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Education for Liberation vs. Education for Assimilation

February 10, 2023 / Sarah Stewart

I’ve been both excited and anxious about writing this blog post. I’m excited that Scott invited me to participate and anxious that what I had to write wouldn’t be academic enough. But truly, that excitement and anxiety is also related to the topic that I’ve chosen. How “academic” is social justice work in education? Is it possible for it to be on par with and seen as equal to more traditional classes and ways of teaching? In education, we talk a lot about decolonization and moving away from “the way we’ve always done it.” But the system is set up in such a way that it seems like change can only be a one-off.

This constant thought process on what it would really mean to expand the possibilities for education has ultimately led to my uncertainty about my dissertation topic in the doctoral program I’m in with Scott and Erin. I know that I want to research and talk about Black women in higher education, maybe including other women of color. I know that I want to write about how we can do “diversity education” and “diversity work” with a real lens of social justice, moving beyond words and nice web pages. To do this work in a way that makes change would require a true disruption of the systems we’ve inherited. And I feel like I often don’t have the time to get my head above water to see the bigger picture or work on it. I’m often too busy doing the work to research it or find the right words to package what I’m doing. So I appreciate this chance to think through what I’m doing, what it’s based on, and what direction I should take in writing down what I do and want to do and why.

I teach a freshman class called Dignitas at the College of St. Scholastica (CSS). Dignitas is a required class for all traditional first-year, in-person students. The goal of the class is for freshmen to learn about the Benedictine values, the CSS community, to build a sense of belonging, and to learn about these things through a specific lens or theme chosen by the instructor. My class’s theme is race and social justice and my class is invitation-only, for students of color only. Students do not need to choose my section and there are students of color every year who do choose other classes. This is important because what we do only works if someone chose to be part of it and is invested.

A big part of my desire to name and package what I am doing comes from my own realization that there are things I do that work and would helpful for other people to know and do in their own ways as the college is talking more and more about the diversity of our incoming classes but also the retention of these growing populations, such as students of color. I know that part of what works is the content of my class but my presence as a Black woman as an instructor is also very important for most of my students. I am often the first person of color that many have had as a teacher and the setup of the class is the only place they’ve ever been in a room of all people of color. These things matter but I’ve had colleagues dismiss them and say that they are unimportant. Only recently have I realized that many of the naysayers are uncomfortable with the idea that things like visibility and the existence of spaces where students of color are not the minority are important. And they are uncomfortable because those aren’t things they can provide as instructors. But why is this any different from skills or situations that those educators can provide that I cannot? In those instances, I don’t blame that educator for what they can do. I simply show up in the ways that I am able to and I feel grateful that my colleagues show up in other ways. This is really about showing up authentically and knowing what need you can fill, not doing everything the same way.

For African American students specifically, I know that I need more time with bell hooks texts and texts talking about education for liberation. While there are naysayers regarding my class, my teaching style, and my course content, my results speak for themselves. Scott is the person who ran the numbers on my course’s success and found rates of retention and persistence to graduation had gone up each year for my students. This is the exact population the school is looking at and those are the exact issues we are supposedly tackling. On a personal level, we have had quite the week in my class. Today, a student talked with me about a friend of hers who wishes she could be in our class, not because it’s “easy” but because she is in a very traditional class with lots of texts and essays. This particular student said she wishes she had a space to really think about issues that are real and important to her and discuss them with her peers. Also during this week, one of my students agreed to let us show the new documentary, “Boys in Blue,” which he is a part of. He also agreed to let me interview him and have the class ask questions. In our class on Tuesday, we did this and there were students thinking and talking about whether they feel welcome at CSS, what it’s like being at a PWI, missing their homes and diversity, and feeling plucked out of a place where they are seen and accepted, only to be set into a place where they are tolerated at best. But they talked too about why they are here and the sacrifices that might be worth it to them and again, why. Then on Thursday, the student was not in class because he went home for a memorial honoring another kid who had been in the documentary but was murdered last year.

