The Fisher King: Achievement as Journey, rather than Objective

Posted: July 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

(There are spoilers for the 1991 movie “The Fisher King” contained within, so proceed forewarned.)

It is sometimes hard for students to understand why undertaking a particular piece of work, in a certain way and at a certain time, is so important to us. For us, as educators, knowledge is developed and constructed through awareness, practice, understanding and application, as well as the further aspects of higher-level intellectual development. When we teach something, doing the assigned homework or assignment is an important reinforcing step. We can regard these assignments in two ways: formative (where we provide feedback and use it to guide improvement) and summative (where we measure the degree to which the students have achieved the standard required, compared to some benchmarks that are important to the course). Summative activities tend to be at the end of instructional units and formative tend to be throughout, for the obvious reasons, but, more pertinently to the discussion at hand, summative activities are often seen as “high-stakes”, where formative are seen as “low”.

The problem with a high-stakes activity is that we can inadvertently encourage behaviour, such as copying, plagiarism or cheating, because students feel so much pressure to achieve and they don’t feel that there is sufficient possibility of redemption in the face of not achieving the required standard. (And, yes, from a previous post, some people start out with the intention to cheat but I shall ignore them for all of the reasons that I have previously stated.)

Ultimately, all of our assignments contribute to the development of knowledge – or they should. The formative ones, as we know, should be placed to encourage the exchange of views between student and teacher, allowing us to guide and shape in an ongoing way, where the summative ones allow us to draw a line and say “Knowledge attained, now we can move on.” Realistically, however, despite the presence of so many summative assessments during and at the end of each course, the journey through University is just that – a journey – and I sometimes present it in this light to those students who have difficulty understanding the “why” of the assignments. I try never to resort to “because I say so”, as this really exchanges no knowledge, but I’m too honest to tell that I’m not at least tempted to say this sometimes!

One of my favourite movies is the 1991 Terry Gilliam film “The Fisher King“, with Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer. This is loosely based on legend of The Fisher King, from the often contradictory and complicated stories that have arisen around the Holy Grail over the last few hundred years, and I don’t have the time to go into detail on that one here! But the core is quite simple. One man, through a thoughtless and cruel act, causes a chain of events that leads to the almost total destruction of another’s world. Meeting each other, when both are sorely wounded by their troubles, they embark upon a journey that offers redemption to the first and healing to the second. (This is perhaps the most vague way to tell a fantastic story. I strongly recommend this movie!)

The final aspect of the movie is Jack’s quest to retrieve a simple cup that Parry has identified as the Holy Grail, and that Parry has been seeking since his descent into madness. After a beating that leaves Parry comatose in hospital, Jack dons Parry’s anachronistic garb and breaks into the house of a famous architect to retrieve the simple cup. When there, he also manages to save the architect’s life, redeeming himself through both his desire to challenge his own boundaries to seek the cup for Parry and by counter-balancing his previous cruelty with an act of life-saving kindness. The cup is, of course, still a cup but it is the journey that has brought Jack back to humanity and, as he hands the simple cup to Parry who lies unseeing in a hospital bed, it is the journey that transforms the cup into the grail for long enough that Parry wakes up.

We are all on a journey, one that we set out on when we were born and one that will finish when we breathe our last, but I think our reactions to the high-stakes events in our lives are so often a reflection of those who taught us, seen through the lens of our own personality. That’s why I like to talk to students about the requirements for the constant challenges, the quests, the moments that are high-stakes, in the context of their wider journey – in the quest for knowledge, rather than the meeting of requirements for a degree.

Are you just after the piece of paper for your degree? Need the credits? Then cheating is, in some ways of thinking, a completely valid option if you can rationalise it.

Are you on a journey to develop knowledge? Need to understand everything? Then cheating is no longer an option.

Knowledge is transforming. There is no doubt about this. We learn something new and it changes the world, or us, or both! When we learn something well enough, we can create new knowledge or share our knowledge with new people. There is no doubt that the journey transforms the mundane around us into something magical, occasionally something mystical, but it is important to see it as a journey that will help us to build our achievements, rather than a set of objectives that we tick off to achieve something that is used as a placeholder for the achievement.

As I always say to my students, “If you have the knowledge, then you’re really likely to pass the course and do well. If you just try and study for the exam, then you’re not guaranteed to have the knowledge.” Formative or summative, if you regard everything we’re doing as steps to increase your knowledge, and we construct our teaching in order to do that, the low stakes and the high stakes have similar benefit, even if one isn’t so much constructed for direct feedback. If we also make sure that we are not dismissive in our systems and can even offer redemption in cases of genuine need, then our high stakes become less frightening and there is no Red Knight stalking our moments of peace and happiness, forcing us into dark and isolated pathways.

The Student Loan Debt Suicides

Posted: July 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

A friend reposted an article on Facebook today about the steady rise of cronyism and the subversion of meritocratic achievement in examination systems since those of the Chinese civil service and, while I’m not going to talk about that article as I don’t think it really hit the point, it did make me think about creeping credentialism and the demands on students today.

Then I ran across this piece from the Huffington Post:

Suicide is the dark side of the student lending crisis and, despite all the media attention to the issue of student loans, it’s been severely under-reported. I can’t ignore it though, because I’m an advocate for people who are struggling to pay their student loans, and I’ve been receiving suicidal comments for over two years and occasionally hearing reports of actual suicides. More people are being forced into untenable financial circumstances as outstanding student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion.

I don’t want to editorialise this, but I thought some of you might be interested in this and may not have seen it yet. Ultimately, as educators, this is part of our environment and being aware of things like this is often useful.

The Big Picture and the Drug of Easy Understanding: Part II (Eclectic Boogaloo)

Posted: July 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the desire to place work into some sort of grand scheme, referring to movies and films, and illustrating why it’s hard to guarantee consistency from a sketch of your strategy unless you implement everything before you make it available to people. While building upon previous work is very useful, as I’m doing now, if you want to keep later works short by referring back to a shared context established in a previous work, it does make you susceptible to inconsistency if a later work makes you realise that assumptions in a previous work were actually wrong. As I noted in yesterday’s post, I’m actually writing these posts side by side and scheduling them for later, to ensure that I don’t make any more mistakes than I have to, which I can’t easily correct because the work is already displayed.

