Let the Denial Begin

Posted: October 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

It is an awful fact that women are very underrepresented in my discipline, Computer Science, and as an aggregate across my faculty, which includes Engineering and Mathematics (so we’re the Technology, Engineering and Mathematics of STEM). I have heard almost every tired and discredited excuse for why this is the case but what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.

Yes, if I were to look around and say “Women are not going to graduate in large numbers because I see so few of them” then I would be accurate and yet, at the same time, completely missing the point. If I were to turn that around and ask “Why are so few women coming in to my degree?” then I have a useful question and, from various branches of research, the more rocks we turn over, the more we seem to find bias (conscious or otherwise) in both industry and academia that discourages women from participation in STEM.

A paper was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS, to its friends), entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”. (PNAS has an open access option but the key graphs and content are also covered in a Scientific American blog article.) The study was simple. Take a job application for  a lab manager position. Assign a name where half of the names are a recognisably male name, the other half are female. (The names John and Jennifer were chosen for this purpose as they had been pre-tested to be equivalent in terms of likability and recogniseability.) Get people to rate the application, including aspects like degree of mentoring offered and salary.

Let me summarise that: the name John or Jennifer is assigned to the same application materials. What we would expect, if there is no bias, is that we would see a similar ranking and equivalent salary offering. (All figures from the original paper, via the SciAm link.)

Oh. It appears that the mere presence of a woman’s name somehow altered reality so that an objective assessment of ability was warped through some sort of … I give up. Humour has escaped me. The name change has resulted in a systematic and significant downgrading of perceived ability. Let me get the next graph out of the way which is the salary offer.

And, equally mysteriously, having the name John is worth over $3,500 more than having the name Jennifer.

I should leap to note that it was both male and female scientists making this classification – which starts to lead us away from outright misogyny and towards ingrained and subtler prejudices. Did people resort to explicitly sexist reasoning to downgrade the candidates? No, they used sound reasoning to argue against the applicant’s competency. Except, of course, we draw back the curtain and suddenly reveal that our sound reasoning works one way when the applicant is a man, another if they are a woman.

Before you think “Oh, they must have targeted a given field, age group or gone after people who do or don’t have tenure”, the field, age and tenure status of the rating professors had no significant effect. This bias is pervasive among faculty, field, age, gender and status. The report also looked at mentoring and, regardless of the rater’s gender, they offered less mentoring to women.

Let’s be blunt. Study after study shows that if there are any gender differences at all, they are so small as to not even vaguely explain what we see in the representation of female students in certain fields and completely fails to explain their reduced progress in later life. However, the bias and stereotypes that people are operating under do not so much predict what will happen as shape what will happen. We are now aware of effects such as Stereotype Threat (Wiki link) that allows us to structure important situations in someone’s life so that the framing of the activity leaves them in a position where they reinforce the negative stereotype because of higher anxiety, relative to a non-stereotyped group. As an example, look at Osborne, Linking Stereotype Threat and Anxiety, where you can actually reduce the performance of girls on a maths test through reminding them that they are girls and that girls tend to do worse on test than boys. Osborne then compared this with a group where the difference was identified but a far more positive statement was made (the participants were told that despite the difference, there were situations where girls performed as well or better). The first scenario (girls do worse) was a high Stereotype Threat scenario (high ST), the second is low ST. Here’s the graph from Wikipedia that is a redrawing of the one in the paper that shows the results.

The effect of Stereotype Threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007) (via Wikipedia)

That is the impact of an explicit stereotype in action – suddenly, when framed fairly and without an explicit stereotype or implicit bias, we see that people are far more similar than we thought. If anything, we have partially inverted the stereotype.

To return to my first paragraph, I said:

what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.

The PNAS paper, among others, clearly shows that the biasses exist. A simple name change is enough, as long as it’s a woman’s name. The demonstrated existence of stereotype threat shows us how performance can be manipulated through preconception. (And it’s important to note that stereotype threat is as powerful against minorities as woman – anyone who is part of a stereotype can be manipulated through their own increased or reduced anxiety.) So let me finally discuss the consideration of all of this and the title of this post.

I am expecting to get at least one person howling me down. Someone who will tear apart all of this because this cannot, possibly, under any circumstances be true. Someone who will start talking about our “African ancestors” to start arguing the Savanna-distribution of roles, as if our hominid predecessors ever had to apply to be a lab manager anywhere. Most of you, I hope, will read this and know all of this far too well. Some of you will reflect on this and, like me, examine yourself very carefully to find out if you have been using this bias or if you have been framing things, while trying to help, in a way that really didn’t help at all.

Some of you, who are my students, will read this and will see that research that you have done is reflected in these figures. Yes, we treat women differently and we appear, in these circumstances, to treat them less well. This does not, under any circumstances, mean that we have to accept this or, in any way, respect this as an established tradition or a desirable status quo. But the detection of an insidious and pervasive bias, that spans a community, shows us how hard my point (c) actually is.

We must first accept that there is a problem. There is a problem. Denying it will achieve nothing. Arguing minutiae will achieve nothing. We have to change the way that we react and be honest with ourselves that, sometimes, our treasured objectivity is actually nothing of the kind.

Beautiful Corrections

Posted: October 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

(Sorry about the delay in today’s post. Yesterday afternoon, I took an early minute, and my wife and I went to view Australian Aboriginal art at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide, had a drink in a pub and then had a long and relaxing dinner at a local ethically-sourced Italian restaurant with a wickedly good pizza oven and a great Langhe Nebbiolo. This didn’t leave much time for blogging. Work/life balance-wise, however, it was a winner.)

Yesterday, I referred to an article on New Dorp high school and I wanted to bring out one of the other things that I really liked about their approach to a ‘get the kids writing’ program. As the article says, thinking, reading and speaking are all interconnected and are reinforced through sound instruction in good writing. This immediately leads to the conclusion that teaching people to write is going to lead to improvements across the board and, as a Probationary-plated social constructivist, I immediately think about constructive interaction between students based on great confidence in speaking, fuelled through a greater depth of understanding and ability to express your ideas.

