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Crossing the Road – from “Please Stop Teaching!” – a work in progress

I am writing a book.

It is currently called “Please Stop Teaching!”.

Here’s what may be the introduction.

Tell me what you think.

Extract from an unpublished short story called, with what will turn out to be bitter irony, ”Road Safety”.

[The narrator (Grandad) is walking his grandson Ed to the nursery. Ed is walking cheerfully along the pavement, while Grandad manages Ed and Ed’s scooter. Ed is swinging his cross-eyed bear, Gladly, by its arm.] 

Ed gives Gladly an extra vigorous swing. And loses his grip on the bear. Gladly soars, and lands in the middle of the road. At the same moment the scooter hits a badly laid flagstone, and jolts me. Ed twists his hand out of my not very tight grip – he hates having his hand held tightly – and dashes into the road to retrieve Gladly. 

Look right look left run!

The white Mercedes van stops well short of us, maybe 20 feet away. No horn, no tyre squeal, no drama.

I manage not to shout at Ed. 

I retrieve Ed and Gladly. 

I turn Ed so that he can see the stationary van. Hold him facing the van for a long moment. Then walk Ed and Gladly back to the curb.

…..

Ed says – “Sorry Grandad”.

I pick him up, give him a hug, and set him on the brick wall of our front garden. Face to face.

The van passes slowly by. The driver ignores me.

“Ed.”

“Sorry Grandad.“

“I know. I know. But we can’t have that again, can we?“

“Sorry Grandad“.

This line normally gets him out of trouble, especially when, as now, accompanied by a wobbling lower lip.

“Ed. This is very important. Now, listen. I need to get something out of the car. And I need your help. Tell me. Is it safe to cross the road to the car?“

He looks at my face. He expects to see the answer inscribed there, as the less powerful often do in the presence of the more powerful.

But he sees no answer on my face.

“Don’t know.“

“Okay. Different question. What would make it not safe to cross the road?”

He states at me. He can still see no answer on my face.

So his brain goes to work.

“Snow?”

“Yes. Snow would make it slippery and not safe. Would anything else make it not safe to cross the road?”

He thinks for a moment.

“Swan.“

On a recent walk round our local lake, a swan had Intruded on Ed’s personal space, and made a profound impression.

“Yes. A swan can be pretty scary. What else?“

“A tricycle?“

This is turning into a long conversation. But, what the heck, he doesn’t have to be at nursery at any particular time. And I am determined to take the grandparent’s approach.  Education, from educere, to draw out (that which is, to some extent at least, already in there, already known). Rather than the parental approach. Which is mainly just to tell, and somehow hope that what is told will be learned. 

I know. I’ve been a parent. 

My method works better, but dear God it needs patience.

“Yup. A tricycle can be pretty mean. Especially if it’s got big spiky wheels and a machine gun.”

Ed knows when to ignore me.

“What else could make crossing the road dangerous?“

Long pause

“A vee hickle?”

I hug him again. Vee hickle is a new word, a new concept, just a week or two old.

“So, can you see any veehickles?” We can work on pronunciation later. A new word is a new word, and to be enjoyed. And used.

“Red one!”

He points to our car, parked on the other side of the road.

“Yes! Now, is that red car dangerous?”

“Mum says you drive too fast.” 

Moving on.

“What would make a veehickle dangerous? When you want to cross the road?”

He scrunches up his face. It’s a complicated question. But he is my grandson. And therefore very bright.

“White?”

The encounter with the white van has also made an impression on him.

“What else could make a vehicle dangerous?”

“Car on fire!”

On a recent bus journey into town, going to see the new Disney, we had seen a car, parked neatly by the curb, and blazing from bonnet to tailgate. A fire engine was arriving. Great excitement.

“Yes a car on fire would be very dangerous if you wanted to cross the road.”

I was beginning to appreciate the parental approach to teaching kids stuff. Educare – tell, impart.

“What else?”

Very long pause.

“If it was moving.” No question mark this time.

Another great big hug.

“Yes! A moving vehicle can be dangerous if you want to cross the road. So. Now. Look up and down the road. Is it safe to cross?”

Ed carefully and thoroughly looks up and down the road. I guess  what’s going through his mind. Any tricycles? No. Swans? No. Snow? No snow. Blazing cars? No. It looked OK to me.

But Ed said “No.“

Educere. Draw it out. However long it takes. Today, right now, nothing is more important than this.

“Why isn’t it safe to cross now?“

“Vee hickle is moving.”

True enough. The white Mercedes van is still making its way down our long road, stopping periodically to deliver a parcel.

“OK, Ed. Good. It is moving. But” – to heck with educere for a moment – “I think it is safe to cross. Why do I think it’s safe to cross?“

Another long pause.

“Going away!“

“Perfect! Yes. It’s safe to cross the road now because the white van is moving away from us!” 

His mother might briefly have been proud of me. 

“Now, Ed, one more time – is it safe for us to cross the road to get the thing from the car?”

_____

Learning (to do) poetry, for example

David Baume

Doing poetry

I wake at 6:17, for no obvious reason.

Poetry comes into my conscious mind. Not any particular poem, but the idea of poetry. 

Then; because I am currently obsessed with the idea of learning; comes the idea of learning poetry. Then; because I’m currently also obsessed with the idea of doing and its problematic relationship with knowing; the idea of learning to do poetry. And it occurs to me that, as I know little or nothing about poetry, that will be a great topic for me to use to explore learning and supporting learning, for the planned book “please stop teaching!“

I am clearly thinking, but, half awake, it feels as if the ideas are floating into my mind. Let’s not worry about exactly what’s going on. Let’s try to capture and make sense of it. (To be clear, I am writing/dictating this half an hour or so after it happened, to capture the thought processes with some but of course not total accuracy)

I remember a conversation months, years ago with a friend, a poet and scholar of literature, about some impossibly complicated kind of poetry. It has very elaborate rules of construction. I cannot remember what it is called. I may email him and ask him. I realise a problem with emailing him and asking him – I do not even know what kind of a thing it is I am asking him about.  

(A note added a couple of hours later – I didn’t need to email him, because I accidentally found it whilst reading something else about poetry. Vilanelle.)

Back in the moment, Is this thing I can’t think of the name of a rhyme scheme? No, this is not just about rhyme, or even primarily about rhyme, I think this is about rhythm. I think back to the songs I wrote six or more years ago, and think about the evolving relationships, almost a negotiation, between wards and music, words and rhythm – T Tom, T Tom, T Tom, T Tom, or TT Tom, TT Tom, TT Tom, TT Tom,  TT Tom, or Tom Tom, Tom Tom, Tom Tom, and many others. Yes, rhythm. But I still don’t think that’s what they’re called in poetry, these structures, shapes, patterns. I could look it up, but I’m not prepared to connect with the world (through my iPhone, beyond what voice recognition requires) just yet. I want to stay in my head, in my memory, to see where I can get to. (If you already know that the concept I’m struggling towards is called meter, then this may be becoming uncomfortable, so I’ve decided to let you off the hook now). In fact I looked this up an hour or two later, after breakfast, after the word meter swim into my mind as possibly the right answer, and I checked online. Meter is is. 

I remembered from school that meters have weird incomprehensible names. The only name I can can remember is iambic pentameter. I haven’t got a clue what it means, because I have very little Greek, although pent suggests five. We shall see.  I have a vivid memory from school of not be able to learn what the meter was because I was too tangled up in trying to make sense of the name. 

The same happened later, when I was teaching engineering. ‘Moment of inertia’. For crying out loud. While I was teaching it, I figured that maybe I wasn’t the only person for whom the name was an obstacle to understanding. So I devised a way of teaching it in which I worked with the class to invent the concept, throwing in the name at the end, as an afterthought. It worked for me, anyway. and for a fair few of my students.

Knowing poetry

But, back in the early morning, I thought: Do I know any poetry? 

Two lines lept into my conscious mind:

  • “That’s my last Duchess, painted (or maybe hanging) on the wall.” 

I remember painted, but hanging maybe makes more sense. Wordsworth? I’ll check when I connect to the world. And:

  • “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” 

Shakespeare of course. A sonnet. I’ll check which one later. (18. Would I be a better person if I had known ?

And Hiawatha. I can remember the rhythms, but little beyond the first line:

  • “Should you ask me, whence these sto ries”. 

