Sean's Reflective Journal

PS

2011-09-30T06:56:00.004+01:00

I'm now a "full-time" Chemical/Environmental Engineering academic. The task I have been given is fairly straightforward, other than the fact that people are involved.

After all I have said about reflection, I intend to keep a private diary of my interactions to facilitate learning how to operate in this still quite new sphere. It might have been fun to do this on-line, but now I'm part of the system, I think it politically unwise, as well as unlikely to result in interaction with people working on the same problem as me.

Other teachers are not doing what I am. I do not believe in any grand unified theory of teaching and learning, so I think that the task of making engineers is fundamentally different from that of making poets. Engineers need to care about things that philosophers do not, and vice versa. Excellence in engineering can be identified far more objectively than in painting,and the IChemE gives a clear list of required outcomes for any accredited course.

So, my problem is not so much how to define what I mean by skill or knowledge in engineering, or to grade the outcomes of teaching, but how to get a department made up largely of expert researchers in the sciences underpinning engineering to share an understanding of the end product of their teaching.

It would be nice to get them to think that making engineers via their teaching is as important as their research, but that might be too much to hope. I'll see.

The End

2011-08-01T10:59:00.003+01:00

Google "reflective engineer" or any other combination of words you'd expect to turn up reflective writing by engineers - Nothing. Whilst reflective practice comes in part from from observation of professional engineers, we are not taught to do it, and the way we do it bears little or no resemblance to the "reflective practice" taught in supposed support of teaching.

I looked at the stats for this blog this morning, and they confirm what I have suspected for some time - there is no interest in reflective practice amongst engineers. I have other blogs on minority interests, none of which are remotely as unread and uncommented upon as this one. It can't be my writing quality or whatever- there are no other blogs on this subject as far as I can see. I'm the only game in town, but it's a game no-one else is interested in playing.

I am very grateful to those few from the humanities (especially both Jameses) who have been willing to put up with my to them no doubt on occasion incomprehensible awkwardness and anger with the nonsense which passes for scholarship in pedagogy, but I cannot see any point in further engagement with the literature or discourse of pedagogy, as it is both worthless and incapable of improvement, having lost its way in anti-realism and political correctness.

Part of the problem seems to be the training of its participants. They cannot see that the extended abstract which they were selected for their ability to excel in is only useful for the generation of hypotheses - without rigorous hypothesis testing, it is worse than useless.

It is more important to be right than interesting, as any engineer knows, and today's educationalists more or less universally deny.

The End

The bleedin' obvious

2011-07-22T12:01:00.004+01:00

Having established that only artists are interested in this sort of discussion, any readers I might have will probably have missed this New Scientist article on the bleedin' obvious by a real scientist turned social scientist, in which he claims that whichever way the truth lies in "social science", it always seems bleedin' obvious in hindsight.

That's all very well in an experimental setting, but in the real world, people know stuff about the ways other people behave which comes as a surprise only to sociologists.

A nice quote on this from Kingsley Amis: "There is an innocence, an unworldliness about most sociological writing which can be its greatest charm. With the possible exception of public relations, I can think of no field of cultural activity in which the expert seems to start off with so much less information than the ordinary citizen. " (as ever c/o James Atherton's links)

Community of Practice

2011-07-22T11:12:00.002+01:00

I have a number of other blogs, all of which are far and away more popular than this one, despite the others being about issues of very limited popular appeal - I don't think I have ever had a comment or a follower on here from a STEM background.

All of my interactions seem to have been with people from an arts background, and all of the other reflective blogs I have seen are by people from the arts. Is there a community of practice amongst STEM teachers?

Teaching and Training

2011-07-22T07:47:00.007+01:00

Finished the dairy training course yesterday, which was really tough for a number of reasons, one of which is to do with the difference between teaching and training. The most convincing definition of a difference between these activities would to me be that teaching involves the acquisition of critical thinking skills.

I was seemingly very successful in awakening the critical thinking skills of my students, such that on the last day the discussion of where they were at in terms of environmental performance (considerably worse than they thought on the day they arrived), and why (mostly management issues) caused the managers present to look very uncomfortable.The director present left the room at one point - I'm not sure I'll get a return gig there!

The audience, who probably had less than half an A-level each, really threw themselves into the course, much of which was material I'd previously used with under-/post-graduate audiences. They were at least as good as the graduates across the board, from the Marshmallow challenge to the Mogden formula calculation, and they were the keenest audience I've ever had. There was a lot of groupwork, with fresh permutations each day and they were as keen on doing sums or touring the plant as they were building towers from spaghetti. The basic model was the one I am presently trialling, of teaching to a point where something practically useful can be done with the information- the "PBL as reward" model.