The article discusses this, because classroom discussion became an opportunity for students to listen, think and be more precise in the way that they discussed their ideas. This can be a trap, as most educators know far too well, if students feel that they have to say something rather than that they have to say something that they can defend, explain or shows signs of reflection. (We see this in writing, too. “What I did on my holiday” is a relatively unassailable personal anecdote with no great guarantee of depth or need for defensible statement, yet “What was the most useful thing that you did on your holiday?” requires thought, comparison, reflection and review. To a degree, obviously. I’m not going to start early writers on a detailed comparison of Yves Klein blue and its apparent lifting from Picasso…)

It is very easy to take classroom discussion in the wrong way. You don’t always have to be cheerleadingly positive (warning: not a real adjective), but framing a critique or a question makes a big difference when you want to encourage discussion and build confidence. That’s why I like what I’m reading about in New Dorp (and I’ve seen elsewhere to a lesser degree), in that the students have a poster at the from of the class that lists ways to respond. For example:

  • I agree/disagree with ___ because …
  • I have a different opinion …
  • I have something to add …
  • Can you explain your answer?
  • I agree with ___ but I disagree with your conclusion (because) …

This is a far cry from the passive responses to a tired questioning approach of “Now, hands up if you think that John is correct”. With this framing, students are encouraged to contribute, contest and expand, but using a formal approach to the argument that reduces dependency upon ad homimen or genetic fallacy issues: we have to address what was said rather than the person or the group that it came from. It’s very easy to say “You’re wrong” or “That’s stupid” and it’s an easy answer that completely undermines what the faculty at New Dorp are trying to achieve.

It’s easy to see how this approach is useful in the higher educational sphere, especially once we get into student-based activities, because we can’t always be the facilitators ourselves, so the training of our sessional staff becomes crucial. One challenge for our sessional staff is how to respond to questions without ending up giving the answer away immediately or doing the work for the student. We expend a lot of time on training (Katrina does a great deal of work in this area) and this simple set of guiding questions and framing, as a training device for our staff as well as a template for our students, will allow us to keep the important lessons fresh and in everyone’s mind. We focus a lot on Contributing Student Pedagogy (CSP), a pedagogy that encourages students to contribute to other students’ learning, including valuing other contributions, generally using a high degree of role flexibility (sometimes you lead, sometimes you support and sometimes you organise, for example). We have a paper in the upcoming special issue of Computer Science Education on CSP, where we talk about this at length, but a simple semi-formal structuring of questions to assist people in thinking about how they are about to contribute or evaluate someone else’s contribution is a valuable component of this kind of approach.

To return to what New Dorp is attempting to do, these questions encourage all participants to think about the why and the because and how their contribution will work in with what has already been said. However, and this is non-trivial, having a semi-scripted start to a response also encourages the correct use of language, familiarity with key phrases and the correct use of modifiers and conjunctions. One of the issues identified at New Dorp was that poor writers couldn’t pull a U-turn in a sentence with much success. Although, despite, and words like that were effectively a mystery – sentences had to be artificially short, tightly focussed and lacking in complexity. Such a limitation greatly limits the degree of expressiveness available to the writer. Sentences don’t have to be long, but they have to be long enough. Sentences don’t have to contain long words, but they have to contain the right words. Ideas need to be expressed in a way that makes them easy to understand but this requires practice, practice and even more practice.

The script on the poster at the front is not a rigid proscription. The poster doesn’t say “Explain the use of adjectives in the sentence.” Instead, it provides a hook that a student can hang their own ideas upon, the leading sentence that starts the invasion of text into the bleak white space of a new page. It encourages discussion, support, interaction and the development of thought.

It appears that New Dorp’s approach is working. Students are improving. Students can write. Students can communicate their thoughts to other people successfully. They can use language. What a great improvement!

Bad Writing, Bad Future?

Posted: October 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was recently reading an article on New Dorp public high school on Staten Island. New Dorp had, until recently, a low graduation rate that was among the bottom 2,000 across the United States. (If you’re wondering, there were 98,817 public schools in the US in 2009-10, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65,840 being secondary. So New Dorp was in the bottom 2% across all schools and bottom 3% of secondary.) New Dorp’s primary intake is from poor and working-class families and, in 2006, 82% of the freshmen entered the school with a reading level lower than the required grade.

However, it was bad writing that was ultimately identified as the main obstacle to success: students couldn’t turn their thoughts into readable essays. Because this appeared to be the primary difference between successful and unsuccessful students, Deirdre DeAngelis (the principal) and the faculty decided that writing would become a focus. If nothing else, New Dorp’s students would learn to write well.

And, apparently, it has paid off. Pass rates are up, repeating rates have dropped, scores are higher than any previous class. Pre-college enrolments are up but, interestingly, the demographic makeup has remained the same and graduations rates have leapt from 63% to a projected 80% this Spring. (Yes, I know, projected data. I’ll try to check this again after it’s happened.)

The article, which I encourage you to read, goes on to discuss why this change of focus was so important. There was resistance – the usual response of “We’re doing our job, but the students aren’t smart enough (or are too lazy)” from certain groups of educators. Yet, students responded with increased participation and high attendance, rewarding efforts and silencing critics. What was interesting is that analysis of why students couldn’t write indicated that most could decipher the underlying texts and could comprehend sentences but had major deficiencies in the use of key parts of speech. Simple speeches were fine but compound sentences and sentences with dependent clauses were hard to decipher and very difficult to write. How can you use ‘although’ correctly when you don’t know what it means?

As understanding of speech grew, so did reading comprehension. Classroom discussion encouraged students to listen, think and speak more precisely, giving them something to repeat in their writing.

It’s an interesting article and I’m re-reading it at the moment to see exactly what I can extract for my own students and where I have to read to verify and expand upon the ideas. From a personal perspective, however, I think of one of the best reminders of what it is like to be a student who is confused or intimidated by writing.

