Feb 20
tomacademic, advertising, intellectual self-defence
There is a fundamental power asymmetry in education. Teachers understand what they are teaching, learners do not. Learners, by definition, cannot have a full appreciation of what they are about to learn, of its value and of how it will change them. If they did, they would not be in the position of learners. The only way you can ignore this is if you are mislead into accepting the banking metaphor of education (education as information transmission, teachers as content providers, students as receptacles to be filled).
One implication of this power asymmetry is that the authority and responsibility of the teacher cannot be abdicated. Students should not be left to ‘decide for themselves’. Sure, students can pursue their own path of inquiry, but teachers should be there to persuade and guide them. For a teacher to pretend that they are letting students ‘make up their own minds’ is simply a denial of their role, an obfuscation. Of course it is important that people can decide for themselves, but students’ autonomy is not icreased by a lack of teacher manipulation of their choices. All our choices are conditioned by our past, our environment and by other people. Free choices are still conditioned choices.
A discussion of this in relation to the morality of manipulation is provided by Buss, S. (2005). Valuing Autonomy and Respecting Persons: Manipulation, Seduction, and the Basis of Moral Constraints. Ethics, 115(2), 195-235. doi: 10.1086/426304. Buss only touches on the topic of education in a footnote (no. 71) but the implications of the general argument for education are clear: we cannot avoid affecting other people, manipulation without informed consent of their free chocies is inevitable, and so we cannot pretend that it is possible for teachers to avoid making choices for their students, or that full informed consent of students in the content of their education is desirable or possible.
Jun 05
tomacademic, intellectual self-defence, psychology
Academia is a quintessentially literate culture. Studying is reading, the outputs of research are papers and books. Your are judged on your ability to express yourself in writing, and when you do this you must reference the written works of others. This is what defines scholarship. More than this, the habits of thought are patterned by literacy. Literate thought is analytic, dissective. The business of science is that of ordering into lists, breaking into parts, assigning subordinate and superordinate.
And yet there is also a non-literate part to being an academic, a part closely alighted with the praxis of the discipline. This is giving lectures, discussing in seminars, attending conferences. The paper outputs of academia can disguise this component, but it is essential.
In a high-education system dominated by production-line and consumption values, by a receptacle-model of education (students as containers, education as a substance) it is easy to denigrate the ‘live’ oral component of academia, but in doing so we deny students contact with an essential part of scholarly life. Additionally we deny ourselves a cognitive model which can augment literate thinnking.
Walter Ong (Orality and Literature, 1982/2002) has written convincingly about the psychological dynamics of oral vs literate culture. Literate culture encourages finished works, whereas the knowledge of oral cultures is always live, an act of telling rather than knowing. As such it is part of a commons, rather than copyrighted (and plagarised). Oral knowledge is situational, empathetic and participatory, rather than abstracted and objectively distanced, it is contested rather than autonomous and tends towards holism rather than the progressive analytic deconstruction of literate thought. Oral thought is thematic compared to literate thought’s ability to dictate strict chronologies and linear narratives / list structures (just think of the memory constraints on oral culture which lacks written aids to see why pure abstract lists are impossible).
It is clear that academia needs to take elements from both of sides of these distinctions. Oral cognition can be impressionistic rather than precise, conservative rather than innovative and amnesic rather the hypermnemonic. Nonetheless the lived aspects of oral thought are a vital part of disciplinary practice and exposure to them is essential if students are to get a true view of their subjects.
A similar thing is argued by Kevin McCarron, a English literature lecturer and part-time stand-up comedian who argues for the imporance of improvisation in teaching. He says that an overreliance on preparation (the script or text of the class) as getting in the way of the (living) interaction of student and teacher:
(article in the Times Higher Education)
“If we don’t put ourselves under pressure, nothing interesting or exciting is going to happen. How could it? In fact, what we’ve done is spent three hours the previous night making sure that it doesn’t happen.
“Then we have the gall to offer these hours of preparation as morally sound. Self-protection is being offered to the world as a moral value. That preparation has been done to protect the teacher from the students. Teachers spend hours and hours preparing because they are terrified of bring caught out.”
Dec 11
tomacademic, psychology
I believe that the important thing about psychology is the habits of thought it teaches you, not the collection of facts you might learn. I teach on the psychology degree at the University of Sheffield and, sure, facts are important here — facts about experiments, about the theories which prompted them and about the conclusions which people draw from them — but more important are the skills which you acquire during the process of learning the particular set of facts. Skills like finding information and articulating yourself clearly in writing. Those two things are common to all degrees. But lately I’ve been wondering what skills are most emphasised on a psychology degree? And I’ve been thinking that the answer to this is the same as to the question ‘how do psychologists think?’. How does the typical psychologist[*] approach a problem? I’ve been making a list and this is what I’ve got so far:
1. Critical — Psychologists are skeptical, they need to be convinced by evidence that something is true. Their default is disbelief. This relates to…
2. Scholarly — Psychologists want to see references. By including references in your work you do two very important things. Firstly you acknowledge your debt to the community of scholars who have thought about the same things you are writing about, and, secondly, you allow anyone reading your work to go and check the facts for themselves.
3. Reductionist — Psychologists prefer simple explanations to complex ones. Obviously what counts as simple isn’t always straightforward, and depends on what you already believe, but in general psychologists don’t like to believe in new mental processes or phenomena if they can produce explanations using existing processes or phenomena.
I am sure there are others. One of the problems with habits of thought is that you don’t necessarily notice when you have them. Can anyone offer any suggested additions to my incoate list?
Footnote:
* I’m using the label ‘psychologists’ here to refer to my kind of psychologists — academic psychologists. How and if what I say applies to the other kinds of psychologists (applied, clinical, etc) I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com
RSS
Recent Comments