We cannot claim to be educators who only worry about “academic rigor” but ignore the personal and the cultural. My students are smart and they are capable. But they are going through so much more than most of their more privileged classmates. And they are going through it constantly. I have many colleagues whose response is to lower expectations for these students or make the expectations higher or to claim that any sharing of the personal is an excuse. The list goes on. But these same colleagues often lament on the number of students who do not persist and it takes a lot of my patience not to scream that there are ways to do it all. So at the end of the day, I often find that I relate more to my students than I do to most of my colleagues and that is because we are dealing with the same issues in different ways. How can we truly educate and work in a way that is geared toward liberation and not toward assimilation?

Everything is different, things never change.

February 2, 2023 / Rafael Palomino

First blooms of the winter from Arctostaphylos densiflora 'Howard Mcminn.' — *First blooms of the winter* from Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Howard McMinn.’

My first professional transition happened when I went from being a graduate student to working in educational development at UC Santa Cruz. I loved the teaching part of grad school, and it felt natural enough to move into a role focused on helping others develop their teaching, and collaborating on university teaching and learning projects.

When the time came to look for another career opportunity, I turned to industry. I knew my skills and experience could be applied to learning & development, especially in the field of instructional design. But I was much less confident about making that transition, and when I got the opportunity to move into corporate instructional design, I braced myself for a steep learning curve.

Almost three years into the new gig now, I’m happy about what I was able to bring to this new environment, and how much I’ve grown. So, I thought I’d take this post to reflect on three things that surprised me the most about moving from teaching and learning in higher ed, to corporate L&D.

The business context doesn’t change the learning challenges like I thought it would.

To be clear, the business context changes everything. But I thought the world of KPIs, corporate values, regulatory requirements, and other aspects of being in a business instead of a school would fundamentally distort the stuff I like most about being a learning professional. But over time, it mostly just started to feel like different requirements and constraints that any professional feels. I remember being at a POD Conference while I was at UCSC and hearing instructional designers talk about how the accreditation process affected their work. I couldn’t relate to those specific experiences, but I could see how accreditation influenced everyone’s decisions, approaches, limitations, and priorities.

It feels like I’m playing a teaching and learning video game, and I’ve dropped into a new world map and rules with my same core actions. At the core of my job, I still think about how to help people learn things, and how to help people instruct things they’re really passionate about, that they want others to learn. Whatever is going on with that other context stuff, I appreciate that the core of what I enjoy is still very much intact and has room for growth.

School experiences and practices permeate learning in industry more than I expected.

I was really interested in how learning practices, language, tools, and environments would look outside of school systems. I remember starting to “build a network” with industry L&D professionals online, and being surprised at how much discussion there was about classrooms, corporate “universities,” and how to set “passing grades.” Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, but school experiences really impact how we think learning should look outside of it. I guess I thought those experiences would be more of a starting point than a template.

This does mean that people are a little more open to discussing things like assessment. On the other hand, it can be hard to get passed ideas like, there must be a quiz to pass for it “to count,” for example.

Reading Erin’s post on positionality, I also got to think more about why I always feel some kind of way when employees in corporate training are referred to as “students.” In grad school, I really struggled with the sudden switch from student to instructor in the teacher-student power dynamic, but it was also incredibly useful to think through any time I made an instructional decision. But outside of the school or university context, it feels so weird to bring in this dynamic when working colleague-to-colleague. There are plenty of other power dynamics to consider.

Most of the time, the use of “student” is just an innocuous word choice because people are used to it. But I also notice when this becomes an unexamined dynamic that influences assumptions about colleagues, their prior knowledge, facilitation choices, how and why we assess learning, what kind of environment supports learning, and how tools are discussed and marketed.

Sometimes, we don’t actually care about learning.

A few years ago, I was on a team developing a lab activity for general chemistry students. We wanted them to tinker with physiochemical properties and decided to use software that scientists use to simulate drug interactions. It let students create and design at a molecular level, and get quick feedback on what they’d done. They only were going to use a fraction of the program’s features, so we made a cheat sheet of the commands and functions they’d use most to help them jump in.