But even though I am confident that my material was sound, the learners got what I was trying to teach them, actively enjoyed much of it, and that during the practical exercises, a number of major soluble problems were discovered, I often found it less than enjoyable. The managers present also enjoyed it far less than the staff, and (as I know that they are the ones who are responsible for commissioning training) I was in conflict all week between with my desire to please them, and my brief to teach certain things.

The managers were not straightforward people, so I think it unlikely that they would tell me what was up, but my guess would be that they wanted a presentation of familiar material in a slick edutainment style. They didn't know that this is what they wanted, until they got what I was offering.

The managers had already been on courses previously commissioned from other providers covering the same syllabus in an edutaining way. The other providers did not as I did use the company's own bills to see how things could be improved, or tour the dairy at which the course was given to illustrate how to spot problems-the managers though that this was great stuff until the staff spotted that they were a good bit of the problem.

I scrupulously avoided suggesting what I thought was wrong,but the staff noticed that their environmental campaigns petered out every time due to lack of middle management support, they had expensive IT systems which swamped them in data but no-one to analyse it or feed out to staff what it meant, that no-one with the right blend of seniority and available resources was leading the campaign for environmental improvements, that no-one other than the environmental managers had ever seen the water bills before this week, so the financial implications of waste were a mystery to the "environmental champions" and so on.

There was a lot more, but basically the company was in the business of shipping as much milk as possible, and if they had to appoint three managers with an environmental remit across the group to produce the paperwork to satisfy the environment management systems of their clients so be it. The environmental champions had full-time hands-on practical jobs and very little training. They were talking a good game as far as environmental matters was concerned, but they weren't making it happen, as they were not allocating the required resources.

In the discussions I sparked with this Envirowise tool the staff spotted all of these things, but when they came to agree an action plan to take back to their facilities, it was all about keeping a better eye on the operators. They received the same unspoken message as I did about what the right answer was.

So my teaching didn't go down too well with the purse-holders, and I felt less than slick on quite a few occasions.

I dressed as I now do in HE, which is quite casual, rather than the suits I used to wear whilst training, and I now think that this was a mistake, I was dressed like the staff rather than the managers.

My attempts to continually tailor the course to the audience, and ensure learning meant that I didn't cover some optional extra material which I had hoped to. I also made a couple of practical mistakes, for example handing out an answer sheet rather than the question sheet on one occasion. None of this would have bothered me for a moment in HE, but I felt that appearances mattered more in the business environment.

It's easier to look slick if you simply deliver the course you wrote, at the pace you planned. Does continually monitoring and reacting to the audience necessarily makes things a little more homespun? It does with me.

I was also left feeling that I could do with more people skills, with which I might somehow have persuaded the inscrutable female managers to tell me what the cause of their slightly distrustful and antagonistic expressions (which gave the lie to their assurances that the course was everything they had hoped for and more) was.

Fashion and Futility

2011-07-18T09:14:00.014+01:00

Having established that pedagogy makes no progress, but instead like fashion, cycles through the same tired old ideas by turns to no end, one should not get the impression that I am claiming that engineering is entirely immune from fashion.

My specialist subject is sewage treatment, and from the dawn of attempts to treat sewage rather than simply dump it into the environment, there have been two basic approaches. You can attach the micro-organisms which you use to treat the sewage onto a surface, or you can let them float free in suspension. Each of these approaches has intrinsic, unavoidable advantages and disadvantages. Back in the nineteenth century, the two processes were called activated sludge, and trickling filters, though their variants now have many names, (or more precisely acronyms, engineers being what they are)

Periodically, marketing departments launch a "new" process which is actually one of these two nineteenth-century processes in a new wrapper. Wild claims are made for the new process- that it transcends the limitations of its type of process, even that it transcends the limitations of all sewage treatment processes.

The slightly less tough-minded engineers in client organisations all have to get on the bandwagon, and have one of these great new plants, but after a few years it always becomes clear that the "new " process is only "a marketing breakthrough", like the scam set-top aerial in the pic. "You pay no satellite fees because you don't use satellite signals"- it never actually says you will be getting satellite TV, does it? Fantastic!