Some strategies are easier to imagine than others.

Strategic approaches to the construction of long term and complex works are essential, but a strategic plan needs to be sufficiently detailed in order to guide the works produced from it. You might get away with an abstract strategy if you produce all of the related works at one time and view them together. But, assuming that works are so long term that they can’t be produced in one sitting, you don’t want to have to seriously revise previous productions or, worse, change the strategy. This is particularly damaging when you are working with students because any significant change to the knowledge construction that you’ve been working with is going to cost you a lot of credibility and risk a high level of disengagement. Students will tolerate an amount of honest mistake, assuming that you are honest and that it is a mistake, but they tend to be very judgmental regarding poor time planning and what they perceive as laziness.

And that, in my opinion, is completely fair because we tend not to allow them poor time planning either. Going into an examination with a misunderstanding of the details of the overlying strategy will result in a non-negotiable fail, not extended understanding from the marking groups who are looking at examination performance. For me, this is an issue of professional ethics in that a consistent and fair delivery of teaching materials will facilitate learning, firstly by keeping the knowledge pathways ‘clean’ but also by establishing a relationship that you are working as hard to be fair to the student as you can, hence their effort is not wasted and you establish a bond of trust.

Now while I would love to say that this means that I have written every lecture completely before starting a new course, this would not be the truth. But this does mean that my strategic planning for new works and knowledge is broken down to a fairly fine grain plan before I start the course running. I wrote a new course last semester and the overall course had been broken up by area, sub-area, learning outcome and was built with all practicals, tutorials and activities clearly indicated. I had also spent a long time identifying the design of the overall course and the focus that we would be taking throughout, down to the structure of every lecture. When it came to writing the lectures themselves, I knew which lectures would contain ‘achievement’ items (the drug aspect where students get a buzz from the “A-ha!” moment), I knew where the pivotal points were and I’d also spent some time working out which skills I could expect in this group, and which skills later courses would expect from them.

We do have a big picture for teaching our students, in that they are part of a particular implementation of a degree that will qualify them in such-and-such a discipline. We can see the discipline syllabi, current learning and teaching practices, our local requirements and the resources that we have to carry all of this out. But this is no longer a strategy and, the more I worked with things, the more I realised that I had produced a tactical (or operational) plan for each week of the lectures – and I had to be diligent about this because one third of my lectures were being given by someone who was a new lecturer. So, on top of all the planning, every lecture had to be self-contained and instructionally annotated so that a new lecturer, with some briefing from me, could carry it out. And it all had to fit together so that structurally, semantically and stylistically, it all looked like one smooth flow.

Had I left the strategic planning to one side, in either not pursuing it or in leaving it too late, or had I not looked at all of the strategic elements that I had to consider, then my operational plan for each week would have been ad hoc or non-existent. Worse, it may have been an unattainable plan; a waste of my time and the students’ efforts. We have far less excuse than George Lucas does for pretending that Star Wars was part of some enormous nine movie vision – although, to be fair, it doesn’t mean that this wasn’t somewhere in his head, but it obviously wasn’t sufficiently well plotted to guarantee a required level of consistency to make us really believe that statement.

The Big Picture is a framing that helps certain creative works drag you in and make more money, whereas in other words it is a valid structure that supports and develops consistency within a shared context. Our work as educators fits squarely into the final category. Without a solid plan, we risk making short-sighted decisions that please us or the student with ‘easy’ reward activities or the answers that come to hand at the time.

I’m not saying that certain elements have to be left out of our teaching, or that we have to be rigid in an inflexible structure, but consistency and reliability are two very important aspects of gaining student trust and, if holding it together over six serial instalments is too hard for Stephen King, then trying to achieve this, without some serious and detailed planning, over 36 lectures spanning four months is probably too much for most of us. The Big Picture, for us, is something that I believe we can find and use very effectively to make our teaching even better, effectively reducing our workload throughout the semester because we don’t have to carry out massive revisions or fixes, with a little more investment of time up front.

(Afterthought: I had no idea that Dr Steele has released an album called “Eclectic Boogaloo”. I was riffing on the old “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” thing. In my defence, it was the 80s and we all looked like this:

This is considered one of the worst movies ever made. Yes, even when you take Gigli into account.

)

HERDSA 2012: Final Keynote, “Connecting with the Other: Some ideas on why Black America likes to sing Bob Dylan”, Professor Liz McKinley

Posted: July 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve discussed this final talk in outline but it has had such an impact on me that I wanted to share it in its own post. This also marks the end of my blogging from HERDSA, but I’m sure that you’ve seen enough on this so that’s probably a good thing. (As a note, the next conference that I’ll be at is ICER, in September, so expect some more FrenetoBlogging (TM) then.)

Professor Elizabeth (Liz) McKinley has a great deal of experience in looking at issues of otherness, from her professional role in working with Māori students and postgraduates, and because she is of Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa and Ngāi Tahu descent herself. She began her talk with a long welcome and acknowledgement speech in an indigenous language (I’m not sure which one it was and I haven’t been able to find out), which she then repeated in English, along with an apology to the local indigenous peoples for her bad pronunciation of some of their words.

She began by musing on Bob Dylan, poet, protest song writer, and why his songs, especially “Blowing in the Wind”, were so popular with African Americans. Dylan’s song, released at a turbulent time in US History, asked a key question: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” At a time when African Americans were barely seen as people in some quarters, despite the Constitutional Amendments that had been made so long before, these lyrics captured the frustrations and aspirations of the Black people of the US and it became, in Professor McKinley’s opinion, anthemic in the civil rights movement because of this. She then discussed how many of Bob Dylan’s other songs had been reinterpreted, repurposed, and moved into the Black community, citing “Mr Tambourine Man” as covered by Con Funk Shun as an example of this. (I have been unable to locate this on Youtube or my usual sources but, I’ve been told, it’s not the version that you’re used to and it has an entirely new groove.)

Reinterpretation pays respect to the poet but we rediscover new aspects about the work and the poet and ourselves when we work with another artist. We learn from each other when we share and we see each other’s way of doing things. These are the attributes that we need to adopt if we want to bring in more underrepresented and disadvantaged students from outside of our usual groups – the opportunities to bring their talents to University to share them with us.