I go to Hong Kong.

If you’ve been to Hong Kong, you’ll know that there is a vast amount of signage, some in Chinese characters and some in English, but there is really far more Chinese neon and it is all over the landscape. I can read some Chinese (duck, soup, daily yum cha, restaurant, men, exit – you get the gist) and I understand some Chinese so I can get a feeling for some of what is happening. But I have no grasp of any subtlety. I cannot create a sentence or write a character reliably. I am a very good communicator in my own language but in Chinese I sound ridiculous. I scrawl characters that good natured colleagues interpret very generously but it is the scribbling of a child.

In Hong Kong, unless I am speaking English, I appear illiterate. It is easy to say “Well, don’t feel bad, why would you have learned Cantonese in Australia” but let’s remember that when looking at the students of New Dorp. Why would anyone have encouraged them in creative writing, written expression and the development of sophisticated literary argument when a large percentage of their parents have English as a second language, effectively reduced access to schooling and, most likely, a very tight time budget to spend with their children due to overwork and job crowding?

A student who can’t write effectively, if we haven’t actually really tried to teach them how to write, is no more stupid or lazy than I am when I don’t try to learn all of Cantonese before going to Hong Kong. We have both been denied an opportunity. I am lucky in that I can choose when I go to Hong Kong. A student who can’t write has a much harder road because their future will be brighter and better if they can write, as evidenced by the increased success rates at New Dorp.

I look forward to seeing what New Dorp gets up to in the future and I take my hat off to them for this approach.

 

The Future of the Text Book: A Printbook, an eText and a Custom walk into a bar.

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Well, it’s still Banned Books Week so I thought I’d follow up on this and talk about text books. I’ve just come from a meeting with a Leading Publishing House (LPH) who, in this fine age of diversification, have made some serious moves into electronic publishing and learning systems. This really doesn’t identify any of the major players because they’re all doing it, we just happen to have a long term relationship with LPH. My students are not the largest purchasers of text books, a fact that LPH’s agent confirmed. While Engineers buy a lot of books, Computer Scientists tend not to buy many and will, maybe, buy one serious text if they think it will be of use to them.

It’s not hard to see why. Many programming language or application books are obsolete within weeks or months, sometimes even before they arrive, and when the books cost upwards of $100 – why buy them when you can download all of the documentation for free? Unlike Humanities, where core texts can remain the same from year to year, or Engineering and Physics, where the principles are effectively established, my discipline’s principles are generally taught by exposure to languages and contextualisation in programming. There are obvious exceptions. Bentley’s Programming Pearls, almost anything by Knuth and certain key texts on algorithms or principles (hello, Dragon Book!) all deal with fundamentals and the things that don’t change from year to year – however, this is not the majority of recommended texts in CS, which tend to head towards programming language guides and manuals. With very few exceptions, any book on a specific programming language has a shelf-life and, if we are updating the course to reflect new content, then we really shouldn’t be surprised if students don’t feel the need to keep buying the new book.

Ah, the Dragon Book.

In other disciplines, the real text book is still being sold extensively and, interestingly, in Australia the eBook is generally sold in a bundle with the real text, even when we know that the student has some form of eBook reader. The model appears to be “work at home from the book and have the eCopy for skimming at Uni”. Both of these forms are still the text book and, if we’re talking about the text book, it appears to be that if students see the need, they’ll buy it. However, the price is becoming more and more important. Is there a widespread model where students can only buy the chapters they need, much as you can buy individual songs from the iTunes Store, and wait until later to see if they want to buy the whole thing? Well, yes, but it’s not widespread in the text book world and, as far as LPH is concerned, it’s not something that they do. Yet.

What is interesting is the growing market in textbook mash-ups. It is now possible to pick a selection of chapters from a range of a publisher’s offerings, add some of your own content, get it checked for copyright issues and then *voila* you have your own custom printed book with only the chapters that you need. All thriller, no filler. Of course, any costs involved in this, especially costly copyright issues, get passed on to the people who buy it. (The students.) This, fairly obviously, restricts the mash-ups to easy to mash materials – books only from one publisher where the IP issues are sorted, open-source images and the like. One problem that surfaces occasionally are people who put their own work in to be included in such a custom run and it turns out that some of the content is not actually original. This can be an oversight and even due to inheritability sometimes. Suppose that Person A created a course from a text, B inherited the course and made some changes based on the course, then continued to change it over the years. It’s a Boat of Theseus problem because the final work is the work of A and B but probably retains enough of the original text source to cause copyright issues when combined back into a new book. Copyright issues can often be overcome but it increases costs and, as stated, that costs the student more.

Given how expensive text books (still) are and that the custom market still operates at a high-ish price point, I’m still waiting for one of the LPHs to take the radical step of providing books at a price point that makes them effectively irresistible. Look at the Orange Penguin reprints, which I do often because I own a million of them, they cost $10 (cheaper in a bundle) and you can pick them up anywhere. Yes, there is an amelioration of the editing costs because these are all reprints of previous versions. Yes, there are no cover arts costs and they are using relatively mainline stock for the printing. But, hang on, isn’t this exactly what we can do in the custom sense, if we stick to jamming together existing chapters? Yet my early researches indicate that there is no large market of custom textbooks that are anywhere near this cost.

I’m going to put up the naïve and relatively ignorant flags here as I’m sure that LPH actuaries have been all over this so, rather than say “Surely…” (and have to kick myself), let me make this a wish.

“I wish that I could assemble a useful book for my students from key chapters of available works and, with low presentation costs, get a book together for under $40 that really nailed the content required for a year level.”  I’d be even happier if that $40 was $20. Or even free. There are some seriously successful free text book initiatives but, as always, there is that spectre of reimbursement for the effort expended by the author. I’m certainly not advocating doing authors out of their entitlements but I am wondering how we can do that and, with minimal overhead, make all of these books as useful and widespread as they need to be. 

