Partnership vs Prison Experiment
Posted: August 13, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, principles of design, resources, stanford prison experiment, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, workload, zimbardo Leave a comment
The Stanford Prison Experiment (official site, Wikipedia, BBC Recreation) is notorious in many ways. For those who haven’t heard of it, in 1971, a randomly selected group of 24 males (out of 70) were split into two randomly assigned groups: prisoners and guards. They were then placed into a mock prison situation. Despite agreeing to a 7-14 day experimental run, the experiment was terminated after 6 days. By this stage, 1/3 of the guards were showing sadistic tendencies, 2 prisoners had quit and the abuse that prisoners were suffering included solitary confinement, loss of mattresses, reduced access to toilets (or enforced primitive access).
Lest you think that the researcher controlling it, Professor Philip Zimbardo, terminated this for altruistic reasons, it was in response to the objections of a graduate student who was observing the experiment – who he was dating and went on to marry. Of the fifty people who had observed the experiment, and the deteriorating conditions, Zimbardo claims that only this one observer objected.
I assume that some of you thinking “Surely… someone else said something?” Yeah, I thought that too, when I first read about it. Apparently not.) It’s worth noting that Zimbardo’s prison started out as a more ‘extreme’ prison than usual, with degrading activities forced onto the prisoners fairly early. You can read about these in the site or you can read about the Abu Ghraib incident, which is strikingly similar.
What is worth noting up front is that this research has never been fully successfully replicated, for a number of reasons, and the publication standard was low. The Stanford Prison Experiment stands, however, in many ways as a failure to protect the people in an experiment, even if the actions of the agents in the system was not as random (there are claims Zimbardo engineered large sections of this) or as meaningful (the experiment was very poorly constructed) as it may appear.
The random selection of the participants, 24 out of an original 70 and randomised roles, seems to indicate a situational attribution of behaviour, rather than one that we are born with. Put someone in a position where they have power over somebody else, put enough rules in the way – *bang* you’re potentially recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment. (Paging Dr Milgram… a topic for a later post.)
Ultimately, demanding compliance can place us in difficult positions where we require authoritarianism on the part of those who demand, and compliance from those who must obey. Whatever the Stanford study showed, this arrangement of struct power-divided rules does not allow for a meeting of minds in any kind of partnership.
One of things I dislike the most about some of the seemingly arbitrary things that we sometimes do (or are encouraged to do) in teaching is that any situation that devolves to “because I said so” or “because I’ve been told to” is requiring compliance under the aegis of institutional support, and driven by some legitimising framework. This gets in the way of one of the most useful and constructive relationships that we can form – the partnership between educator and student. Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that most students have the maturity or depth of knowledge to devise and run entire courses but a partnership role allows us to avoid falling into the traps of guard and prisoner. We do have hard limits that we need to adhere to, to make the recognition of education possible in many senses, but building courses that clearly set these limits in a constructive and useful way, rather than a reactive and inauthentic way, pulls us out of the “I told you to do this” and allows us to move into the “why didn’t you do that?”
(We could talk about allowing individuals mobility to reduce their dependency on external validation from their peers, and hence allow us to encourage the pursuit of individual goals and reduce any fighting over favouritism but I’m not well-versed enough in social identity theory yet to give this much flesh.)
I, as the subject matter expert, am trying to assist the student in developing knowledge within a particular set of subjects and any useful associated areas. If I have created something where, in order to understand the work, you need to complete certain readings and assignments, perform certain actions, and do so in a certain timeframe or lose the opportunity to participate – most students will actually do this. On top of the issues of knowledge, we have the other skills that we are trying to transfer: design, time management, ethics, professionalism, communication skills. This is where it gets hard.
Say, for example, I design a course where you need to finish Assignment 2 before we discuss a certain topic in a lecture/tutorial/studio activity. Therefore, you have a reason to finish assignment 2 before some deadline. I can set a deadline that is just before the next activity or I can set it a few days before to give people some digestion time prior to looking at it again. Or I can set an earlier deadline to give people practice at time management. However, if Assignment 2 is work that will not be referred to elsewhere in the course, except for the exam, when should I set the deadline?
The problem we have is that allowing deadlines to run late means no marking or feedback until late – this, of course, drives our education design to bring formative work forward but, once again, this only makes sense if that feedback will be useful earlier on.
So, to briefly recap, setting an arbitrary hand-in time that is purely to make your marking life easier and has no pedagogical driver or no impact on student learning is understandable but, in many ways, potentially an abuse of your position. (I am all too familiar of the realities of staff and resource shortages on when and how we can mark, especially when we start getting told to increase feedback or have all assignments back within time X. But let’s get this straight: formative and summative have different roles and marking loads. We know that we can achieve things with good learning design that far exceed what we can manage with arbitrary action.)
Now let’s look at a more complex issue – late penalties. I have evidence that students change their behaviour when late penalties are fixed on 24 hour barriers. We’ve seen students line up with these and start handing up in response to these new barriers: miss one and you lose even more marks. But have we changed the right behaviour or does this merely lead to a certain form of resignation in the face of arbitrary authority?
Why am I removing marks anyway? If the work is handed in before the time that it’s needed, then, from a knowledge point of view, the aim has been achieved. Which skill am I developing? If you responded with ‘time management’, then providing that we are completely clear on when the work must be handed in to achieve certain requirements AND that we have added an overall factor in the ‘professional’ spectrum of time management, we are probably doing the right thing. If we’re just saying “hand it in on time OR ELSE” then we are conflating issues of knowledge development with issues of compliance and this is where it starts to get murky.
Now it doesn’t have to get murky but it’s completely possible in this zone. You risk ending up academics who won’t accept anything because it’s late (regardless of reason) or students who start acting up (out of defiance) or, potentially worse, students who become completely passive and dependent upon your authority. If self-regulation is supposed to be in play, then we haven’t achieved much by doing this.
Nothing I’ve said should be interpreted as “no deadlines” or “no authority” but what I am saying is that we know what happens when we take a randomly assigned group of people and make one beholden to the other, when there is no really good reason or sense of equality or partnership between them. We’ve seen it time and time again.