She then discussed social justice education in a loose overview: the wide range of pedagogies that are designed to ameliorate the problems caused by unfair practices and marginalisation. Of course, to be marginalised and to be discriminated against, we must have a dominant (or accepted) form, and an other. It is the Other that was a key aspect of the rest of the talk.

The Other can be seen in two very distinct ways. There is the violent Other, the other that we are scared of, that physically repels us, that we hide from and seek to destroy, sideline or ignore. This is drive by social division and inequity. When Gil Scott-Heron sang of the Revolution that wouldn’t be televised, he was speaking to his people who, according to people who look like me, were a violent and terrifying Otherness that lived in the shadows of every city in America. People are excluded when they don’t fit the mainstream thinking, when we’re scared of them – but we can seek to understand the other’s circumstances, which are usually a predicament, to understand their actions and motivations so that we can ameliorate or remedy them.

But there is also the non-violent Other, a philosophical separation, independent of social factors. We often accept this Other, letting it be different and even seeking knowledge from this unknowable other and, rather than classify it as something to be shunned or feared, we defer our categorisation. My interpretation of this non-violent other is perhaps that of those who seek religious orders, at the expense of married life, even small possessions or a personal life within a community that they control. In many regards this is very much an Otherness but we have tolerated and welcomed the religiously Other into our lives for millennia. It has only been reasonably recently that aspects of this, for certain religious orders, has now started to associate a violent Otherness with the mystical and philosophical Otherness that we would usually associate with clerics.

Professor McKinley went on to identify some of the Others in Australia and New Zealand: the disadvantaged, those living in rural or remote areas, the indigenous peoples. Many of the benchmarks for these factors are set against nations like the UK, the US and Canada. She questioned why, given how different our nations are, we benchmarked ourselves against the UK but identified that all of this target setting, regardless of which benchmarks were in use, were set against majority groups that were largely metropolitan/urban and non-indigenous. In New Zealand, the indigenous groups are the Māori and the Pacific Islanders (PI), but there is recognition that there is a large degree of co-location between these peoples and the lower socio-economic status groups – a double whammy as far as Otherness goes compared to affluent white culture.

Professor McKinley has been heavily involved and leading three projects, although she went to great lengths to thank the many people who were making it all work while she was, as she said, running around telling everyone about it. These three projects were the Starpath Project, the Māori and Indigenous (MAI) Doctoral Programme, and the Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori PhD students (TLRI).

The Starpath Project was designed to undertake research and develop and evaluated evidence-based initiatives, designed to improve educational participation and achievement of students from groups currently under-represented in degree level education. This focuses on the 1st decile schools in NZ, those who fall into the bottom 10%, which includes a high proportion of Māori and PI students. The goal was to increase the number of these students who went into Uni out of school, which is contrary to the usual Māori practice of entering University as mature age students when they have a complexity in their life that drives them to seek University (Liz’s phrase, which I really like).

New Zealand is trying to become a knowledge economy, as they have a small population on a relatively small country, and they want more people in University earlier. While the Pākehā, those of European descent, make up most of those who go to Uni, the major population growth is the  Māori and PI communities. There are going to be increasingly large economic and social problems if these students don’t start making it to University earlier.

This is a 10-year project, where phase 1 was research to identify choke points and barriers in to find some intervention initiatives, and phase 2 is a systematic implementation, transferable, sustainable, to track students into Uni. This had a strong scientific basis with emphasis on strong partnerships, leading to relationships with nearly 10% of the secondary schools in New Zealand, focused on the low decile groups that are found predominantly around Auckland. The partnerships were considered to be essential here and the good research was picked up and used to form good government policy – a fantastic achievement.

Another key aspect, especially from the indigenous perspective, was to get the families on board. By doing this, involving parents and family, guardian participation in activities shot up from 20% to 80% but it was crucial to think beyond the individual, including writing materials for families – parents and children. Families are the locus of change in these communities. Part of the work here involved transitions support for students to get from school to uni, supported by scholarships to show both the students and the community that they can learn and achieve to the same degree as any other student.

One great approach was that, instead of targeting the disadvantaged kids for support, everyone got the same level of (higher) support which normalised the student support and reduced the Otherness in this context.

The next project, the MAI programme, was a challenge to Māori researchers to develop a doctoral programme and support that didn’t ignore the past while still conforming to the academic needs of the present. (“Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples” by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, was heavily referenced throughout this.) Māori students have cultural connections and associations that can make certain PhD work very difficult: consider a student who is supposed to work with human flesh samples, where handling dead tissue is completely inappropriate in Māori culture. It is profoundly easy, as well as lazy, to map an expectation of conformity over the top of this (Well, if you’re doing our degree then you follow our culture) but this is the worst example of a colonising methodology and this is exactly what MAI was started to address.

MAI works through communities, meeting regularly. Māori academics, students and cultural advisors meet regularly to alleviate the pressures of cross-cultural issues and provide support through meetings and retreats.

The final project, the Māori PhD project, was initiated by MAI (above) to investigate indigenous students, to understand why they were carrying out their PhDs. Students were having problem, as with the tissue example above, so the project also provided advice to institutions and to students, encouraging Pākehā supervisors to work with Māori students, as well as the possibility of Māori supervision if the student needed to feel culturally safe. This was a bicultural project, with five academics across four institutions.

From Smith, 1997, p203, “educational battleground for Māori is spatial. It is about theoretical spaces, pedagogical spaces, structural spaces.” From this project there were differences in what the students were seeking and the associated pedagogies. Some where seeking difference from their own basis, an ancestral Māori basis. Some were Māori but not really seeking that culture. Some, however, were using their own thesis to regain their lost identity as Māori.

The phrase that showed up occasionally was a “colonised history” – even your own identity is threatened by the impact of the colonists on the records, memories and freedoms of your people. We had regularly seen colonists move to diminish and reduce the Other, as a perceived threat, where they classify it as a violent other. The third group of students, above, are trying to rebuild what it meant to be Māori for them, in the face of New Zealand’s present state as a heavily colonised country, where most advantage lies with the Pākehā and Asian communities. They were addressing a sense of loss, in the sense of their loss of what it meant to be Māori. This quest for Māori identity was sometimes a challenge to the institution, hence the importance of this project to facilitate bicultural understanding and allow everyone to be happy with the progress and nature of the study.

