Teaching Made Visible

Hallway conversations about teaching and learning

Tag: equity

Reflecting on what it means to engage with equity, diversity, and inclusion

February 23, 2023 /

Before you read any further, I need to note that this post isn’t meant for everyone, and I think that’s okay, though it does raise some inherent, unavoidable contradictions.

Some context: Last year, I was part of an NSF grant proposal related to a project that’s been around for over 20 years and is coming to the end of its current pot of funding. As a team, we all agreed that our project was behind the times when it comes to explicitly addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI – as an aside, I know that’s not the typical order of the letters, but I like the reasoning of putting “equity” first as the goal of inclusion and diversity [1]). We wanted to use this new proposal as an opportunity to make EDI an explicit part of our project, so we worked with a consultant to help us critically reflect on our processes and project designs. This work was relatively new to my two White colleagues. For myself, I had some amount of experience with critical self-reflection from my prior work addressing EDI in academic departments, research involving culturally responsive and relevant curriculum, and coursework. 

After the proposal was submitted, my colleagues remarked how they weren’t prepared for what it meant to do intensive EDI work, and we considered how we might share our experiences with our other colleagues.

And that brings me to this post: as part of reflecting on the process and how I might discuss the process of doing EDI work with others, I needed space to process my own thoughts and write them down. But that also brings up the aforementioned inherent, unavoidable contradictions. I identify as a multiracial cis-gender woman, as part of the LGBT+ community, and as both a scientist and a crafter/maker. Yet my “multiracial”-ness stems from the fact I am half HongKongese and half Irish/Welsh/American, with a very much White-passing complexion. In many ways I am highly privileged. Yet the goal of EDI work is to center the most marginalized voices, and so writing an article about my experience runs counter to that goal. But at the same time, as my colleagues pointed out, they felt they would have been able to engage better with the EDI work if they had a better idea of what to expect.

Separately (relatedly?), I find it hard to write or present about anything related to EDI in a way that can work for all audiences. Instead, I’d rather be clear on who I hope something is useful to (though I welcome feedback from everyone!). In this case, my imagined audience is someone with dominant/privileged identities who has some awareness of EDI and is about to begin engaging with some intensive EDI work.  

And with that preamble, here’s some reflections on my experience. Not everyone will experience or react to these things in the same way as me, and there is no “this is the way” or “one size fits all” for this kind of work.

Expect to be uncomfortable

As someone from a STEM background, I’m mostly used to the idea that learning can be uncomfortable [e.g., 2, 3]: essentially, when you learn something new, you’ll initially struggle and be bad at it, whether the topic is quantum mechanics, calculus, or computer programming. It takes a lot of practice to get good at something, and that process involves a lot of failing and stumbling.

However, the “discomfort” from EDI work is a very different feeling. We live in a society that has structures and systems that were developed in a way that was biased towards certain groups, and even though the legal basis for doing so has been (largely) eliminated, those structures and systems persist to this day. A recent National Academies report [4] explored this in detail and called for STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) organizations to actively address these systems.

Learning about these realities leads to some very harsh realizations. Those of us who have identities that are not marginalized have likely benefited from these systems, and also have probably contributed to these systems. For example, I used to advocate for STEM outreach programs that target women and people of color with the goal of “increasing interest” in STEM (which is also a deficit framing), without paying any attention to the realities of STEM that push out and exclude those students. Another example is that I’ve generally been in departments where I had access to mentors who looked like me (cis-female, White-passing), and I haven’t had to go through the thought process of how to communicate or relate to a mentor who didn’t look like me.

Those realizations are uncomfortable. How many students have I hurt by assuming they weren’t actually interested in STEM? How many students did I impact and convince to pursue STEM, only for them to then hit barriers that harmed them and pushed them out? How many students could have excelled in STEM but didn’t have the mentors to support them? How have the standards and expectations we set in STEM denied creativity and de-valued students’ skills and expertise?

Doing EDI work means making peace with the fact that there will be A LOT of uncomfortable realizations, and that is a part of the learning process. I’ve sometimes seen this sentiment framed as “be comfortable with being uncomfortable”, and that’s honestly how I first heard this bit of advice, but I personally prefer the framing of “expect to be uncomfortable”. The idea of “becoming comfortable” doesn’t sit right with me – while it is something that’s an expected and regular part of the work, I don’t like the connotation that it becomes something you’re “okay” with happening. Instead, every instance of discomfort needs to be an alarm bell or a red flag because it means there’s something there that needs to be questioned.