Kohn, in “Punishing with Rewards”, makes a number of observations, some good and some bad, including that one of our biggest risks is in the rupturing of relationships by setting up a disparity of power levels, where one person controls and the other person complies or seeks to appease, rather than to achieve the actual objective. It’s an interesting way to look at a very challenging problem, to give us more lines along which to think.
I should finish this by noting, again, that Zimbardo’s experiment was flawed in many ways and deriving significance from the role is hard. It appears, from the UK version, that leadership plays a key part in what happens. It was only when strong leadership started to lead the prison guards down dark paths in the UK recreation that they started to approach what had happened in Stanford. Zimbardo admits that his role in the experiment may have been not been all that sensible in many ways but it may be that his briefing set the scene for what happened. His passive observation as matters deteriorated, with the guards knowing that he was watching, certainly validated their actions. Either way, if it is a fact that one key leader can have so much impact, then that makes what we do even more important – even if it’s occasionally looking at something, thinking about it and saying ‘No, actually, that’s wrong.”
The Key Difference (or so it appears): Do You Love Teaching?
Posted: August 12, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, blogging, collaboration, community, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, workload 3 Comments
Please, any of my students reading this, do not give me an apple. I have sufficient!
I wander around fair bit for work. (I make it sound more impressive than that but the truth is that I end up in lots of different places to work on my many projects and sometimes the movement, although purposeful, is more Brownian than not – due to life.) I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of people who teach – some of whom are putting vast amounts of effort into it and some of whom aren’t.
The key difference, unsurprisingly, is generally the passion behind it. We see this in our students. They will spend days working on a Minecraft construction to simulate an Arithmetic and Logic Unit, but won’t always put in the two hours to write 20 lines of C++ code. They will write 20,000 words on their blog but can’t give you a 1,000 word summary.
We put effort into the things that we are interested in. Sure, if we’re really responsible and have self-regulation nailed, then we can do things that we’re not interested in, or actively dislike, but it’s never really going to have the same level of effort or commitment.
Passion (or the love of something) is crucial. Some days I have so much to say on the blog that I end up with 4-5 days stocked up in the queue. Some days I struggle to come up with the daily post or, as yesterday, I just run out of time to hit the 4am post cycle because I am doing other things that I am passionate about. Today, of course, the actual deadline timer is running and it seems to have made me think – now I’m passionate and now you’ll get something worth reading. If I’d stayed up until after my guests had left last night, written just anything to meet the deadline? It wouldn’t be anywhere near my best work.
Passion is crucial.
Which brings me to teaching. I know a lot of academics – some who are research/teaching/admin, some research only, some teaching/admin and… well, you get the picture. The majority are the ‘3-in-1’ academics and, in many regards, looking at their student evaluations and performance metrics will not tell you anything about them as a teacher that you can’t learn by sitting down with them and talking about their teaching. It is hard to shut me up about my courses and my students, the things I’m trying, the things I’m thinking of adopting, the other areas I’m looking at, the impact of what other Unis and people are doing, the impact of reports. I am a (junior) scholar in the discipline of learning and teaching and I really, really love teaching. For me, putting effort into it is inevitable, to a great extent.
Then I talk to colleagues who really just want to do their research and be left alone. Everything else is a drag on their research. Administration will get the minimum effort, if it’s done. Teaching is something that you have to do and, if the students don’t get it, then it’s their fault. What is so weird about this is that these people are, in the vast majority, excellent scholars in their own discipline. They research and read heavily, they are aware of what every other researcher is doing in this area, they know if their work has a chance for publication or grants. Having these skills, they then divide the world into ‘places where I have to scholarly’ and ‘places where I can phone it in’. (Not all researchers are like this, I’m talking about the ones who consider anything other than research beneath them.)
What a shame! What a terrible missed opportunity for both these people who should be more aware of the issues of learning and teaching, and for the students who could be learning so much more from them? But when you actually talk to these academics, some of them just don’t liked teaching, they don’t see the point of putting effort into it or (in some cases) they just don’t know what to do and how to improve so they hunker down and try to let it all slide around them.
Part of this is the selective memory that we have of ourselves as students. I’m lucky – I was terrible. I was fortunate enough to be aware and mature enough as I reconstructed myself as a good student to see the transformative process in action. A lot of my peers are happy to apply rules to students that they wouldn’t (or don’t ) apply to themselves now or in the past, such as:
“I’m an academic who doesn’t like teaching, despite being told that it’s part of my job, so I’ll do the minimum required – or less on some occasions. You, however, are a student who doesn’t like the sub-standard learning experiences that my indifference brings you but I’m telling you to do it, so just do it or I’ll fail you.”
This isn’t just asymmetrical, this is bordering on the Stanford Prison Experiment, an arbitrary assignation of roles that leads to destructive power-derived behaviour. But, if course, if you don’t enjoy doing something then there are going to be issues.
Have we actually ever asked people these key questions as a general investigation? “Do you like teaching?” “What do you enjoy about teaching?” “What can we do to make you enjoy teaching more?” Would this muddy the water or clear the air? Would this earth our non-teaching teachers and fire them up?
Even where people run vanity courses (very small scale, research-focused courses design to cherry pick the good students) they are still often disappointed because, even where you can muster the passion to teach, if you don’t really understand how to teach or what you need to do to build a good learning experience, then you end up with these ‘good’ students in this ‘enjoyable’ course failing, complaining, dropping out and, in more analogous terms, kicking your puppy. You will now like teaching even less!
It’s blindingly obvious that some people don’t like teaching but, much as we wouldn’t stand out the front of a class and yell “PASS, IDIOTS!”, I’m looking for other good examples where we start to ask people why they don’t want to do it, what they’re worried about, why they don’t respect it and how we can get them more involved in the L&T community.
Let’s face it, when you love teaching, the worst day with the students is still a pretty good day. It would be nice to share this joy further.
Declining Quality (In the Latin Sense)
Posted: August 10, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, community, education, educational problem, elitism, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, measurement, quality, teaching, teaching approaches Leave a comment“I’m quality. You’re a mediocrity. He’s rubbish.”