I agonized over this cheat sheet. Were we taking away their agency? Were we shutting down productive paths of learning just because we didn’t think it was part of the learning goals? Scott told me to chill, probably. We used it when we taught the lab, and it was fine. We didn’t notice any resistance, the students used it to create some pretty cool molecules, and they made all kinds of connections and explanations about the program’s simulations. All without having to do a long and boring module about how to use the software.

Now, I realize we just made a nifty job aid. And that sometimes, it’s less important that someone learns something than it is to reference something, in the moment of need, to successfully complete a task. That’s performance support, sort of. While not new at all, this was new to me, and now I see it everywhere, from Ikea furniture assembly to flight emergency checklists.

And while “corporate performance” sends off all sorts of alarm bells and whistles in my head, I’ve loved having this approach opened up to me more, and in obvious ways, since I’ve left higher ed. If I’m really advocating for learners (performers?), sometimes the most helpful thing is to do everything except train. Depending on the context of the job, a sound learning experience may be less learner-centric than making useful stuff for people to use when they need it.

I could probably figure out how to better connect these three areas, but more than anything, they’re the things that continue to surprise me in my new environment. There have been plenty of other changes, and some of them easily fade into my new world map and game rules. But I know not to get too comfortable with new environments, and I’m glad there’s so much to explore and challenge my thinking, decisions, and actions.

Positionality, Perceptions, and Power Dynamics in Educational Spaces

January 26, 2023 / Erin Karlgaard

Contemplating questions worth asking over a mug of mocha.

There have been so many thoughts swimming around in my head in preparation for writing my first blog post here. I’ve been wrestling with positionality for a couple of years as a white, female body in a profession dominated by others who look like me. While the link above refers to the term positionality as “how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society,” another very real aspect of positionality is how I am perceived by others because of my identities, and in light of others’ positionalities.

In addition to thinking about my presence and the effect it has on others in my classroom, I also think about my practices, how they are formed, and who benefits or is harmed by them.

One of my passions within the field of education is teaching (and presenting to other teachers) around critical thinking. I find myself changing as a human through the questions I wrestle with, and so my blog submission here is centered on questions we should be asking ourselves, and my meandering thoughts about each of them. For me, asking questions leads to asking more questions–until eventually I get to the questions that really need to be asked. I hope you’ll join in and add some questions of your own.

Presence in the Room

How often do we consider the power dynamics at play in our daily interactions? Even as we grow collective consciousness around positionality, power dynamics don’t yet get enough attention in many educational spaces. Partially, this is a product of our system–a Frierian concept of learning, where teachers and other adults subscribe to the hierarchical system of being the authority in the room. The other part is the pace: juggling academics, meetings, parent phone calls, dealing with social and emotional issues with students, sick kids, etc. etc. It wouldn’t be too much of a hyperbole to say that I move a hundred miles a minute some days. And yet, that autopilot allows us to ignore the perpetuation of “power over” within our spaces.

As I think about days I’ve felt most successful at my job, I’m aware that those are the days that are most dialogic with my students, the times I’ve paused the “hectic” and made adequate space for critical, student-led conversations–for all of us to be human together. Autopilot is responsible for so much of our bias creeping out from the recesses of our brains and into our practices–and ultimately, part of our bias reflects our upbringing and experiences we had as students in the classroom, including management, and teacher/student roles and relationships. I wonder what this looks like in other areas of education and in other professions entirely? How are others aware of power dynamics? How do you counter hierarchical power imbalances within your spaces?

What do students perceive / What do I want my students to see?

A few years ago, my principal asked us to give descriptors of our best teachers–what made them people we still remember today? We were also asked to describe what qualities stood out in those who were our least favorite. Teachers who were caring toward students, took time to listen, pushed students to do their best, were a consistent positive presence, and showed compassion to their students stood out as memorable. Those who just taught their content, didn’t seem to care, were sarcastic, had “favorites” or didn’t really know the students personally stood out in the opposite way–it was clear that teaching was just a job for them. First of all, I love this activity as a way to reflect on how I show up every day. Am I memorable? Have I created an environment within my classroom that I would want others to remember in positive ways? Would I as a student have remembered me as an educator? I think about what my students perceive about me, as a teacher as well as a white, middle-aged female. How do they experience my presence in the room, and what are their perceptions about how I create learning spaces for them. While I do get feedback from students and families pretty regularly, I reflect on how students’ perceptions likely vary according to their identities within my space.