At this point in my own notes I wrote “IDENTITY IDENTITY IDENTITY” because it became clearer and clearer to me that this was the key issue that is plaguing us all, and that kept coming up at HERDSA. Who are we? Who is my trusted group? How do I survive? Who am I? While this issues, associated with Otherness in the indigenous community, are particularly significant for low SES groups and the indigenous, they affect all of us in this times of great change.

An issue of identity that I have touched on, and that Professor McKinley brought up in her talk, was how we establish the identity of the teacher, in order to identify who should be teaching. In Māori culture, there are three important aspects: Matauranga (Knowledge), Whakapapa (ancestral links) and Tikanga (cultural protocols and customs). But this raises pedagogical issues, especially when two or more of these clash. Who is the teacher and how can we recognise them? There are significant cultural issues if we seek certain types of knowledge from the outside, because we run headlong into Tikanga. These knowledge barriers may not be flexible at all, which is confronting to western culture (except for all of the secret barriers that we choose not to acknowledge). The teachers may be parents, elders, grandparents – recognising this requires knowledge, time and understanding. And, of course, respect.

Another important aspect is the importance of the community. If you, as a Māori PhD student, go to a community and ask them to answer some questions, at some stage in the future, they’ll expect you back to help out with something else. So, time management becomes an issue because there is a spirit of reciprocity that requires the returned action – this is at odds with restricted time for PhDs and the desire for timely completion if you have to disappear for 2 weeks to help build or facilitate something.

Professor McKinley showed a great picture. A student, graduating with PhD gown surmounted by the sacred cloak of the Māori people. They have to have a separate graduation ceremony, as well as the small ‘two tickets maximum’ one in the hall, because community and family pride is strong – two tickets maximum won’t accommodate the two busloads of people who showed up to see this particular student graduate.

The summary of the Other was that we have two views:

  • The Other as a consequence of social, economic and/or political disaffiliation (Don’t pathologise the learning by diagnosing it as a problem and trying to prescribe a remedy.)
  • As an alterity that is independent of social force. (Welcoming the other on their own terms. A more generous form but a scarier form for the dominant culture.)

What can we learn from the other? My difference matters to my institution. We need to ensure that we have placed our ethics into social justice education – this stance allows us how to frame ethics across the often imposed barriers of difference.

Professor McKinley then concluded by calling up some of her New Zealand colleagues to the stage, to close the talk with a song. An unusual (for me) end to an inspiring and extremely thought-provoking talk. (Sadly, it wasn’t Bob Dylan, but it was in Māori so it may have secretly been so!)

HERDSA 2012: Final general talk – that tricky relationship, University/School

Posted: July 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

When working in Higher Education, you fairly quickly discover that there is not actually a genuine continuum between the school level and the University level. School curricula are set, with some input from the higher ed sector, mostly by school and government, but they have little-to-no voice at the Higher Education level. We listen to our peers across the water and around our country, adopting ACM and IEEE curricula suggestions, but while we have an awareness of what the different sectors are doing (in terms of local school and University) it’s certainly not a strong, bi-directional relationship.

That’s where the Australian government reforms of 2009, designed to greatly improve participation in University, get interesting. We’ve been told to increase participation from lower SES groups who hadn’t previously considered Higher Education. We, that is ‘we the university’, have been told this. Ok. Great. Now some people will (flippantly) start ranting about how we’ll have to drop quality standards to do this – an argument that I feel is both incorrect and somewhat unpleasant in its tone. Given that we haven’t gone out of our way to try and form a continuum before, well some people have but with limited success, we can certainly address some of the problem by identifying higher education as a destination to students who may not have been aware that it was even an option for them.

This is where the work of Dr Karma Pearce comes in, won “Building community, educational attainment and university aspirations through University-School mentoring partnerships”. Dr Pearce’s research was based on developing student aspirations from traditionally disadvantaged regions in South Australia. The aim was to look at the benefits of a University/High School mentoring program conducted in a University setting, targeting final year secondary school students from the low SES schools in the area.

We are all aware of the problems that disadvantaged schools face and the vicious circularity of some of these problems. Take Chemistry. To teach chemistry properly, you need teachers and lab resources, including consumables. It’s not like a computer lab that can be run on oldish equipment in a room somewhere – chemistry labs have big technical and safety requirements, and old chemicals either don’t work or get consumed in reactions. If your lab is bad, your numbers drop because the teaching suffers. If the numbers drop below a certain level for schools in South Australia – the class gets cancelled. Now you have a Chem teacher and no students. Therefore, repurposed teacher or, shortly, no teacher. (Of course, this assumes that you can even get a chemistry teacher.)

The University of South Australia had recently build new chemistry labs in another campus, leaving their old labs (which are relatively near to several traditionally disadvantaged areas) free. To the researcher’s and University’s credit (I’m serious, kudos!) they realised that they could use these labs to support 29 secondary school students from schools that had no chem labs. The school students participated in weekly lecture, tutorial and practical chemistry classes at Mawson Lakes campus, with the remaining theory conducted in their own schools. There were two High School teachers based in two of the schools, with a practical demonstrator based at Mawson Lakes. To add the mentoring aspect, four final year undergraduate students were chosen to be group mentors. The mentors required a minimum of credit (B) level studies for three chemistry courses. The mentor breakdown, not deliberately selected, was three women and one man, with two from private (fee-paying) schools and two from regional state schools. Mentors had transport provided, a polo shirt with logo, were paid for their time and received a significant amount of mentor training as well as a weekly meeting with a University coordinator.

The mentors assisted throughout the 26 week program and, apart from helping with chemistry, shared their experiences of University as they worked with the students. Of the 20 secondary students who completed the program (10 F, 10 M), they indicated in surveys that they thought they now understand what Uni life was going to be like but, more importantly to me, that they thought it was achievable for them. From that group, 35% of them had family who had been to University, but all of the secondary participants who made it to the end of the program had enrolled to go to Uni by the end of their Year 12 studies.