Separating “guilt” and “blame” from “responsibility”

This one might be the most “your mileage may vary” item in this article, but for me, this helped initially as a way to process the discomfort of EDI work. I found that the worst discomfort was over the idea I may have unintentionally caused students harm. I got involved in education research specifically because I wanted to make sure students had better experiences in STEM. How could I have done something so opposed to what I believe in?

For me, one article that helped re-frame my thinking was “White Complicity and Social Justice Education: Can One Be Culpable without Being Liable?” by Barbara Applebaum (2007) [5]. The article’s legalese-like interpretation of culpability and liability appealed to me because of my background in things like high school debate (which itself is probably something to think about, with norms of competitiveness, but that’s a separate article), and it helped me re-frame the blame and shame that I was feeling. Applebaum argued for a distinction between culpability and liability. Because we live in a racialized and biased society, dominant (White) individuals will take actions that reinforce systemic bias without knowing their actions have that impact. However, once they (reasonably) should know something has an impact, only then are they responsible and liable for doing better. 
So, sometimes when I’m feeling particularly uncomfortable because I realize I have helped to reinforce marginalization – like when I read about how many active learning strategies implicitly support assimilation to Western norms of debate and communication, and many of the curricula I’ve worked on emphasize active learning [6] – I ask myself whether my lived experiences would have shielded me from knowing what I was doing was wrong. Usually, the answer is “yes”, but now that I know, I have a responsibility to do better, e.g., talking with colleagues and rethinking my own approaches.

Expect to question everything

Given what I’ve learned about the ways I’ve been unintentionally complicit, I also consider it a responsibility to do what I can to identify potential blindspots gaps of knowledge (note: I left the strikethrough in because I only realized the ableist language when revising this article [7]). This responsibility can take many forms, such as reading articles or watching webinars to learn from experts, but another form is questioning everything, especially with the help of a consultant or a critical friend [e.g., 8].

For example, when designing curricular activities, I ask questions about whose knowledge is present, and what kinds of skills or knowledge is “valued” for grades.  Or when designing a process for reviewing applications, I ask questions about who is able to submit applications (since the process itself can serve as a gatekeeper) and what characteristics are “valued” in the selection process. Some of these questions can get at the very foundations of a project: Who decided the particular issue being addressed is something of value? Who was included in determining this was the “best” approach to take towards addressing that issue? And honestly, sometimes, these are questions I can answer but can’t (directly) affect, but even in those cases, I think it’s important to ask the question and acknowledge the issue.

EDI work is never done

I sometimes joke that I’m attracted to the kind of work where if we were completely successful, that kind of work would no longer exist. If we could fully address EDI concerns, then someday, theoretically, we wouldn’t need to focus on EDI. But unfortunately, that’s sadly not how the world works. I don’t think it’s hopeless – I genuinely think I can make a difference – but we’ll still be doing this kind of work for a long, long time.

So, this means the process of learning (and unlearning) never ends, and we can always do more to identify ways to address systemic biases. And since there’s aspects of the system I have no agency over, I can always work on finding better ways to mitigate those systems and/or finding ways to increase my ability to affect those systems.

And all of these things can be iterated on, especially as the landscape of EDI work in general continues to evolve and change. One of the things I’ve been pushing for on my projects is to do a better job of being transparent about our successes and our failures, especially on issues related to EDI. While everyone’s path is different, sharing that information can provide inspiration and/or identify obstacles to help those who want to pursue their own EDI journeys.

Part of me wonders, and another part worries, what I will think if I revisit this article in a year or three. Will I still think this is a good article for the intended audience, or will I cringe at what I wrote and consider this article to be a “failure” on my EDI journey? 

But that’s not an excuse to put off the work – I have a responsibility to do the best I can, and to keep learning so I can do better.

