Outcomes and Assessments: Point of Order

Some of you may remember that I am not antipathetic towards the outcomes and assessment movement. In fact, I'm rather a fan of the idea of faculty sitting down together and seeing how the students are doing and coming up with ways to make sure students graduate with a degree that means something. I like the idea of giving a common exam to all students on a course and having double-blind readings of the scripts. I like the idea of outside examiners. To me, those things are signals that there is some sort of conversation across a field about what is important, and it would certainly encourage me to work harder on content and on making sure I was better organized. I don't find such things threatening to my autonomy, as do many of my colleagues at SLAC and in other places. They are just reminders that I have to cover a certain body of knowledge, and not all students will answer all questions anyway.

I feel similarly about the sort of outcomes my department has, which are largely skills-based. Here I'm on very shaky ground and likely to really piss people off. Different historians have different sorts of skills expertise. We can't all be experts in all of them. I have a colleague who uses local archives all the time - I've never done local history, nor used an archive; at the same time, some of my colleagues have very different ideas of what it means to write a primary source analysis than I do. I think a student can write a perfectly good, and more importantly, rigorous, 5000-7000 word research essay that asks a question of a single source, perhaps a saga, or Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History; or perhaps of a few dispute charters or traditiones. Close reading is integral to what I do (so much so that sometimes I skimp on the literature more than I should). But if there is a single course that all students have to take to teach the skills we say we assess, it seems to me that faculty need to work together to define the skills and they need to give up some autonomy to make sure that, whoever teaches the course, the students can go on to all other classes in the department and be fairly successful without any one faculty member having to teach from scratch the stuff that students in their classes need.

In a way, outcomes and assessments done well and meaningfully are sort of a reflection of Rousseau's Social Contract. We all give up being able to teach only what we want,* or just our way of doing things, in order to make sure our students will be successful in other departmental courses, or if they transfer elsewhere. They have to have faculty buy-in and contribution at all levels, and faculty, even those who are willing, need to see the bigger picture.**

Lots of things can gum up the works. Lack of faculty buy-in, administrators who take far too dictatorial an approach (other than saying, "I don't care how you do it, but it needs to be done by X or we lose funding and accreditation."), Accreditation agencies and governments who are far too hung up on "accountability" when they have no bloody idea of what is important in a field (and everybody think they know what is important in history -- dog forbid that it requires anything like training to be an expert!).

But this week, I realized what the number one problem with having valid outcomes and assessments is. You could have the most cooperative faculty in the world and the most supportive administrators. It doesn't mean a damned thing if the students aren't prepared for university level work. If they can't manage, or won't do, the readings; if they don't come to class sessions, especially seminars and discussions, prepared; if they are ignorant of geography, how can we teach towards the outcomes we've set? How can our assessments and measurements of those outcomes be valid?

They can't.

If we teach at the university level, we have to have outcomes that reflect that level. But such outcomes are based on the idea that our students can work up to that level over the period they are at the university. How do we measure when we have to (and yes, this is true not just at my SLAC, but at colleges and universities all over the US) spend time on how to study, how to write an essay, how to read effectively,*** take notes, write an essay exam, become familiar with the most basic world maps of the present (let alone the past)...? Those things are just plain inappropriate as university level outcomes. Some of them belong in elementary school, for goodness' sake!

And how do we measure that the reasons students cannot achieve the outcomes we set, outcomes that should match up to those at other institutions like ours, are not necessarily because of our teaching, or even of student learning, are because the underlying assumptions of what it means to be ready to study for a university degree have not been met? Technically, it's not all that difficult to document, I suppose. We can ask students to self-report average time spent studying on a course (the are surprisingly honest!). We can scan and save student writing samples to demonstrate that students are not prepared, or that they have learnt something, but it may not be what they were supposed to learn for the course (mine usually write better at the end -- at least "write a well-argued analytical essay that answers a historical question, supported with specific detail," is one of our outcomes!