There are some books and sets of chapters that I’d love my students to have, while respecting the author’s right to receive their entitlements for the work and setting a fair price. To be honest, it really seems like I’m expecting too much. What do you think?

Banned Books Week: Time to Hit the Library!

Posted: October 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Banned Books Week until October the 6th so what better time to talk about the freedom to read and go off and subversively read some banned or challenged books? There’s a great link on the American Library Association’s site with the top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009. Some of them are completely predictable and some of them are more surprising. The reasons given for withdrawing books are, in the words of the ALA site:

Books usually are challenged with the best intentions—to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.

However, it is always easy to see where such noble intentions have been subverted and politics or other overtones have come into play. Let’s look at the Top 10 from 1990-1999 as an example:

  1. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (7)
  2. Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite (-)
  3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (6)
  4. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (3)
  5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (14)
  6. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (5)
  7. Forever, by Judy Blume (16)
  8. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson (28)
  9. Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman (-)
  10. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (19)

Book 1 is scary and has gruesome illustrations. Book 2 deals with homosexual parents.Book 3 contains a rape involving an eight year old girl. Book 4 is about bullying and also contains a masturbation scene. Book 5 is … book 5 is Huckleberry Finn!!! Of course, HF is probably in here because of the fairly extensive use of racial pejoratives and stereotypes, even if argument can be made that the book itself is anti-racist. Book 6 is a magnificent book but, between the deaths and a dead puppy, it’s not exactly an easy book. Book 7 has teen sex in it but nowhere near the same tone or difficulty as some of the previous. Book 8 is a surprisingly depressing book that manages to balance a fantasy world with death and disappointment. Book 9, well, what a surprise, another book on homosexuality has made the list. Finally, we have Catcher, full of profanity and sexual depiction.

Looking at this list, we see sex, racism, homosexual relationships and death being the major themes. (Notably, to be banned for sex, depictions that range to the explicit are required for heterosexual activity, but it is merely the existence of the relationship that can suffice for homosexual relationships.) Those numbers at the end are, by the way, where they feature in the top 100 of 2000-2009. Let’s look at that to see what appals and is too complicated for children or library users in the first decade of the 21st Century, I’ve bolded the new entries:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

I’ll come back to Harry Potter in a moment. Number 2, the Alice series, covers a wide range of topics, including our old friend sex, so it’s for the sexual content that it made the list – topping the list in 2003. Number 4 is a children’s book based on the observed behaviour of two male penguins who became a couple and raised a hatchling. (You can read about Roy and Silo here.) Number 8 has some nasty moments across the trilogy but, in the main, has drawn most of its criticism because of a negative portrayal of religion in general, and Christianity specifically. Number 9 is on the list because, from a Banned Books story in 2010, “Preoccupied with sex and college, the teen girls encounter realistic situations that feature foul language, drugs and alcohol in a less than casual way.” Finally, the new number 10 contains references to suicide and death, as well as the usual teen cocktail of drugs, alcohol and sex that guarantee requests for banning. Oh, and there’s also a gay friend and there is a reference to child molestation. But none of it is graphic and it’s written up as a series of letters to a friend.

So the themes are now sex, drugs, bad language, homosexual penguins (Penguin Lust!), discussion of real teenagers and… fantasy novels? Let me return to Harry Potter which contains teens who are so heavily plasticised that they appear to have no real functioning genitalia, never smoke drugs, don’t swear seriously even when being threatened with death and are laughably vanilla in so many ways that the dominant fantasy conceit of the HP universe is not the magic, it’s that teenagers would actually function this way! This, and the inclusion of His Dark Materials, appear to show the direction that book banning has taken over the last decade: removing a point of view for reasons that appear to have little to do with protecting children from difficult ideas and information, but to remove them from ideas that have been stated as unacceptable by some form of organised body.

I strongly suggest looking at both lists, side-by-side, so that you too can have the moments that I had of cocking your head to one side and thinking “why is that on there?” Then coming to the slow, and unpleasant realisation, that the answer is not “because it’s too dark or encourages drug use” but “because of an organised campaign by a group who are trying to orchestrate the removal of a book that, ultimately, is a fairy tale and of no more harm to children than any other”.

There are sometimes good reasons to restrict access, by age or maturity, to certain materials and, definitely, there are lines that you can’t cross and expect to show up on a public library on the shelves – this is a far cry from completely removing or destroying a work. But what appears to be happening now is that the political reasons for banning are starting to dominate, with Internet and local organisation allowing a majority to form that can request a book’s withdrawal. Fortunately, the Internet can bring books to anyone but, with existing models, e-Books may not be as widely available as we often think so the local and school library forms a valuable point for students. I read voraciously when I was younger and, despite reading many of the banned books on the lists, I don’t appear to have turned out too badly. (I know, I know, anecdotal existential evidence doesn’t count. But I can say that not everyone who reads The Chocolate War turns into a psychopath, so why is it always in the top 5? If anything, it made me aware that the adult advice on bullying was generally an empty mechanism that never dealt with the real problem: bullies are not always cowards, don’t fear the same type of repercussions and, sometimes, are in charge. I know – how subversive!)

Let me leave you with an example of how things have changed in the last two decades. One inclusion on the banned book list only showed up in the last decade, despite being published decades earlier, and it’s number 69 on the 2000-2009 list. I’m scared how high it will be driven in the 2010-2019 list and it is yet another example of why we have to be very careful about how we construct any list of books that we wish to treat differently. Or ‘sanction’. You might have heard of it.

It’s called Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

Educating about Evil

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

While we focus on our discipline areas for education, we can never lose sight of the important role that teachers have in a student’s life. As I’ve said (in ones way or another) repeatedly, we have large footprints and a deep shadow: thinking that we are only obliged to worry about mathematics or the correct location of the comma is to risk taking actions that have a far greater impact than intended.