(We didn’t study Hiawatha at school. I remember, rather self-consciously, sitting down in the lounge at my parents’ (and my) home and deciding to Read Hiawatha. And being astonished and delighted and slightly hypnotised)

As, later, I check these, I reflect, as increasingly often these days, on the impact of search technology on the value of knowledge.  Knowing which sonnet the line came from was, and probably still is, taken as a sign of education. But all it needs these days is access to a search engine, and the ability to formulate the search term or question. Why do we still value the recall of the now so easily found?

These lines are memories from school English, and private reading, a long time ago, over 60 years, not often subsequently reinforced. 

I subvocalise the lines. And discover that the first two they have the same rhythm, whatever the word I was looking for was. T Tom, T Tom, T Tom, T Tom, T. Tom. 10 syllables. In five pairs. With the emphasis – do we call it the stress?- falling on the final syllable each time.

Hiawatha is relentlessly T T Tom T. 

Well.

The stress is Shakespeare and Duchess more obviously fall on the final syllable each time. Although other readings of both are possible. The Duchess line could be spoken a little differently – for example, – “That’s my last Duchess, painted on the wall.” (I checked. And, now of course, it’s Browning.) It’s much more spooky with the emphasis on last. And how alarming would “hanging” have been now?

Analysing poetry 

‘Doing poetry’ for me, even in these few half-awake minutes, already seems to mean far more than learning poems, let alone writing poems. It means at least suggesting a meter, maybe requiring it, and / or maybe providing a blank canvas (or wall), or maybe an outline, a sketch, onto which the reader can project their own rhythm, meter, emphasis, and to some extent even meaning. 

“.. summer’s (day)” suggests the same meter as “Duchess”, but somehow far less insists on the stress being where I have shown it. There are so many ways, so many rhythms, in which to read Sonnet 18. I found a valid reading of it which had a different number of beats in each bar, but I’ve lost it now. That may be as well.

I wonder – is Shakespeare more highly prized than Browning because, among a myriad of other reasons, he can be read in a greater variety of ways, meters? Is that one reason why actors and audiences love Shakespeare – every production can be original?

Students of literature, scholars of poetry, will probably have given up on me by now.   

Dong poetry again 

What I’m doing here is capturing a few minutes of thinking about poetry; of, I would claim, in some real senses, doing poetry. Asking my own questions, following my own connections, building my own lines of enquiry and investigation, using, playing with, what very little I know.

I don’t think I could do this for higher education. I know too much about it.  I think. I’ll have to try.

But, back to poetry: All of this, and a million times more, smarter, better, deeper, better organised, could be told, taught, written down. And no doubt has been, and is being, and will be, by generations of teachers and scholars and students.

If I had been taught all of this, read all of this, been examined on all of this, would I have known it? In what senses would I have known it? Following my particular current obsession – would I be able to do it?

If I have been taught it, or if I had read about it, I might have been able to recall it. I would certainly be able have been able to find it. 

Focusing again on meter; I could probably have remember RD definitions of some meters. If I had seen the point of remembering them, or if I had used them sufficiently often that I had, without trying to remember them, remembered  them. If remembering them proved more efficient than looking them up, which would be tough these days, because they would be at my fingertips. I would certainly have had ready access to a list of names, definitions, hopefully also examples and explanations of, many meters. 

I could, with practice, and if it got difficult with help and / or feedback, have identified some poems as adopting one or another particular named meter. 

With further practice, and feedback, and maybe the occasional conversation with others engaged on the same quest, I would hopefully have become able to identify and describe variants and combinations of meters, and also ambiguities and alternatives of meter within particular poems.

As I read, hopefully still enjoyed, and inevitably analysed, a wider range of poetry, I might have started to identify the limits of meter as a tool for analysing poems. I might have sought and found others.  Rhyme schemes are another obvious tool or framework. I am sure there are others.) Having thus found;  or; lm, locally and personally, and with no wider claim to originality; created; the idea of ‘tools for analysing poetry’, I would have look Ed out for other such. 

Or I might have given up the analysis quest entirely, more likely intermittently, and just read and enjoyed. Maybe even written.

Leaning and being taught 

This book is called Please Stop Teaching. I have described In the previous few paragraphs  how I might have used being taught about, in this case, poetry, to expand my ability, in simple and as yet largely undefined terms, to do poetry. 

I have contrasted this with, in the many previous paragraphs, an account of me doing poetry. 

Why?

Why my objection to being taught, and therefore to  teaching?

I would probably have been taught the what, and maybe the how – meanings and definitions, and methods for analysis, particular ways to do particular things. 

I might not have been taught the why. I am a pretty stubborn learner these days. I have re-learnt the importance of asking why, principally from my young grandchildren. The why can be tough to teach, and much tougher to learn, than the what and the how. 

Or maybe the why can’t be taught. Maybe you can only teach me your why, or the why’s of valued  others. Or, if some why’s  are taught, they may just become stuff, content. 

Maybe we always have to ask our own why question for it to be a real, productive, personal, motivational, driving of action, why?

That’s what small children do. Maybe it’s why they learn so fast. I wonder why education and parenting so effectively drive out young people’s asking of why? The less worthy  but often true answer is – we find it exhausting to deal with the barrage of why’s. 

But we need  not.  The barrage of why’s is only exhausting if we feel we have to answer them all. And I’ve suggested above that we can’t, maybe shouldn’t. Why is a very personal question.

“Why do you think?” or “ How could we find out?” or “What do you think (person X) would say?” can all take the question into useful new directions. Why do we, whether parent or teacher, so burden ourselves with the feeling that we really ought to be able to answer the question ourselves? That’s a sad, unnecessary load to take on. And we lose valuable opportunities to help our would-be learners to learn. Not to teach them. But to help them to learn. Which is a completely different thing.

What?

The what is propositional knowledge; facts, stuff, which we are to varying extents good at remembering, and the remembering of which is very easily assessed., And, perhaps not coincidently, often very highly valued.

Returning to poetry: The definition of different meters is an example of propositional knowledge. You know it if you can define it; that is, probably, recall a definition of it that you have learnt, or produce your own version of that definition which means much the same thing. (You could do this either by consciously modifying an existing account, so to speak to avoid copyright infringement, or you could genuinely make up your own version. These are similar looking, but I suggest in practice very different, activities.)

How?

The how is probably much more useful,  given both the accelerating obsolescence of particular pieces of propositional knowledge and also the greater ease of finding such knowledge. Although of course the how also changes. 

Problems with know-how

But we have to be careful with the how. The commonly used phrase “know-how” reveals the danger.  Being able to describe how to do it is often confused with being able to do it. They are not the same thing at all. I can remember a list of instructions. There is no guarantee at all that I could follow them. 

Sometimes, of course I can. Sometimes, knowing how translates directly into being able to. For example, taking a defined sequence of simple actions, with no feedback required on whether each action has been successfully accomplished before the next one is taken. If each task was within my intellectual/psychomotor capabilities, if the necessary tools and equipment were available, et cetera, yes, I could probably do it.

If feedback were required before taking the next step,  I should like to have practised once or twice, to know what the feedback actually looks like, and whether there are any complexities or judgements required that the (expert In doing but maybe not in briefing or in teaching) person who wrote the list forgot to mention.

But I would hope that very little high level learning was of this type. And even then it’s probably safer to look it up – because memory fails, and because procedures change. There may be circumstances when looking it up would be infeasible, or might damage the confidence of the client. These should probably be respected.  But they are probably few. Surgery and flying an aeroplane (not at the same time) spring to mind, although pilots and even surgeons increasingly use checklists.

Can do 

It is much safer to stick with “can do” rather than with “knows how to do”. 

Knowing how to doesn’t guarantee being able to. 

Nor does being able to guarantee knowing how to, in the sense of being able to describe how to. Occasionally asked for help with computing at home, I usually had to show rather than tell – I usually had to do it rather than describe how to do it. I could(sometimes) do it. But I couldn’t describe in advance how to do it. This is sometimes called unconscious competence. Or finger memory. Which is great for doing things, but terrible for teaching them.

Why again?

Why is something else again. The question why? Is often a search for explanation, or meaning.(You can memorise an explanation, but that can still just be propositional knowledge, no more.)

The real issues with why are our criteria for a satisfactory answer to the question why? We rarely articulate these criteria. We can rarely say ahead of time what a satisfactory answer to a why question would look like. We need to know why we are asking why. 