But I ask you -- how can assessment be meaningful if we spend as much time teaching students to be students as we do our subject? and how can the teaching in our subject not suffer if we are taking so much time away from it to give students the skills they need to succeed (to a point -- if students really are clueless and hopeless, I will ask them to drop). I have colleagues who simply fail such students, but there has to be a better resolution.



What do you all do, if you have to deal with such things? How will you, when you do?(which you might not if you are in the UK, since the Big Society mavens seem to be very happy with the idea of limiting uni education to the elite -- although they seem to have bugger all in the way of ideas as to what's going to happen to everybody else).




Update: Dave at The Long Eighteenth Century has pointed me to his very useful post on exactly this sort of thing! Thanks, Dave!








*Yeah, I know: most of us don't teach just what we want, but you'd be surprised at how many people think that academic freedom means complete control over the curriculum. There are things I don't teach, but it's not because I don't want to -- it's generally because I can't get to them because the most specialized class I teach is Ren-Ref!

**I will smack the first one of you that says this is a dean-ish comment. Just because I can think like an administrator doesn't mean I want to be one!

***this week I have had the fun of discovering that a student thought an incredibly common expression meaning "people were so focused on this thing that it became the driving force behind government and social policies," instead meant, "people discarded this thing and got as far away from it as possible." There was also the joy of having students tell me the only way they could learn was to bring their books to class and read along while we were discussing the information. No joke.

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

So I am at a friend's/adopted sister's for Thanksgiving. Me, her, and her husband. And the cats. One is rather large .. 27 lbs and about 3 feet long, not including his tail. The other is also not small, but only in a normal not-small-cat kind of way. He's also very orange. We've been talking about life, and teaching, and departmental politics. One of the nice things is that both of them are modernists who sometimes do American history. So they can offer sensible opinions of what normal methodology is for people in their fields. This has been really helpful, both in validating my feelings that all of the people in my department don't mean the same thing when we use the same words (for example, in my world, document analysis almost always requires a close reading of the text, as well as demonstrating an understanding of the context; in theirs, it's far more about context, and close readings are optional at best). It's also been very helpful for my understanding where some of my Americanist colleagues are coming from. Apparently, when Americanists go to conferences, they don't really quiz each other on the use of evidence the way medievalists often do. For me, this is a little weird. I mean, if I went to a panel on Merovingian bishops, I'd expect to hear references to Gregory or maybe Venantius, or... you get the idea. There's a general sort of corpus of narrative history that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, and we examine the use of those sources as much as anything else, I think. But apparently, this isn't true in all subfields. This explains a lot to me about some of my department's dynamics. It also means I need to re-think some of the ways I teach the methods course, so that the students working with the Americanists will have a better idea of what they need to do on their theses...

ETA: It's interesting that my friend described my approach to what I think of as documents or sources as more akin to a literary approach to texts: very old-fashioned; something that might have been acceptable 40 years ago, but would never be published today. In fact, she intimated, it was like the approach of lit people, where everything is reduced to a text, and context occasionally is missed out. For my part, I said I thought that the other approach was clearly good for synthesis and focusing on context, but the actual primary source evidence seemed to be getting short shrift. In some ways, it seems to me that it's the difference between starting with the primary sources and working outward and starting with a question and the scholarship in working inward. There should be a conversation between the two, obviously, and I doubt I will ever be convinced that the old-fashioned approach is therefore less worthy (in part because I will still always have the attitude of someone who is expected to have more tools in her toolbox to start with, but is also big enough to allow for more tools). But it is probably good to get the perspective of someone else, because this really plays into ideas of academic rigor and assessment.

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

So it's November, and I'm trying to get a bunch of things in order, so what better way to do it than to vow to blog daily for a month. Today's post will be somewhat random, and therefore bulleted...

• I'm planning to respond to a lot of interesting blog posts this month...
  
  
• Jason Isaacs is terribly attractive,even when playing the dreadfully unpleasant Lucius Malfoy. Gary Oldman is also strangely compelling. But did you ever think that just perhaps we might want to take Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a little bit more in the way of an object lesson? Because really, every single death in the story is pretty much down to Harry and his amazing lack of self-reflection.
  