These are some of the (facetious) opening words from a recent opinion piece in The Australian by Professor Greg Craven, Vice Chancellor of Australian Catholic University. In this short piece, entitled (sic) “When elitism rules the real elite is lost in shuffle” (as, apparently, is the punctuation) he addresses that fundamental question “what is quality?” As he rightly points out, basing our assessment of quality of a student on an end-of-secondary-school mark (the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, or ATAR, in Australia, or the equivalent in any other country) when it tells you nothing about knowledge, capacity or intellect.
What appears to be a ‘low’ ATAR of 66 tells you that this student performed better than two thirds of his or her peers in this young. In Craven’s own words:
“So moaning about an ATAR of 51 to 80 is like crying over an Olympic silver medal. No, it’s not gold, but you still swim faster than most people.”
There is no assessment of the road taken to reach the ATAR either. A student who overcame ferocious personal and societal disadvantage to earn a 70 would look exactly the same as a privileged and gifted student who put in a reasonable effort and achieved the same rank. From a University educator’s perspective, when the going gets tough, I’m pretty sure I know who is more likely to stay in the course and develop the right skill set. We see the ‘gifted but unfocused’ drift in, realise that actual work is required and then drift out again with monotonous regularity. The strugglers, the strivers, the ones who had to fight through to get here – that tenacity would be wonderful to measure.
The ATAR serves a useful purpose as a number that we can use to say “These students can come in” and “these can’t”, except that a number of factors affect the setting of that cut-off. The first is that high prestige courses lose that prestige if you drop the cut-off. Students from certain backgrounds will not select low ATAR courses, even if they are known to be of higher value or rigour, because they reverse shop on the cut-off score. The notion that being a single ATAR point short of getting in is anything other than noise is, obviously, not valid. It’s not as if we sat down and said that the ATAR corresponds to a certain combination of all of these desirable traits and being one short is just not good enough.
Craven makes a good point. The ATAR is a convenient tool but a meaningless number. Determining the genuine qualities of a student is not easy and working out which qualities map to the ‘ideal’ student who will perform well in the University setting is nigh-on impossible. True quality assessment is multi-faceted. It allow for bad years, slow starts or disadvantage, and alternative pathways. Education is opportunity – using quality as an argument to exclude people is a weapon that has been overused in the past and should be put down now. We seem to believe that hitting the government goal of 40% of the population entering higher education requires us to let in just about anyone and the sky will fall – low quality will ruin us! As Craven says, if the OECD can achieve 40%, why can’t we? Are we really all that special?
Craven makes two points that really resonate with me. Firstly, that it is the graduates that come out that determine the final quality. To be honest, if you want to see how good a University is, look at its graduates in about 20 years. You’ll know about the person and the institution by doing that. If the input quality of student is so important then what exactly is it that we are doing at the Uni level? Just minding them for three years while they… excel?
Secondly, that quality is not personal but national. To quote Craven again:
A country that discards its talent out of prejudice or poor policy fatally weakens its own productivity.
Determining the quality of a student but looking at one number, taken at a point where their personality has barely formed, which is not generous in its accommodation of struggle or disadvantage, is utterly the wrong way to express a complex concept such as quality.
What is quality? That’s the homework that Craven leaves us with – define “quality”. Really.
(ultimately) Racism: Vivian Chum Writes About Her Seventh Grade Experience
Posted: August 5, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: authenticity, community, education, educational problem, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, racism, smith magazine, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, the moment, thinking, vivian chum 3 CommentsI’m reading a book called “The Moment”, which claims to contain “Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories” and, you’ll be relieved to hear, this book is delivering what it promises on the cover. It’s put out by Smith Magazine and is 125 of the pivotal life moments of “famous & obscure” writers and artists. Each story is short, pithy and (so far) worth reading.
Fair warning, this is a post about one person’s account of an event that may never have happened – but here is my reaction to it. One of my definitions of a writer is that they can react to an event that may never have happened and show you something interesting, perhaps even useful.
Today, I am writing in reaction to Vivian Chum’s ‘moment’ about the time that she, and all other non-white students in her Texas public school, were called to a meeting with the public address announcement “All seventh-grade minority students, report to the cafeteria.” There is no date on this story but, given that (according to the bio I’ve found) Chum graduated from Rice in 2002, we can work backwards and put this in the late 80s to early 90s – not the 50s or 60s. So we’ll start from the fact that a segregated announcement drew all of the non-whites to the cafeteria – African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American.
The point of the assembly was to instruct the students in the importance of reducing their underperformance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills set, compared to white students. It is, of course, bar graphs on a screen time because nothing shows students how to achieve more than a dry PowerPoint presentation of underperformance and an exhortation to work harder, study more, be more focused. After all, school funding is tied to performance in this test – here is a battery of graphs showing African-American and Hispanic student performance. For some reason, Asian-Americans aren’t on these particular underperformance graphs.
Chum, looking around the room, notices that some of the best performers in the seventh-grade are sitting here – but because they are non-white, they are here regardless of their actual achievement. She’s thinking about the lessons they’ve learned about racism, and the KKK and the Nazis, about the slave trade and she’s uncomfortable being here and, increasingly, angry, but she’s 11 or 12 and she’s not sure why she’s feeling this way.
No-one is in chains.
No one has thrown a rope over a tree branch.
No-one is even explicitly calling anyone a bad word.
And, yet, she knows that this is wrong. This is unfair. She wants to tear up every award or recognition that she’s ever been given because, of course, today the truth is finally out. She’s not the same. She’s a statistic in terms of test compliance and her race is more important than her individuality.
The (positive) lesson that Chum takes away from this is that this is the last time that she will ever take anything like this without speaking up, without walking out or not even going to things like this.
But, if her account is to be believed, then this is a tale of ignorance, racism, wrongheadedness and unthinking compliance with imposed test standards that is shocking enough, but frankly appalling when we place it into the last 20 years.