You can see how difficult this can get. The young child’s game of repeatedly asking why until a parent screams or leaves the room, preferably in most cases the latter, can indeed be a game. But it is also serious. The child is also exploring what a satisfactory explanation, what a satisfactory meaning, would be, for them, in the moment.

Studying poetry

The study of poetry that I began at 6.17 one morning  could go off in 100 directions or more.

I could develop my capability to identify meters in poems. 

I could explore any relations between metres and rhyme schemes. 

I could explore the uses, the effects, of different metres. 

How could I do the studying?

I could go to lectures or take courses on these things. And  I might thereby experience that dazzling excited glow of “oh yes! I understand!“ A glow which can fade.

I could read about them. 

I could continue asking my own questions, following my own enthusiasms, referring out to sources and maybe even to courses. I’m not suggesting a simple choice between do it yourself and let other people do it to you, with readings as a kind of halfway house between them. As ever, there is a spectrum of possibilities. But I don’t think it’s necessarily as simple as choosing a position on the spectrum of possible ways of learning. 

It can be that simple. If you choose to do a course – not just sign up for it, but do it – then you spend a lot of time doing what you’re told. The course may be excellent or awful for you. It may meet all or some or none of your needs and preferences. And you will act accordingly, continuing the course or adapting it to your preferences or abandoning it. 

I think the issue is, who is in charge of your learning? My prejudice, as you will have guessed by now, is to stay in charge of your own learning. 

That doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. There may be points in your study which you realise that you need considerable external help, support, challenge, whatever. If you need this, take it. But it is your decision, and your responsibility. In this importantsense, you stay in charge, even as you shift between entirely managing your own learning and subcontracting some teaching, some input, some feedback, to others.

I could do poetry in the sense of writing poetry using the various metres I had identified. This would give me a very different take on the nature of meters, the uses of meters, their technical intricacies, their impact. This isn’t about becoming a poet, although if you do want to become a poet, it will help, in that you will be writing poetry. But, even if your main aim is to understand, appreciate, analyse, make sense of, poetry, your capabilities in doing all of these things will be enhanced if you write some poetry. You will come to understand, to make sense of, to be able to explain, some of the mechanisms and techniques of poetry, so to speak from the inside, rather than from the outside, not just as a reader, nor even as a critic.

And this so far is all about the forms of poetry. Then there’s the content… 

The obvious suggestion to make is that you should decide why are you want to study poetry, what 

studying poetry means to you, what doing poetry means to you, before you start your studies. This sounds reasonable. If you can do it, great. 

But studying is very rarely this tidy. You start with a particular interest, question or goal. You discover new things, make a new sense, and your priorities change. That’s fine. It’s called learning. Learning necessarily involves change; changes of direction, changes of focus, quite probably changes to your own account of what it means for you to do poetry, changes in what you value. This is , again, fine. Untidy, and fine.

Whose studying?

A danger in allowing yourself to be taught, or indeed in allowing yourself to read lots of books about poetry, is that you can lose charge of the process. You can become disengaged from your own questions, swept along someone else’s river. You can learn the sense that other people have made of poetry, rather than making your own sense. You can learn other people’s accounts of what poetry means, rather than making your own accounts. 

Will their accounts not help you to form your own accounts? They may. But they may not. 

Reductionism

Worse, you may get dragged into simplistic accounts of doing and studying, learning about, poetry. Just now, when I checked Hiawatha, one of the top Google questions about Hiawatha was “What is the main meaning of Hiawatha?” That sounds to me like the kind of question a teacher would ask about Hiawatha. I’m not sure it’s a question a student would spontaneously ask. One epic poem, and simplistic question, one necessarily simplistic but readily marked answer. You can probably see why I’ve gone off teaching.

A closely related danger is that you may shift back from learning to do poetry to learning propositional knowledge about what other people think poetry is, means, does, how it works. The pull of propositional knowledge is strong. We still value propositional knowledge strangely highly. Knowing a lot can be reassuring, even pleasing. It brings a certain security. 

But knowing can pull us away from doing as well as inform our doing. Even as we listen, or read, or do assignments that we have let others set us, we need to keep our own questions, concerns, issues, enthusiasms, front and centre. That will keep alive what we are learning, and why we are learning it. It will redefine the nature of our learning, keep us away from just learning stuff, and keep us considering why, as well as keeping us learning things and also learning how to do things. 

I am not against knowing

Knowing things is not automatically bad. If we know a lot of things, we can roll them around in our mind, look for connections and relationships between them. 

And being able to do things is not automatically good. We can be able to do bad, useless, irrelevant, meaningless, even wrong or dangerous – things.

What matters is that we keep asking questions; about the status, the provenance, the utility, the values associated with, what we know or can do.

To put it as concisely as i can; knowing it doesn’t assure being able to do it. 

We will learn things on the way through, as we learn to do. We will learn stuff, propositional knowledge. We will learn it, through repetition and through use. But, when we remain critically and actively engaged in learning, we will also continue to ask questions about the status of the propositional knowledge we are hearing and reading; about the extent and limits of its truth and utility, about its sources,  about its implications. 

There are intimate and complex relations between knowing and doing. For example – we don’t just do things in empty air. We do things to and with knowledge, with content. bBut it doesn’t necessarily work the other way. We can know, but to be able to do nothing with or to what we know.

This account is focused on self-directed learning, although we have explored ways in which such a learner can use resources out there, even including courses, formal processes of study designed by someone else.

However, in focusing on learning, it also carries implications for those who would design and then teach formal courses of study. You will have your own views of what these implications are. Let me make mine explicit.

  1. We have to have conversations with learners about learning the subject, not just about the subject itself. 
  2. These conversations need to focus on what it means to do the subject, and what it means to learn to do the subject.
  3. The doing has to be mindful. It has to be critical, intelligent, selective, appropriate, scholarly, pleasurable, all the many virtues we look for in good academic work. For reasons that may be connected to class snobbery, “doing” may carry connotations of meniality. I’ll make a strong case for rating doing, in the way suggested above, over what I will confidently call ‘“mere knowing”.
  4. Good learners know and show that they are learning to do the subject, and then actually doing the subject, not just learning content that might (or equally might not) be used in doing the subject.
  5. Assessment has to require learners to show that they can do the subject, not just that they know things about the subject, nor even that just that have know-how about doing the subject, can describe how to do the subject. They have to show that they can do the subject in order to pass. 
  6. Learning to do the subject is mostly going to be an enquiring process, a process of investigation and discovery and sense making.
  7. Learning to do the subject is going to be an active process, supported by receiving and also giving feedback, and collaborating and conversing with other learners.
  8. Learning to do the subject is going to include learning why to do the subject, why to do each of the things they are learning to do. 
  9. Learning to do the subject means being able to do the subject in ways that are appropriate to context, values, and the shifting knowledge base.

There is not a lot of scope for teaching here. There is a lot of scope for designing and operating learning processes, and providing the necessary support and learning  resources, and then for conversations with learners.

Which is fine. 

It’s fine because we will all need to continue to learn way beyond the capacity and capability of teachers to teach us. 

It’s fine because we therefore need to be good at learning other than by being taught. And that capability takes time and support to develop.

It’s fine because, I strongly suspect, and in some respects from experience as both student and teacher know, that teaching can damage the ability to learn. It does this by reducing the need to learn. It also does it through the  insidious message the only valid way to learn is through being taught.  in this respect, good teachers can do more damage than bad. I have seen this used as a, hopefully playful, argument in favour of bad teaching. I think it is more persuasive as an argument for not teaching.

And it’s fine because, again, and with the best will in the world, that which is taught has a considerable tendency to degenerate into content, into stuff. And learning stuff now really isn’t enough. If it ever was.

Learning to do – to do critically, intelligently, thoughtfully, in ways informed by theory and evidence and values – this is what matters most. Whether we are learning to do poetry, or anything else.

from “Please Stop Teaching”

I am writing a book.

It is currently called “Please Stop Teaching!”.

Here’s an extract – me in conversation with my granddaughter, on a train

Railway Signals

It was our first trip to London with our  now ten-year-old granddaughter, by train, for well over a year. She was excited to be on a train again. She watched as we sped through the countryside. After a few minutes she opened her current Harry Potter.

Then we slowed.

1 “Why are we slowing down?”

2 “Because there’s another train in front of us.”

3 “Are we going to crash into it?”

Kids!

4 “No.”