  
• Guy Halsall's blog is starting to annoy me, because he's writing really interesting stuff I don't have time to read
  
  
• You may also hear about my going to the gym. This is because I've been terrible about taking care of myself for the last year or so. And that is largely because there has been a lot of crap going on in my life, primarily professionally. That you won't be hearing about.
  
  
• Speaking of which, spinning classes are hard, but not as hard as yard work. I'd forgotten all about that aspect of home-owning
  
  
• again, or still, I'm amazed by how some faculty react when they hear the word "assessment" -- It's as if the word means, "we don't trust you to do your jobs and are going to scrutinize every little thing you do, and if it's not perfect, there will be Consequences!", when really, it mostly just means, "what is it that you want your students to learn, how can you tell if they are learning it, and what do you do if they aren't?" Instead of getting that it's perfectly ok to fail, and then fail better (as long as you document it), they instead talk about "gaming the system" -- even though the system is generally up to faculty to define. I mean really, it boggles the mind.
  
  
• Meanwhile, I'm going to be trying to post boring updates about my research projects, just to keep me honest.

and that is my first post of the month. Sorry it's a bit dull.

The problem with Assessment...

The Problem with Assessment

I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately. This is partly because it is on my institution's radar screen in a big way, and partly because it seems to be one of the real stumbling blocks for faculty relations all over. That is, it seems to me that there are often faculty who are very much on board with the idea of having clearly articulated assessment programs and others who aren't. It doesn't seem to me to be a generational thing, although there is certainly something to that -- at SlACs like mine, older faculty are often used to doing things their own way, whereas younger and often junior faculty are a bit more open to working on such programs. You all probably know that I'm sort of an assessment fan. I don't want anybody in lock-step with me, and I don't want to be in lock-step with anyone else, but I see the value in all the people in a department or an institution having the same sort of standards.

This seems to me to be a particularly American thing in some ways, too. My colleagues in the UK are used to a system of double marking and outside evaluators. I think that's a good thing. I know people who see it as a threat. In fact, I think that, in general, the people who want to stay as far away from any coherent assessment program are those who are the most frightened of being found out. It's impostor syndrome, but in a way I've never thought of before. I worry all the time about being found out, about my colleagues finding out I'm not really one of them. This is entirely centered on my worth as a scholar. It never occurs to me to feel like a fraud in the classroom, but then it always occurs to me that there are better ways to teach something, and I talk to people about teaching all the time. there are plenty of ways my teaching is flawed, but I do also know that I'm not a bad teacher. Weirdly, it never really occurred to me that there might be people whose impostor syndrome worked in the reverse.

Assessment, good assessment, means looking carefully at oneself and the way that one teaches. When we talk about assessment and "quantifying the unquantifiable" as one of my colleagues puts it (which is total bullshit, as far as I'm concerned), it looks like we're tracking our students. To some extent we are, but more importantly, we are assessing ourselves. If our students aren't doing well, then we have to ask why. And why it might be that we aren't doing as good a job as we ought to be doing. We might have to change and re-think things. To me, this is a given. But I can see that, to others, this might also be an indicator that we were wrong, that we weren't doing our jobs well. What if our students aren't lazy or stupid? What if it's us??

I think the truth is that we do have some lazy students and some students who are kind of boneheaded. But we also just have students who are smart, but aren't ready, or unprepared. And we do need to learn to teach them, and perhaps to change the way we teach in order to serve them and yes, to teach them in ways they can learn. Because if we don't assess, and self-assess, then the problem *is* us.

Cross-listing courses and Interdisciplinarity, part 1

Cross-listing Courses and Interdisciplinarity, part 1

This is actually one of those few times where I'm posting about something of particular relevance to something happening at SLAC, even though I'm sure that y'all have all dealt with such things before. One of the reasons I'm posting is because I told a colleague I would, and would share with hir the comments that are left. So zie is sworn to silence about this blog. And cannot share it with anybody else. Otherwise, I might not be able to continue blogging, if a ton of my colleagues start reading this. And that would be a shame, since I'm up to judge the Cliopatria Awards this year. Dunno which category yet, but watch this space for more on that.