In discussion, a couple of points did emerge, especially regarding the very high teacher/student ratio, but overall the message from the research is pretty positive. Without having to change anything at the actual University level, a group of students, who didn’t come from a “university positive” environment and who were at some of the most disadvantaged schools in the state, now thought that University was somewhere that they could go – their aspirations now included University. What a fantastic result!

One side note, at the end, that I found a little depressing was that some students had opted to go to another University, not UniSA, and at least one gave the reason that they had been lured there by the free iPad that was being issued if you enrolled in a Bachelor of Science. Now, in the spirit of full honesty, that’s my University that they’re talking about and I know enough about the amazing work done by Bob Hill, Simon Pyke and Mike Seyfang (as well as a cast of hundreds) to completely rebuild the course to a new consistent standard, with a focus on electronic (and free) textbooks, to know that the iPad is the icing on the cake (so to speak). But, to a student from a disadvantaged school, one where a student going into medicine (and being the first one in the 50 year history of the school) is Page 3 news in the main state newspaper, an iPad is a part of a completely different world. If this student is away at a camp with students from more privileged background, this device is not about electronic delivery or lightening the text book burden or interactive science displays and instant communication – it’s about fitting in.

I found this overall talk very interesting, because it gave an excellent example of how we can lead educationally by sharing our resources while sharing the difficulties of the high school/University transition, but it also made me think about how students see the things that we do to improve their education. Where I see a lab full of new computers, do students see a sign of stability and affluence that convinces them that we’ll look after them or do they see “ho hum” because they’re only 21″ screens and not the i7 processor?

Once again, when I look at things from my view, what do my students see?

HERDSA 2012: Connecting with VET

Posted: July 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

As part of the final session I attended in the general conference, I attended a talk by A/Prof Anne Langworthy and Dr Susan Johns who co-presented a talk on “Why is it important for Higher Education to connect with the VET sector?” As a point of clarification, VET stands for Vocational Education and Training, as I’ve previously mentioned, and is generally concerned with trade qualifications, with some students going on to diplomas and advanced diplomas that may be recognised as some or all of a first-year University course equivalent. If a student starts in a trade and then goes to a certain point, we can then easily accept them into an articulation program.

The Tasmanian context, a small state that is still relatively highly ruralised, provides a challenging backdrop to this work, as less than 18% of school leavers who could go on to University actually do go on to University. Combine this with the highest lower socio-economic status (SES) population by percentage in Australia, and many Tasmanians can be considered to be disadvantaged by both access to and participation in University level studies. Family influence plays a strong part here – many families have no-one in their immediate view who has been to University at all, although VET is slightly more visible.

Among the sobering statistics presented, where that out of a 12 year schooling system, where Year 12 is the most usual pre-requisite to University entry, as a state, the percentage of people 15 years or older who had year 10 schooling or less was 54%. Over half the adult population had not completed secondary schooling, the usual stepping stone to higher education.

The core drivers for this research were the following:

  1. VET pathways are more visible and accessible to low SES/rural students because the entry requirements aren’t necessarily as high and someone in their family might be able to extol the benefits.
  2. There are very low levels of people articulating from VET to Higher Ed – so, few people are going on to the diploma.
  3. There is an overall decline in VET and HE participation.
  4. Even where skills shortages are identified, students aren’t studying in the areas of regional need.
  5. UTAS is partnering with the Tasmanian VET provider Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute.

An interesting component of this background data is that, while completion rates are dropping for the VET skills, individual module completion rates are still higher than the courses in which the modules sit. In other words, people are likely to finish a module that is of use to them, or an employer, but don’t necessarily see the need of completing the whole course. However, across the board, the real problem is that VET, so often a pathway to higher ed for people who didn’t quite finish skill, is dropping in percentage terms as a pathway to Uni. There has been a steady decline in VET to HE articulation in Tasmania across the last 6 years.

The researchers opted for an evidence based approach to examine those students who had succeeded in articulating from VET to HE, investigating their perceptions and then mapping existing pathways to discover what could be learned. The profile of VET and HE students from the SES/rural areas in Tas are pretty similar although the VET students who did articulate into Uni were less likely to seek pathways that rewarded them with specific credits and were more likely to seek general admission. Given that these targeted articulations, with credit transfer, are supposed to reflect student desire and reward it, or encourage participation in a specific discipline, it appears that these pathways aren’t working as well as they could.

So what are the motivators for those students who do go from VET to Uni? Career and vocational aspirations, increased confidence from doing VET, building on their practical VET basis, the quality and enthusiasm of their VET teachers, the need to bridge over an existing educational hurdle and satisfaction with their progress to date. While participation in VET generally increased a student’s positive attitude to study, the decision to (or not to) articulate often came down to money, time, perceived lack of industry connection and even more transitional assistance.

It’s quite obvious that our students, and industry, can become fixated with the notion of industrial utility – job readiness – and this may be to the detriment to Universities if we are perceived as ivory towers. More Higher Ed participation is excellent for breaking the poverty cycle, developing social inclusion and the VET to Higher Ed nexus offers great benefits in terms of good student outcomes, such as progression and retention, but it’s obvious that people coming from a practice-based area, especially in terms of competency training, are going to need bridging and some understanding to adapt to the University teaching model. Or, of course, our model has to change. (Don’t think I was going to sneak that one past you.)

The authors concluded that bridging was essential. articulation and credit transfer arrangement should be reviewed and that better articulation agreements should be offered in areas of national and regional priority. The cost of going to University, which may appear very small to students who are happy to defer payment, can be an impediment to lower SES participants because, on average, people in these groups can be highly debt averse. The relocation costs and support costs of moving away from a rural community to an urban centre for education is also significant. It’s easy sometimes to forget about how much it costs to live in a city, especially when you deprive someone of their traditional support models.

Of course, that connection to industry is one where students can feel closer when they undertake VET and Universities can earn some disrespect, fairly or not, for being seen to be ivory towers, too far away from industry. If you have no-one in your family who has been to Uni, there’s no advocate for the utility of ‘wasting’ three years of your life not earning money in order to get a better job or future. However, this is yet another driver for good industry partnerships and meaningful relationships between industry, VET and Higher Education.

It’s great to see so much work being down in both understanding and then acting to fix some of the more persistent problems with those people who may never even see a University, unless we’re dynamic and thoughtful in our outreach programs. On a personal note, while Tasmania has the lowest VET to HE conversion, I noticed that South Australia (my home state) has the second lowest and a similar decline. Time, I think, to take some of the lessons learned and apply them in our back yard!