5 “Why not?”

I like trains. I know something about how railway systems work. I felt the beast stirring within – the rich tangle of fascinating knowledge uncoiling, stretching, demanding to be expressed, the inner teacher preparing to unleash itself.

But I was strong.

“OK”. I think that’s my code word, my warning to Catrin that some educating, some explaining, is imminent. This gives her permission to duck out, to say “It doesn’t matter”, which is my cue not to explain. But she stayed silent.

6 “OK, how do you think our train driver knows there’s a train in front of us?”

That’s an easy one!

7 “Because they can see it!”

8 “No. The other train is a mile or more down the track in front of us, round a couple of bends. And it’s dark and foggy snd raining…”

9 “No, it’s bright sunshine!”

10 “But trains still run when it’s dark and foggy snd raining. Anyway, our driver can’t see the train in front.”

She was intrigued now.

This is still a dangerous moment. My knowledge is pleading to be let out. But again I am strong.

11 “So, how could our train driver know there’s a train ahead of us, around a bend or two?”

Pause.

12 “He’s got an electronic map that shows him the road – the track?”

Like satnav in the car. Brilliant.

13 I talked a bit about how railways are quite traditional in some ways, so, no, I don’t think that’s how it’s done, although some day soon it probably will be. She nodded.

14 “Do you know about railway signals?”

15 “No?”

Again the lecture wells in my throat. 

Again I am strong. What’s the minimum I can say?

I direct her attention out of the train window. After a few moments, a signal post flashes past.

16 “Did you see that?”

17 “What was it?”

18 “A metal post with coloured lights on”

19 “What colours? Too fast. I couldn’t see.”

20 “They were red at the bottom then amber and then green and amber at the top.”

21, 22, 23 “How do you know? What’s amber? You said amber twice.”

It had gone OK so  far. I hadn’t done old semaphore signals, operated by wires connected to big metal levers in lonely signal boxes. But double amber was an unnecessary complication at this stage. Basics first.

24 “Signals are always the same. [Pretty much.]  Amber on top. Amber, orange, yellow. Anyway. Then, green. Amber again.Then red at the bottom.”

She nodded.

What could I ask next? Ask, not tell?

25 “If you were driving a train and you came up to a red signal, what would you do?”

Easy.

26 “Stop!”

27 “Green?”

28 “Go!”

29 “Amber / orange / yellow?”

Pause

30 “Go – slowly?”

31 “Yes! So when we slowed down back there – did we stop?”

32 “No.”

33 “So – “

34 “Amber signal!”

35 “Yup! Well done!” So, green means …”

36 “Go!”

37 “And yellow / orange / amber means… “

38 “Slow down. Go slow. And red means stop!”

39 I told her what double amber meant. Somewhere between single amber and green. 

40 “So we passed an amber signal. Slowing down. What colour is the next signal the track? Right now?”

41 “It could be – oh. It’s red”

And – she’s got it!

I reckon I had told her 6 or 7 things and asked her around 11 questions. Not a bad ratio. I try to keep the asking to telling ratio as high as I reasonably can. 

She had asked me around 8 questions, and I had answered 5 of them with answers and 1 with a further question. It would’ve been better for me to answer fewer of her questions and answer more questions with questions. But, sometimes, you have to answer the question. Like – she might have asked, “Why is single-amber somehow more urgent than double amber?” I could guess. I don’t know. She didn’t ask. If she had, we could have looked it up.

The analysis isn’t perfect. “Amber” is an answer. “Amber?” Is an answer with an added “Is that right?” But a little analysis is probably more useful than none. 

Then, I asked her, for each possible signal colour, what colours the next signals ahead were, or probably were. She got them all right.

I didn’t do the relationship between signals and track circuits and ”train in section”, and points and interlocks, and all that fascinating geeky stuff. 

I asked ”OK?”

Which meant, “Is that enough for now?”

“Yes thank you.”

She returned to Harry Potter. 

It doesn’t matter that Catrin understands the basic logic and sequence of UK railways four-aspect coloured light signalling. Except insofar as, I believe, it is generally good to make some sense of how the world around us works. Or at a minimum understand that sense can (usually) be made. 

But she learned, more likely reinforced, something much more important. That she can work stuff out, make sense of stuff, with a little input and some questions. 

I know, it’s slow. But it works. I could’ve told her everything that we worked out, in a couple of minutes. But what would have been the point?

Some reasons to stop teaching

by David Baume

As I’ve said before, I’m writing a book, tentatively called “Please Stop Teaching”.

And, yes, I am serious.

Here are some of the reasons why I think we should stop teaching

Let me know what you think.

PST Section 4 – Reasons to stop teaching

  1. Teaching doesn’t work very well. Most of what is taught isn’t learned.
  2. Teaching doesn’t work partly because it answers questions that the learners haven’t (yet) asked. “Let me tell you about quadratic equations!” “Er – why?”
  3. Teaching and its predecessor activity, course design, identify what is important, what is valuable, what is true, what people should learn, what is the right way to do things … irrespective of the questions and interests of the learners.
  4. Teaching leads inexorably to assessment, to judging the learners. I know that, officially, assessment judges what learners know, or can do. But, when your work is being assessed, it can also feel as if you, not (just) your work, is being judged.
  5. Teaching is inherently authoritarian, an imposition, even in post- compulsory education. If you want to pass, and you probably do, then you are subject to the authority of the teacher, the institution, the profession or discipline that you seek to join.
  6. Teaching often disempowers.
  7. Some of what is taught is inevitably wrong, or irrelevant, or both.
  8. Much more of what is taught will inevitably become wrong, or irrelevant, or both.
  9. Teaching rarely talks about the status of what is being taught.
  10. Teaching rarely talks about why the curriculum contains and omits what it does. 
  11. The power dynamics of teaching and assessment make it difficult for students to develop vital critical and independent capabilities.
  12. The act of teaching tells us, implicitly but powerfully, that teacher knows best, irrespective of what is taught or of how well it is taught.
  13. Teaching usually somehow ends up as teaching stuff.
  14. Teaching usually somehow ends up as telling.
  15. Teaching is often an inauthentic act. It often involves asking questions, the answers to which the questioner already know. This pulls us into the “guess what teacher thinks the right answer is” game. Authority yet again.
  16. Teaching does not help us to learn, does not help us to get good at learning; just at taughting, at being taught.  This is not the same thing at all.
  17. Teaching often interferes with learning, slows it down, especially in a class, where each learner needs to undertake their own process of making sense of what they were just taught / told, not to attend to whatever the teacher decides to teach next, however sensible the teaching sequence seems to the teacher
  18. Teaching underestimates learners’ ability to learn.
  19. Teaching hinders learners’ exercise and further development of their own individual ability to learn.
  20. Teaching usually ignores what we bring to learning, especially our questions and our current knowledge and expertise. 
  21. Teaching somehow often manages to make learning boring, which is a very real and very damaging achievement.
  22. Alternatively, and in an attempt to prevent boredom, teaching becomes about fun, a branch of show business. Edutainment is a thing.
  23. Teaching pretends that the world is made up of subjects. Which it mostly isn’t.
  24. Teachers often want to teach all that they know, which is usually far more than, as well as different from, what learners currently want and need to learn.
  25. Teaching is about answers rather than questions.
  26. Teaching is Insufficiently about answering and about questioning.
  27. Teaching is too much about stuff and insufficiently about passion, enthusiasm, making sense.
  28. Teaching may be doomed at the point at which you decide what they need to learn, to know. Unless you can persuade them that they really need to know, to do, right now.
  29. Teaching rarely asks “What do you want to know?”
  30. Teaching rarely asks “What do you already know, think, feel, care about this?” Which, as well as making education less effective, is also impolite.
  31. A teacher told me, in a workshop about teaching, I think with pride; “You can’t make my subject easy or interesting! It is hard, hard work, boring! It just is!” My response – “There are no boring subjects, only poor teaching” – produced a stunned silence. But I believe this to be true. Insofar as good teaching is possible at all. 
  32. In the age of print, let alone the world wide web, teaching as telling is ridiculous, at least to learners who can read or hear, and think.
  33. Setting teaching up as a profession implicitly delegitimises anybody else from helping anybody else to learn anything. Such as parents, friends, colleagues …
  34. Setting school or college or university up as the place where learning happens delegitimises anywhere else as a place where valid learning can happen. Such as home. Or work. Or indeed the entire world outside the educational institution.  
  35. Teaching makes learning competitive, alas. Comparative, collegial, fine. Competitive, probably less so.
  36. Teaching implicitly says “You can only learn through being taught”.
  37. Teaching separates learning from the rest of life, a disastrous message. Learning is an integral part of life. Essential, invigorating, empowering.
  38. Teaching is bad because it is easy for teaching, even with good intentions, to be bad . There are many pressures to teach badly, as listed of the reasons listed above.
  39. Even good teaching has to be bad, for some of the reasons listed above
  40. None of this means that we shouldn’t share what we know and can do with those who truly want to know and do it. But that still doesn’t make it okay for us to teach them it. With their permission, and employing all we know about learning, we can help them to know it, or become able to do it. And that’s it. Oh, and maybe we can share the odd thing that they didn’t know they didn’t know. Once in a while,  

Literacies, Part Three – Literacies and Beyond

David Baume, PhD, SFSEDA, SFHEA

Fellow, University of London Centre for Distance Education

This is part of a series.