Anyhoo ... cross-listing. Last week, a colleague asked me whether zie could cross-list a course as a history course. As department chair, it's my call. This ended up opening up a few cans of worms, not the least of which is a conversation about interdisciplinarity. One of the other cans was how different my own ideas about cross-listing seem to conflict with what seems to have been the norm at SLAC. The feeling I've got from speaking to more senior colleagues is that cross-listing has often been treated as a sort of unofficial barter system based on the way FTEs have been counted: a faculty member wants to teach a course in a special topic, but the course won't make unless it's cross-listed with another department, because students don't have a lot of electives to spare. So the course gets cross-listed, the faculty member gets to teach the cool class because there are enough students, and the department that allows the cross-listing gets credit for additional FTEs that accrue into the departmental total.

To be honest, I've never seen anything like this before, but then, most of my teaching experience is at state schools. My response to the request was in line with what I've seen done elsewhere -- I asked for a syllabus and typical assignments, and said that, in order for a course to be listed in my discipline, it needed to clearly address and fulfill my department's outcomes and assess them in ways consistent with what my departmental colleagues and I have agreed are acceptable for courses at that level, and are consistent with what we actually do. My initial rationale for this was pretty basic -- our accreditors require that we show that we do the things we say we do, so if a course is listed as history, it has to do those things, and I have to be able to work the assessment data into my annual assessment report, which means comparing apples to apples. Period.


There are other ramifications that have come to light here that I want to talk about, because they touch on things like gatekeeping, interdisciplinarity, and our own definitions of our fields. And my own personal pet peeve, which I sort of worry plays into it: the idea that anybody can teach history. But before I go there, I'd like to put out a call for input especially on how your campus goes about cross-listing courses. If you could comment below, I'd really appreciate it. I checked with the institution where I taught for the longest time pre-SLAC, and it was even more complicated than I remembered. First, a faculty member would approach the cross-listing department or program with a syllabus in hand. That syllabus would have to reflect the outcomes of the cross-listing department and assessments for those outcomes. Next, once verbal agreement was reached, the faculty member would fill out a course proposal form and get sign-off from both department chairs and the dean. Then, the proposal would go through the regular curriculum committee process, which could take up to several months, and the course would be approved for the next academic year.

Now, one problem with this particular approach at SLAC is that, if in a case like mine, it's a special topics course being cross-listed as a special topics course, then that would mean that all courses taught in both departments under the special topics numbers would be forever linked. That's just a bad idea. But we have a rule that we can't add new courses permanently until they've been taught twice successfully as special topics. Be that as it may, my own impression is that most institutions handle cross-listing more as former college does. Or am I wrong? How does it work at your place?

Assessment by stealth is a different animal

Assessment by stealth is a different animal

I know I defended Outcomes and Assessments in my last substantive post. But since then, I've run across a huge exception to that.


Actually, it's not an exception. I think OA is great in theory and can be done well, in a way that enhances our teaching. For that, it has to be faculty driven.

This is different. I am currently in the position of having to change my syllabi to say that I teach things that I find entirely inappropriate to my courses. Because I believe the syllabus is a sort of contract, I will therefore teach those things. Why? because if I don't, our secondary ed students will have to add another mandatory course to their already very heavy load. The alternative? The Ed. School loses accreditation.

So basically, NCLB and the state K-12 wonks are able to drive what is taught in the universities. And that is wrong. THAT is a case of non-experts telling us what we can and can't do. And one of the best parts? they are getting the curriculum in part from outdated textbooks, which makes it almost impossible for us to correct many of the things that current research rejects, i.e., we are forced to perpetuate bad history, just so we can teach students that the people we taught to teach them in K-12 were wrong.

How screwed up is that?