Engineers who aren't too close to the design process can be flim-flammed like the general public into buying an overpriced recycling of old ideas, but design engineers are rather harder to con- they see through the marketing department gloss, and say "that's essentially activated sludge", or whatever.

They run their heuristics over the proposal and see that the manufacturers' claims are highly improbable,and ask the manufacturer to provide evidence to back the claims. In every case, the margin of error on the data lies from around the normal performance of that type of technology to the salesman's claim. Thus design engineers soon learn to trust only raw data, and traditional heuristics.

This reliance on heuristics is despite the fact that biochemical engineers like myself can predict the performance of individual strains of living organism under lab conditions as accurately as if they were a non-living assemblage of biochemicals, or a machine.

However, there are many strains of many kinds of organism in a sewage treatment works, the feedstock to the system is constantly varying in volume, composition, temperature, pH and so on. Sewage can contain any chemical whether man-made or naturally occurring, and the metabolic breakdown products of these substances after passing through humans and other organisms-compared to sewage treatment, teaching has a very small number of variables.

If we wanted to put together an extraordinarily complex model, we might approximate quite fine details of behaviour in a sewage treatment system, but all of the computing power in the world would not be able to tell us about the fate of one bacterial spore.

The system is irreducibly complex, by its nature probabilistic, it defies numerical analysis at the level of a single element. Yet I could teach some undergraduates everything they needed to know to outline a system design in two hours because whilst it is impossible to know what happens to an individual element, it is quite simple to understand roughly what will happen overall.

So, if teaching is a complex as we are constantly told, there is little point in trying to understand all of its individual details, even if we were in a position to use them in a non-time-pressured way to design the system (and those attempting the investigation were real scientists). That we have to do the most important elements of design on our feet makes any attempt to scientifically analyse the subcomponents (as the neuroquacks do) futile.

I can design a sewage treatment plant in my head whilst driving a car, or redesign it whilst standing looking at it - I can compare it with the heuristics on my feet. This is professional practice- the Edge article James linked to recently seemed to capture elements of it well, though it is more numerate in the case of engineering. Our gut feeling is tested against coarse numerical standards.

To call those who like Phil Race try to produce such heuristics for teachers " mere trainers" is simply a version of that old British snobbery about application and practice versus pure research (an interesting thing about the Edge article was that Americans seemingly think that they have this prejudice and we don't)
In summary: professionals need reliable heuristics which can be applied on the fly-they do not need, nor can they use philosophising, blue-sky research, political correctness, or bullshit.

My Pedagogic Creed

2011-07-15T10:46:00.012+01:00

Now that we have established that the original source of pretty much all of the unexamined axioms in pedagogy is Dewey, we can look at his own irrational beliefs, which he helpfully listed in a document which he referred to as his "creed", betraying its Christian origins. It can be seen here, and in fairness, it is at least honest in that it list his beliefs not as claimed truths, but by their proper name.

So these are religious beliefs, not scientific theories, but these beliefs form what is supposed to be the bedrock upon which modern European pedagogy is founded. Anyone who doubts that these are religious beliefs founded only in emotional responses need only look at the last, and summarising one:

" I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God."

I'm not in the prophet business, and my response to Dewey's creed is to say "I dunno if..." to each of his assertions. They fall into that worst of all categories for a scientist - not even wrong. So this is why pedagogic discourse so often seems like theology. Because it is.

So what then is my pedagogic creed (or "Teaching Philosophy" as it is now called to disguise its true roots, and to make it seem as if we were grounded in rationality rather than emotionalism)? I don't have one - philosophers change their minds with no greater frequency than religionists. I am unwilling to produce a list of things in which I "believe", in the sense in which Dewey used the word, as I try not to hold beliefs in the face of contrary evidence at all - I hold no store in "faith".

I have recently been reading "what we believe but cannot prove", which has sat unread for quite some time, as I was being assailed by enough unprovable beliefs as it was on the MA. Of course we all as human beings have beliefs which we cannot prove, but I am not going to carve mine in stone, nor am I going to foist them unchallenged on my charges in education.

However:

I believe that it isn't my job to attempt through my teaching to remake society for the best, as I don't believe that I know what would be best for society in general, how to change people so that they believe as I do, or how exactly they should achieve any change in society I might wish for.

I believe that it is generally speaking the very people who want to remake society to their personal vision of what would be for the best who are responsible for the worst things that ever happened to people. This is true irrespective of whether their ideology is religious, political, philosophical or psychological. I know they mean well, but just look at the results!

End of creed.