Higher levels of literacy

There is something I don’t like about literacy, literacies. Literacy sounds – well, a bit low-level for higher education.

I am not against literacy! I am delighted when children in the primary schools of which I am a governor show how they can read, write, listen, talk, select and use information, make sense, solve problems using reasoning and numbers …

But surely higher education should mean, should require, more than such (vital and to be celebrated) basics? Something – higher?

What would make literacies higher level, more degree-worthy? Perhaps:

  • The upper three levels of Bloom (Bloom, Kratwohl and Masia, 1974) – analysis, evaluation and synthesis?
  • The upper levels of Biggs SOLO taxonomy (Biggs, n.d.) – the abilities to bring together, synthesize, maybe compare and contrast, and then go beyond, increasing quantities of information and numbers of concepts?

Or, as QAA suggests (QAA, 2008, Part A,  4.15), abilities to:

  • … devise and sustain arguments, and/or to solve problems, using ideas and techniques, some of which are at the forefront of a discipline
  • … critically evaluate arguments, assumptions, abstract concepts and data (that may be incomplete)
  • … make judgements, and to frame appropriate questions to achieve a solution – or identify a range of solutions – to a problem
  • … communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. and
  • An appreciation of the uncertainty, ambiguity and limits of knowledge.

There are lots of ideas here about where level in capabilities, literacies, lies. Key ideas may be that higher levels lie in:

  • Complexity (of capabilities);
  • The ability to communicate accurately, clearly and effectively;
  • Taking an active approach;
  • Taking a critical approach;
  • Explaining, justifying, reviewing, improving, going beyond; and
  • Explaining how and why ‘beyond’ is actually ‘beyond’, and not simply different, or more of the same, or just painted green.

Beyond literacies

I like the idea of literacies, capabilities, as goals for education, for learning.

But I don’t think capabilities alone are enough.

What’ s missing?

I suggest, at least three things.

1          Values and principles

Alongside literacies / capabilities, surely values and principles are also essential parts of academic, disciplinary, professional, practice and identity?

The ‘know, do, be’ hierarchy described in Post One on Literacies helps us here. Values and principles need not figure much in knowing, except as propositional knowledge; knowing what the values and principles are. Values and principles can be more prominent in what we do – they can inform what we do, and also how and why we do what we do. Indeed, if they don’t inform what we do and how we do it, they remain dead propositional knowledge. But values and principles are, surely, an inextricable part of our academic, professional, disciplinary, indeed our personal, identity?

Values and principles have long figured in professional qualifications for those who teach in higher education. (SEDA, n.d.) (Advance-he.ac.uk, n.d.).

Values and principles in professional standards

The story of the origin of values and principles in professional standards for those who teach in higher education is not well known. The story may illustrate the rather abstract account of values and principles given above.

The core capabilities for teaching in higher education can perhaps be summarised as Plan; Teach and support learning; Assess and give feedback; Review the effectiveness of what we do; and Develop, continue to develop, as a teacher.

The account became more complex. I still like this simple version.

But where was equality of opportunity in this? Where was scholarship? Where was the collaboration that is an essential feature of effective teaching?

We tried adding these as capabilities – Practice equality of opportunity. Practice in a scholarly way. Collaborate.

But there was a problem. Equality of opportunity, scholarship, collaboration are different kinds of things than plan, teach, etc. You can’t meaningfully do them in isolation. You have to plan, teach etc. in ways that assure quality of opportunity. You have to be scholarly about planning, teaching, assessing and giving feedback, etc.

(Knowledge came into the standards later. I’m still not sure that knowledge helps in professional standards. Of course teachers need to know things, about education as well as about what they teach. But knowledge easily separates off from practice. Part of the argument of this whole series of posts on literacies is that knowledge lives in action (action here includes thinking ). Alone, static, knowledge can die.)

We weren’t sure whether equality of opportunity, scholarship, etc. were principles or values – we settled on values. But, crucially, they weren’t part of the same list as plan, teach etc. There were a second dimension.

We had to convert the original list of capabilities to a table. If plan, teach etc., were the rows of the table, then equality of opportunity , scholarship, etc were the columns. They had to permeate each of the rows, each of the capabilities. Plan, teach etc, are what you do.  Equality of opportunity, scholarship etc. talk about how you do them.

Just as knowledge without action can be dead, so actions without values or principles can be – well, value-less, unprincipled. And thereby incomplete.

2          Embedded capabilities

Let’s stay with doing and being. It is rarely enough to be able to do things. If the things are important enough, we also need to do them, as essential and continuing parts of our practice, indeed of our identity.

Literacies, capabilities, learning outcomes, are things that we can do. But, when we shift from doing to being, then they become things that we always do. They become, in a deliberate double negative, things that we cannot not do.

Capabilities have, on this account, now become things that we must do – again, critically, reflectively, embodying our values and principles, embedded in our practice.

3          Fluency

When we exercise these capabilities often enough; when they become part of our practice and of our identity; we become fluent in their practice, exhibiting a certain grace.

Fluency feels a good quality; as long as we remain critical and reflective about what we do and how we do it. We need to get beyond unconscious competence, and get to what I have called reflective competence (Businessballs.com, 2004).

Conclusion

With the addition of values and principles; a commitment to embed these in our practice; and at least the aspiration to a certain fluency; we can render the idea of literacies more appropriate as an organising principle for teaching and learning higher education.

Next time – Locating and teaching literacies

References

Biggs, J. (n.d.). SOLO Taxonomy. [online] John Biggs. Available at: https://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/solo-taxonomy/  [Accessed 17 Nov. 2019].

Bloom, B., Kratwohl, D. and Masia, B. (1974). Taxonomy of educational objectives. 1st ed. New York: David McKay.

Businessballs.com. (2004). Conscious Competence Model – BusinessBalls.com. [online] Available at: https://www.businessballs.com/self-awareness/conscious-competence-learning-model/  [Accessed 17 Nov. 2019]. Search on Baume

QAA. (2008). The framework for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland August 2008. [online] Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/Framework-Higher-Education-Qualifications-08.pdf  [Accessed 29 Apr. 2017].

SEDA. (n.d.). Further guidance on the seda values for members. [online] Available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/further-guidance-seda-values  [Accessed 17 Nov. 2019].

Literacies, Part One – The Changing Meanings of Literacy

Literacies, Part One

New meanings of ‘literacy’

The meaning of ‘literacy’ seems to have expanded, while I wasn’t looking.

It used to mean something like ‘being able to read and write, maybe also listen and speak’. Now literacy (sometimes, literacies) caries a much broader meaning, something like ‘being competent or capable’, at – pretty much anything.

So we have several (often overlapping) literacies – digital literacy, information literacy, library literacy, cultural literacy, academic literacies, research literacy, even numerical literacy – numeracy, surely? And perhaps others to come. Employability can be recast as careers literacy.

This isn’t a moan about the changing meanings of words. It isn’t a moan at all. It’s a reflection on a change, a change that goes off in several interesting directions. Let’s try to follow some of these, here and in subsequent posts.

Literacies considered as capabilities

Literacies, whatever else they are, are capabilities. They are things that people can do. People who are, in these various senses, literate, can – read, write, listen, speak, be academic, manage information, work with numbers, plan and manage a career …

I like this. I find it productive to consider learning as the gaining, the development, of capabilities.  (You will see a predilection for verbs over nouns throughout this article. Not to the exclusion of nouns. But, as a metaphor, sentences generally need both a noun and a verb, and some indication of how they relate.)

