Furthermore, you want us to accept this program based on a situation where the folks working to impose this stuff on us have no evidence that we are not doing our job? Look, I'm fully aware that the systems aligned against a historical, sociological and political economic perspective on this crap, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.
I'll accept the idea that my students are learning less than those in the 1960s and 1970s - at CMU - when they show me that the students who took GenEd, major and upper division classes in sociology and other fields sustainably learned the material then and don't now AND when they show me that it is MY fault that my students are learning less. But, THEY - the folks pushing this stuff - have to generate a metric that works to compare the kinds of rote learning and utility of the majority of the functionalist material taught then to the multi-format, engaged and experiential teaching of critical sociological material - which is FAR harder to get students to accept, since it more extensively undermines their socialization particularly after thirty years of more or less hegemonic neoliberal and neoconservative discourses - that I teach.
FURTHERMORE, in order for them to legitimately compare what my students are learning with what students in the 1960s and 70s learned, they are going to have to come up with a metric that corrects for the differences in primary and secondary schooling, as well as a corrective for the fact that a far far greater number of kids (therefore with a far wider range of educational "success") are now attending college and doing so for notably different reasons. AND, I want my teaching, research and service load reduced to the point that it parallels that experienced by faculty 50 years ago, if they can show that my colleagues and I are the problem.
At the same time, I will insist that the administrators pushing this kind of project simultaneously generate standards of assessment of their productivity - particularly focused on the amount of time they have us waste on self-assessment, teaching assessment, learning outcomes and a billion other forms of self-legitimation - that keep us from doing what we were hired to do... and give us the power the discipline them if their actions negatively impact our performance.
A pre-semester test and post-semester test, alongside cumulative data, understanding, application, analysis, evaluation and synthesis assessments aren't going to do anything to address any of the structural features impacting education, much less assess whether or not any of the material I can show students learn over 15 weeks sticks with them for more than three weeks afterwards.
We're not going to improve things until the focus isn't on the people busting their humps to respond to the contradictions of the system and it is on the contradictions themselves. What you're embracing, it seems to me, is a response that accepts that we are the problem and that the way to respond to the problem is to accept that position, the position of powerful folks looking for efficiency, cost-cutting and clear, cut-and-dried results as part of a corporatized disciplining of public institutions/education, and play along. I am not the problem. My teaching is not the problem. The problem is the death of the 40-hour work week and the crushing of unions and social movements. The problem is the death of the family wage, stagnant household incomes despite the dominance of dual-earner households, the intensification of all work and the unviersal spread of contingency and redundancy. The problem is economic crisis, fiscal crisis, legitimation crisis, steering crisis, and motivation crisis. The problem is tax give aways to the wealthy and corporate citizens who, in the past paid upwards of 20, 30, 40% higher tax rates. The problem is low and stagnant teacher salaries, perpetual reductions in staffing levels and ever-more frequent reductions in benefits packages. The problem is every higher demands for teaching quality, research productivity, grantsmanship and committee work, simultaneously - and without additional compensation or leaves. All this assessment stuff simply serves as a distraction, as misdirection, as a disciplinary tool.... its asociological, prepolitical, filled with ecological fallacies, and fundamentally misconstrued. If you want to measure my effectiveness, see how many students I recruit into the major in my intro classes, see where the students in my upper division courses rank in terms of GPA in the major and beyond, see how many of my students go on to graduate school or get jobs associated with the major, look at what the ones who do well say about my teaching, have colleagues sit in and evaluate the style and content of classes every once in a while and let us, as a department, deal with these issues on our own terms only reporting problems up the hierarchy when major issues with particular personnel cannot be resolved... otherwise, leave me the hell alone with my colleagues and students, we're more than fine and don't need more scut work.
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> You say we need to develop
>> meaningful strategies for assessing student learning... who says we don't
>> have them? That overwork doesn't make them impossible to use without
>> destroying other aspects of our pedagogy and/or lives? That the problems
>> with faculty teaching ans student learning don't lie mostly outside the
>> classroom and assessment mechanisms?
>>
>> Alan
>>
>>
> Alan,
>
> This is the issue I'm pointing out here. If we faculty say "trust us,
> we're assessing student learning", or even more bluntly "assessing student
> learning is ridiculous", we're not making an argument based on evidence;
> we're asking people to believe us because of our social status as "experts".
> That's just not a defensible position to me. Sure, there are lots of
> problems with our educational system, and I agree wholeheartedly that NLCB
> is a colossal clusterfuck. We're not going to improve things, though, until
> we thoughtfully gather and use systematic evidence about learning.
> Anecdotal claims about how important the class was to some student a year
> after they took the class isn't going to cut it.
>
>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319