Further Reaction: Silly Arguments

2011-07-12T12:28:00.003+01:00

James's recent post on the silliness of the andragogy vs pedagogy debate tempted me to comment glibly "but when you take away the silly arguments, what is left"? I resisted, but what is there in the field of learning and teaching but silly arguments?

No-one ever delivered a lesson which conformed exactly to the teachings of a single philosophical school, and if they had, it would have been the worst lesson ever delivered. This is one of the reasons why there is no direct evidence of the superiority or inferiority of progressive vs traditional teaching, andragogy vs pedagogy, constructivism vs whatver-ism and so on.

Secondarily, where there is evidence, as for example in the research/teaching nexus the field's valuation of things for which there is reasonable evidence as of no greater likeliness than things which are merely philosophically arguable ensures that no debate will ever be concluded.

Thirdly, the methods used in the field are so poorly controlled for confirmation bias that virtually all of the research is worthless.

Fourthly, the idea that it is better to be interesting than right is a commonplace.

Fifthly, the intake of education departments is more or less the least intelligent in academia.

In summary, the field has been optimised to ensure that nothing will ever be known about the subject, but third-raters will be provided with a sinecure, reliably producing nothing except silly arguments.

It is intrinsically silly to expect any answers from a field so constituted, but even if we were to staff education departments with real scientists, they would not be able to tell us which philosophy is best. Philosophies are not better or worse, they are founded in axioms rather than facts. If you agree with their axioms, they are good. If you disagree, they are bad.

So let's forget about trying to prove that our own brand of philosophy is better than the other one-how about trying to see if a particular technique is better than another in our limited context. Forget philosophy, forget grand unified theories-what works with our particular students, teaching our particular subject? I'm not talking here about what we feel works, or what we enjoy teaching, I'm talking about what gives measurably better results. Even my little investigations show that such research is really pretty easy, and can form what looks to be a reliable basis for getting better at teaching.

Reactionary: Be Right, Be Relevant, Work Hard

2011-07-08T10:26:00.010+01:00

Though few or none are doing it (perhaps because it runs counter to the progressive spirit of hope above experience) I think it potentially possible to do research into education which is right, relevant and rigorous, contrary to the advice from insiders.

My disappointment with the paper on engineering education research I found recently was that I hoped that some of the overwhelming majority of engineering academics who think that educational research is nonsense might have thought to start doing their own.

Relevance is at the heart of engineering's distinctive non-scientific methodology. Engineers are used to doing ultra-relevant research addressing how to make something work as well as possible, and devising reliable performance indicators to facilitate this process. Taylor, the hated, though misrepresented time-and-motion man was an early advocate of something which is now very sophisticated. The effective application of this technique to processes including people is commonplace. The results of the research are not intended to be universally applicable, or "true"- they are intended only to be effective in that context.

Rather than making grand claims, how about some tiny, but relevant ones, like for example: "A technique for teaching mass balance to first-year UK chemical engineering undergraduates which outperforms didactic lecturing and tutorial on a contact time per exam score basis"- if there was a decent experimental design, solid quantitative analysis, and a convincing p value, that might pique the interest of some engineers.

Be Right, be Relevant, Be Rigorous-or Fuck Off.

Regrets

2011-07-08T09:42:00.005+01:00

I've been reading pedagogic literature again, and I really need to stop. As I know from previous investigations, any claims made in such literature are without rational foundation, despite the surface appearance of the document.

Take for example this blog post, which James featured on his shared items. It makes some very strong claims for the universal efficacy of a certain kind of XBL to teach "creativity"

" There are an increasing number of studies on educational methodology that demonstrate the same types of results—they find increased learning and participation in classes that use an integrated approach to teaching, as opposed to the traditional lecture"

The papers she quotes directly, which she considers to provide more or less conclusive proof of her assertions are not strong empirical investigations, but philosophical speculations.

She herself is a behaviour therapist working with autistic kids, but she is writing about the teaching of STEM subjects to"normal" kids as if she might have a valid professional opinion. She and the selective sources she quotes represent a narrow political viewpoint. She thinks of herself as a scientist, but she doesn't think like a scientist - she presents baseless philosophising and small studies not corrected for the Hawthorne effect as if they were strong evidence, and thinks her completely unrelated professional experiences and personal history bolster her case. She makes sweeping general claims based on highly specific studies, and so on.