On the Outcomes and Assessments Borg

On the Outcomes and Assessments Borg

There has been much in the blogosphere lately about Outcomes and Assessments and (mostly) how we should Just Say No. It's all Clio Bluestocking's fault. She started it. Then Historiann picked it up, and Sisyphus riffed on that, and then Dance offered an alternative. The shortest post I could make right now is to say, "Wait, people? you know that idea of Dance's that you all seem to like? that's a lot of what OA is when done correctly!"

Somehow, I think people might expect me to say a little bit more, given my lengthy comments elsewhere. So here are some reasons I think OA is not necessarily the Borg:

1. As I just said, OA done well can be as simple as sitting down and thinking about what you are doing, what you want to be doing, articulating those things, assessing for the evidence of those things, documenting how your expectations fit what the students are doing, then going back and tweaking your teaching and/or your expectations the next time around, documenting that, and so on. It's about documenting process and goals. Having said that, there are people who want to use 'bad numbers' to beat us over the head. Those are the people we need to fight, not the idea. Self-reflection is not a bad thing, whether on a personal, departmental, or institutional level.
   
   
2. Outcomes at the course level are good pedagogy. Too often we find ourselves building new preps in a hurry, and many new faculty who have not taught before, as well as some of their more senior colleagues, are wont to build the class based on coverage -- Look! a textbook that has the same number of chapters as the semester has weeks! we'll do a chapter a week, and then ... This is not a good way to plan a class, unless your idea of history is to teach a narrative via lectures, and then get the students to paraphrase your narrative on essay exams. I don't think that's what a good history class should be, even at the survey level. A university history class, IMO, should be teaching the discipline of history, as well as a (or several) narratives. So I'm all for thinking about what I want students to get out of my classes, and it's not a difficult step for me to translate that to course outcomes.
   
   But that's not really what we're talking about -- this is more department- and program-level outcomes. Well, honestly, I can't find any reason that my department shouldn't have a common set of ideas about what somebody graduating with a degree in history should know, and know how to do, when they finish. Since my department has a capstone course, something that, by the way, seems to make a lot of accrediting agencies very happy, if it's done well, it only makes sense that we sit down together and decide how to make sure that the students are given the chance to learn the skills for the capstone no matter whose classes they take. It also makes sense that people teaching the same course should agree on how they are going to measure the students' performance, rather than having one History 101 prof giving weekly quizzes, two midterms, a paper, and a final, and another giving a research paper and a final and a power-point presentation for the same course. And generally speaking, the students should be learning the same material, although obviously different people will focus more on their strengths and interests. But if there is such a thing as canon, then it should be taught in each section of a course taught by several people. It's only fair to the students.
   
   
3. Speaking of departments, one of the things that Historiann and others have said repeatedly is that we are all professionals, and we already examine our teaching, and do the kind of self-reflection that OA is supposed to encourage. In a perfect world, yes, that's true. In the one where I teach? Not so much. I've never taught at a place where there was not at least one truly dysfunctional department, and usually a couple of faculty colleagues who weren't professional, weren't at all self-reflective, and were the pedagogical equivalents of a night on bad tequila -- the students can't help but vomit, and they can't bear the thought of getting near the subject again for years. Now, these colleagues are not going to go away, and these departments are not going to get functional, but the process at least allows the faculty who do want to teach in a solid program, and do want to serve the students who want to learn to work together more efficiently, document when their unprofessional colleagues are not playing nicely with other children to the detriment of the program and to its students, and let the students know what is expected of them.
   
   
4. Students. They are not customers. But they do pay money to be allowed to study with us. Is it a bad thing to work together to make it clear to the students why we do things the way we do? to give them clearly articulated expectations and then demonstrate that we grade according to the expectations we say we're going to grade by? Is there anything worse than the perception that a faculty member is unfair (well, other than the things that are really worse, obviously)? But seriously, is it a bad thing to have an outcome that says that students will learn to differentiate primary from secondary sources, and use them to create a well-supported narrative or analysis? And then to say, "this is what we mean by well-supported"? Let me tell you, I've been in meetings where my very professional colleagues cannot give examples of these things, or even the characteristics of them, instead relying on the, "I have a PhD and know it when I see it," argument.
   