Last fall I listened to a newer podcast on leadership called Disrupting Our Practice, specifically an episode that focused on positionality. It completely changed my perspective on how I’m perceived in professional spaces (I highly recommend a listen). I wonder if others wrestle with how they are perceived in their professional spaces. Does stopping to reflect on perceptions and positionality cause us to reconsider practices or change how we operate?

These discussions are happening in every field right now, and I’m curious to see specifically how it might shift educational practices in the next decade. What shifts have you noticed in your settings, and what do see as outcomes of disrupting the educational status quo?

1512 woodcut of throwing a baby out with the bathwater. Public domain. — 1512 woodcut illustration from Thomas Murner's "Appeal to Fools." Public domain.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater

January 19, 2023 / Scott Seagroves

Whew, a lot of pressure on the first “real” blog post. And there are so many things I could talk about!

For now, John Warner’s take is about where I’m at regarding ChatGPT. I don’t teach a course that’s likely to be very affected by AI until next spring — at which point, no doubt, the technology will be very different from today. Maybe I’ll have to work out my thoughts more carefully before then.
I don’t know if this is such big news everywhere, or just here in Minnesota; anyway, no one needs my hot take on what happened at Hamline. I’ll defer to nuanced takes from Muslim organizations and commenters (unpaywalled link).
This article in The Verge is a good review of the whole Twitter fiasco of the last few months.

I had a strong reaction as I read “The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning Outcomes’” (unpaywalled link). All I could muster at the time was a cliché . Maybe here I can develop my reaction more.

This article is the first time I’ve encountered Gayle Greene. She is apparently an accomplished scholar and professor emerita. It’s important to point out that her essay in the Chronicle is adapted from her current book, Immeasurable Outcomes, which I haven’t read. I’m sure the book has room for much more nuance and qualification than the essay. It looks like the book is a strong defense of liberal education ideals — I bet there is a lot in there I would agree with.

I find it striking that there is positive blurb there from Lynn Pasquerella of the AAC&U. They articulated the essential learning outcomes of a liberal education and promote a method of assessing student learning of those outcomes. Yet Greene’s essay is a protest against ideas like those.

Maybe her essay is a deliberate provocation. Consider me provoked (cautiously).

The air is abuzz with words like models and measures, performance metrics, rubrics, assessment standards, accountability, algorithms, benchmarks, and best practices. Hyphenated words have a special pizzazz — value-added, capacity-building, performance-based, high-performance — especially when one of the words is data: data-driven, data-based, benchmarked-data. The air is thick with this polysyllabic pestilence, a high-wire hum like a plague of locusts. Lots of shiny new boilerplate is mandated for syllabi, spelling out the specifics of style and content, and the penalties for infringements, down to the last detail.
Gayle Greene, “The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning outcomes'”

I get it. There are some of these corporate-ish words that set my teeth on edge, too. “Scale” is one of my pet peeves. It always feels like a way to dismiss anything that’s good as not good enough; “Yes, that’s great, but how does it scale?”

Greene’s thesis is that the learning that takes place is college is ineffable, unmeasurable, “matters of the spirit, not the spreadsheet.” Her characterization of the current machinery of learning outcomes and their assessment as “pernicious nonsense” captures a feeling that I know many in higher education share. When these processes are approached from a perspective of box-checking, of compliance, then I agree, it is not a good use of anyone’s precious time. But what if the ways that these processes work are the bathwater, and the purpose these processes ought to serve is the baby?

In passing, Greene links to this comment: “… while we are agonizing about whether we need to change how we present the unit on cyclohexane because 45 percent of the students did not meet the learning outcome, budgets are being cut, students are working full-time jobs, and debt loads are growing.” I’d suggest that these are real problems and that learning outcomes assessment has nothing to do with them. In fact, learning outcomes assessment is how you know that 45% of your (I presume organic chemistry) class doesn’t understand cyclohexane — and isn’t that useful information?