When I was at HERDSA, a speaker talked about providing support for those students who were struggling, or were having trouble adapting because of family background, and stressed the importance of making time to talk to every student. Instead of forcing the under-achievers to make more time in their schedule to fit in pastoral care and to drag themselves out of classes to go to ‘under achiever’ events, every student had a scheduled time to talk about things. Yes, this is a large investment of time but this addresses all of the arguments about ‘ignoring the big achievers’ or ‘focusing on the outliers’ and allow a much greater sense of community and ‘wholeness’ across the class.
When I was at school, we had an active remedial mathematics and english program run, very discreetly, across all of the years of secondary school. At the same we had a very active extension and stretch program, too. To be honest, to this day, I would not know how many (or who) of my classmates were in either. It was an accepted fact that across all of the boys (yes, single sex) in the school, there would be a range and it was up to the school, which was full fee-paying (thanks, Mum), to provide support to lift up those who were struggling and to provide interest and extension for those who could go further.
This, of course, has had a major impact upon me and this is what I expect of education: for everyone, regardless of their background and abilities, and according to their needs. Reading Chum’s account of how stupid we can be on occasion, it only drives home how lucky I was to be at such a school and the overall responsibility of educators to look at some of the things that we are asked to do and, where appropriate, say “No” so that we don’t force 12 year olds to have to stand up to protect their own rights as individuals, rather than indistinguishable pawns of a race.
Whackademia: Anectopia, More Like. (A Rather Opinionated Review)
Posted: August 4, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: blogging, education, ethics, higher education, richard hil, thinking, whackademia, work/life balance, workload 5 CommentsI recently posted about some of the issues that we face in Academia and, being honest, they aren’t small problems and they aren’t limited to one locale or country. You may also recall that I wrote a summary of a radio interview with Richard Hil, the author of Whackademia and I said that I’d write more on Richard’s thoughts when I finished the book.
Hmm. Be careful what you commit to. This book is long on moan but short on solution. But, to explain this, I must be long on moan – please forgive me. I realise that some of you may feel that I am a heavily corporatised shill, who the book is targeted against, and therefore unworthy to comment on this so caustically. Believe me when I say that I believe that my role is to hold my integrity in my job while trying to achieve a better environment in which all of us can perform our jobs – and I believe that anyone who knows me and what I do would agree with that. If I am a shill, then I am the shill that you want on your side because it would be harder to find anyone more committed to the purity of learning and teaching and the world enriching nature of research. Yes, I am an idealist who walks with the devil sometimes, but my soul is still my own.
There were a couple of points in the original radio interview when I would have preferred that Hil go into more detail, or provide some more supporting evidence. I can honestly say that my desire for some more substance has still not been met.
There is no doubt that there are problems, that rampant managerialism is not helping, that a review of the sector in the light of a reduced commitment to funding from the government is important. But what is presented in Hil’s book is a stream of unattributed complaint, whinging and, above all, a constant litany of admissions of unethical behaviour from Hil’s interview participants – with the defence that they were told to comply so, of course, they did. Rather than interpreting this as a group of noble warriors being forced to bend their heads before a cruel and unjust overlord, I read this as the words of people who, having one of the most important jobs in the world, took the easier path.
Do I think that I’ve ever assigned a mark to a student that they didn’t earn?
No. No, I don’t. This is at odds with any number of Hil’s interviewees who freely admitted to fixing marks when asked to, bending over in the face of the administrative wind and, then, having the hide to complain about slipping standards and lack of freedom. I don’t interpret the monitoring levels of academic progress and student progressions rates as a requirement to pass people, I regard it as a way of ensuring that we fairly advertise what is required to pass our courses, that we provide opportunities for students to display their ability and that we focus on education – taking difficult things and conveying them to students.
Show me someone who is proud that their course is so tough that 90% of students fail it and, frankly, I think that they can call themselves anything they like, as long as the word teacher or educator isn’t used. I could fail 100% of students who take my course – gaze upon my works, for there are none as smart as I! This isn’t academic integrity, this is hubris.
Why am I so disappointed in this work? Because I agree with a number of Hil’s points but he presents the weakest, anecdotal means for supporting it. “Whackademia” is eminently dismissible and this is a terrible thing, as it makes the genuine problems that are raised easier to dismiss.
I am still desperately searching for a solution, a proposal from Hil that is more tangible than a fragmented wish list and anything other than his journey through a poisonous and frustrated Anectopia – light on fact but dripping with salacious, unsubstantiated detail. I really shouldn’t be surprised. If you read the contents page, you’ll see that Chapter 7 is entitled “Enough Complaint: now what?” on page 193. Given that the book is over by page 230, that’s a lot of complaint to solution! (Note to self, check the ratio in this post…)
Let me give you some quotes:
“Additionally, older interviewees argued that younger academics were far more likely to have adopted today’s regulatory rationalities, in contrast to more seasoned academics who are perhaps more resistant to the new order. Whether or not this is true is less important than the fact that, to survive and thrive in the current tertiary culture, certain compromises may have to be made – even if this feels at times like putting one’s soul out to tender.” p91
Whether or not this is true? Hang on, truth is optional in this sentence?
Let me put that quote back together with the qualifiers and questionable modifiers highlighted.
“Additionally, older interviewees argued that younger academics were far more likely to have adopted today’s regulatory rationalities, in contrast to more seasoned academics who are perhaps more resistant to the new order. Whether or not this is true is less important than the fact that, to survive and thrive in the current tertiary culture, certain compromises may have to be made – even if this feels at times like putting one’s soul out to tender.”
“faculties – sometimes referred to as ‘corporate silos'” p87
“These sorts of observations might be dismissed out of hand by today’s university managers as elitist, sentimental drivel, born of resentment of the new corporate reality. Well, if indeed these reflections are drivel then they are shared by all but one of the ten or so older professors I interviewed for this book.”
Hil’s book is identified on the cover as a searing exposé from an insider but, as someone who is also on the inside, it appears that the insides that we inhabit are distinctly different. No doubt, there are people inside my own institution who would read Hil’s words and shiver with the rightness of his words: “Yes, I am being pushed around!”, “Yes, I have to take shortcuts because big bad Admin makes me!”, “Yes, students are just sometimes too stupid for my wonderful course and I should be allowed to fail 80% of them!” But I’d disagree with them as much as I disagree with Hil.
