arnoldian ideal of the teacher which suffuses Delderfield and (to continue the Arnold [Matthew this time] reference) the Hebraist, utlilitarian construction of the role in the present.

Were I marking this, I would be in a real quandary. There is no doubt as to its academic quality; argument, sourcing, ... they are all there. (And frankly, although there may be dispute about the grade, this is a clear pass at M level, regardless).

But, this does smack of an expert playing an academic game. It takes one to know one! As you know, we set up assessment systems for all kinds of reasons and in response to all kinds of pressures. Very few of those pressures are about demonstrable improvement in professional performance, for all kinds of reasons, including the sheer difficulty of specifying a valid task. But the game is not the real world. The map is not the territory (I know, someone else articulated that before Korzybski, but it's Friday night!)

This submission clearly demonstrates that you can play the game. But how does it contribute to showing how your performance has improved as a teacher? It doesn't. You asked for my opinion on this as a submission for assessment; I've been through the criteria, and there is clearly no problem with any of them-----------given the choice of topic, of course.

Now to get brutally real.

• I would not have accepted this title, but I would have insisted on it (the title) being submitted and approved in advance, so you would never have written it.
  Delderfield's romantic vision of (school) education for a privileged elite between the wars has very little connection with "bod standard" (i.e. post-1992) universities today. You do not show how any connection might be made.
• I can't see how working on this essay (not just writing it) has challenged or stretched your understanding of teaching and learning (apart perhaps from the reference to your changing view of Friere).
• Playing structured games is about maximising performance within given rules and parameters. It's not about stepping outside them and seeing whether such skill works in the real world. We devise games as pale imitations of the real world, and the educational game is the most hubristic of them all, as you know. Perhaps it is because you know that, that you play the game so knowingly!

I may meta-comment later!

On bandwagons

I have been contacted by someone who obviously knows that the blog exists, although I have no idea whether he has ever read it. He wants me to plug the conference which the header links to; I declined, but I'm doing it anyway. This is a great way to earn the opprobrium both of fans of the conference, for not endorsing it properly; and of opponents, for not simply ignoring it!

However! I'm actually mentioning it because of a phrase in the email commending it to me; "delegates have lots of opportunities to become inspired to try new ideas and leave with 'use it on Monday' materials!" Gee-whiz! This is two (quite expensive---£325 + VAT for the conference alone---and it's "not for profit"?) two days which will revolutionise attenders' teaching? What do these people know, and what can they impart in two days which teachers did not get in a year's PGCE training and another year's NQT mentoring, and a programme of CPD ever since (apologies to those of you not familiar with the initials, but you'll get the gist)?

No only do quick fixes not exist, but most claims to them back-fire. Remember "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" and "accelerated learning"? You should, because they are still current. But what do such ideas actually do?

• They declare that if teachers adjust to ever more variables in planning and fine-tuning their teaching (as if they ever could do any more than have broad-brush plans given all the variables which come into play when you get into the classroom) — then students will miraculously learn better!
• And if students don't learn (sorry, "achieve") better, it is of course the fault of the teachers for not adopting this refined approach. (No way, of course, has it anything to do with the half-baked, untested and unresearched dogma underlying this snake-oil prescription.)

Forced to the choice, I'll go for prescribing fish-oil and better diet. The methodology of the "research" is just as flaky, but it has other spin-off benefits, it helps school meals staff feel valued (and even university catering staff—let's hear it for them!—they're brilliant and seriously under-valued) and even if it doesn't help with learning it protects joints and the cardio-vascular system. (I haven't checked out that research in detail, I confess, but I'll take the media reporting on trust for once.)

On visualisation

Wow! If you like visual representations of all kinds of phenomena, this site is amazing. There's no more to say, other than to recommend that you not go there if you have anything else planned for several hours.

On VLEs

I have just come across this wonderful rant! I agree with it all (at least, the bits I can understand), and it is a superb examination (some might even say "deconstruction") of the educational, cultural and even political assumptions contained in them.

One thing the author does not mention, however, is that a Virtual Learning Environment (or Learning Management System/LMS) requires a sophisticated infrastructure; small educational "providers" can't support them. Then again, they may need them even less than the rest of us, because people might actually talk to each other... On the other hand, the net has evolved. "Web 2.0", the social web is here. Practically everything a VLE can do can now be done better and more easily using free tools on the wider web; I'm working on a paper on "DIY VLE" about this.

Any ideas and comments would be welcome!

On the skills crisis

For all those of you in technical and vocational education; listen to this BBC "File on 4" programme to find out how present policies are causing distortions in the system.

On a passing tradition

This posting is unashamedly academic, elitist and reactionary.

I was sad to read today of the death of Tony Nuttall, who taught me as an undergraduate at Sussex in the 'sixties. But I was also deeply struck by his obituary by Laurence Lerner, another of the founding faculty at Sussex, and the values implicit in it. Lerner starts;

"A. D. Nuttall once gave a lecture at Sussex University about some difficulties in the Darwinian theory of natural selection, of which the first sentence was: "This lecture is the rashest act yet committed in an admittedly rather unadventurous life." [...] the sentence is a splendid glimpse of the intellectual atmosphere of the early years of Sussex (a new university in 1961) which he did so much to create.

"As a literary scholar, Tony Nuttall was willing to explore all intellectual issues that seemed to him to impinge on our way of seeing the world: [...] he showed his lecture to his colleague John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading Darwinians, who took its objections wholly seriously.