Somewhere btwn the jargon of assessment processes sought by accreditation & the “nothing worthy of a liberal arts educ. can be measured,” there is a responsible effort to find out how well students are learning & what can be done to improve it. Polarizing the issue is unhelpful.
— Marc Schaeffer (@MarcSchaefferGD) January 9, 2023

A response to Greene’s essay from @MarcSchaefferGD

When she mentions these real problems in passing, I suspect assessment is just the punching bag taking the brunt of the criticism for the fact that higher education today is not like the halcyon days of yore. But let’s disrupt those nostalgic sepia-toned images of the past to also remember that higher education then served a much wealthier and far less diverse student body. Higher education today must learn to serve much greater diversity, families that are not so well-connected, and students who come with a greater variety of goals. Data — yes, some from assessment processes — are tools for helping us do a better job working toward those worthwhile goals.

I’m not being snarky here: I wonder what Greene would do with a student’s essay if they claimed they “understand Shakespeare’s use of light and dark in Macbeth.” Wouldn’t she ask the student to elaborate further, to demonstrate their understanding with examples, with (dare I say it) evidence? Why, then, is it any different when we look at our own claims? If we claim that students are learning things in college, then shouldn’t we be able to elaborate further, to demonstrate how we know they learn those things?

I think maybe a major stumbling block is the issue of objectivity. She writes, “But that is the point, phasing out the erring human being and replacing the professor with a system that’s ‘objective.’ It’s lunacy to think you can do this with teaching, or that anyone would want to.” I teach physics, so my humanities colleagues might expect me to be a major proponent of “objective” and quantifiable measures. But surprise! I think this is a misunderstanding of the assessment process.

Surely mentors read and commented on the chapters of Greene’s dissertation. That feedback was assessment but no one claimed it had to be objective. In fact, one of the most common complaints of graduate students is that different mentors on their dissertation committees give contradictory feedback. That’s just the way it goes.

I wonder if thinking of the dissertation helps in another way: Some faculty just seem convinced that critical thinking skills are, by their very nature, not assessable. But what were your mentors doing when they commented on your writing? Greene ends by saying, “We in the humanities try to teach students to think, question, analyze, evaluate, weigh alternatives, tolerate ambiguity. Now we are being forced to cram these complex processes into crude, reductive slots, to wedge learning into narrowly prescribed goal outcomes, to say to our students, ‘here is the outcome, here is how you demonstrate you’ve attained it, no thought or imagination allowed.'” Did she feel there was no thought or imagination allowed when her mentors clarified what they wanted to see from her, when she was a student?

Introduction

January 13, 2023 / Scott Seagroves

Welcome

I had an idea — well, several ideas, I guess. I wanted a project that could be an excuse to work with some of the great people I know. I wanted a low-stakes venue to write as a form of working out my own thinking. I wanted a kind of writing that could be a joy rather than a dreaded item on my to-do list.

I started to loosely outline an idea for an old-school group blog. I envisioned essays and posts in each person’s distinct voice. I pictured us reading each others’ pieces, commenting, creating conversations. Some of my friends and colleagues were skeptical, to say the least. For one thing, who blogs anymore, in the era of social media?

Everyone should start blogging again. Own your own site. Visit all your friends' sites. Bring back the artisan, hand-crafted Web. Sure, it's a little more work, but it's worth it. You don't even need to stop using social media! It's a "yes, and" situation, not a "no, but" one. https://t.co/BzHYh59F36
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 24, 2022

A tweet about blogging from @scalzi

But one time, I described this idea of the most informed, engaged, inspiring educators I know, writing informally — maybe even tentatively — in conversation with each other and the wider worlds of education and pedagogy. And I got just the affirmation that I needed:

“That would be like listening to the conversations I wish I had with colleagues.”

(I’ll keep who said that to myself, to protect her colleagues.)