The greatest disappointment I ever feel is when someone squanders their opportunities and their gifts, especially when they destroy opportunities for other people. In this case, not only has Hil wasted his spot in the sun, he has made it harder for a more thoughtful and constructive book to be written as his work, writ large in the media and read widely, will control and shape the debate for some time to come.
Again, for shame, sir.
All That Glisters Is Not Gold
Posted: August 3, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: blogging, community, education, educational problem, higher education, identity, in the student's head, learning, olympics, reflection, thinking 1 Comment
We’ve seen some disgraceful behaviour in the local media regarding “underperformance” at the Olympic Games. Australia fancies itself in a couple of sports – swimming is definitely one of them. It would be, sadly, an overstatement to say that we are good winners and bad losers – we’re smug winners, as a media scrum (the athletes are generally quite humble), and we’re absolutely vile losers. If someone from another nation (which isn’t Britain or the US) happens to beat us, then out come the accusations of doping, or sly comments. A young man who has achieved Olympic Silver and has missed out by 1/100th of a second is confronted, just out of the pool, by an ex-swimmer who should know better asking if he’s feeling shattered. What does it achieve? Do we need it? Do we care?
Why should he feel shattered? Did he stop for a drink half-way? Did he throw the comp (as some athletes who have already been expelled did)? No? Then let it go.
I was watching the kayaking (I was trapped in an airport lounge) and the guy who came third was absolutely stoked – a Bronze for Czechoslovakia! Why? Because he did his best and it happened to get him a medal. The lone male Australian athletics competitor came 19th but it was the best result for mens athletics for Oz in decades, I believe, so that was a good thing and he got some brief praise on the television. Sadly, and I’m sorry, athletics people, I think that’s because nobody expected him to do that much and, being very honest, very few people give two hoots about Australia’s performance in this area. (I will be surprised if he’s ever mentioned again – which is terrible after his achievement.)
Here’s what everyone sitting on a couch, remote in hand, beer in the other, criticising these athletes for getting Silver (woo), Bronze (gasp!) or (hushed silence) no medal (no hoper!) is secretly reciting to themselves.
“We’re sun-bronzed Aussies! We’re cut out of the same rock and leather as the outback heroes who became ANZACs and went off to war, larger than life and twice as tall! We own the pool! We rule the velodrome! We occasionally shoot things with guns and bows! We’ll remember who you are for a few minutes in another sport if you win a medal – we’ll make you a natural treasure if you’re cute, you win through an amazing series of people falling over or if you get us unexpected medals in a Winter Olympics. We might even remember your name.
For a while.
Of course, run into a pommel horse and break your jaw and we’ll play that on the TV for 20 years because nothing appeals to us more than the humiliating failure of people that we would praise if they won.”
(Note that this is not everyone who watches the Olympics but it’s certainly everyone who walked around for the last day or so giving our swimmers a hard time or accusing the Chinese swimmers of doping. Seriously, that’s your first reaction?)
What a curse of expectation lies over all of this – the sport you pick, the way you do it, people sitting in armchairs judging professional athletes as to how much over their PB they should have achieved. You know what I’m drawing to here. This is exactly what happens to people who come to Uni as well. If you’re first-in-family and not well supported, then you’ll be listening to people telling you that you’re wasting your time. If you’re getting distinctions, why not HDs? (Hey, if you’re offering constructive assistance and support, I have much less problem. If you’re saying ‘Wow, 98, what happened to the other 2’ and even vaguely mean it? Shame on you.) Everyone else did better than you? Why not drag up a racial or cultural stereotype, or accuse the staff of favouritism, or come up with any excuse other than “I didn’t do anything”. I still have a lot of sympathies for these students because I think that a lot of this rubbish comes in from around you. If you’re not excelling, then why bother?
This kind of culture is pervasive – you win, or you’re nothing. If someone else wins, they cheated, or (somehow) it wasn’t fair. It’s impossible to construct a sound learning framework out of rubbish like this. What’s worse is that if you start to think that everyone else is winning by cheating or by being ‘lucky’, then suddenly little switches go off in your head as your rationalisation engine starts shutting down the ethical cut-outs.
I generally try not to watch sports or commentary around Olympics time because, for all of the amazing athletic effort, there’s always far too much hype, nonsense and unpleasantness for me to able to appreciate it. It’s no wonder a lot of my students can barely think sometimes as they stress themselves into careers that they don’t want, degrees they don’t need, or towards goals that they aren’t yet ready to achieve, when we have such a ferocious media scrum hanging around the necks of our best sportspeople. You tell people that’s what winning looks like and, be careful, they might believe you.
To Leave or Not To Leave (Academia)
Posted: July 28, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, higher education, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, work/life balance, workload 6 CommentsThere’s a post that’s been making the rounds from a University of New Mexico academic who is leaving to go to Google. Mark has blogged on it, and linked to a more positive post that reinforces why you would stay in the job, but my reaction to the original post is that there are far too many solid, scoring, points being made and, while it’s not gloom for the whole sector yet, there are large storm clouds hanging heavily over our heads.
I think that we’ve made some crucial mistakes that, on reflection, we need to address if we want to stop people leaving. Be in no doubt, when the storms come, yes, the casual workforce takes it in the neck but a lot of other people jump as well. They go somewhere else that supports them, inspires them, challenges them and does not make them wonder why they’re doing the job. It takes 10-20 years to produce a “useful” academic. Get the University climate wrong and they will pick up and leave. Will that work for everyone? No. It will work for your passionate, knowledgable, personable, approachable and amazing staff who will easily find work elsewhere.
Which, of course, leaves your schools and departments gutted of the firebrands, the doers, the visionaries and those who can inspire and lead the rest of us to the same level. I believe that we can all lift to the level of these great people – if we can remain in contact with them. Take them away and we stagnate. We all know, deep down, that bad cultures come from uninspired people, and uninspired people are uninspiring. Gut a school enough and you will have a terrible time of rebuilding it. But what happened?
I think that we made three terrible mistakes.
- We let people cut our funding and we all just worked harder.