This is why I have no time for educators who sleep with their students, because they have reduced anything positive or supportive that they ever said to the student into a part of the seduction and it contaminates the relationship that the student will have with authority, possibly for the rest of their life. In the strongest terms I condemn this, not the least because it is almost always illegal, immoral and wrong, but because it is, at its heart, unscholarly, unthinking and anti-educational. If you want to teach, then you’ve put yourself in a position where your voice is going to carry more weight – and this brings responsibilities. Naively enough, one of the key responsibilities for me is that we must think carefully about our actions so that, by our thoughtless action or inaction, we do not facilitate evil.

I do not have a belief system that gives me a convenient Devil so, for me, evil is a concept that is very abstract, but no less real for not having a trident and cloven hooves. I know it when I see it. I know it when I see its hand at work and it is the shape of evil’s hand that I generally discuss with my students. Let me show you.

Elizabeth Eckford, girl in dark sunglasses, attempting to enter Central High in the Little Rock School District. (Photo: Will Counts)

Can you see it? Let me show you from another angle.

The girl screaming racist abuse is Hazel Massery. The year is 1957. (Photo: Will Counts)

That’s a 15 year old girl standing at the front who is, under established legal precedent, trying to enter a previously all-white school. The girl behind her, about the same age, is yelling this: “Go home, n____! Go back to Africa.” Those soldiers you see are national guardsman, stationed not to help an isolated 15 year old girl but, instead, to keep her and the other 8 students who haven’t shown up today, from bringing their black selves into this white classroom.

I see the hand of evil all over this incident but, via these photographs, but I see it most with its scaly digits clutched around Hazel Massery’s mouth. She had a family with troubles and a background entrenched racism, and Hazel was a troubled girl but, in this moment, she was a hysterical, screaming puppet, baying for the blood of a 15-year old girl who was just another human being. The people around Elizabeth are yelling “Lynch her!” “Drag her away!” Women who look like your grandma are spitting on her. But look at Hazel Massery. It’s hard to find a more spectacular example of the evil of the mob than this?

Fifty-five years ago this month, nine students tried to make it into the school and, finally, after being turned away three times by National Guardsman, they managed to enter, escorted by soldiers of the 101st Airborne. Some of the people in that crowd, smiling, chuckling, taking pictures – they are teachers. Elizabeth’s ongoing problems at school, and they were many, included one teacher who would not even take anything directly from Elizabeth’s hands because of the colour of Elizabeth’s skin. Elizabeth was systematically abused, isolated and bullied up until the time that the school got closed and she had to try and complete her studies by herself.

After months of abuse, one entry from Elizabeth’s experience reads: “She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day.”

When I was a teenager, I attended a talk where a minister said that he had always expected the test of his faith and integrity to be a suave man with horns and a tail, wearing a good suit, who offered him a dollar to smoke a cigarette and spit on the Bible. As he got older, he realised that evil, in many forms, was much harder to recognise and, of course, that sometimes doing nothing counted as evil, if you didn’t take the opportunity to do good. (As I later realised, in the style of Edmund Burke!)

You know, I don’t expect that much of a lot of people, if no-one has gone to the trouble to actually educate them and shake those xenophobic beliefs that seem to accumulate when we’re in small, scared bands and huddled in the dark. But I do expect a great deal of anyone who takes up the role of educator. I expect them to stand up for the truth. To go looking for the light if they realise that they’re in the dark. To treat all students as what they could be rather than what they have been assumed to be.

But, base level, in any activity regarding students and mobs, formed from stupidity and bigotry, I expect the teachers to be in a circle around the students and facing out, standing between the mob and their charges, certainly not facing in and taking part in the discrimination.

There’s a Vanity Fair article where you can read more about this. We have, I am thankful to say, come a very long way but it is quite obvious that there is still some way to go. The VF article talks a lot about the good people of the community, who stood up, who helped up, who realised that this was wrong and you should read it because it is a story of hope. But let us never lose sight of what evil looks like, because I need to train my students to see it so that they can stamp on it.

Push it back into the darkness where it belongs and blind it with truth, facts, science, reasoning, enlightenment and goodness. In 100 years time I want someone who sees that picture to not even be able to understand why this would have happened. I want cute kids to cock their heads to one side and look confused – because they can see an obviously visual difference but not inequality or divide, and hence not establish it as in immutable categorical statement of worth or ability. I think we’re all part of the glorious pathway that will lead to that great and wonderful time. Naive? Yes. But we have to start somewhere and, fifty-five years ago, Elizabeth and eight other brave young people did just that. We’re just carrying it on.

Our Obligations: Moral and Legal?

Posted: September 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mark Guzdial raises an interesting point over at a BLOG@CACM article, namely that, if we don’t keep up to to date with contemporary practice in learning and teaching, can be considered unprofessional or even negligent or unethical? If we were surgeons who had not bothered to stay up to date then our patients, and certifying bodies, would be rightly upset. If we are teachers – then what?

The other issue Mark discusses is that of the legal requirement. The US has Title IX, which should extend the same participation rights to all genders for any education program or activity that attracts federal funding. If we do not construct activities that are inclusive (or we design activities that, by their nature, are exclusive) would we be liable under US law?

Mark’s final question is: If we know a better way to teach computing, are we professionally (and even legally) required to use it?

That is a spectacularly good question and, of course, it has no easy answer. Let me extend the idea of the surgeon by building on the doctors’ credo: primum non nocere (first, do no harm). Ultimately, it requires us to consider that all of our actions have outcomes and, in the case of medical intervention, we should be sure that we must always consider the harm that will be caused by this intervention.

Let us consider that there are two approaches that we could take in our pursuit of knowledge of learning and teaching: that of true scholarship of learning and teaching, and that of ignorance of new techniques of learning and teaching. (We’ll leave enthusiasm and ability to the side for the time being.) While this is falsely dichotomous, we can fix this by defining scholarship as starting at ‘knowing that other techniques exist and change might not kill you’, with everything else below that as ‘ignorance of new techniques’.