Unlearning overwork: Embracing Sacred Rest

February 16, 2023 /

I was supposed to be playing ultimate frisbee with my women’s league team tonight but instead I was sitting on a bench at the playground beside the fields crying my eyes out on the phone to my father. About work. About how I had way too much to do. I was co-teaching my first semester-long course with a colleague at UBC and the pressure to be ready, prepared, on, awesome, two or three mornings a week for my students, was so much. To be awesome for my colleague, who I was supposed to be helping learn about interactive teaching methods. I knew all the things about how to design and teach a really great active learning course and we were transforming it and I was leading that, and I had beautiful plans, beautiful dreams about how to innovate and make the course awesome. And instead I was just a pile of deep sobs and stress, sitting on the bench at the playground, feeling like I couldn’t be ready, I couldn’t push myself to be ready again for tomorrow. And if I managed it one more time, I wouldn’t be able to do it again, and again, and again, and again, through the term.

Have you been there?

I invite you to take a deep breath with me.

<Breathe>

If you want, I invite you also to join me in lighting a candle, and saying a prayer as you blow out the match. That’s what I just did, to start writing this post.

It’s a beautiful thing to want to create an awesome class, an effective and supportive experience for our students, an equitable and inclusive workplace. Yes. And. We so often push ourselves too hard, and/or feel super strong pressure and expectations on us to work too hard, from our academic departments, from society. I think these pressures probably exist in most areas of work, and I think they are especially insidious in sectors that are about helping people, like teaching and equity work. We are here because we want to do awesome things to help our students, and there’s always more that can be done. We can reach out to a few students who haven’t been in class lately. We can create a new interactive activity. We can ask a colleague for feedback on a class session. We can take a workshop on incorporating Indigenous ideas into our curricula. We can brainstorm ways to grade more fairly and equitably. We can give more feedback to students on an assignment. We can read an article (or blog post!) about teaching. We can reflect and write in a teaching journal. We can advocate for more equitable admissions and hiring processes to our departments. And many folks have additional work expectations on top of teaching expectations: advising students, writing grants, doing research, serving on committees. We want to do those things well too.

But there’s too much to do. I’ve been talking with a bunch of physics and astronomy faculty who are doing EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) work through several projects I’m part of (e.g., APS-IDEA), and a very common theme is not having enough time and burnout. With the extra difficult twist that the people who care the most about EDI tend to be the most overcommitted people — they put deep care into all of their work and so are trying to do way too much, and getting exhausted. From myself, and so many friends and colleagues who are academics and educators: everyone is exceedingly busy, and tired. I’ve been there too: the scene I set above at the frisbee field in 2016 was not isolated, and in 2021 I experienced a very difficult period (of work burnout and other things) that included being unable to work for months. When I was considering taking time off to heal, I kept thinking that was “indulgent.” And it’s not just academics of course. I was struck the other day in yoga class when the instructor encouraged us all to let our stress melt into the floor. So very many of us feel stressed.

When we’re exhausted all the time, we don’t have the space to dream. Of beautiful visions of amazing and liberated worlds we want to create together. To create, for the Joy of it. To try something, change our minds, and try something else. To think outside ten boxes. To be deeply courageous. To do surprising things. To sit in silence and beingness and gratitude and even joy for exactly where we are, right now, in its fullness.

The American theologian Thomas Merton wrote,

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

During that period in 2021, one of the spiritual gifts I received from Beyond was a set of eight spiritual principles for living my life, and one of those is Sacred Rest. It’s not easy, but I’m on a journey of slowly learning how to live it.

Here are some pieces of that journey for me, that I hope might resonate for you too.

Note: I attended a workshop a couple of weeks ago called “Liberating our Time” by Whiteness at Work. Some of the ideas and resources I’m sharing below are drawn from or inspired by that workshop. Thank you, Adaway Group!

  1. Recognizing the capitalist and colonial origins of overwork. There are a diversity of ways of thinking about and relating to time.

“This constant sense of urgency, and this constant frantic expectation for work, comes from a capitalist and colonial relationship to time.” So says Larissa Crawford in this powerful piece called “Time Is A Colonial Construct — Here’s How I Learned To Reclaim Mine.” 

In this podcast on Rest as Resistance, Tricia Hersey says, “To not rest is really being violent towards your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production.” Her message is for all of us in capitalist society; she especially focuses on the importance of rest for descendants of enslaved Black people.

So how much “should” we be working? What we in North America are used to as a “typical” 40-hour work-week is of course a human-made construct. (And of course many academics would love to work “only” 40 hours, spending 50, 60, 70+ hours on work per week.) This article describes the origins of the 40-hour work week in the US, which came from collective bargaining and laws to reduce the number of hours for overworked factory laborers.