If you can cut the amount that you pay the worker, while keeping the same productivity level, why on earth would you pay them any more? You separate the worth of the activity or the person from the value that they produce and then you try to maximise your profits. Why do people keep cutting University and school funding? Because we just step up and work harder because we are committed to our jobs.
What is worse, we not only work harder at our real jobs, we do all of the extra stuff as well. - We did all of the admin on top of our real jobs, which include mentoring, guidance, teaching, learning, research, and so on.
This is the crazy thing – not only are we all working harder meeting imposed metrics and standards, we’re also filling out countless forms, sitting around in meetings arguing about paperclip purchase optimisation (or similar) or sitting through yearly regurgitations of what we’ve done, delivered by other academics who can’t manage, and we do it almost as hard as we do the things that we get paid to do as academics. - We didn’t sit down and weigh up the future cost of steps 1 and 2.
And here’s the killer. Because we’re doing 1 and 2, and because the sky hasn’t fallen and education is still happening, administrators and funding bodies would be crazy to not try and push this further in order to see if they can get even more savings out and still maintain the same levels. This is fundamental business practice – pay the least that you have to for your supplies, charge the most that you can for your product.
Ultimately, this will kill us. We are have gone from comfortable, to lean and mean – now we’re heading towards starvation. Rather than worrying about this, we stand and admire ourselves in the mirror like mentally ill thirteen year-olds, congratulating ourselves on how good we look when we are starting to lose important function – irreversibly. The fat, such as it was (and I think that has been overplayed for political reasons), is gone. Now we’re cutting muscle and organs.
Governments talked about tight times, funding bodies talked about financial crises, business found cheaper overseas workers, off-shoring meant that local investment started to dry up – we listened, we nodded, we said “Ok, we’ll keep going” and we sent completely the wrong message.
Universities take 10-20 years to train academics, but the impact of a drop in educated populace takes about the same time to really have an impact on the workforce. This is well beyond the average lifespan of an elected official and it’s not as direct as the “in your face” nature of a tax increase. But this is our fault, to and extent, because we know that this is a problem and, as a group, we took it.
I had an argument with someone the other day about the role of academics and they were, I think, angry with me because I placed pedagogy and learning quality as a higher priority than convenience of access to the students. Of course, I want everyone to have access to Uni but if what we are teaching is not of sufficient quality then there is no point coming! As a teaching academic, this should be my job. Social equity, access to University, increasing mobility and improving the school systems? That’s the government’s job, the government’s purse, working in association with the schools and universities – I welcome it! I support it! But I have neither the funds, the influence or the training to actually do this. Yet, because of shortfalls elsewhere, as our funding is cut, as the casual workforce grows, as we all work harder , more and more of the things that are not core fall on me and my colleagues.
This is a fantastic job. This is an important job. Universities, in whatever form, are vital to the future and development of our species – when they are run properly and to a high standard. I do not think that all is lost, but I am rapidly reaching a point where I think that we have to stop taking it, look at those crucial three mistakes and say “No more.” Funding bodies, administrators and, on occasion, we ourselves are devaluing ourselves through our professionalism, our dedication and our politeness. Yes, we need to be pragmatic but we have worth, we do a good job and we are part of an essential role: education must be maintained.
My priority is to my students and my colleagues, and to the future. I think that it’s time for some serious re-thinking.
The Early-Career Teacher
Posted: July 24, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, herdsa, higher education, learning, principles of design, reflection, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design, work/life balance, workload Leave a commentRecently, I mentioned the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant scheme, which recognises that people who have had their PhDs for less than five years are regarded as early-career researchers (ECRs). ECRs have a separate grant scheme (now, they used to have a different way of being dealt with in the grant application scheme) that recognises the fact that their track records, the number of publications and activity relative to opportunity, is going to be less than that of more seasoned individuals.
What is interesting about this is that someone who has just finished their PhD will have spent (at least) three years, more like four, doing research and, we hope, competent research under guidance for the last two of those years. So, having spent a couple of years doing research, we then accept that it can take up to five years for people to be recognised as being at the same level.
But, for the most part, there is no corresponding recognition of the early-career teacher, which is puzzling given that there is no requirement to meet any teaching standards or take part in any teaching activities at all before you are put out in front of a class. You do no (or are not required to do any) teaching during your PhD in Australia, yet we offer support and recognition of early status for the task that you HAVE been doing – and don’t have a way to recognise the need to build up your teaching.
We discussed ideas along these lines at a high-level meeting that I attended this morning and I brought up the early-career teacher (and mentoring program to support it) because someone had brought up a similar idea for researchers. Mentoring is very important, it was one of the big HERDSA messages and almost everywhere I go stresses this, and it’s no surprise that it’s proposed as a means to improve research but, given the realities of the modern Australian University where more of our budget comes from teaching than research, it is indicative of the inherent focus on research that I need to propose teaching-specific mentoring in reaction to research-specific mentoring, rather than vice versa.
However, there are successful general mentoring schemes where senior staff are paired with more junior staff to give them help with everything that they need and I quite like this because it stresses the nexus of teaching and research, which is supposed to be one of our focuses, and it also reduces the possibility of confusion and contradiction. But let’s return to the teaching focus.
The impact of an early-career teacher program would be quite interesting because, much as you might not encourage a very raw PhD to leap in with a grant application before there was enough supporting track record, you might have to restrict the teaching activities of ECTs until they had demonstrated their ability, taken certain courses or passed some form of peer assessment. That, in any form, is quite confronting and not what most people expect when they take up a junior lectureship. It is, however, a practical way to ensure that we stress the value of teaching by placing basic requirements on the ability to demonstrate skill within that area! In some areas, as well as practical skill, we need to develop scholarship in learning and teaching as well – can we do this in the first years of the ECT with a course of educational psychology, discipline educational techniques and practica to ensure that our lecturers have the fundamental theoretical basis that we would expect from a school teacher?