Knowledge

Of course I also value the acquisition of knowledge. People – I – enjoy learning new things, and knowing things. But my inclination always is to value what people – again, I – can do with and to knowledge, rather than simply the possession and recall of knowledge. Higher-level capabilities build on, test, analyse, draw connections between, and show the need for, items of knowledge.

To emphasize: I am not against knowledge, against knowing. The more knowledge we in some sense have; or can readily access, or know of the existence of, or can reasonably surmise the existence of; then the more connections, relationships, we can suggest and make and test among these items of knowledge. (This previous sentence is intended to suggest a technology-aided increasingly porous boundary between what we know in our heads and what is increasingly readily accessible to us.)

And the number of these connections rises exponentially in relation to the number of nodes, in this case the number of pieces of information. This is an individual version of the network effect.

But knowledge, knowing, become increasingly problematic, certainly until we are clear about the status of what we know. And we often are not clear about this, certainly not explicit about the status of our knowledge, not always readily able to say how confident or provisional we are in our knowing, and why. And even when we are currently clear about the status of our knowledge, of our knowing, then some knowledge still becomes wrong and /or irrelevant, more and more rapidly. New knowledge is being created at an increasing rate, faster than we can know it. And old knowledge is becoming wrong or redundant faster than we can forget it.

Anyway, there is more to a satisfying and productive life than being good at answering quiz questions, fun though that can be. (See the extract from the LSE Magazine ca. 1968 below. I’m the one on the left. Summary: we won. Notice the epically sexist 1968 prizes. Men drink. Women need help to remember who they are. Amazing.)

 Knowing involves finding or making, and then testing and explaining and using, shapes, patterns, structures, out of bits, bricks, facts.

BBC Third Degree Quiz contestants, 1968

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Knowing, doing, being

A useful hierarchy of goals for learning starts with knowing – knowing physics, social science, literature, any discipline.

It progresses to doing – again, doing physics, social science, literature, any discipline.

At the top of this hierarchy may lie being – being a physicist, a social scientist, a writer or critic or scholar of literature, any disciplinary or professional identity. Not excluding our many other identities, personal, political, and as citizens of the world.

I do not offer this as a developmental sequence. I have reservations about developmental sequences, particularly if they are used to plan education. There is no necessary, let alone automatic, progression from knowing to doing to being. But the hierarchy may usefully describe extents or qualities of engagement with a discipline. I value being over (just) doing, and knowing, and doing over (just) knowing. Although of course I recognise that a piece of knowledge can prompt a question, an action, and even offer a glimpse of an identity.

This whole series of posts will suggest a shift in our balance of attention away from just knowledge and towards action and then identity. Not a rejection of knowledge; rather an increased caution about it, and, again, putting knowledge in its place.

Conclusion, for now

So: I like literacies because they shift attention from just knowing, and towards doing, and potentially towards being.

 

Next time – Knowing and Action

Literacies, Part Two – Knowledge and Action

David Baume, PhD, SFSEDA, SFHEA

Fellow, University of London Centre for Distance Education

This follows Literacies, Part One.

Knowing and action

Building on Part One, we may be able to use the idea of literacies to reconceptualize – I would suggest, to recover – the idea of a discipline.

What do I mean by this? What got lost? What needs recovering?

Disciplines are often described, conceptualized, treated, as areas of knowledge.

Which might partly be fine.

Except that, somehow, in our course design and teaching and then in our assessment; and with no malign intent, but just in the way of things; knowledge is often gently reduced to declarative knowledge, to propositional knowledge, to content, to stuff.

We may reinforce this view of knowledge when we write knowledge down, when we lecture, above when we use unseen closed-book written examinations. Such examinations, whatever else we may intend them to assess, inevitably also assess knowledge. And, often, not much more. A recent examiner report (the Chatham House Rule applies here) spoke of the need, to obtain a good degree, for a student to actually address the question. A lower class of degree could be obtained by writing down some things that were relevant to the topic of the question. Really?  A degree?

“But”, you may protest, “in my examinations, I do not just test students’ knowledge. I also test students‘ abilities to apply, to critique, to compare and contrast, and to do other sophisticated high-level things with, and to, and about, knowledge.”

I am glad to hear this. But I imagine that you also prepare students for examinations? So, in their examinations, are they really doing these high-level things? Or are they, to some extent at least, recalling, and hopefully at least slightly modifying, answers they have previously read or constructed? Only you and they can know. (The QA system probably does not know. This is a hole at the heart of our assessment processes.)

There can also be snobbery at play here.  This snobbery prefers knowing over doing. Knowing is sometimes felt to be, is sometimes treated as, rarefied, exalted, a thing of fine minds and clean hands. Doing, by contrast – well, “horny-handed sons and daughters of toil” exemplifies a view of those who (merely) do.

Here is a true story about relations between knowing and doing. The event happen some 15 years ago. It has influenced me considerably, as I shall explain:

I went to see my GP. I described my symptoms. He paused, and then said “I am sorry, I’m just back from two weeks of holiday, and my brain seems to have emptied itself completely. Do you mind if I look this up?”

We had a good relationship, and he knew I worked in education. So what I said, as reported immediately below, was not intended or heard as rude.

“Hm. Let me think. Would I rather you guessed, possibly guessed wrong, and failed to cure me, or even made things worse? Or would I prefer you to look it up?”

He correctly took my questions as encouragement to look the symptoms up.  He used what he looked up – no doubt alongside his fast-returning memory – to prescribe a course of treatment. It worked.

In this short encounter with my GP, I discovered that I value what we may call expertise – the ability to do – of course the ability to do critically, intelligently, responsively, and in a knowledge-informed way, in whatever reputable place that knowledge is found – over knowledge alone.  I still take this view. And well beyond medicine.

What follows? Among other things, this advice:

  • Look it up.
  • Encourage your students to look it up.

Why?

  • You may have misremembered it. They may have misremembered it.
  • And some of the ‘its’ will have changed, some will have become wrong, some will have become irrelevant, some will have been superseded.

And looking it up gets easier by the month. And safe, as long as we constantly apply and hone our critical faculties.

This is how the real world works. Neither the use of closed-book unseen examinations, nor a snobbish, possibly class-based, preference of knowledge to action, should drag us into over-valuing knowledge.

A former colleague had previously served in the Army. He worked with artillery shells, fuses and the like. In his examinations, if he was seen to take any critical action without reference to the manual, he would immediately fail the examination. Not everything we and our students do can have explosive consequences. But surely some of what we and our students do matters? Surely it often makes sense to check?

Recovering disciplines as fields of practice – putting knowledge in its place

By ‘recovering the idea of a discipline’, I here mean conceptualizing and treating the discipline as a field of practice, and also as an identity – as something that  I do, perhaps even something that I am – well beyond, although still embracing, something that I know. Not rejecting the knowledge that is an important element of any discipline. Rather, putting that knowledge in its place; as a tool or object for critical and creative thought and action. rather than as the summit of aspiration.

Nothing of value is lost, I suggest, when we move away from considering disciplines as (just) bodies of knowledge, and instead / additionally consider them as fields of practice, and then as identities.

And much is gained.

How does that work?

It works as students both use and critique their advancing knowledge. Indeed, students learn knowledge, and much more besides, as they do the discipline; as they define and refine and tackle questions and problems; as they, critically and analytically, start to adopt and explore and test their forming disciplinary or professional identity.

Knowledge achieves much of its significance in action. Learning to do and learning to be, as developmental and critical functions, are at once more challenging and more rewarding than just learning content, learning stuff. I also addressed this in Part One.

Knowledge, capability and identity

The relationships between knowledge, capability and identity are complex. I shall not explore them further here. Except to suggest that the idea of a progression from, in terms from Bloom’s taxonomy of educational outcomes in the cognitive domain (Bloom, Kratwohl and Masia, 1974), knowing, and then advancing, as the years of study pass, through understanding and application to analysis then synthesis and evaluation, bears very little relation to how students actually learn. Bloom suggests, or is often taken to suggest, that students start by collecting and memorizing a bunch of facts. Then, on a second pass through, they come to understand these facts. And then they revisit these understood facts and learn how to apply them …

This is of course nonsense. Most teachers don’t wholly teach this way, fortunately. But I have seen this Bloomian idea of progression pervade teaching portfolios and HE Academy Fellowship claims. I was briefly seduced by it, early in my teaching career. But I recovered. The idea clearly at least affects the practice of teachers, and is sometimes made explicit in course handbooks. (Bloom, in these portfolios and claims, often lies alongside Kolb’s learning cycle and Biggs’ constructive alignment, the latter usually going much heavier on alignment than on constructivism.)  Perhaps, in relation to Bloom at least, the frequent disconnect between teachers’ espoused and enacted pedagogic theories (Baume 2017) is not such a bad thing.