So I’m founding Teaching Made Visible. We’ll talk about teaching and learning construed broadly. If the team of voices I’ve put together here can be generalized, I think it’s fair to say we’re all interested in social justice, the interplay between theory and practice, and a certain balanced respect for both scholarly, research-based understandings and practical, experience-based ones. Maybe, if we live up to the affirmation above, it’ll be like virtual hallway conversations among educators.

Team of contributors

The “groupness” of this project has remained the one non-negotiable for me. I had no interest in just starting a blog of my own. I’m excited to showcase some great voices from important perspectives. And I get the joy of having a project I’m working on with them. Let me introduce them in my own words here, then I can give them the floor from here on out:

I’m Scott Seagroves. I teach physics and direct the liberal arts general education program at The College of St. Scholastica. A lot of my career has been connected to the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators, where I recently led a collection of publications. I’m pursuing an Ed.D. studying “teacher identity” in higher education faculty.

I’ve known Anne Metevier since around 2000, and I started working more closely with her around 2003. She has led and/or been invaluable for much of our work at the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators; for example, she led this recent publication. She teaches astronomy at Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College.

Anne is there in many of my best career and personal memories. She was part of the small group that helped my wife and I elope!

I first met Linda Strubbe when she participated in our ISEE Professional Development Program around 2009. She is an independent educator and educational developer and, oh, also, she co-founded the Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers. I’ve been circling around vague ideas that how professional development is done in higher education is all wrong, and I keep coming back to some points she and her collaborators make here.

If you have a serious case of impostor syndrome — not me, just, you know, someone — you defensively tell yourself that people who study astrophysics at CalTech and Berkeley might be smarty-smart but they’re not, you know, well-rounded whole people, right? And then you hang out with Linda.

Around 2012, I became fast friends with CSS‘s Dean of Students, Megan Perry-Spears. I kept hearing students talk about the W curve, and she explained it to me. I wish every higher education faculty member understood that the student affairs staff are educators the way I understand it from knowing Megan. As a matter of fact, she might be more thoughtful about student learning than the average faculty member.

Megan and her wife were — unbeknownst to them — listed as the emergency contacts for my son at school. Obviously there’d never be a time when the school couldn’t reach me or my wife, right? Oops.

Rafael Palomino joined our ISEE Professional Development Program around 2013, and within a couple years he was an instrumental member of the development team. Most recently we worked together on the Equity & Inclusion “theme” within that program. He is senior instructional designer at Cepheid. He has a remarkable command of numerous frameworks and theories; I’m excited to hear more from the corporate education/training perspective.

I can never tell if Rafael’s being sincere or patronizing when he compliments my music tastes.

I met Sarah Stewart around 2015. She is the associate director of CSS’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Somebody asked a dismissive question about the invite-only opt-in first-year seminar for students of color that she teaches, and I found that it demonstrably improves graduation rates for those students. She’s also my classmate in our Ed.D. program.

When I first met her, Sarah said something about a short, unpleasant stint in North Carolina, and I’ve felt that somehow it’s my job to make it right ever since.

I met Christine O’Donnell when she joined the ISEE Professional Development Program around 2018. Recently I had the privilege of working as her editor on this article; that really got me thinking about her experiences and perspective. She is an Education and Diversity Program Manager at the American Physical Society.

I can’t find it now, but I swear I’ve seen a collage of photos of Christine in hardhats visiting cool facilities.

I’ve only known Erin Karlgaard since 2021, when we joined an Ed.D. program in the same cohort. She is a 3rd-grade teacher, a Racial Equity Advocate, and a 2022 Minnesota Teacher of the Year finalist. She consistently asks an equity question at times when I’m distracted by something less important.

At one point I asked a “hypothetical” question: If I ask someone from my Ed.D. cohort to blog here, do I have to ask everyone from my cohort? It wasn’t hypothetical, obviously — I wanted to ask Erin!

What now?

Our plan, for now, is for someone to blog here approximately every week. Several of us will always be “on duty” to converse in comments. We’re going to see how this goes for a little while, and then pause to check in. I’m excited to get started!

Teaching Made Visible