I think she must have taken read another bit of tripe James linked to recently: Be Irrelevant, Be Wrong, Be Lazy: Three Rules for New Educational Researchers, which tries to imply that it doesn't mean what it seems to be saying, but ends up looking like that it exactly what it means, codifying a method to ensure confirmation bias, grand and unjustified claims, and utter pointlessness.

How do I know that any strong claims for the universal effectiveness of XBL are unlikely to be true? Such a strong and universal effect would show up in meta-analyses, and I know that they show XBL to be a disaster area. How do I know that it is stupid to be wrong, irrelevant and lazy? It's bleedin' obvious.

I regret reading these posts, and consequently having to put effort into figuring out what is wrong with them. Their certain stupidity angers me, and my anger makes it harder to see if there is any meat on their bones, and if I am not careful makes me less open-minded, less generous, less forgiving.

Even the little time spent on debunking them is wasted time - very few educationalists will think my criticisms valid, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stem the tsunami of crap which constitutes "educational research". It is endemically wrong, irrelevant and lazy-David Labaree is right about that.

A Little Learning and Dys-whatever

2011-07-07T08:27:00.022+01:00

An friend who does additional learning support has been told to start teaching in a certain way by a superior with an GCSE in psychology, who told him in support of the instruction certain things:

1. That the location of short-term memory has been located via MRI scans

2. That the mechanism of action of dyspraxia, dyslexia and dyscalculia is based in identified physical structures in the brain

This sounds like neuroquackery, or "brain based teaching" as it is known, but it's a fast moving area, perhaps I'm out of date?

My first question is one I've been puzzling about for a while now: what are these three "disabilities", exactly?

Dyspraxia, according to the BBC's expert may be caused by brain damage, and the NHS tell us whilst it makes you slow to learn, this somehow doesn't mean you are less intelligent than those quicker to learn.

Dyslexia is essentially reading difficulty in those with normal intelligence when competently taught- there's a couple of problems right there- which middle-class parent is willing to admit their child has less than normal intelligence? Which teacher willing to admit to providing substandard teaching?

Dyscalculia is the analogue of dyslexia for mathematical ability, with the same potential problems.

Dyspraxia differs from the other two by its association with ADHD and organic brain damage.

It has been claimed as our mickey-mouse psychologist has clearly heard that there is a neurological basis for dyslexia, and/or a genetic one, but a recent review concluded that "there is a mistaken
belief that current knowledge in these fields is sufficient to justify a category of dyslexia as a subset of those who encounter reading difficulties.".

So (if there is such a thing) "dyslexics" and "dyscalculics" are slow learners, and there probably no reliable way at present of distinguishing those who are just a bit thick from those who may have some sort of genetic or neurological deficiency than the social class of their parents - Tim Nice-but-dim clearly has dys-something-or-other.

There are a number of interesting sub-issues. How can you believe (as it seems many do) in dys-whatever if you don't believe in IQ tests? Surely your general intelligence has to be measured to determine that there is a discrepancy between your intelligence and your learning ability in some specific field?

Who diagnoses dys-whatever? In a commonplace occurrence, my friend's boss with the GCSE in psychology screens students herself- a highly experienced teacher who has observed her efforts thinks her screening a farce.

Diagnosing students with dys-whatever covers up bad teaching, brings in extra government money to learning institutions, and increases their apparent efforts to widen participation, and the students themselves get extra time in exams, free laptops, special treatment of all kinds. So both student and institution want a positive diagnosis, and there is a consequent conflict of interest in institutions being able to diagnose these conditions.

After screening, the student is sent out to one of the dys-whatever diagnostic services, but such services are unregulated and it is in their client's interest for them to provide a positive diagnosis. I wonder how many go home empty-handed from such diagnosis mills?

With no reliable tests, those responsible for the testing having no relevant training, and a conflict of interest for the tester, so what is the level of false positive testing? Are there any false negatives at all? Who knows, but those familiar with human nature can guess.

Now, I'm not saying that extra help isn't needed for slow learners, I'm just saying let's call them what they are-a bit slow on the uptake, even if their mummies and daddies are middle-class, and know how to work the system. The money spent on hiving-off the middle-class slow readers would be better spent helping all of them.

More personally, I note that my lectern is cluttered with the Dictaphones of "dyslexics" at the Russell Group Uni, but there are apparently none at the former poly (or they can't afford Dictaphones). They are presumably just a bit thick - they certainly sound thick with their local working-class accents (just as I am sure do to my posher colleagues).