A student is far more likely to learn when a problem, question, issue, idea or challenge seizes their attention, and when they work; at any and all six Bloom levels as appropriate; to solve the problem, answer the question, or do whatever it takes to satisfy them. For now.

The teacher has clear, important and rewarding roles here, including offering questions or problems, helping students to analyze these, and then steering and informing and challenging and reacting – and in helping students to do these things for themselves, and for and with each other. Not so much in telling students lots of stuff, in answering questions that students have not yet asked, as lectures often do.

Bloom’s Taxonomy can provide a valuable tool for analyzing the level of learning outcomes. But it is disastrous as a guide to course design.

Conclusion

So: I also like literacies, with their focus on doing, because they can help us to re-conceptualize disciplines in productive ways. Indeed they can help us to recover disciplines to something like what the discipline or profession means for the member, the practitioner, the advocate, the enthusiast, the lecturer.

Perhaps something like a field of academic, disciplinary and / or professional practice?

Reference

Bloom, B., Kratwohl, D. and Masia, B. (1974). Taxonomy of educational objectives. 1st ed. New York: David McKay.

Next time – Literacies and Beyond

Literacies, Part One

David Baume, Fellow, University of London Centre for Distance Education

New meanings of ‘literacy’

The meaning of ‘literacy’ seems to have expanded, while I wasn’t looking.

It used to mean something like:

‘Being able to read and write, maybe also listen and speak’.

Now literacy (sometimes, literacies) caries a much broader meaning, something like ‘being competent or capable’, at – pretty much anything.

So we have several (often overlapping) literacies – digital literacy, information literacy, library literacy, cultural literacy, academic literacies, research literacy, even numerical literacy – numeracy, surely? And perhaps others to come. Employability can be recast as careers literacy.

This isn’t a moan about the changing meanings of words. It isn’t a moan at all. It’s a reflection on a change, a change that goes off in several interesting directions. Let’s try to follow some of these changes, here and in subsequent posts.

Literacies considered as capabilities

Literacies, whatever else they are, are capabilities. They are things that people can do. People who are, in these various senses, literate, can – read, write, listen, speak, be academic, manage information, work with numbers, plan and manage a career …

I like this. I find it productive to consider learning as the gaining, the development, of capabilities.  (You will see a predilection for verbs over nouns throughout this article. Not to the exclusion of nouns. But, as a metaphor, sentences generally need both a noun and a verb, and some indication of how they relate. In education, learning outcomes generally need both nouns and verbs, and, again, some indication of how nouns and verbs relate.

Generally, “Students will be able to (verb) to, or with, about (noun).

Knowledge

Of course, I also value the acquisition of knowledge. We enjoy learning new things, and knowing things. But my inclination always is to value what we can do with and to and about knowledge, rather than simply the possession and recall of knowledge. Higher-level capabilities build on, test, analyze, draw connections between, and show the need for, items of knowledge. 

To emphasize: I am not against knowledge, against knowing. The more knowledge that we in some sense have; or that we can readily access, or of whose existence we know, or can reasonably surmise; then the more connections, relationships, we can suggest and make and test among these items of knowledge. (This previous sentence is intended to suggest a technology-aided increasingly porous boundary between what we know in our heads and what is increasingly readily accessible to us.)

And the number of these connections between items of knowledge, whatever form these items of knowledge take, rises exponentially in relation to the number of nodes, in this case the number of items of knowledge. This is an individual version of the network effect.

But knowledge, knowing, become increasingly problematic, certainly until we are clear about the status of what we know. And we often are not clear about this, certainly not explicit about the status of our knowledge, not always readily able to say how confident or provisional we are in our knowing, and why. And even when we are currently clear about the status of our knowledge, of our knowing, then some knowledge still becomes wrong and /or irrelevant, more and more rapidly. New knowledge is being created at an increasing rate, faster than we can know it. And old knowledge is becoming wrong or redundant faster than we can forget it.

Anyway, there is more to a satisfying and productive life than being good at answering quiz questions, fun though that can be. (See the extract from the LSE Magazine ca. 1968 below. I’m the one on the left. Summary: LSE won. Notice the epically sexist 1968 prizes. Men drink – hence, tankard. Women need help to remember who they are – hence, identity bracelet. Amazing.)

Knowing includes finding or making, and then testing and explaining and using, shapes, patterns, structures, explanations, out of bits, bricks, facts.

Knowing, doing, being

A useful hierarchy of goals for learning starts with knowing – knowing physics, social science, literature, any discipline.

It progresses to doing – again, doing physics, social science, literature, any discipline.

At the top of this hierarchy may lie being – being a physicist, a social scientist, a writer or critic or scholar of literature, any disciplinary or professional identity. (Not excluding our many other identities, personal, political, and as citizens of the world. If not of Europe. Sorry. No, not sorry, enraged.)

I do not offer this as a developmental sequence. I have reservations about developmental sequences, particularly if they are used to plan education. There is no necessary, let alone automatic, progression from knowing to doing to being. But the hierarchy may usefully describe extents or qualities of engagement with a discipline. I value being over (just) doing and knowing. I value doing over (just) knowing. Although of course I recognize that a piece of knowledge can prompt a question, an action, and even offer a glimpse of an identity.

This series of posts will suggest a shift in our balance of attention away from just knowledge and towards action and then identity. Not a rejection of knowledge; rather an increased caution about it, and, again, putting knowledge in its place.

Conclusion (for now)

So: I like literacies, because they shift attention from just knowing, and towards doing, and potentially towards being. Much more useful than just knowing.

David is working on information literacies, and on literacies more broadly, for the University of London Centre for Distance Education. 

Next time – Knowing and Action

Open Web Examination – OWE

Some thought experiments.

1

Revisit one of your recent examination papers. Make just one change to the rubric – “Students will have full access to the World Wide Web during this examination.” (Assume, at least for now, that they will still handwrite their answer.)

How would the nature and quality of students’ answers be different from the actual answers they wrote? Why?

2

You might want to narrow things down a little. You might want to ban the use of email and other forms of communication, within / outside the examination room. You might or might not want to let students access their Dropbox folder, or the University VLE. Your call. (Why did you make the choices you made?)

What differences would this additional item of rubric make? What would be gained, what would be lost, what would be?

3

Use the results of thought experiment 1 to plan the next examination, in the same subject, with the same new rubric – “Students will have full access to the World Wide Web during this examination.” What difference will that make to the questions you set? What would be a good Open Web version of last year’s questions? Or would you need to set radically different questions? What questions? Why?

4

Changing the exam without telling the students at the start of the course would obviously be wrong. So, assume that you have decided to set an Open Web Examination in this subject next time. First of all, whom if anyone would you have to persuade? What objections might they raise? How would you respond to these objections?  What concerns might you have? What are your responses to these concerns?

5

Assume that you have decided to set an Open Web Examination in this subject next time, and have obtained any necessary permissions.

How will the change to an Open Web Examination affect:

  • The design of the course?
  • The Intended learning outcomes?
  • The assessment criteria?
  • The way you teach the course?
  • The kinds of learning activities, both individual and collective, that you ask students to undertake?
  • The kinds of feedback they receive on their work?
  • The information and advice you give them on finding and sharing and using information?

In each case, again, why?

6

Jump forward a few years. Assume that the University has been using Open Web Examinations for the last few years, certainly all the time your current cohort of students has been at the University. Imagine announcing to them that you, are going to change to closed book examinations. What reactions would you anticipate? What questions would you expect to receive about the change? How would you answer these questions?

7

Imagine that, instead of handwriting their answers, students can word process their answers onto the same machine they are using to access the Web. Again, how do you think colleagues and students will react? Again, what changes would this make to the kinds of questions you ask, and to the way that you plan and run the course and teach the students? (One interesting side-effect would be to make plagiarism detection easier. It is difficult to run a hand-written examination script through Turnitin.)