HERDSA 2012: What is the New Academy?

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended some (more) interesting talks today on building research capacity, how we build the connection between education and research (the dreaded research-teaching nexus) and how we identify ourselves as academics. If I were going to summarise all three of these talks, it would be as:

How are we defining the Academy of the 21st Century?

There is no doubt that research is a crucial component of what we do – you can’t even be registered as a University in Australia unless you pursue research – but it often seems to be the favoured child in any discussion of importance for promotion and allocation of serious resources. Now I realise that a lot of work is going into fixing this but research has, for many years, counted for more.

So it’s interesting that, as Winthrop Professor Shelda Debowski, UWA, observed after returning from her Churchill Fellowship, we don’t really bother to do as much training as we should for research. Research success doesn’t automatically flow from finishing a PhD, any more than a PhD is an indication of readiness or aptitude to teach – yet many early researchers don’t get a great deal of development assistance. This leads, in some cases, to what Debowski refers to as middlescence: a great PhD but after 5+ years it all dies.

Succesful research requires many capabilities and ongoing learning and, while our universities try to support this, we’re not often sure what the best way is to support this. Staff are seeking guidance – research leaders are keen to help. How can we connect them usefully and efficiently? For me, I rephrase the question as:

How are we defining the Research Academy of the 21st Century?

Research is a simple world with a complex set of concepts behind it. Are we looking at the basis of inputs, outputs, strategy and impact? Are we looking at industrial interaction with collaboration, engagement and support? Are we being productive and effective, innovative and creative? There is, for many people’s careers, not much room for failure.

The PhD used to be all that was needed, in theory, because we had the time to make some mistakes, to find our feet, and to iterate towards a better model. Not any more.

My take on this, to go on from what I was saying in the last post, is that we can define the New Research Academy in terms of its environment. Like any species, the New Research Academic must adapt to the environment that they are in or they will perish. Climate change is a threat to the world, similarly Academy Change is a threat to the old inhabitants. The New Academy is fast, hungry, competitive, resource starved, commoditised, industry linked and, above all, heavily dependent on the perception of our efforts. The speed of change makes a difference here because if you were raised in the gentler environment of the Old Academy, but have been around for 20 years, then you have probably achieved enough success to survive. If I may take another biological example, you have accumulated enough resources that you can survive the lean years or the harsher years. The New Academy has frosts and only so many places available for the tribe. You build your resources quickly or it’s over.

Unless, of course, you can find a group to support you. Returning to Debowski’s material, she points out why development of researchers is so critical:

  • Start with PhD – used to be the only thing that you needed to do.
  • Now you have to understand how it fits into strategic research areas and areas of strength (broader sphere of understanding)
  • Need to hook in with a research community (this is your resource sharing group)
  • ECRs need to have to develop: communication skills, team and collaborative skills, project management, track record/profile, time, priority, career management, and grant seeking behaviour
  • Research managers and leaders need to take a professional stance to support this: induction, culture setting, human resource management practices, strategic management, financial management, relationship building, mentoring and sponsorship, project management, risk management, media/promotion.

But, looking at that final list, do some of those look like the behaviours of a professional research academic? I’ll come back to this.

Debowski finished by emphasising the role of mentors and, in the Old/New Academy framework, this makes even more sense. A new PhD student has only a limited amount of time before poor performance effectively removes them from the appointment and job pool – they don’t have time to waste taking false paths. A mid-career researcher needs to work out which path to take and then has to optimise for it – do I continue teaching, do I focus on research, should I take that Associate Deans position? This is where a mentor is vital because the New Academy has a cold wind blowing through it. Huddled together, we’ll see Summer again – but, of course, you have to huddle with the right people.

This brings me to the next talk, on How Universities Connect Education and Research, presented by Professor Lawrence Cram. This was a very interesting talk, dealing with complexity theory to explain the small-scale chaotic relationships in trying to explain which actions get people promoted these days. This is a very mechanistic approach to life in the New Academy. Which X do I need to maximise to achieve Y? Cram, however, very nicely identifies that X is in fact a set of things, Y is a different set of things, and the connections between them operate at different levels at different times.

Cram identified the outputs of Universities as experience goods, where the product is hard to observe in advance, in terms of characteristics such as quality or price, but you’re quickly aware of how good they are once consumed. This generally requires you to sell your product on reputation but once this reputation is established, your pricing model (market position) tends to stay fairly stable. (Amusingly, dropping the price of experience goods, because we’re unsure of how the goods are created, may result in uncertainty because people will make up reasons for the price drop that generally include drop in quality, rather than efficiency of delivery or something positive.)

This makes mapping inputs to outputs difficult and explains why such measurable outputs as number of students, pass rates and research publications are far more likely to form the basis of any funding. Cram is looking across a very large area with a very large number of questions: does research success generate a corresponding success ‘buzz’ in the student body? Does research discovery parallel or assist the student with their own voyage of discovery through their courses?

Ultimately, directives from senior management drive a functional and idealistic approach that produces graduates and intellectual property, but most universities are struggling to unify this with directives and government funding, compared to what students want. Linking this back to the roles that we are expecting research managers to take, we start to see a managerial focus that is starting to dominate our professional academic staff. I rephrase this, and segue to the next talk, as:

How are we defining the Professional Academic in the 21st Century?

The final talk used identity theory to examine the different work ideologies that academics espouse. Wayne O’Donohue presented his and Richard Winter’s paper on “Understanding academic identity conflicts in the public university: Importance of work ideologies” and it was both an interesting presentation, as well as being a full paper that I hope to finish reading this evening.

Fundamentally, managerial and professional ideological beliefs differ on how academic work should be organised. As I have mention throughout this post, we are seeing more and more evidence of creeping requirement to become managers. Managerialism, according to Winter and O’Donohue, has moved us into market-driven entities that regard students as commodities. Consumers need to be swayed by branding and pandering to preferences – we risk basing the reputation of our experience good upon a good marketing campaign rather than a solid academic reputation.