But the way dominant culture in North America currently thinks about time is not the only way. Different cultures think about time in different ways, throughout the world and history. From the Liberating our Time workshop, I learned about the ideas of “monochronic” and “polychronic” orientations to time. Dominant culture in North America and Northern/Western Europe takes a monochronic orientation to time. There are of course diverse ways of thinking about time within each of these categories, and within any cultural group, but (acknowledging this is a generalization): Many Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and Southern European cultures take polychronic orientations to time.

Here’s a comparison of these orientations from Whiteness at Work. (There’s some good discussion in this article too: Everything about time – Monochronism – Polychronism – Orientation.)

When I read these lists, I feel like, monochronic feels like what you’re “supposed to do,” what you have to do to be “serious,” while polychronic feels like what my heart and soul want — how my heart and soul already are, but monochronic is something imposed on top. Monochronic feels like an externally constructed system of time, while polychronic feels like listening to ourselves. What do you feel?

Monochronism is connected to capitalism and colonialism in deep ways that I’m just learning about. In monochronism, time is people’s labor, a resource to be extracted from us. Polychronism is depicted as less enlightened, less civilized. Colonial powers imposed and continue to impose monochronism on Indigenous people and societies, using it as a tool of oppression towards the goal of extraction. (My understanding is that even colonial powers that take more of a polychronic time orientation for themselves imposed monochronic time for extraction on the people they colonized and enslaved.)

For settlers as well, individual productivity is held up as an ideal for how to live our lives, and a measure of our worth. This paradigm is not quite so physically forced on us, but rather becomes insidiously part of our own psyches as we absorb it through culture all around us. This is harmful for all of us — we all feel not-good-enough, unable to reach or maintain this “ideal” level of productivity — and is particularly harmful for people whose bodies are unable to work that hard, to be that productive. 

“Cripping time” is a way of thinking about time from the disability community. In Cripping Time At Work, Katie Walsh writes that “it is the idea that people simply move, think, and speak at their own pace… understanding that our value as workers—furthermore, as people—is not tied inextricably to our ability to produce on an able-bodied timeline.”

Another idea that resonates for me, inspired by reading about Indigenous ways of relating to time (e.g., Larissa Crawford’s article), is that time and work can be seasonal, moving with Nature. To me it makes sense that we might work differently, different amounts and schedules and types of work, at different points during the year. I feel differently about working in the darker, rainier winter months than I do during the summer. Isn’t there even something liberating to feel it could be totally valid — not subversive or secret — to say, it’s a beautiful sunny day today, I’m going to go for a hike instead of working, and I’ll maybe do some more work another time when it’s raining? This clear night with a beautiful full Moon and low tide would be a great night to stay up late and dance at the beach, which means not starting work early the next morning.

There’s a ton to learn here about colonialism and capitalism and time, and different ways of thinking about time. Just knowing that is a step of liberation for me.

  1. Creating the boundaries we need, and celebrating ourselves for expressing them.

I asked at the workshop: What can I say to faculty who want to do great EDI work but feel they don’t have enough time? Desiree Adaway replied: EDI (and I could add: education) is a long game. If we burn ourselves out, we aren’t going to be able to do the work of transforming towards a more just and equitable society. We need to take care of ourselves while doing EDI work, teaching, etc. The urgency of EDI work is very real, and can feel in tension with this. It’s helpful to name and grapple with that tension.

I’m learning how to figure out what boundaries I need and want around work-time, and how to express them to relevant people around me. And not just boundaries of dire necessity, when things are starting to feel really bad and I’m super exhausted, but long before that. I recognize that I have many deep expectations about how society / colleagues think I should orient to time (whether or not I agree), and fears about both expressing my boundaries — and about not expressing them 🙂 I also recognize that my boundaries flex and evolve, and that’s awesome. I’m trying to high-five myself for saying no to things, and also for saying yes-and to things: there are lots of ways to work together with colleagues to figure out a path that works well timewise for everyone. It can all be more flexible than I realize I’ve been thinking.

Developing and gently but proudly owning my identity of how I orient to time (something two friends recently encouraged me to do) is both scary and empowering.

  1. Healing ourselves and listening to our hearts and bodies.

Sometimes I repeat (or sing!) a mantra like I am Enough. I remind myself of my worth as a whole human being, not just/primarily my work.

