Just been to a seminar on being a student
in the twenty-first century. Lots of clichés - increasing
complexity and "supercomplexity" of the world, inadequacy of
knowledge and skills, "lifewide" education, etc, etc. The world is
changing and the student experience needs to change too. Obviously.
The speaker encouraged all comments from
the floor, so the clichés were interspersed with a random selection of comments as everyone
got on their own particular hobby horse. The seminar leader contrived to turn
every comment into a platitude he could agree with - we must treat students as
people, there are no right answers, things are getting progressively more
complex, and so on and so forth.
There are two general sets of assumptions
behind this sort of discussion - mutually contradictory, and both unhelpful.
The first is that students and teachers, or facilitators, are always engaged in a collaborative, consensual
process with no right answers,
and the teacher does not possess superior
expertise. This was certainly the philosophy espoused and practised by the
seminar leader. He did not set himself up as the expert, and all contributions
were accepted and valued. However, it's probably more accurate to say that
there were no wrong answers, because all suggestions were accepted as right.
The second is that learning is hard, often unpleasant, and requires
incentives, which means that it is inevitable that many learners will fail, and certification
is required to distinguish the successful from the failures. Failure obviously
implies that the learners' answers are
wrong, and that the teachers' answers are right: the teacher is the expert and
the teacher and the learner do not agree
about right and wrong. This is never made explicit, but is implicit in the talk
about dealing with learners' anxieties. Assessment in some form is always
assumed, and this makes little sense without clear definitions of right and
wrong.
This prompts two thoughts. First, the
contradiction between the two sets of assumptions needs to be faced. The first
set of assumptions is actually too silly to be worth probing in detail: experts
obviously do have some expertise (although usually not as much as they think
they do), and some answers are obviously wrong. The second set of assumptions
is less obviously flawed, but I think that overturning it, which would mean
redefining education, would be hugely beneficial. If the system could be
redesigned so that there is more success, and the blame for a lack of progress
is not laid at the door of the poor anxious student - this would surely be a
good thing. I have outlined some thoughts along these lines briefly in this article, and in
more detail at http://woodm.myweb.port.ac.uk/nothard.pdf.
The second thought is about the sterility
of this kind of session. The
introductory ideas proposed by the seminar leader were really platitudes: the
sort of things you couldn't disagree with without feeling like an idiot or a
villain. And then the interjections were mostly along the same lines, and any
that weren't were either ignored, or redefined so that they are consistent with
the dominant mood.
Sessions like this would be more productive
if they had more of an edge, if they incorporated some negative or disruptive
thoughts to challenge the cosy consensus. But for this to work, we need to
learn to suspend our initial distrust of uncomfortable ideas, and give them a
chance to see where they lead.