The conceptual framework for this work is that the two identities are, effectively, at odds with each other. Academics who are forced to be managerial find themselves at odds with their idea of what it means to be an academic – they are not being who they want to be and are at odds with what their University wants them to be. If we are to be good managerial entities then we focus on competition and consumer preferences for allocating resources. If we are to be good academics, then we focus on economic and social welfare of all members, stressing normative goals and beliefs. It is hard to think of two more opposing points within this sphere and it is no wonder that the people surveyed by Winter and O’Donohue had to be censored to remove obscene language that reflected their frustration at their own perception of their role.

We know that the market is not all that good at managing public good items. We know the benefits of the educational system in breaking the poverty cycle, reducing crime and violence, improving families, but the market would have to change its short-term benefit model in order to factor this in. We are looking at the substantial differences of short term economic focus versus long term social welfare focus.

Ultimately, the dissonance generated by people doing things that they were asked to do, but didn’t want to do, causes dissatisfaction and cynicism. Dispirited academics leave. Leaving, of course, those who are willing to adapt to the more managerial focus to then rise through the ranks, take positions of power and then impose more managerial focuses.

So what is the New Academy? Is it really a world of bottoms on seats, feudalist in its enforced fealty to existing barons to see you through the lean years, unconnected to funding models and overly metricated in strange ways?

If you want my honest answer, I would say “Not yet.”

Yes, we are heavily measured, but we still have the freedom to challenge and correct those measurements. A great deal of work is being done to produce instruments that give us useful and applicable information, as well as ‘handy’ numbers.

Yes, it helps to be in a research group, but informal communities of practice, faculty and university initiatives, external funding sources such as OLT, ALTA and the ARC do not require you to sign your swords over to a baron or a King.

Yes, we are measured as to our student intakes but we are still, in many important ways, academically free. We can still maintain quality and be true to our academic heritage.

You don’t have to take me word for it. Read everything that I (and katrinafalkner) have been blogging about. You can see all of the work being done, that we have seen at this conference, to draw us all together, to make us remember that we are strong as group, to provide useful metrics, to collaborate, to mentor out of the desire to help rather than the desire to control and the work being down to find and advertise our identity and the way that we can achieve our goals.

Yes, the idea of the New Academy is intimidating, and I write as one who was lucky enough to ride the wave of the new expectations, but in the same way that we bring our students together to learn and explore the benefits of collaboration and social interaction, I am convinced that the best rebirthing of the Academy will occur as we continue to share our work, and meet to discuss it, and go back home and be active and build upon everything that we’ve discussed.

And, being honest, sometimes it just takes sticking to our point, when we’re right, and not doing something that we know is wrong. I know that these are times when people are scared for their jobs, and I’m certainly not immune to that either, but the question comes down to “how much will you put with?” Let me finish with two final questions, which are also, I’m afraid, a call-to-arms:

What have you done today to define the Academy of the 21st Century in a way that matches your ideals and intentions?

What will you do tomorrow?

When the Stakes are High, the Tests Had Better Be Up to It.

Posted: July 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(This is on the stronger opinion side but, in the case of standardised testing as it is currently practised, this will be a polarising issue. Please feel free to read the next article and not this one.)

If you make a mistake, please erase everything from the worksheet, and then leave the room, as you have just wasted 12 years of education.

A friend on FB (thanks, Julie!) linked me to an article in the Washington Post that some of you may have seen. The article is called “The Complete List of Problems with High-Stakes Standardised Tests” by Marion Brady, in the words of the article. a “teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author”. (That’s attribution, not scare quotes.)

Brady provides a (rather long but highly interesting) list of problems with the now very widespread standardised testing regime that is an integral part of student assessment in some countries. Here. Brady focuses on the US but there is little doubt that the same problems would exist in other areas. From my readings and discussions with US teachers, he is discussing issues that are well-known problems in the area but they are slightly intimidating when presented as a block.

So many problems are covered here, from an incorrect focus on simplistic repetition of knowledge because it’s easier to assess, to the way that it encourages extrinsic motivations (bribery or punishment in the simplest form), to the focus on test providers as the stewards and guides of knowledge rather than the teachers. There are some key problems, and phrases, that I found most disturbing, and I quote some of them here:

[Teachers oppose the tests because they]

“unfairly advantage those who can afford test prep; hide problems created by margin-of-error computations in scoring; penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways”

“wrongly assume that what the young will need to know in the future is already known; emphasize minimum achievement to the neglect of maximum performance; create unreasonable pressures to cheat.”

“are open to massive scoring errors with life-changing consequences”

“because they provide minimal to no useful feedback”

This is completely at odds with what we would consider to be reasonable education practice in any other area. If I had comments from students that identified that I was practising 10% of this, I would be having a most interesting discussion with my Head of School concerning what I was doing – and a carpeting would be completely fair! This isn’t how we should teach and we know it.

I spoke yesterday about an assault on critical thinking as being an assault on our civilisation, short-sightedly stabbing away at helping people to think as if it will really achieve what (those trying to undermine critical thinking) actually wanted. I don’t think that anyone can actually permanently stop information spreading, when that information can be observed in the natural world, but short-sightedness, malign manipulation of the truth and ignorance can certainly prevent individuals from gaining access to information – especially if we are peddling the lie that “everything which needs to be discovered is already known.”

We can, we have and we probably (I hope) always will work around these obstacles in information, these dark ages as I referred to them yesterday, but at what cost of the great minds who cannot be applied to important problems because they were born to poor families, in the ‘wrong’ state, in a district with no budget for schools, or had to compete against a system that never encouraged them to actually think?

The child who would have developed free safe power, starship drives, applicable zero-inflation stable economic models, or the “cure for cancer” may be sitting at the back of a poorly maintained, un-airconditioned, classroom somewhere, doodling away, and slowly drifting from us. When he or she encounters the standardised test, unprepared, untrained, and tries to answer it to the extent of his or her prodigious intellect, what will happen? Are you sufficiently happy with the system that you think that this child will receive a fair hearing?

We know that students learn from us, in every way. If we teach something in one way but we reward them for doing something else in a test, is it any surprise that they learn for the test and come to distrust what we talk about outside of these tests? I loathe the question “will this be in the exam” as much as the next teacher but, of course, if that is how we have prioritised learning and rewarded the student, then they would be foolish not to ask this question. If the standardised test is the one that decides your future, then, without doubt, this is the one that you must set as your goal, whether student, teacher, district or state!

