Thursday 28 August 2014

unlearning Higher Ed

Steven Shaviro
25 August at 16:14 · Edited · 
"Starting this Fall 2014, all syllabi must include learning outcomes. This is now a requirement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University. Please put the learning outcomes on the first page of your syllabus. See http://provost.wayne.edu/news_archive.php?id=12179 for more information.
"Formulating learning outcomes is an important part of course design and for continuous course improvement, communication of expectations to students, and alignment of student assessment and activities with the learning objectives."
I have been receiving endless notifications from my university about this new requirement. I've been willing to do it -- I added boilerplate language in my syllabi this semester to conform with the requirement. What *really* angers me, however, is language like the above, which states that putting such language in the syllabus has anything whatsoever to do with improving teaching. This is not true. The *only* reason for putting "learning outcomes" into syllabi is to increase bureaucratized standardization and control of teaching -- with the ultimate goal, probably, of having everything quantified so that teachers/professors can be subjected to "competition" and fired more easily, and so that university education can be reduced to a matter of instilling marketable skills, with anything having to do with imagination, creativity, critical thinking, and departing from pre-established norms completely suppressed. The requirement for "learning outcomes" is a Trojan Horse -- it seems innocuous in itself, but in fact it is a wedge toward the goals of destroying education as we have known it up to now (and as sometimes, in the best cases,it actually is), and reducing both faculty and students to the status of menial laborers interchangeable at will. The "learning outcomes" requirement is completely anti-educational and anti-intellectual. Now, there are lots of things I have to do despite not liking doing them; some of these things are even necessary if we are to have a civilized society. I am not one to go on ego trips over small matters of perceived insult or inconvenience to myself. So I will put these "learning outcomes" into syllabi -- hypocrisy is part of the price we pay for not having society be reduced to a war of all against all. But I will also not shut up when confronted with this bullshit -- all the more so since, in the present case, the purpose of the hypocrisy is precisely to demolish society in the name of the supremacy of our corporate overlords, who want nothing more than to have everything besides their own comfortable, powerful, and rich position to indeed be a war of all against all.
LikeLike ·  · 
  • Hamish Ford I hear ya - we've been forced to have this the last couple of years, too.
    25 August at 16:34 · Like
  • Peter Sarram yes, sooner or later the plague will reach all. there is no escape.
    25 August at 16:37 · Like
  • Hamish Ford As usual, we get the worst of capitalism and the worst of Stalinist admin in universities.
    25 August at 16:43 · Like · 3
  • Joe McElhaney Two questions: 1) What happens if you don't put "learning outcomes" on your syllabus? Is tenure taken away?; 2) If a learning outcome is listed on the syllabus but a student feels, at the end of the semester, that the "outcome" was not achieved, can they lodge a formal complaint against you? Sue the university?
    25 August at 16:46 · Like · 1
  • Steven Shaviro 1)they have issued dire threats, but they haven't actually told us how we might be disciplined. Mostly, they tell us that if even one single syllabus lacks learning outcomes, the university will lose accreditation.
    25 August at 16:47 · Like
  • Steven Shaviro 2) unclear, absolutely no idea
    25 August at 16:47 · Like
  • Tiziana Terranova that started in the UK about 15 years ago, before in australia... it is the starting point of an endless downpour of arbitrary commands
    25 August at 16:49 · Like · 4
  • Hamish Ford Good questions, Joe. So utterly obsessed with legal business, it's strange that unis would open themselves, to esp no. 2 above. For example we're not allowed to have attendance marks because it's not legally enforceable - assuming some student one year is going to read through endless corporate web wages and say, So I don't have to come to class!
    25 August at 16:49 · Like
  • Daniel Barber we have this too, and also 'statements of academic integrity' AKA, if you cheat, and we catch you, you fail.
    25 August at 16:49 · Like
  • Tiziana Terranova akseli virtanen an economist from finland that you might have met talks about the transformation of the economy into a kind of arbitrary power, very interesting conversation between him, brian massumi, peter pal perbart and maurizio lazzarato about this recently
    25 August at 16:51 · Edited · Like · 2
  • Greg Elmer on the rise: tuition, class size, & learning outcomes
    25 August at 16:54 · Like
  • Renée C. Hoogland Indeed, Tiziana Terranova: a drag that started in the Netherlands around the same time. No noticeable improvements, as far as I recall.....
    25 August at 16:55 · Like · 1
  • Tiziana Terranova on the contrary getting from bad to worse
    25 August at 16:55 · Like
  • Felicity Colman my faculty preparing for an external audit has senior management administrators going through unit by unit and programmes are being called in to 'fix up' specific units where the LO aren't reflected in the Assessment forms adequately enough. When you a...See More
    25 August at 17:00 · Like · 2
  • Davidson Warren Burnam Forgive my likely naïveté but is it possible to write "imagination,creativity, critical thinking, and [departure] from pre-established norms" into learning outcomes?
    25 August at 17:02 · Like · 3
  • Ellis Reamt this course will cultivate imagination, creativity, critical thinking, and will depart from pre-established norms completely suppressed.
    25 August at 17:02 · Like · 3
  • Felicity Colman nope. has to be measurable. 
    25 August at 17:05 · Like
  • Ellis Reamt those r measurable
    25 August at 17:06 · Like · 1
  • Felicity Colman well you have to match each of thos things as LOs for (non-academic) management to measure. therein lies the regulatory pain.
    25 August at 17:09 · Like
  • Charles J Stivale I am requisitioning some more lube from WSU.
    25 August at 17:09 · Like
  • Nicole Bond Make the students write them. Ha.
    25 August at 17:11 · Like · 1
  • Nicole Bond (Not joking).
    25 August at 17:12 · Like
  • Joe McElhaney It should also be clearly stated in any "learning outcome" that this outcome will not be achieved unless the student is fully committed to the course and that the outcome is not simply a matter of the instructor feeding quantifiable information to them.
    25 August at 17:14 · Like · 4
  • Nicole Bond No way. Students can speak for themselves, and ought to. Thanks.
    25 August at 17:22 · Edited · Like
  • Nicole Bond Sounds so cheap. Meh.
    25 August at 17:23 · Like
  • Istvan Csicsery-Ronay I second Ellis's formulation. I don't have to do this yet, but like the trigger-warnings I get perverse pleasure in writing them anyway in a way that subverts the bureaucratic intentions. If you get ahead of the process, you might have an edge.
    25 August at 17:53 · Like
  • Patricia R. Zimmermann Excellent analysis. I agree 100% and feel you nailed its hidden ideology. Outcomes are a market agenda to silence all that is chaotic which is what criticality unleashes. You should publish as an op Ed.
    25 August at 18:32 · Like
  • Patricia R. Zimmermann Ellis Reamt. Excellent
    25 August at 18:33 · Like
  • Kenneth Surin "Learning outcomes" is pure bollocks. You can Google the term and get a Thesaurus of such outcomes. I simply cut and paste these into my syllabuses, job done.
    25 August at 19:10 · Like · 3
  • Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Thanks for the tip. Kenneth. I think I'll copy and just leave strategic blanks, like Mad-Libs.
    25 August at 19:33 · Like · 3
  • Mutant Ballyhoo At the other place I was adjuncting, I used to get a list of appropriate verbs and inappropriate nouns to use in crafting learning outcomes.
    25 August at 19:34 · Like · 1
  • Patricia R. Zimmermann Faculty and admin live in alternate universes
    25 August at 19:40 · Like · 1
  • James Morrison Just wait until you get to the "Assessments" part!
    25 August at 20:03 · Like
  • James Morrison (I post a link to the alleged outcomes - and hand out a paper copy blissfully free of them.)
    25 August at 20:04 · Edited · Like
  • John Hutnyk 'A malignant and parasitic bureaucratic class has taken over the university sector'
    25 August at 21:39 · Like · 2
  • Ross Pudaloff Language like this has nothing to do with learning either. That's the (or a) dirty little secret. This language is effective in obstructing any serious thought, which I think is one of its purposes.
    25 August at 22:02 · Like · 2
  • Peter Zhang This is viral. To post this snippet is to court tons of notifications. Let's not forget there are some amongst us who take great pride in telling others to do precisely this. The oral-anal becoming of education -- no folds in between, and thus better c...See More
    25 August at 23:24 · Like
  • John Hutnyk To 'accellerate' or not to... I'll risk reposting a story I told to Tom Bunyard in June on this topic of Learning aims and outcomes etcetcetcetera: .....: "at the Subversive Festival in Croatia last month I heard a restorative story from a senior colleague who when asked to fill in a course aims and outcomes document for something he had successfully taught, and updated, for 15 years, filled out said forms and sent them in to central admin. A few weeks later word came back to say that changes were needed to make the document 'more accessible and readable'. He waited seven days, then changed the font and sent it back to the committee. They approved it."
    26 August at 00:20 · Like · 1
  • Peter Zhang to helvetica?
    26 August at 00:46 · Unlike · 1
  • Lidia Yuknavitch yes. precisely.
    26 August at 03:17 · Unlike · 1
  • Angela Ndalianis Welcome to our world.
    26 August at 03:24 · Like · 1
  • Barry Shank the fear of loss of accreditation drives the command to put expected learning outcomes on our syllabi at Ohio State, too. Which means that this is one of the effects of the increasing takeover of education from the top down by corporate style management. The final learning out come I list is "unexpected learning outcomes" which tries to explicitly state the the best learning goes beyond what I expect to happen in the classroom. The really saddest part of this whole process, however, is that the students who are entering our classrooms have been trained throughout their grade school through high school years to respond to rubrics that tell them what they have to know to pass the standardized tests that are the only "measures" of their learning that matter to anyone. So the top down transformation of higher education really does match the expectations and learning styles of the bottom up consumers of our teaching. When students in my class confront unexpected learning outcomes, many drop. Because it doesn't seem fair to them.
    26 August at 12:15 · Edited · Like
  • John Hutnyk Great Barry, I want to see more unlearning as an outcome. Not only in Spivak's sense, or in terms of unlearning privilege, but also just to remind ourselves that education is not a social good. Let me say again: Education as an institution is not a social good, rather it is a shoddy transparent device to reinforce class hierarchy, capital accumulation and the industrial-entertainment-military (its not complex, its cretinous). When someone says education out comes my gun, already Marx's 'sausage factory' quote said this well enough, today it is reinforced by a ruinous stupidity as modern proletarianisation. How did it become universally widespread with mere token opposition (and yet any mention of the line 'malignant and bureaucratic bureaucratic class takeover' seems to scuttle job interviews instantaneously)?
    26 August at 14:00 · Like · 1
  • Sha Xin Wei And so, what is to be done about it? Seriously, what strategic and tactical actions are useful?
    26 August at 15:31 · Like
  • John Hutnyk Refuse to fill the forms with anything but the algorithms of despair. I have just completed a tenure review for another uni in which I included the sentence: 'the time it must take to have prepared all this material for evaluation must satisfy some abstract and obscure quality assurance administrative karmic register somewhere, but for the purposes of determining the competency of a teacher, it seemed like repetitive overkill to me'. That is still however a futile gesture, and in the absence of militant organisation, rather than pay-packet focussed 'unions', the gestures that might matter all mean leaving the institution.
    26 August at 15:55 · Like · 1
  • John Hutnyk he said, on FB!
    26 August at 15:55 · Like
  • John Pat Leary Steve, I wrote a thing about "learning outcomes" a little while ago, and have been thinking about it again since I got that email. And while this doesn't change anything fundamentally, WSU is actually less oppressive about its learning outcome mandate ...See More
    Keywords for the Age of Austerity 2.5: Learning Outcomes
    jpleary.tumblr.com
    A short, digestable, and easily implementable keywords definition for your weekend, because some of these words practically write themselves. For more on learning outcomes, let’s take a listen to the...
    26 August at 20:35 · Unlike · 2
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