Sometimes I touch my heart and ask myself the question, What do my heart and soul and body want for how I work? We are educators: it’s not that we don’t want to work, to teach, to do good things for our students and colleagues and the world. Rather it’s the question, What would that work look like if we could shape it exactly the way that our bodies and our hearts and our souls are calling for? 

Since that tearful evening at the frisbee field, I’ve been reorganizing my workday, my work schedule, and my expectations for myself within my constraints, while also working to free myself from those constraints.

For example, I’ve learned that I’m usually most productive in the morning, and that I am happiest and work best when I can look out a big window and gaze at trees and sky. So I plan my “hard” work in the morning, and have found big windows where I can work. Then I need to stretch and move my body, so I often have a short walk. I plan my meetings in the afternoons when I can. I have different types of work that I do, e.g., more creative, more analytical, more individual, more social, some for my own joy (like writing this!) and some for others. During the day and week, I try to feel what kind of work I’m in the mood for and move back and forth between those, while getting done what “needs” to get done when it “needs” to. These are often affected by how well I slept the night before, and I try to take a gentler schedule if I don’t sleep well, where I can. When I transition between blocks of work in a day, I often pause a moment for some deep grounding breaths and a short prayer.

I try to have gratitude for and acknowledge the great privileges that help me be able to take these kinds of steps for myself right now. Even just in small ways, I try to help others to have more freedom and rest, too, and aspire to do that more. This is part of acting collectively (more in #4).

I’m putting all of this after #2 because I’ve found we often need to put in boundaries first, to create the space to be able to breathe and heal.

  1. Acting collectively. 

This is about societal transformation, not just about individual changes. We are not at all alone in experiencing time challenges. Talking about it normalizes that struggle. When we express boundaries and choose self-care, that’s inspiring to everyone to see, helps others feel stronger to do the same. Larissa Crawford (and others) call for decolonizing time.

As we ask others to honor our self-care, our heart-led timelines, it’s an invitation for us to honor others’ self-care and timelines as well. What could it look like to do that for our colleagues? How do I do this well in some contexts, and what resistance comes up in me in other contexts?

What could it look like to truly honor our students’ own timelines? (The Covid-19 pandemic gave us some glimpses of this.) To decolonize time in our classrooms, in our education system? I think it involves more flexibility, more compassion, and less power-hierarchy between students and teachers — and is ultimately a pretty radical transformation. Decolonization efforts should of course be led by Indigenous folks.

  1. Experiencing joy, reflecting, and dreaming.

This is about relishing and taking great joy in my work when I have the right energy for it, and it is the right time for me to do it! I can deeply love what I get to do in my work, and that’s amazing. Watching more of that joyful work-energy flow for me when I am taking enough rest.

This is about dreaming about amazing worlds we could create, self-reflecting, and listening to others. For me as a white person wanting to do EDI work, I need to take space to really be introspective about places where I might be contributing to or profiting from white supremacy and other systems of marginalization, feeling defensive, and working with those feelings… because they are difficult and it’s hard to look at them. If we’re exhausted all the time, then we’re not going to be able to do that well. Trying to take time to educate myself, listen to people of color and other marginalized communities, engage in sensemaking, understand nuance. Dreaming myself, listening to others’ dreaming, and dreaming together.

Overlapping, not separately: This is also about enjoying the time and space that I’m setting out to preserve for myself. Dancing, meditating, praying, sitting in stillness, having an unhurried conversation with a friend, watching something silly on Netflix, cooking a nice meal, taking a long bike ride.

Remembering that it’s not just about moving away from harmful conceptions of time, but moving towards more beautiful soulful ones.

I wish you well on your journey.

“Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings…
Be kind to yourself, dear.”

Rumi

I acknowledge that I live and this writing took place on the unceded, ancestral, traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. I identify as a white-European cis-woman settler, immigrant to Canada, child of immigrants to the United States. My identity, history, experiences, and place all shape my lens on what I’ve shared here.

How do you think about time, work and rest? 

I’d be grateful for any thoughts and feedback you’d like to share with me on this piece. Thank you so much for reading.

Positionality, Perceptions, and Power Dynamics in Educational Spaces

January 26, 2023 /
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 /

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?

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?

© 2024 Teaching Made Visible

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