Where and how would one now find;

• A specialist in English Literature capable of lecturing seriously and critically on Darwin?
• An institution which could offer him the opportunity to do so?
• One in which academics in English actually know any of their biologist colleagues?
• ... to the extent that each would look over the other's lectures?

As Lerner goes on;

"At Sussex, [...] he played a leading part in the development of the contextual course on the Modern European Mind, which placed some of the great modernist writers in their intellectual context, so that students read Dostoevsky or Lawrence along with Freud, Conrad or Sartre along with Marx, Thomas Mann along with Nietzsche. This course was an unforgettable intellectual adventure for several generations of students - and for their teachers.

It was indeed; it was certainly one of my greatest privileges to have taken some of it. Some of it, because at its heart was a lecture circus, as one of the faculty called it; three lectures a week throughout the year, one on each of three strands for the term. On that basis, it was estimated that, provided no more faculty wanted to join in (gloriously forlorn hope!) it would be possible to begin to repeat the sequence in five years or so. (The undergraduate programme lasted then as now three years.) Indeed, the sheer chutzpah of offering a course too big for anyone to grasp the whole of it was an academic statement in its own right.

We could not do it now. What would be the "learning outcomes"?

On completion of a glimpse of this module, students will;

1. Have been permitted to stay up late, creep into a corner of a sometimes hushed and sometimes raucous debating room in the library and begin to participate in the "conversation across the ages" which is the glory of our culture.
2. Have found their heads to be the battlegrounds of competing ideas on the most important (and occasionally the most trivial) topics of our time.
3. Have realised that there are no static answers, nor should there be, and that it is our obligation to ensure that there never are ...?

Devise an assessment scheme for that!

The author of this obituary, Laurence Lerner, gave me the only A+ grade I ever got. It was for an essay on "Was Henry James a philistine?", in which I discussed "Portrait of a Lady" in the framework of Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence". Not that it mattered what grade one got, in terms of degree classification; all summative assessment was by sudden-death final exams in three weeks at the end of the third year (perhaps there are some areas in which we have made progress).

I'm not bemoaning, "where did it all go?" (even at Sussex). I'm asking if there is any chance we might get some of it back?

On Spring

It may be some way off, but—for all you literacy buffs out there;

What is the past participle or simple of "spring"? Is it;

1. springed
2. sprung
3. sprang
4. sprought
5. spromething else?

On Academese

I'm thinking of signing up for a conference in June in Poland. I went to their website and found—great idea—that they had set up a blog for the session proposals as they came in. (That's the link in the title.)

Then I read the abstracts. Oh dear! All my prejudices about my fellow-academics are confirmed. Just read them for yourself!

I'd still like to attend (but only because I know from experience that this silly pretentious language is—in most cases—confined to the formal academic jousting of the event, and bears little relation to how people talk informally); but I can't play this game. Nor do I want to.

And for all the pretentions, there are still no hotel recommendations or costings. Forget it!

On References

Very best wishes to you all for 2007!

The link in the title to this post is primarily a bit of fun, but I do enjoy a beautifully crafted reference!

On Christmas messages

I have not posted over the holidays themselves, because I have stayed away from this machine (under threat of dire consequences). You could say I went "cold turkey". Or perhaps not... :-)

If you are interested in a couple of fun Christmas messages, check out;

• http://christopher.plaquet.free.fr/christmasday/concertoduperenoel.swf
  

or for something a little funkier;

• http://www.thecompassgroup.biz/merryxmas.swf

Or if you are into something a little darker (although I am sure it is unintentionally so), consider this message, which was passed on to me via email as these things are. I have extracted some of the text only from a very slick PowerPoint slideshow;

• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep... You are richer than 75% of this world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish some place ... You are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy
  
• [...]
  
• Have a good day, count your blessings, and pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.
• You are wished a Merry Christmas

(There are ten slides in all, with cosy images as backgrounds; the whole thing is seductive enough for me to make a deliberate effort not to become part of a viral campaign). My brother commented; "it reminds me a bit of those shopping malls where they introduce a fragrance into the plenum system to evoke misty eyed memories of long ago seasons so you will go into the stores and spend more money than you planned to. Or am I getting more and more cynical?"

No! I don't think that reaction is cynical enough. These po-faced "messages" embody a really miserable double message (technically a "double-bind", following Bateson and Watzlawick...)

1. You are so much better off than practically everyone else, you have an obligation to be happy
2. How can you possible be happy when the rest of the world is in such a mess?

...and to foist that on us in the guise of a "Merry Christmas" greeting is a little disingenuous? hypocritical?

There is no way one can emerge from such a message feeling "merry". (Although I concede that despite the ubiquity of the injunction, it is not indeed the "point" of the season.)

Indeed the final paragraph; "You are wished a Merry Christmas" is really insidious, carrying as it does the sub-text, "...but you don't deserve to be!"

Some day I may start a theological blog, but this is not it; this one is about learning. But these messages carry messages in turn about learning...

• about the levels of messages carried by our material
• and particularly for adult learners--what messages do they imply about the learners themselves?

(Plonking comments on something very subtle and quite powerful. Revisit later?)

On standards

The new professional standards for teacher/ tutor/ trainer education in the lifelong learning sector have finally been published! Deep joy!

Great news, particularly for people like me who make a living from squeezing really good teacher education programmes into these artificial shells. It's a bit like pre-revolutionary China, and binding girls' feet...

Seriously: where is the evidence that conformity to these specifications makes any difference to students' learning? What research underpins this speculative exercise? Where is the evidence that "trained" teachers are better than "untrained" ones in vocational education? Are we sure what "better" means, here?