I am not that great at maths, compared with my other abilities, so I am sure that if tested, I'd readily be diagnosed as dyscalculic. If I had done so (rather than as I had to, retaking my failed O-level in Maths under the same circumstances as everyone else, and then work extraordinarily hard to master the maths content of a master's in engineering) would I be as good an engineer?

No I wouldn't - I'd have been given easier tests than my peers, and would have been given what was really a lesser qualification because I was a bit slow. It's the difference between testing what a student is capable of doing if all circumstances are optimised for them personally, and what a student does under standard test conditions. The latter is what most people think qualifications represent- if we are going to give the dummies a head start, why not let them take their notes in, or just let someone smarter do the test for them?

Fellowship and Grade Inflation

2011-07-06T12:35:00.001+01:00

Got my FHEA certificate in today's post. Has anyone else noticed that the HEA's standard membership grade is Fellow, rather than Member, such that the usual "Fellow" grade has to be bumped up to "Senior Fellow"?

Overruled

2011-07-06T11:11:00.003+01:00

In the course board I wasn't invited to, it was decided to allow one of the students, who was a good four percent short of the minimum passing grade to be given "referrals" on a couple of bits of work she had not submitted, and had simply ignored the opportunity to submit late. Who knows what claims were made in support of this suggestion, or whether I could have factually contradicted them.

I was asked this morning by email if she might resubmit these bits of work now, or whether I would like to set an alternative bit of work for her to demonstrate understanding of the learning outcomes.

I wanted to teach the students how to work under pressure, and this student submitted nothing for a number of assignments, made no excuses, has no extenuating circumstances, and entirely ignored my attempts to get them to submit late or offer evidence of special circumstances. A student with a 2% higher total mark has been booted off the course.

Why do I get the feeling that it would be very unpopular, even pointless, to give a failing grade, whatever she turns in? Why does it seem to me that this referral is actually intended to be a free pass back onto the course?

Though Business Practice is clearly not taken as seriously as scientific subjects, my predecessor as module leader would definitely have been invited to the board meeting. I'm of no consequence to these people because I'm a part-timer, but I'm not going to take the opportunity to lazily be the person they think I am, even though no one is paying me for this.

I'll set a new bit of work intended to measure the learning outcomes, and I'll mark it on the same marking criteria as the work which was ignored. I'm not giving any free passes, nor will I succumb to the temptation to simply validate my previous conclusion. That's me- awkward.

So how should things be?

2011-07-05T13:54:00.021+01:00

Having established that educational theory is about how things should be, rather than how they are: how is it that things should be?

There's a preponderance of Dewey's ideas in today's UK educationalist's axioms: learning should be by doing rather than from textbooks, it should be social, focussing exclusively on understanding, fostering social and democratic aims and life-long learning, and it should champion immediate personal experience rather than "authoritarian" externally imposed truth, the teacher's need to be reflective- all Dewey.

Trainee educators are also exposed to Marxist, Post-modernist and other extreme ideological positions, but the basic core axioms are essentially Dewey's. The extreme stuff is saved for M-level, where I was on the face of it surrounded by Marxists who made the WRP seem like Liberals, and people so philosophical that (like Storm) they presumably felt as much as ease leaving by the second-floor window as the door. Your "advanced" student might consequently have acquired all sorts of other axioms, from the necessity to destroy any sort of hierarchy in the teaching process, the obligation to teach Marxism or post-modernism, whatever the name of the course, and so on.

In all of the philosophising, no-one ever mentions anyone outside this narrow spectrum of beliefs, but there is a contrasting position, which I had heard nothing about before today, known as"Essentialism", which apparently forms the philosophical basis of the overwhelming majority of modern American education.

So Dewey lost the argument in his own country, and American classrooms are apparently traditional, authoritarian and teacher centred, everything that our progressive ones are not. Our "universal" truths are actually parochial European ones, as Dewey's philosophical roots were German.

Now, essentialism is thought to be conservative and traditionalist, and progressivism - well, progressive. But:

Does it necessarily follow that an educational system founded in a socialist-humanist philosophy gives an outcome which socialists and humanists find more desirable?

Is it not the case that what works best in teaching is neither political nor philosophical, and that whether your aims are to produce socialist scientists or conservative ones, the way students learn is the same?

Is it not the case that no way of reliably schooling people into a given political viewpoint is known, and that exposure to wishy-washy liberal teachers is just as likely to produce fascists as liberals?

Is it valid to attempt to politically or philosophically indoctrinate our learners at all? Is this how things should be?