   This is the one that annoys me the most, I think. The idea that we are somehow above explaining what it is we do. There is an intrinsic beauty in history and its study, I think. And I don't really buy the idea that we should have to justify our disciplines to non-experts. But at the same time, we really don't live in a world where people think that way. And we are employees of universities and colleges. If they are public, well ... when does, "trust me, I'm the expert," work for us academics? Moreover, we have a glut on the market in the humanities these days. If you can't explain what it is you do, and how you grade to your own colleagues, then there are people who can do your job just as well who can and will.
   
   
5. That last bit kind of brings me to my second-to-last point for right now. I'm a little freaked out by how authoritarian I sound. Because honestly, I'm all about good faculty governance, good contracts, and the tenure system (with regular post-tenure reviews). But I also see myself as an employee of my institution. There are things I am required to do as part of my job -- I have to provide receipts for reimbursement, I have to turn in grades on an A-F scale no later than the semester deadline, I teach history, and not English or Religion, I teach the students the university admits, whether or not I think they should be there, and I go to godawful meetings when I am supposed to. Sometimes I even teach a class at a time I'd rather not, because that's what the Dean has asked me to do. In exchange, I get to teach my subjects pretty much in the way I like, I get to teach courses I like, more or less -- as long as they serve the students and the university, I get support to travel and research (to some degree -- and lots of moral support!), and a paycheck.
   
   Having said that, I can't imagine the sort of top-down approach to OA that a lot of people are complaining about. The places where I've encountered something even in that realm are places where either the administration didn't take assessment seriously and are therefore cacking themselves because they have to try to come up with masses of data all at once, or where there was never a clear explanation to the faculty of why they needed to drive the faculty part of OA -- or where faculty are just so disaffected that they refused, and are now facing something that is not at all what they expected. No matter the reason, Clio N's experiences sound pretty abysmal, and I can see why she doesn't want to do it.
   
   
6. Last point ... institutional assessment. I'd like to think that it worked. I'd like to think that Student Services, Admissions, Computing, the Registrar, Campus Life, Facilities, etc., were really assessing themselves the way good faculty do. Even if they aren't? I think that OA can help to support some faculty concerns, because my guess is that this is one of the places where number crunching can give a fairly accurate idea of what's going on.

It's dinner time.

it's baaack!

it's baaaack!!

Well, so all of a sudden I realised that I had crunched all of our assessment numbers, but hadn't actually entered them into the computer to be stored forever into our accreditation records. Interesting thing. Turns out the numbers I crunched don't match up to what we say we're tracking. So ... I'm guessing I have one more task to add to my increasing OMG, the semester hasn't started and I haven't worked on the book, I now need to write an article draft by the end of the year, I owe a book review that is so late it may have been forgotten, helping organize a panel for K'zoo and an abstract for Leeds, and syllabi?????

OY.

It does not help that I've been going through that 'oh, wait, I am now senior faculty, wth?' thing since I got back.

so yeah, assessment.

Still, one of my goals this year, along with getting to the gym and getting that personal life that Superdean suggested I might want? is to blog a little more thoughtfully, and a little more often. Wish me luck!

If you teach in a forest, and nobody learns

If you teach in a forest and nobody learns ...

...did you really teach?

When I started this academic gig, I pretty much figured I knew the basics of the job: academics, no matter where we are employed, are engaged in some combination of teaching, service, and scholarship. The priorities and proportions may shift depending on where we are, but it's pretty much that, right? I also am one of the last people to subscribe to the idea that a college or university is a business, at least in the sense that the student is the customer and the customer is always right. No. Really, no. The student pays to have the chance to learn or not learn, as she chooses. Paying tuition gets a student in the door. What they do after that point is largely up to them. But in another way, institutions of higher education are businesses. It's not just that people are paying for the opportunity to learn, but they are also paying, especially at SLAC's like mine, for a particular sort of experience, a certain ratio of faculty to students, and to feel that they are being given the best possible chance at success -- and that's not even counting things like decent dorms, edible food, nice gym facilities, and ... oh yeah, quality teaching.

So what is quality teaching? How do you measure it? Can you measure it?

These are not trick questions.

For some of us, we measure our teaching by how much students learn. More or less. Obviously, if students are crap, or unable to do the work, they won't be learning much, no matter how good we are as teachers. But in general, the only way I can think of to tell if I'm a good teacher is to see whether the students are learning. This means that I need to think about what it is I want them to take away from my teaching, and in some way, measure it. I guess. The traditional way of measuring learning is through exams. And you know, I'm good with that in a general sense. You spend a period teaching a subject, and at the end, you test the students to see if they've learnt it. But that's a pretty broad interpretation. When I was attending Beachy U, and in Grad School, I knew I was responsible for learning all the information delivered to me in lecture and in the readings, and synthesizing it (and to some extent, regurgetating it) on exams. That's how it was done. If you had asked my profs how they measured learning, it would likely have been expressed more or less as, "the student used historical information from a variety of sources in order to support arguments for a particular historical interpretation." Or something like that. And I agree that that's basically what we want students to do. But what does that mean?

There are lots of important factors in learning history. And even those students who received what are considered decent high school educations are often ill-equipped for such exercises. They don't know what they don't know, nor are they sure what they are supposed to know. So in order to figure out if they are learning, i.e., if I am teaching effectively, I have to ask myself this: What parts do I most want them to learn? Is it learning the narrative? Is it learning to read and analyze primary and secondary sources? Is it learning to argue a particular view of why something happened? Do I focus on content or skills? Those are all important things. For myself, I'd like some sort of balance between them all, but if I have to choose, I tend to fall towards the 'learning to be a historian' side of things, because I think that the sorts of thinking and the presentation of information and creation of narratives that we do are the things that transcend the narrative, and are the tools that allow people to create their own narratives, and to question the ones they are offered. I think this is because, to me, thinking that learning history means learning a narrative, and maybe some varying interpretations, is like thinking a degree in English is about learning all the important works well enough to recite the plots, and compare and contrast them, but not ever learning about how the works have been seen, interpreted, and fit into the contexts of genre, style, period, etc.

Admittedly, there is a disadvantage -- well, lots of them! -- to this approach. First, it means that I often rely on my students learning a narrative (not the narrative, but a narrative) and the general factual stuff on their own, so we can spend the majority of class time discussing primary source documents. Next, it's just hard, because it means going in to every class not knowing where the discussion might lead. Students in one class might pick up on one thing, but not the same thing that another class does. I'm not saying it's chaos, but it means being fairly flexible and sometimes taking what you thought was an obvious discussion of class and changing into a discussion of gender roles, for example. Finally, that flexibility means that you really have to keep in mind, and keep steering towards, the things you want the students to learn, even if it means getting there by a slightly different path.

Honestly, I'm also a bit leery about this approach, because I worry that the students aren't learning enough content, enough narrative. And I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be just as good to walk in and give topical lectures and ask the sort of questions that help the students tie it all together. But this is all in my Survey courses, and I think I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that there is no way to cover all the content for five continents and anywhere from 500 years to 5000 years, so concentrating on a few themes seems a good way to go. And you know, it's not too hard to assess whether students have learned -- the hard part is making sure I cover the stated outcomes for the Gen Ed the course is supposed to fulfill.

Well. For a minute I was worried I'd got off track, but maybe not.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, whatever I'm doing wrong or right, when I think of teaching, it's always connected to whether or not the students are learning. If they aren't learning, I look for other ways to teach so that they do. There are some things I can't do: the sort of teaching do requires that the students take a lot of responsibility for their own learning, and it really doesn't work if they don't prepare for class. But still, in my head, there the point of teaching is that students learn from it: I need to be able to tell if they are learning and, if they aren't, I need to think about whether how I am teaching is part of the problem. And again, I am a little worried that the what I am teaching seems to be getting short shrift, or maybe I'm expressing it badly? Or maybe it's because, even apart from the survey, I teach Ancient, two different Medieval courses (this is my one attempt at 'specialty' courses -- I do Late Antiquity to the end of the Carolingians, and the Central- and HMA as separate courses -- still pretty much surveys), Ren/Ref, East Asia, and am supposed to fit Britain, Contemporary Europe, and Historiography/Methods into my two-year course rotation. So honestly, I'm still working on refining preps, and focusing on how I can teach well given that I've only taught one of these preps twice seems my best option. Or maybe it's excuses?

Anyway, I think we've established that teaching and learning are absolutely connected in my mind.

But not everybody sees it that way. There is a school of thought that our expertise is what makes us good teachers, that teaching is an art itself, and can be judged separately from whether students learn. And, well ... I think that, without students, I couldn't teach. They're sort of the point of it for me. A university, no matter the size, exists because of the students. Now don't get me wrong -- I think that the faculty are the heart of the university. Without us, there's no reason for the university to exist, and I wish more administrators and staff would remember that (SLAC's top administrators are admirable in the amount of support they give faculty, but some of the others seem intent on creating a culture among their staffs that breeds contempt for faculty and not only treat us as nuisances, but will say out loud that we aren't to be trusted advising students on career paths, courses to take in our majors, etc.). Without faculty who can do their jobs, no one else would have a job. But without students to justify faculty, none of us would have jobs. Or that's my understanding of how this stuff works.

To return to that idea of expertise, though, I have to ask: "what is the purpose of expertise?" And how do we judge it? Is it by the fact that our peers in the wider academic world respect us? Is it because we publish? I never really understood until I came to SLAC just how justified some people were in scoffing at the academics safely ensconced in their Ivory Towers. I'd met one or two in my career, but they were generally considered out-of-touch, oddballs. My undergrad days are far behind me, but even today, I can go to a conference in Anglo-Norman stuff, and when people ask me how I, the Carolingian person, can feel comfortable asking questions on Orderic Vitalis, for example (I wrote my senior thesis on his ideas of proper female behavior), I can say, "I did my undergrad work with X,Y, and Z at Beachy U", and S the scary A/N legal guy was on my PhD committee," and all is explained. Same when I go to the Late Antiquity panels -- what can I say? I studied with good people as an undergrad and grad student. Hell, I studied with people who are very well known in their fields. I have friends who are well known. So do a lot of us, I know. But my point is, none of these people, these well-known scholars, ever have ever given me the idea that there was a separation of teaching and learning, or that their expertise, especially the expertise attached to their rather extensive CVs, was enough to justify their continued employment or get them out of service or teaching or the exercise that is assessment. In fact, I just flashed on the fact that one of the best known of all of these folk was better-known on our campus for his teaching, which contained many of the best show-tunes-based historical filks I've ever heard. I'm sorry -- a song about Alfred the Great sung to the tune of "Mame"? How could you not remember bits of narrative when presented that way?

And yet, the more time I spend at SLAC, and the more I hear from friends at SLACs, that Ivory Tower phenomenon is not nearly as rare as I thought. Our brilliance is not something quantifiable, our lectures are well-prepared pearls cast largely to an audience of unappreciative swine, and any attempts to articulate our goals and whether or not we meet them is merely killing the program by reducing it to numbers and threatening our academic freedom. I used to think this was more to do with an older generation of faculty who didn't like all of that newfangled assessment stuff, and who hadn't been allowed any buy-in when it came to self-evaluation and the setting of assessment standards. After all, that's the message that we often get from news reports on the possibility of external agencies and the federal government imposing standards from above. But now, I'm wondering if it isn't something more to do with the culture of the Small (Private) Liberal Arts Colleague. Where there is a tradition of building a particular culture of 'we are special', are we more at risk for creating Special Snowflakes?






I leave you with a cautionary tale -- Here's what happens when people have elevated their quest to something that may exist only in legend, or at least when they can't articulate their quest very well!