Now let us consider the impact of both of these bases, in terms of enthusiasm. If someone has any energy at all, then they will be able to apply techniques in the classroom. If they are more energetic then they will apply with more vigour and any effect will be amplified. If these are useful and evidentially supported techniques, then we would expect benefit. If these are folk pedagogies or traditions that have long been discredited then any vigour will be applied to an innately useless or destructive technique. In the case of an inert teacher, neither matters. It is obvious then that the minimum harm is to employ techniques that will reward vigour with sound outcomes: so we must either use validated techniques or explore new techniques that will work.

Now let us look at ability. If a teacher is ‘gifted’ (or profoundly experienced)  then he or she will be more likely to carry the class, pretty much regardless. However, what if a teacher is not so much of a star? Then, in this case, we start to become dependent once again upon the strength of the underlying technique or pedagogy. Otherwise, we risk harming our students by applying bad technique because of insufficient ability to correct it. Again, do no harm requires us to provide techniques that will survive the average or worse-than-average teacher, which requires a consideration of load, development level, reliance upon authority and so on – for student and teacher.

I believe that this argues that, yes, we are professionally bound to confirm our techniques and approaches and, if a better approach is available, evaluate it and adopt it. To do anything else risks doing harm and we cannot do this and remain professional. We are intervening with our students all the time – if we didn’t feel that our approach had worth or would change lives then we wouldn’t be doing it. If intervention and guidance are at our core then we must adopt something like the first, do no harm maxim because it gives us a clear signpost on decisions that could affect a student for life.

One of the greatest problems we face is potentially those people who are highly enthused and deeply undereducated in key areas of modern developments of teaching. As Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord would have said:

One must beware of anyone who is [undereducated] and [very enthusiastic] — [s/he] must not be entrusted with any responsibility because [s/he] will always cause only mischief.

If your best volunteer is also your worst nightmare, how do you resolve this when doing so requires you to say “This is right but you are wrong.” Can you do so without causing enormous problems that may swamp the benefit of doing so?

What about the legal issues? Do we risk heading into the murky world of compliance if we add a legal layer – will an ethical argument be enough?

What do you think about it?

The Complex Roles Of Universities In The Period Of Globalization – Altbach – Part 2

Posted: September 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Continuing from my previous post, Altbach deals with the University as a focus of the international community. We host other people, share interests, cross-populate each other with PhD students and professors – sometimes it’s a wonder that we don’t get spontaneous germination of new Universities just from all of the swapping! Because of our mission, we tend to have a much greater ability to look, think and act on the international level. This is an interesting contrast to the role of the Uni as a national stabiliser, as the more one travels and looks outward, the more one realises that your country is just one of many. I travel a fair bit for work and I can tell you that, right now, I haven’t run across a single issue that is not being felt by at least two (or more) Universities at an equal level of pain, yet most people who don’t travel or share their world view feel isolated and that “no one else would understand.” The realisation that all countries are really very similar (yes, with one or two exceptions) and that Unis are the same all over the world sets the academic even further away from the people outside and again increases the obligation to communicate with people outside of academia. Hoarding knowledge or sneering at the uninformed do not come with the territory – Universities have traditionally been the centres of connectivity, even before the internet, and now that most Unis end up being the default Internet distribution point in many regions, this is becoming even more important.

This ties in with the next topic that Altbach mentions, our role in social mobility. Education transforms people. While you have to the son of the King to (most likely) become King, anyone can become an engineer (with a few caveats, to keep my colleagues in Eng happy!) with access to education. Expanding Universities from a small and elite focussed approach to a larger scale, massified, model has brought access and equity to a much larger group of people. This is not a given, of course, as the first-in-family do face a lot of challenges but, where the right attention is given to support and scholarships, great things can be achieved.

We are also engines for economic development, in that our knowledge can be commercialised, spun-off, licensed and re-used, through adjacent Science and Technology Parks or through relationships with industry. There are entire twins in the US that would shrivel up overnight without their co-located University. Academic research is still a key driver in innovation both directly and indirectly, through the production of research staff who then go to corporate research facilities.

But a number of these are fairly recent developments. International focus requires knowing about the world and having a method of travel, as well as not being at war with the place you’re trying to visit! The change from small and elite to large and massive requires vast amounts of money and resources and the changes have taken place with staggered effects across most of the second half of the 20th Century, into this new century. It’s not just the number of students, Altbach emphasises, it’s the range of post-secondary options that have sprung up to meet technical and industrial demand. These new institutions have new charters, new focus areas, different lengths and types of degree and we suddenly find that, much as oranges are not the only fruit, training at a University that can grant PhDs may not be the best preparation for working at an institution that is post-secondary yet nothing much like the places that its teachers have come from. The ‘pinnacle’ research institutions, prestigious and few in number, serve a smaller group and are probably the most complex institutions in the spectrum, training the most professionals and receiving the lion’s share of research funding. This introduces tension, between the doctoral graduates of the pinnacle who may transfer to other institutions and find themselves at odds with a very different mission, and because any system where an entrenched elite receive advantages that allow them to stay elite is always going to cause tension. Massification has led to greater disparity. Yes, almost anyone can go to college, but it appears that achieving that has meant that we have now risked devaluing the term ‘college’ along the way. In Australia, students say they’re going to ‘Uni’ when that could mean TAFE (Technical and Further Education), adult education, or actual University. (We had a comprehensive shake-up some time ago that turned all of the institutes of technology into Universities, or we would have that distinction as well. The previous separation of degrees and ‘applied’ degrees had actually worked quite well, at least in my reading and opinion, but government initiatives are what they are, and we will talk more about this in the discussion of public and private good.) Should it matter what one does when the word ‘college’ is mentioned? No, it shouldn’t. The problem is when the issue becomes confusing or we provide a service that we call ‘college’ to all of our citizens, yet some citizens get a better version than others for reasons that are not transferable or equitable. To quote Altbach:

Massification inevitably creates more variations and diversity in academic systems. It creates opportunities for access that are unprecedented in world history, but at the same time it creates systems that are less equal and more difficult to support financially.