Of course, it is the future of the child that is most threatened by all of this, as well as the future of the teaching profession. Poor results on a standardised test for a student may mean significantly reduced opportunity, and reduced opportunity, unless your redemptive mechanisms are first class, means limited pathways into the future. The most insidious thread through all of this is the idea that a standardised test can be easily manipulated through a strategy of learning what the answer should be, to a test question, rather than what it is, within the body of knowledge. We now combine the disadvantaged student having their future restricted, competing against the privileged student who has been heavily channeled into a mode that allows them to artificially excel, with no guarantee that they have the requisite aptitude to enjoy or take advantage of the increased opportunities. This means that both groups are equally in trouble, as far as realising their ambitions, because one cannot even see the opportunity while the other may have no real means for transforming opportunity into achievement.

The desire to control the world, to change the perception of inconvenient facts, to avoid hard questions, to never be challenged – all of these desires appear to be on the rise. This is the desire to make the world bend to our will, the real world’s actual composition and nature apparently not mattering much. It always helps me to remember that Cnut stood in the waves and commanded them not to come in order to prove that he could not control the waves – many people think that Cnut was defeated in his arrogance, when he was attempting to demonstrate his mortality and humility, in the face of his courtiers telling him that he had power above that of mortal men.

How unsurprising that so many people misrepresent this.

Actually, Now You’re On My Turf

Posted: July 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

This Diagram Officially Not Recommended By The Texas GOP 2012

I don’t normally dabble in politics on this blog, quite deliberately, because I don’t want people to stop reading things that might be of use because of partisan issues. However, with the release of the 2012 Texas Republican platform, and its section on Education (page 12), I don’t feel that I’m dabbling in politics to address this – because with the following statement, the Texas GOP has very firmly put their feet into my area, and I feel that a response is required.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Now, I have tried to go the Texas GOP website to see if there have been any developments on this but, for some reason, I can’t seem to be able to get there at the moment. (This is often the Internet’s way of saying “You have become interesting to a great many people. All at once.”, where congestion is caused by fascination.)

I am hoping that this turns out to be some kind of Internet hoax, or the actions of one person, rather than the genuine statement of a major political party for a large US state. As an educator, as a University lecturer, as a scientist, as a thinker, as a human being I am terrified that critical thinking skills, the foundation of our civilisation, are being singled out as being something undesirable – because it will challenge the students’ fixed beliefs.

We have had long periods where beliefs could not be challenged, where critical thinking was either suppressed or ignored, and we generally refer to them historically as dark ages. What really confuses me is that, somehow, critical thinking is going to immediately lead to the collapse of parental authority – as if critical thinking is guaranteed to be obstructive or contrary thinking. Critical thinking is the consideration of claims to decide if they are always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false. There is no guarantee that parental values need to be isolated as claims that are always false and, in many ways, it is a sign of concern of the veracity of one’s beliefs if you assume that any critical assessment is going to lead to an immediate rejection!

The critical thinking that we teach, and consider vital, is a respectful criticism of ideas, rather than people. One of the strengths of a good academic is that they can be critical of an idea, without needing to belittle the thinker (the person behind the idea). I’ve talked about this at length with movement from dualism to relativism and then commitment, under the Perry developmental classifications.

To identify that we should keep children as authority dependent drones, never allowing them to question anything? That is to keep them as children for all of their lives. But this would also lead us to a far darker future than just permanent childhood. Our civilisation is based on thinking, on reaching further, on questioning, on asking “What if?” and then finding answers. What is covered in the section on Knowledge Based Education is a threat to all education at the higher level and, ultimately, something that every educator has to worry about.

This is not a political issue – this is, and always will be, an educational issue. A societal issue. A civilisation issue.

Again, please let this be a joke or a hoax. If this is what a large group of 21st Century Americans can believe is the right way to proceed, then we have a great deal of work to do in informing people of why critical thinking is desirable, rather than some terrible threat to their own authority. But this feels as if it is based in fear, and fear is always very hard to deal with.

Transparency: Our universal requirement

Posted: June 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

There’s been a lot of discussion recently on the removal of Teresa Sullivan as the President of the University of Virginia. You can read about it here or Mark’s excellent summary and commentary here, for a couple of summaries, or just search for more details because there is certainly no shortage of information. There are many theories as to why it may have happened but, what is completely clear from almost every source, Teresa Sullivan had managed to make impressive levels of positive change happen and with the agreement and support of a large percentage of her faculty and administrators.

Of course, all of us want to know the real reasons ‘why’ behind this decision because if an apparently successful President can get fired there must be a good reason. Right?

An unbiassed lens. Value this – they’re rare.

Despite wanting to speak to the Board of Visitors in open session, Sullivan has only been offered a closed session and, from what both she and the board have released, we have no real information to go on.

This is a catastrophic failure of transparency – one of the qualities that we (should) cherish as educators because it is the core of our objectivity, our ability to replicate results and of a fair system. At the start of every semester, I tell the students how they can earn their marks, what I expect, what their deadlines are, what the penalties are, where they can find our policies, what these policies mean to them and, believe me, I consider myself as bound to these statements as I do to my marriage vows. (And I am exceedingly married.) If I don’t tell my students what they need to do, then they have a black box model – they try inputs, see outputs and try to map one to the other. I don’t want them to waste time on this because I want them to learn the important stuff. By being open and transparent in my approach to teaching, we focus on the right things and work out how to do what I want, rather than guessing (and probably getting it wrong).

We can talk about the influence of boards, or unpopular decisions, as much as we want but the issue here is that the next President of UVa had better work out pretty quickly what the secret transformation is concealed inside that Black Box or they will join Teresa Sullivan on the outside. How can you attract someone with the values that you should expect to have in this position, if you can’t even tell the world how they didn’t meet a secret set of rules, apparently put in place by a small group of people.

Telling people what they need to do, giving them guidance on how to do it, being open and transparent about what these requirements are, for all comers and at all times, are the cornerstones of a fair, balanced and modern education system.

It’s a shame that the Board of Visitors at University of Virginia appear to have forgotten this.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →