I had a recent discussion thread going with colleagues from my discipline (anthropology) who were raising and struggling with the practical question “how do I keep students from using their cell phones in class?” Related questions were raised about other similar technologies—laptops, ipods, etc.
My first reaction in the thread was to ask “Why would you want to do this?!!" (That is, to keep them from using such tools) But as I tried to engage people in conversation about rethinking “class” and “teaching,” and “learning” in creative ways that *incorporated* people’s technologies of choice rather than treating them as disruptions, I was met with many practical considerations (enormous class sizes, curricular demands to “cover” sufficient materials, the ‘digital divide’ among our students etc.); the discussion itself seemed to speak volumes about how far “we” had *not* come in any paradigm shift (“From Teaching to Learning,” a la Barr and Tagg, 1995, or in addressing the learning-needs of the “digital natives”) (Barr and Tagg).
It seems in fact that until this "paradigm shift" is embodied in what we are seriously doing in our profession, the place of assessment of learning—and further, the adoption of tools such as portfolios (e- or otherwise)—will suffer from severe misunderstanding and perennial fits and starts of eventual dead-end use.
What we are talking about in our discussions around learning-focused approaches in education is at heart a call for engaging one another (teachers/students) as learning subjects. Before we ever get to the questions about any particular techniques or tools or technologies, we are challenged to approach our educational environments and institutions as places to engage one another as active subjects in our own learning processes. This in turn does not call for the disappearance of ‘experts’ but their/our engagement instead as facilitators, guides, those with prior cultivated and informed experience, who can challenge other subjects in our mutual efforts to learn together. (Lave; Smith)
In this process then, “assessment” isn’t something done *to* learners (or *to* teachers), but instead represents ongoing moments in process—moments of (guided) self-reflection in the process(es) of learning. Likewise, tools such as portfolios (e or otherwise) are the artifact-occasions for such self-reflection. They fall flat if they are only somehow “scored” or “graded” by the “experts.” They likewise fall flat if they are only “commented on” by their creators (supposedly showing that we have somehow “included students in their own assessment”). They offer so much more to all involved (teacher/learner as well as institution) if they are incorporated and used within the full process of guided learning/assessment.
To its detriment however, change in (higher) education suffers from a suite of often unintended characteristics embodied in educational institutions and professional educational practices. Succinctly, many administrators have expressed this through the use of the image of "herding cats." And as a result, change itself is too often experienced and perceived as an endless confusion of misguided and unnecessary fits and starts in countless directions, subject to the whims of politicians, administrators, boards, professional organizations, and public opinion.
At any given moment if you are outside of your own institution enough you'll find one group or other suddenly grabbing on to the latest "solution" that appears in their field of vision, under pressure from accreditors, in fear of legislative/public pressure, in the name of "accountability." For some it will be the promise of "curriculum mapping"; for others it will be "e-portfolios"; for some it will be "classroom assessment techniques"; others will imagine that the adoption of an "assessment management system" will be their turnkey solution.
However, with so many instances of eventual "buyers remorse," many will soon end up discovering the disjointed, unsatisfying nature of their "solution of choice," faculty will retire, new faculty will be brought in to the legacy of unsated institutional expectations, administrators will advance to new institutions, IR professionals will continue in their daunting task of reporting "student success" rates and related compliance data, and we will have yet to ask effectively (nor answered) the core question "what are we/our students learning, and how do we know?" ...the questions "subjects of their own learning" would want to learn to ask...
(to be continued...)
Barr, Robert and John Tagg. 1995. From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Education. Change. Nov./Dec.: 13-25.
Batson, Trent. 2008. Digital Arrays for Evidence Based Learning. Campus Technology. Aug. 20. http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2008/08/Digital-Arrays-for-EvidenceBased-Learning.aspx?p=1
Lave, Jean 'Teaching, as learning, in practice', Mind, Culture, and Activity (3)3: 149-164
Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009) 'Communities of practice', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.
Tagg, John. 2008. Changing Minds in Higher Education: Students Change, So Why Can’t Colleges?. Planning for Higher Education. 37(1): 15–22. http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/Barr_Tagg.pdf
Also, see my previous post from 2008 on this topic:
http://fromteachingtolearning.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-system-should-we-use-for.html