Can I not share Dewey's sympathies without thinking his aims desirable or his methods effective?

Normative and Descriptive Theory: Philosophy for Dummies

2011-07-05T13:32:00.001+01:00

There's the precise form of words for what's wrong with the entire content of all teaching courses I have been exposed to - entirely normative, or pseudo-descriptive.

They tell you more or less only about either how things ought to be, or about the pseudo-research which shows that things are as they should be. They teach you in essence to be a tenth-rate philosopher, or more commonly still a blind follower of ninth-rate philosophers. Thus their content is essentially normative, and their theories are defined as a philosopher's are.

It is not that the descriptive theories which science works with are intrinsically impossible to formulate, but that the entire field deals only in normative theories.

Educational theory is thus functionally identical to philosophy of education. Concepts brought in from subjects which might have some empirical tradition are treated only as a source of philosophical ideas. Hard facts (if there were any) would similarly need to be transformed into an approximated theoretical construct of no greater intrinsic value than one with a similar body of directly contradictory evidence before they could enter the gate of pedagogic discourse.

What if traditional teaching were better than progressive teaching?

2011-07-05T12:55:00.004+01:00

Since we don't really know anything about teaching and learning, its not merely possible that traditional teaching methods are better than progressive ones, it's quite likely.

Traditional teaching methods were developed as an art over a few millennia by people with no axe to grind, who only wanted to be as good as they could be at it. This method is not scientific, but we know from the application of this method to other arts how effective a method it is for developing a skill.

So then let us ask the engineer's question: "what is wrong with traditional teaching that needs fixing?" I can find no evidence that anyone actually showed that progressive education was better than the traditional kind. Progressive education is essentially founded on the beleif that knowledge without understanding is always and at all levels worthless, and is essentially the nineteenth century root of all forms of XBL.

But as discussed previously XBL is mostly pretty disastrous as a teaching technique compared with more traditional methods. Progressive education is against all sorts of drill based learning for example, but we all know (and I recently confirmed) some things are best taught by rote.

So progressive education is based on the application of a doctrinaire philosophical position to all situations. Now I know it has to be worse than traditional education - hide-bound ideology blind to facts never improves any situation.

Navigation by the Numbers: Analysis of Feedback

2011-07-05T08:26:00.007+01:00

Did my little analysis of WEA feedback today. I'm a tad concerned as to why I only had half a class on the last session, but those who were there assured me it wasn't disgruntlement, which is slightly reassuring.

Student Satisfaction

All "excellent" and "good" (mostly excellent) in the categories I affect (up from "satisfactory"/"good" on the last presentation)

There were spontaneous comments on the great team spirit (fostered by letting the punters make up their own team, rather than doing "team building exercises"?), my patience (hopefully not an ostentatious suffering-fools-gladly patience), and explanatory skill.

I have to withdraw one of my previous conclusions- you can get WEA learners to work between sessions - by arranging sessions in the normal slot with no teacher present.

Student Achievement

Everybody improved, with many going from the minimum "D" to the maximum "A" in the most important categories. Everyone who completed a form felt competent at navigation in the set environment (and as they all made it to the pub, they clearly were!)

My reaction: I think this went a lot better. What interests me most about this is that student satisfaction was improved using what is on the face of it an exquisitely dull instructional technique, and seemingly a strong team was built without any overt "team building exercises" - Lao-Tzu would approve.

Credit where it's due?

2011-07-04T10:17:00.004+01:00

Reading the New Scientist last weekend, I came across the following statement by a liberal arts academic:

The second half of the 20th century saw a collection of geniuses, warriors, pacifists, cranks, entrepreneurs and visionaries labour to create a fabulous machine that could function as a typewriter and printing press, studio and theatre, paintbrush and gallery, piano and radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier.

So, no mention of the boring old scientists and engineers who were actually responsible for the production of the fabulous machine in question, the networked computer, unless those are the "geniuses" or "visionaries" he refers to.

These practical professions (and indeed the entrepreneurs) were required, but the warriors, pacifists and cranks were as irrelevant as the philosophers who like to claim the computer as an example of their utility.

The Key Section

2011-07-04T08:57:00.022+01:00

Where is Gordon Freeman when you need him? I know he's only a theoretical physicist, but he's a physicist with a crowbar, which makes him a sort of engineer.