Are we dancing around the point and, extending the heresy, require something much closer to the Diploma of Education to certify academics as teachers, moving the ECR and the ECT together to give us an Early Career Academic (ECA), someone who spends their first three years being mentored in research and teaching? Even ending up with (some sort of) teaching qualification at the end? (With the increasing focus on quality frameworks and external assessment, I keep waiting for one of our regulatory bodies to slip in a ‘must have a Dip Ed/Cert Ed or equivalent’ clause sometime in the next decade.)
To say that this would require a major restructure in our expectations would be a major understatement, so I suspect that this is a move too far. But I don’t think it’s too much to put limits on the ways that we expose our new staff to difficult or challenging teaching situations, when they have little training and less experience. This would have an impact on a lot of teaching techniques and accepted practices across the world. We don’t make heavy use of Teaching Assistants (TAs) at my Uni but, if we did, a requirement to reduce their load and exposure would immediately push more load back onto someone else. At a time when salary budgets are tight and people are already heavily loaded, this is just not an acceptable solution – so let’s look at this another way.
The way that we can at least start this, without breaking the bank, is to emphasise the importance of teaching and take it as seriously as we take our research: supporting and developing scholarship, providing mentoring and extending that mentoring until we’re sure that the new educators are adapting to their role. These mentors can then give feedback, in conjunction with the staff members, as to what the new staff are ready to take on. Of course, this requires us to carefully determine who should be mentored, and who should be the mentor, and that is a political minefield as it may not be your most senior staff that you want training your teachers.
I am a fairly simple man in many ways. I have a belief that the educational role that we play is not just staff-to-student, but staff-to-staff and student-to-student. Educating our new staff in the ways of education is something that we have to do, as part of our job. There is also a requirement for equal recognition and support across our two core roles: learning and teaching, and research. I’m seeing a lot of positive signs in this direction so I’m taking some heart that there are good things on the nearish horizon. Certainly, today’s meeting met my suggestions, which I don’t think were as novel as I had hoped they would be, with nobody’s skull popping out of their mouth. I take that as a positive sign.
The Heart of Darkness
Posted: July 23, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentMy friend, fellow educator and cousin, Liz, commented on yesterday’s post where I (basically) asked why we waste educational opportunities by being unpleasant or bullying. Here’s something that she wrote in the comments:
How we respond to young people is vitally important. How a parent or teacher responds is so important to the self-esteem of a child/student. There is rarely a call for being brutally blunt or thoughtlessly cruel. But bashing is in style. It’s been in style a long time, long enough for an entire generation to think it is the norm.
The emphasis of that phrase “But bashing is in style” is mine because I couldn’t agree with it more. You can see it where we knock people down for being good in ways that we think that we may not be able to attain, while feting people who are wealthy, because somehow we can see ourselves being millionaires. Steinbeck, unsurprisingly, said it best and we paraphrase is longer thoughts on this as:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” as given in A Short History of Progress (2005) by Ronald Wright.
So there’s surprisingly little bashing of the “haves that we might attain if we are really lucky or play the game in the right way”, but there is a great deal of bashing of visionaries, dreamers, risk-takers, experimenters, those who challenge the status quo and those who dare to dabble within a field in which we consider ourselves expert. I think that list of ‘types’ pretty much describes every single good student I’ve ever had so it’s not that surprising that a large number of the experiences that these students have are negative.
This has not always happened – the forward thinking, the intellectual, the artistic manifesto maker have been highly prized before but, somehow, this seems to have faded away. (I know that every generation complains about this but, with our media saturation and our near-instantaneous communication, I think that the impact of negative feedback and bashing has a far wider reach, as well as being less focused on debate and more on cruelty, destruction and brutality.)
Let me give you an example. I am an artist, across a few different outlets but mainly writing and design, and I am creating a manifesto to describe my intentions in the artistic space, my motives in doing so, and my views on the fusion between creativity and the more rigid aspects of my discipline. The reaction to this, if I tell people, is predominantly negative. Firstly, due to a certain famous manifesto, most people assume that I am making some sort of revolutionary political statement. (The book “100 Artistic Manifestos” is an excellent reference to get a different view on this.) Secondly, most people assume that I am somehow incapable of doing this – I suspect it’s because they believe that my job is me or that Computer Scientists can’t be creative. The general reaction is one of “knocking”, a gentle form of dismissive undermining common in Australia, but this is just a polite version of bashing. People don’t believe I can do this and have no problem expressing this in a variety of ways. Fortunately, I’ve reached the point in my career and my art that the need to write a manifesto is based on a desire to explain and to share, so people not understanding why I would do it just tells me that I need to do it. (Of course, calling yourself an artist is a hard one, as well. Am I published? No. Do I have any works on display? No. Do I make my living from it? No. Am I driven to create art? Yes. By my definition, I’m an artist. If I ever sell two paintings, of any kind, I’ve doubled Van Gogh’s lifetime sales. 🙂 )
This is the environment in which my students are learning and growing – and it’s a dark one. If I have noted nothing else from working with the young, it is that they are amazingly fragile at some points. The moments that you have to work with people, when they feel comfortable enough to be open and honest with you, are surprisingly few and far between – being cruel, taking a cheap shot, not having the time, cutting them down, not listening… it’ll have an effect, alright, and it may even be an effect that stays with that student for life. Going back over your memory of your teachers and lecturers, I bet you can remember every single one that changed your life, whether for good or for ill.
I don’t really want to harden my students, to make them into living armour, because I think that is really going to get in the way of them being people. Yes, I need them to be resilient but that’s a very different thing to rigid or tough. I need them to be able to commit to a particular set of ideas, that they choose, and to be able to withstand reasonable argument and debate, because this is the burden of the critical thinker. But I’m always worried that making them insensitive to criticism risks making them easily manipulable and ignorant of useful sources. It’s far too easy to respond to people you see as bashers with bashing – Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both spring to mind as people who wield words and ideas as weapons in an (on occasion) unnecessarily cruel, dismissive or self-satisfied way. There is a particular smugness of “basher-bashing” that is as repellent as the original action and this is also not a great way to train people that you wish to be out there, sharing and discussing ideas. If I wanted repellently smug and self-serving prose, I’d read Jeremy Clarkson, who is (at least) occasionally funny.