This brings us squarely into Altbach’s next point, the issue of public versus private good, a debate that rages unabated today. Changes in Australian University funding have very much been under the presumption that the greatest good is being enjoyed by the private citizen who receives the education, rather than the society to which they contribute, hence the citizen should bear more of the load for their own education. (My response is ‘piffle’, the benefit to our society of the educated is hard to overestimate,  but I’ve already discussed this in an earlier post.) As noted in the article, whether the state can or cannot support public education is moot as many states are just shifting the burden to the citizen and their families. This inevitably creates a two-speed system, where some go to college and some do not, because of influences and decisions that may have had an impact on the grandparents and parents of the student, rather than any personal merit. Given that, even in a meritocratic system, training programs and preparation schools can make all the difference, and these are usually private and expensive, any meritocratic system risks quickly falling into the same two-speed divide. Even if a place is available at the correct type of institution, the costs of relocating, leaving a secure community and moving from a more socialised and low-cash environment to an isolated, pay-up-front and distant location to attend a college may place another bar in the way of the prospective student from a less advantaged area. Mass higher education is supposed to be for the masses but solving the issues of nomenclature, access and preparation do nothing if no-one can actually attend unless they’re rich. Many of our activities are linked, in one way or another, to the public good and we are well aware that feeling that you are an active and contributing member of your society is usually associated with greater motivation to participate and be involved with this good. Any restrictive mechanisms driven by forcing the burden back on to the citizen, defended by the notion of personal benefit dominates any public benefit, undermine the ability of people to join and contribute to greater society: this undermines the public good, as well as setting the stage for disenfranchisement and a disengagement from society. Every time we do this, we risk casting another generation out of the circle of those who will go to college.

I’ll finish this tomorrow, with a discussion of the contemporary issues, from the report, and my own thoughts overall.

The Complex Roles Of Universities In The Period Of Globalization – Altbach – Part 1

Posted: September 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the most handy things about having a new member in a research group, especially one who is just finishing or has just finished submitting a PhD, is that they come in with an entirely new subset of the possible papers in the given discipline, which they have used to construct their theses and inform their thinking. While you will have the standard overlap of the key papers in the field, there will often be waterways that run away from the main river and it is in these diverse streams that we find new ways of thinking, even leading to these stream becoming tributaries that feed back into our main body, strengthening the overall work.

R has just sent me a reference from her thesis, a copy of Altbach’s 2011 publication in Higher Education in the World 3: New Challenges and Emerging Roles for Human and Social Development, entitled “The Complex Roles Of Universities In The Period Of Globalization”. The abstract is pithy but this quote stands out: “The academic drift of the 21st century raises concerns about the core functions of universities and how contemporary changes have affected academic missions.” This is a fascinating paper and one that I wish I turned up early because it has the same concerns as I do, and as Richard Hil did with his Whackademia book, in that we are all being asked to do more with less and it is how we do this that will decide our future, and the future of higher education. (Readers may recall that I did not agree with much of what Hil said – as I said, I wish I had read Altbach sooner because it would have made the rebuttal easier.) I’m going to cover this across a few posts because the paper has a fair bit of comment and I’d like to make some commentary!

Altbach looks at the different roles that Universities have had over time, including the different roles that they play in certain countries and how time, politics, religion, wealth and nationalism have all contributed to changing demands on the sector. There is no doubt that teaching and research make up our core functions but we can vary from country to country as to whether we are teaching technical skills, professional skills or general education at Universities. Over time, we have often been in conflict with our own societies, which can lead to great creativity but at the cost of additional load or difficult burdens. Research is equally difficult to pin down: are we talking ‘pure’ research or ‘applied’ research? Does research have to be discipline focused or can we perform research on teaching, or research on research? Does it matter where the research money comes from? Different areas inside the same university can have completely different answers to these questions so it’s little doubt that this question is still open!

Universities have been used to foster national development and identity, as Altbach mentions with German, Japanese and American examples, or as stabilising influences in the third world. We are also steadily evolving academic centres, adding courses as the ranks of the professions grow. My profession, Computer Scientist, wasn’t even a profession until the second half of the 20th century (that’s why we have so few cool awards – there is no Nobel prize in Applied Algorithmics). Immediately we see a conflict in the sense of stability and status quo required to be a national touchstone, while determining how we adapt to the changing demands of the workforce and the new professionals.

We have always been associated with knowledge as both the defenders and disseminators, ignoring secular and religious demand to not teach certain things or to state that red is black, with a focus on organisation to facilitate later retrieval. This access to knowledge also feeds in to one of our other key facets, or at least one of the most desirable, that of an intellectual centre. As academics, we have the freedom to express our ideas and, many would argue, the obligation to do so given that we have that freedom. The expertise that our staff have should be available to all in terms of interpretation and refinement of ideas and concepts but to do that we have to engage with the community. It is of little surprise that we often find ourselves involved in social and political movements, supporting other activists, providing resources and making an overall contribution to the intellectual life of our surroundings.

This is, for me, a very important point because it forces us to consider where the private individual ends and the public intellectual begins, if such a division even makes any sense. From a personal perspective, I would not raise my politics in a classroom but I would discuss issues of ethics and equality, some of which may or may not be in accord with prevailing government thought. Let me be more explicit. Yesterday, I attended a rally for Marriage Equality, as part of a reaction against the Australian Federal Government’s rejection of a bill to allow same sex marriage. I would most certainly not have advertised this event in my lectures or told my students about it because I think that there’s far too much capacity for me to influence my students to act through our relationship, which is not a discussion or political sharing but overt influence. I attended the rally as a private citizen but if my students asked me about it, because we did get photographed and videoed, then I feel that I could explain my actions within an ethical framework, which means that this is informing my role as public intellectual. My community, equality and ethical focus drives both the citizen and the academic and allows me to carry out two roles while attempting to minimise any exploitation of the power relationship that I have with my students. However, my capacity as a (notional) public intellectual requires me to have an explanation for what I did that is articulate and comprehensible. The private citizen is impassioned but the academic is both passionate and rationale, and can place the activity in a context that allows it to be shared.