I was reading a paper whose title sounded interesting* this morning (which disappointingly turned out to be yet another a call to make engineering a branch of the liberal arts) when I came across this informative section:

In the U.S., the most closely related idea is that of a liberal arts education, designed to prepare students for “civic life” through education in philosophy, ancient languages, mathematics and science, which has a long history in U.S. higher education (Harper, Lattuca, Yin, & Terenzini, 2010). In fact, liberal arts was the foundation of U.S. higher education up until career-focused training in engineering, commerce and other topics were introduced and expanded throughout the 1800s and 1900s. Harper et al. (2010) explain: For most of the history of U.S. higher education, the goals of liberal education were thought to be different from and by some, incompatible with the goals of professional education in fields such as engineering, business, education, law, and medicine. …More recent are the calls for greater integration of the two components of a collegiate education...The concept of interdisciplinarity is related more recently in response to a means to organize expanding numbers of students and faculty members at universities since academic disciplines emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Dressel & Reichard, 1970). In order to develop professional skills such as teamwork, ethical decision making, communication, and consideration of social context which have been emphasized in the past 20 years, engineers should engage with other disciplines including the liberal arts. Thus, the movement can be labeled either liberal arts or interdisciplinarity. Harper et al. (2010) found strong support for the idea of engaging with other disciplines, as it relates to preparing future engineers, among U.S. engineering department chairs and associate deans in charge of undergraduate curriculum. However, preliminary results from the Creating a Culture of Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education project (Jamieson & Lohmann, 2009) indicate that some U.S. engineering faculty members are still struggling with the tradeoff of removing technical content from crowded curricula to accommodate such topics.

So (as I vaguely suspected) "interdisciplinarity" is a code for shoehorning in liberal arts content- (interesting also that a proper liberal arts education is supposed to encompass science and maths- how about shoehorning a bit of STEM into the far-less-crowded liberal arts timetable?)

The author of this paper's seeming bemusement that engineers cannot see the value of losing technical content to include study of the liberal arts shows that they are unfit either to teach engineering, or (as they attempt in the quoted section to do) to discuss "making engineers".

"Making engineers" would more likely involve somehow causing them to have utter contempt for the Arts in general and the liberal arts in particular- the engineering students I went to college with mostly thought of liberal artists in the same way that Cartman thinks of hippies: stupid, lazy, useless, woolly-minded twerps. We don't deliberately educate our students to think that way, but they are smart kids - they notice how many more hours they work than arts students and how much higher A level grades (in far harder subjects) they got than the liberal artists. They know that they are much smarter than the liberal artists and that their profession is far more useful.

It isn't that engineers necessarily despise culture, but what goes on in HE arts departments is bugger-all to do with the actual production of cultural artifacts. It is to do only with the promulgation of a particular sort of anti-realist criticism of those bold enough to actually attempt to produce something by those incapable of doing anything but criticise. Somehow engineering has managed to do without this function up to now, though presumably if we allow ourselves to be contaminated by these drones, we will acquire not just schools of liberal engineering education, but schools of incoherent cod-philosophical criticism of engineering's output.

Why do even academic engineers balk at introducing liberal arts content? Even if they get over their vague, (and I am sure entirely unreasonable) prejudice against taking advice from the "thickies" in the arts dept, a real engineer is going to think "many (but by no means all) of those aims sound worthwhile, can you show me some evidence that your suggested content change actually achieves them?" or "are you sure that those aims are specifically useful to an engineer's professional development?" Being engineers, sooner or later, one of them is going to ask these questions, disrespectful as this might seem to liberal artists too "civilised" to ask uncomfortable questions, and no-one will be able to give an answer which will satisfy a real engineer.

Even if we were to accept the (highly questionable) axiom of the liberal arts that their version of education is somehow civilising, engineers are not necessarily in need of civilisation- a certain amount of hairy-arsedness may be required in the profession. It takes all sorts to make a world, and if engineers are as a class a bit rough round the edges, I'm not convinced that that is a problem.

I'm not even convinced that their traditional preference for reading the Torygraph is a problem. I remember when The Sun tried to make being left-wing a sort of mental illness, but I'm in no mood for pay-back. Being a Tory doesn't need fixing - our student's politics are no more our business than their sex lives.

*The Emergence of Engineering Education Research as an Internationally Connected Field of Inquiry (Journal of Engineering Education January 2011, Vol. 100, No. 1, pp. 14–47)

Exam Board

2011-07-04T07:55:00.001+01:00

Exam board for the Business Practice students is tomorrow. Naturally as I'm a part-time lecturer, no-one has though to invite me, even though I'm the module leader.