8

You might want to go even further. Imagine students can communicate with each other, inside and outside the examination room. What differences would that make?

 

These thought experiments, these scenarios, obviously clarify differences between the conditions under which students are required to demonstrate some of their graduateness and the conditions under which, in the real world (including Universities), academic and professional work is done, with access to libraries, the web, email, interchange, conversation, feedback. Articulating these differences may encourage us to revisit conventional examination conditions, and check their continued appropriateness as part of certification for life and practice in the 21st century.

The scenarios draw attention to some of the capabilities that we do not assess – in the examination, at least, we may examine them elsewhere.

They suggest to me that closed book examinations show a sustained belief in the importance of memory, even in an age where we increasingly outsource our memory, though hopefully not our critical faculties. Thinking about Open Web Examination may encourage us to think hard about relations between knowing and doing in an age where both knowledge and action are changing faster than ever.

In a little more detail – Open Web Examination invites us to focus more closely on what students can do with, and to, what they know. It also invites us to focus on how they do what they do: For example, as we fervently hope, in ways that are critical, reflective, scholarly, principled, and values- and research-informed. In the good senses of both words, to act both academically and professionally.

Open Web Examination – OWE – also, Open World Examination.

What would it take for you to bring these OWE thought experiments to life? Again – what would be gained, lost, changed?

 

 

On Difficulty

What makes something – a subject, a topic,an idea, an ability, anything – difficult?

I found it easier to think about difficulty in relation to abilities, things we do. Is a 360° backflip on a BMX bike difficult? Well, I would find it so. I can’t speak for you. But I can probably speak for somebody who had already done a 720° backflip. They would probably say “No, a 360° is not so difficult.”

So, the difficulty of a particular ability is at least partly in the mind of the practitioner. And that difficulty is great or small at least partly in relation to what they already know they can do.

Staying with ability, and shifting from an individual to a societal view, another indicator of difficulty may be the smallness of the proportion of the population that can do it. The rarer, perhaps, the harder.

Staying with ability – we’ll get onto difficulty in relation to subjects, topics and ideas, l promise – other popular or intuitive dimensions of difficulty may be complexity and scale. I can play any particular chord from Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto – give me a minute – but not all three movements. I can climb onto a small rock, but not climb Everest.

So, as elements or indicators of difficulty in practical tasks, I can offer:

1 Relation to my current capabilities: “It’s hard because I can’t do it (yet)”, which is “I haven’t done it yet” with the possible addition of “and I can’t immediately see how I would do it.”

2 The proportion of the population that can do it: “It’s difficult because lots of people can’t do it.” (Of course there are lots of things that most people don’t do mainly because they would never dream of or want to do them, but we’ll ignore these for now.)

Implicit in both the BMX and the Tchaikovsky examples:

3 The time taken to learn the ability: “It’s hard because it will obviously take a long time to learn to do it” and

4 The effort taken to learn the ability: “… a lot of work … “.

⁃ And then:

5 The complexity of the ability, the number of different elements and relationships in play; “Good grief but that looks complicated” and, related but not the same,

6 The scale – which may be size, duration, whatever applies. “Gosh but that looks enormous.” The Tchaikovsky example illustrates this well.

These are six possible dimensions of difficulty of abilities. What others do you see?

OK, at this point in the writing process, I admit I am surprised. If you’d asked me before I started what I was going to conclude, I’d have predicted that I would just say “Difficulty is purely, or mainly – i’m not sure which – subjective.” I enjoy writing when it gets me to an unexpected conclusion. The unexpected conclusion I’ve got to so far is that it is possible to talk about more-or-less objective factors which may contribute to difficulty.

But there is a sense in which my initial reaction was right, although of course badly incomplete. Difficulty is a feeling. Time or effort or complexity or rarity, any of the six dimensions of difficulty teased out above, may or may not bring with them a feeling of difficulty. For example, to the persistent or the individualistic, the large time investment required or the fact that the vast majority of people can’t do it may not be problems, may not be sources of difficulty. They may simply be facts. Or they may even attract, appeal.

As promised; what makes a subject, a topic, an idea, difficult?

I think, all of the above, as explored briefly here:

1 “I don’t understand it” and, perhaps, for a more persistent learner, “I can’t immediately see how I would come to understand it.”

2 Maybe “Very few people understand that.” or “Everybody says it’s really hard to understand”, a norm-referenced or crowd-sourced account of difficulty.

3 and 4, perceived or actual time and effort required, are very similar for ideas and for abilities. In education, time and effort may be reflected in the length of the course, or by popular accounts of how hard the course is, or by entry requirements.

5, Complexity, in both senses described here – the number of elements and the number of relations among them – is captured by Biggs in his SOLO taxonomy.

6, Scale is also captured by SOLO, and may be made manifest by the length of the reading list or the size of the textbook.

These close links between difficulties in abilities and difficulties in subjects, topics or ideas should not be a surprise. The many and complex relationships between abilities and knowledge are topics for many other blog posts. For now, I’ll simply note that, in education, knowledge usually embraces ability, which may be the ability to construct, critique, use and do many other things to and with the knowledge. Learning outcomes, on a good day, provide a bridge between knowledge and ability.

Beyond the six suggested above, there are further possible elements of difficulty in academic subjects, topics or ideas, if we work with learning outcomes rather than with knowledge as slabs of content.

7 Bloom offers us one way to conceptualise the difficulty of tasks. He considers a range of things we can do with and to knowledge, from recalling it, making sense of it and applying it to analysing it, evaluating it, and synthesising new knowledge. The higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy are widely treated as corresponding to higher levels of difficulty, with for example lower level courses being confined to the lower levels of Bloom. I have serious difficulties with this, as i explore in other posts. But nonetheless the relating of Bloom level to difficulty is widely practised.

8 If we put Bloom and SOLO together, or rather set them orthogonal to each other, we can develop a useful account of difficulty as a composite function of level and complexity.

9 Wickedness is another dimension of difficulty, in the widely used sense of wicked problems. Wicked problems are not so much difficult to solve as insoluble, certainly incapable of an optimum solution. We may take solvability as another dimension of difficulty, applied of course to problems rather than just to content. To what extent, how far, can an exact or at least a satisfactory solution be obtained? The less solvable, perhaps, the more difficult.

10 If I can do arithmetic on small numbers, I can probably, with some care and effort, become able to do the same arithmetic on larger numbers. I am simply extending my capabilities.
By contrast if I can confidently do arithmetic and I am suddenly faced with differential and integral calculus, it may take me a long time to become competent and confident with them. They may feel to be much more difficult than doing arithmetic with larger numbers.

Why the difference in difficulty?

Doing arithmetic with larger numbers is still doing arithmetic. It’s more difficult, but it’s the same kind of activity. Differential and integral calculus are, by contrast, something else entirely. We have to change our view of what constitutes mathematics, adding calculus to arithmetic, and thereby add new ways of thinking, make sense of and then use new notations and concepts.

In Piaget’s language, calculus requires us to accommodate, to change, our view of what comprises mathematics. By contrast we can simply assimilate arithmetic with larger numbers into what we already knew about arithmetic. Rogers tells us that we are much more likely to resist new ideas and concepts that threaten our sense of self, our current worldview. Changing and extending paradigms, worldviews, is likely to be much more difficult than working within and extending current paradigms. This gives a further plausible account of difficulty.

11 Land and Meyer’s accounts of threshold concepts – ideas which among other qualities require a (usually irreversible) change in world view, and are therefore sometimes troublesome, difficult – usefully add to the work of Piaget and Rogers.

“What do you mean by difficult?”, or “Why do you say this is difficult?”, may be useful questions to ask learners, including of course ourselves. As the technology becomes better and better able to enact simple abilities, ideas, concepts, subjects, questions and tasks, then we are going to be left with the more difficult ones. (To which I reply, yippee, bring ’em on!)

Analysing the nature and sources of difficulty, as I have started to do here, doesn’t magically enable us to deal with these more difficult tasks. But it will give us valuable clues, precursors for planning and acting.

Notes
1 I am very grateful to Gerard Long, Head of Accounting and Finance at Waterford Institute of Technology, for a conversation earlier today which prompted this post.
2 The rather narrow broadband here in Jos, Nigeria, and the relatively small screen of the iPhone, together deny me ready access to references and sources. I shall insert these when back home, but not immediately,

As always – tell me what you think.