But, as I always say, there is no point having a system that only works with perfect people. Altbach is talking about our institutions, which is the right focus for the paper, but the institutions are just buildings without the academics and students that fill them. I attempt to juggle my private and public self and, while sometimes I succeed more than others, I think I know what I should ‘look like’ to my institution, my peers, my students and my social groups. What will be interesting in the coming world of change for Universities is how we deal with the people who don’t work as well within the role of educator. I have no time, respect or tolerance for those of my colleagues who confuse intellectual freedom with a wanton disregard for reasonable behaviour in this privileged role. Just because we organise the knowledge doesn’t mean that we own it, nor does our mastery of intellectual pursuits (if we achieve that) make us any better than anyone else: we have merely had more opportunity but, for me, that comes with a corresponding level of responsibility. I have seen more than one academic, not at my own University I hasten to add, who has obviously been grooming a student through manipulation of the aura of competency that any decent academic can muster, where we appear wise, worldly and incredibly, staggeringly, deep on matters that are so very, very passionate and important. Altbach writes of what changes we have seen in Universities but you only have to read through the yellow press (or the FFFF00 press on the web) to see how many educators are abusing their relationship with their students and I’m not sure what this says about how the educators themselves are changing. I have heard dire tales of exploitative behaviour in the 70s and 80s in my country – “A for a lay” unpleasantness and similar. When we talk of our intellectual freedoms, our influence on the world as national stabilisers and centres of knowledge, it is important to remember that the components of these institutions are merely people. As we increase the stresses on the organisations, so too do we distribute this across people and, given that people are already failing some key moral and disciplinary requirements, any discussion of what our role should become will have to take into account the fact that we are building a system from people, to work with other people.

This Is Your Captain Speaking: Turn Off Your Gadgets

Posted: September 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

This is your Captain speaking. Shortly,I’m going to push on a set of levers that will allow fuel to pour into the steel cylinders affixed to the side of the plane and, in the presence of well-engineered flame, create a series of small and controlled explosions that will allow us to lift roughly 400 tonnes of metal and flesh into the air and propel you towards your destination.

As part of this, when the plane heads down the runway, we will pass a threshold known as V1. Do you know what V1 means? V1 is the takeoff decision speed  and is the speed at which we will try and take off, even if one engine fails. Basically, V1 is the speed at which we are travelling so fast that we are safest in the air – we are beyond the realm of air brakes or the rather amusingly useless brakes on the wheels. You know that mechanical brakes can evaporate on trucks when they’re going too fast, right? Think an even faster “pfft, bloooo” for planes.

Having gone through V1, we will reach V2. That is the speed at which, having committed to take-off, we will attempt to rotate the nose up and we will safely be able to take off, even if one engine is down. You know this speed. We trundle down the runway and you might miss V1 but the moment we rotate the nose up, that’s V2.

If I can’t easily find out when either of these speeds are, we’re stuffed. I need the read-outs in front of me to give me a reliable idea of these speeds or my co-pilots and I will be working on guesswork and you, seriously, do not want that.

There are two points when you are seriously vulnerable in an aircraft: takeoff and landing. During both of these moments, our proximity to the ground and reduced speed combine to form a major liability: any misjudgement at this point can lead to catastrophe because we have not got any time to recover from disaster. This, of course, is why we ask you to turn off every single possible source of interference to out aircraft systems, which includes phones, iPods, iPads, MP3 players, Kindles, Kobo readers, whatever. We want to have the best chance possible to let the plane tell us everything that it can.

Some of you don’t turn the gadgets off and, as your Captain, let me berate both you and the people who educated you. You, because you ignored the legal requirement to comply with my instructions and your teachers, because they failed to adequately instruct you in the importance of cause and effect, personal responsibility, and anecdotal evidence.

If you, as a person, opt to leave your gear on despite being asked not to, you are saying to the roughly 500 other passengers that your need to read a book in an electronic form, or watch a movie, trumps their fundamental right to personal safety. Now, we’re not 100% sure that this will cause a problem but, as we’re also not sure that it won’t interfere with our systems and we do need to know lots of stuff about the aeroplane at these critical times, we ask you to switch this gear off. Will it cause an accident? Probably not. Is it safe? We don’t know. Right now, you’re not demonstrating an adequate knowledge of cause and effect or personal responsibility.

Oh, so your Uncle Willie left his mobile on and nothing happened? Great! Fantastic! Was it this type of plane? Same avionics? Was there unforeseen confusion in the flight deck that no-one mentioned (Probably not but you don’t know.) Hey,  I hear Uncle Willie drove through an intersection once against the red lights at 100 mph – why don’t you try that?  Anecdotal evidence, especially one exceptional case, proves nothing.

Actions have repercussions but this doesn’t mean that there will always be a 1:1 match-up between them. If mobile phones always crashed planes, we’d search you and confiscate them. It’s the possible and unlikely interaction of plane and gadget that we’re worried about and this is why we sincerely hope that your teachers have managed to get this idea through to you, along with the fact that rationalisation doesn’t equal reason and one contrary exemplar does not state a uniform case.

Let me remind you that we will shortly be flying in a 400 tonne piece of metal that hurtles through the sky at 650 mph on top of 2-4 engines of burning flame.

Do you actually want to make it harder for me to control this?

Think about the possible impact of your actions, comply with crew directions and, for a few minutes at the start and end of the flight, do what I ask you to do and turn off your gadgets. It might not do anything, but it might give you a chance to be irritated by a similar announcement on a subsequent flight.

Thank you for your attention.”

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