The obvious rejoinder to this is that “well, we need people on our side who are as tough as the opponents” and, frankly, I don’t buy it. That sounds more like revenge to me, with a side order of schaudenfreude. If we don’t act top stop it, then we make an environment in which bashing is tolerated and, if we do that, then the most successful basher will win. I’ll tell you right now that it won’t have to be the person who is smartest, most correct, most well-prepared – it is far more likely that it is the person who is willing to be the most cruel, the utterly vindictive and the inescapable persecutor who will win that battle.
So, longwindedly, I complete agree with Liz and want to finish by emphasising the start of her quote: “How we respond to young people is vitally important. How a parent or teacher responds is so important to the self-esteem of a child/student. There is rarely a call for being brutally blunt or thoughtlessly cruel.”
I am convinced that the majority of educators and parents are doing everything that needs to be done to give a good environment, but we also have to look at the world around us and ask how we can make that better.
A Missed Opportunity: Miles Davis and “Little Miles”
Posted: July 22, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, education, educational problem, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking 10 Comments(Edit: someone claiming to be “Little Miles” has now commented on this and said that he was fine with it. That’s great, but he also says that he accepted Miles’ comments in the face of him being known for being curt. It’s worth a read and, of course, I was speculating but my comments on the utility of Miles’ comments stand. Miles was known for being like this and I don’t see talent, even talent as great as Miles’, as being an excuse for bad behaviour. Jazz people may feel differently. I’m in the business of education, not torturing students. I would suggest that this is something all exemplars in a field should keep in mind if they want their area to flourish.)
If you click on this linked video (SFW) (YouTube), you’ll see a young trumpet player, who goes by the nickname “Little Miles”, play “On Green Dolphin Street” in front of Miles Davis. Now, it appears that, if I’ve done my detective work correctly, it’s a 1986 interview conducted by Bill Boggs (corrections welcome!).
Now, if you’ve watched that video, you’ve seen three things.
- You’ve seen a young trumpet player, who really isn’t that good, do a tolerable version of a song with a couple of mistakes.
- You’ve seen Miles Davis sit all the way back in his chair, then, finally, in a dismissive tone offer the advice of “Get some more practice” and “It’s in E Flat, you’re playing it in D Natural”, which is about as close to telling the kid to go back to wherever he came from and take up the tambourine as you can without actually going to the effort of doing so.
- You’ve seen a young trumpet player who, more than likely, is not going to keep playing the trumpet for much longer. The host quickly gets him off stage before anything more unpleasant can happen to him.
Now there is a world of wrong-thinking going on here to even let a young boy, who is called (whether he calls it himself or not) “Little Miles”, anywhere within fifty metres of Miles Davis, unless that young trumpet player is so, SO, good that Miles is going to have to accept that it’s not that much of an insult. And, being honest, the kid’s not that good. When you look at Miles Davis’ past, he was playing professionally for 3-4 years and studying at Juilliard before he went out and hunted down his idol, Coltrane. (Edit: my apologies, it was, of course, Charlie Parker. Thank you, Lewis, for noticing this!) When you think about it like that, wandering into a television studio calling yourself “Little Bird” after playing the sax for a few years and, obviously, not at a standard where you could play professionally – that’s a pretty silly thing to do.
But, of course, Miles’ reaction was pretty toxic. It was unnecessary. The kid wasn’t a threat to anyone and, after playing that way, “Little Miles” was going to fade away, unless he practiced a whole heap more. Taking Miles’ comments at face value, could they have been educational? Ehhhh, not in that tone and with that delay and posture. It was a “Buzz off, kid” if it was anything.
The funny thing is that this is a cascade of bad decision making, which resulted in the worst kind of outcome – no-one actually learned anything.
- Whoever was putting the boy up should have either prepared him better or held him back until he was. He shouldn’t have been here.
- Whoever gave the kid the name or encouraged him to use it should really had thought twice about it, if proximity to the real thing was even on the horizon.
- Someone let this train-wreck happen in front of Miles Davis.
- Someone didn’t get the kid off or go to commercial when it was (blatantly) obvious what was about to happen.
- Miles was offensively honest in a way designed to injure.
So, someone had put together a view of jazz trumpet playing and exposed the student to it so that they thought that their version of “On Green Dolphin Street” was good enough that they could stand on a stage, called “Little Miles” and expect anything else. That’s a problem with the teacher, for me.
That name… Oh! That name! The hubris required to call yourself that, unless you are so, so, very good that the comparisons leap to all lips. Somebody didn’t sit back and look at that from enough perspectives to work out that it was sending completely the wrong message.
What could the boy learn from listening to Miles? Practice more and stay on key. Wow. Thanks. It was, as I’ve said, not designed to be educational but hurtful – and of course it had no real educational value. It was a punishment and, like any punishment, it’s designed to make you avoid a behaviour, not train you into a new behaviour. Stay away from the trumpet, Kid.
The boy learned nothing that he couldn’t have known by playing with some echo. He certainly didn’t learn anything from one of the finest horn players in the world. What worries me the most is that, after this all happened, his parents or his teacher came up to him and said something “Well, what does that Miles Davis know, anyway?”
“What does he know? I named myself (or you named me) after him as a nickname. I’ve been looking forward to this for three months (say). And now you say it’s nothing?”
Little Miles now has two extreme options, as well as the continuum of compromise in the middle. Either he’s crazy enough to believe that Miles Davis was wrong and that he’s going to be the best ever, spending his life pursuing a vindictive dream where any intrinsic motivation is swamped by a burning hatred for Gold Lamé, or he suddenly realises that his teachers and his parents don’t know that much about music – and that everything that they’ve said has been wrong.
I started out talking about education, but I’m coming to finish up talking about joy. Yes, there was a failure to educate, a failure of guardianship, many failures of judgement but there has also been a loss of joy. That young man was happy, mistakes and all, until Miles Davis slammed his angry fist down on him and I can’t really see how his love of trumpet would have survived that, without being at least a little bent and mangled.
It’s really easy to be unpleasantly critical and it’s hard to be constructively critical, especially when people are washed in the warm milk of low expectations, but I really wonder sometime why more people just don’t try a little harder to do it.
Nick Falkner 