Interesting Times
So I sat down late last night with old friends and companions from the days of my youth. The topic was an interesting one. It involved lawyers, politics and education.
To begin with, let's consider education. Education as a field of study tends to suffer from the 'closed classroom' problem. Teachers don't like invasion of the classroom via the 'fourth wall' or any other way in general. This is because teaching is often seen as a personal relationship, and also because some people just don't like being watched doing what they do. This leads to all kinds of creative research methodologies aimed at finding out exactly what happens in a school (as opposed to what all schools will tell you about what they are doing).
Of course, the main point of education research is to find out what we did right and how to scale it up, broaden its reach, and/or deepen its level of philosophical justification. Sometimes we can't do all three, but we try to make it better because education is our gift to future generations (and nobody wants to be handed a booby prize). The problem of the closed classroom is that we can't find out what we need to find out, so we don't know if what was done actually added value or not.
It is actually in the interest of institutions to do their own rigorous research or allow themselves to be researched so that they can improve. The next problem is that given the closed classroom, some people tend to a) not do their own research because they don't have, can't provide or won't use the required resources; and b) won't allow 'outsiders' to help them with it, thinking that any external viewpoint will lack understanding of the local context (which of course can be a real difficulty) or worse, be inimical to the interests of the school.
So how does a school improve? It is possible for a school to improve by evolution: what works and what doesn't work eventually ought to result in a larger proportion of what works if sufficient penalties for bad stuff and rewards for good stuff are available. It is possible for a school to improve by incrementalism: adding more of the same or adjusting the same things in very small ways in a fixed policy direction that just happens to be right.
But neither of these methods is superior to a real, deep, searching appraisal that can identify systemic problems and attempt to clear them up. So why don't we do such appraisals, why don't we 'downward bend [a] burning eye'?
The first part, identification of problems, is already seen as negative and hence is not likely to be supported. Risk-averse people call them 'areas for improvement' because this allows you to believe they are good and can be better (rather than bad and can be made good). A variant of this is the 'we can't do anything about it anyway, so why bring it up?' response.
The second part, clearing them up, will always bump into smoke, bushes and other obfuscatory devices. This is because survival in the original situation probably requires people to learn survival skills which they are too heavily invested in to throw away. It's like clearing rocks away to make a space available for agriculture. The organisms who live under the rocks and benefit from the rocks are likely to be very upset.
Over the last few weeks, I've heard all this from some people who are not so happy that I am doing research at all. But my history of research (short though it may be) shows nothing but a respectful approach to the institutions in question. Yes, I do recommend improvements; quite often, I highlight what can be learnt in a positive fashion from what I have found. I have never engaged in destructive research simply because that's not what education is about. People who suggest, either implicitly or explicitly, that I will do such things regardless of what I have actually done are actually defaming me.
And so, we live in interesting times. Despite what some people think, I am not averse to engaging legal opinion or adopting a martial stance. It is even more interesting to see that when I do this, people who have been harassing me take offence at my decision to draw a line. That way is the way of bullies and opportunists.
My grandfather once said, "If people don't make use of you, you must be useless." I totally agree; my problem here is with people who would like me to be useless in the first place. That, I will not be. As an educational researcher, one of my duties is to the useful truth; substance that can be used to make people's lives better, stuff that can be used to improve teaching and learning. Why would anyone not want that?
To begin with, let's consider education. Education as a field of study tends to suffer from the 'closed classroom' problem. Teachers don't like invasion of the classroom via the 'fourth wall' or any other way in general. This is because teaching is often seen as a personal relationship, and also because some people just don't like being watched doing what they do. This leads to all kinds of creative research methodologies aimed at finding out exactly what happens in a school (as opposed to what all schools will tell you about what they are doing).
Of course, the main point of education research is to find out what we did right and how to scale it up, broaden its reach, and/or deepen its level of philosophical justification. Sometimes we can't do all three, but we try to make it better because education is our gift to future generations (and nobody wants to be handed a booby prize). The problem of the closed classroom is that we can't find out what we need to find out, so we don't know if what was done actually added value or not.
It is actually in the interest of institutions to do their own rigorous research or allow themselves to be researched so that they can improve. The next problem is that given the closed classroom, some people tend to a) not do their own research because they don't have, can't provide or won't use the required resources; and b) won't allow 'outsiders' to help them with it, thinking that any external viewpoint will lack understanding of the local context (which of course can be a real difficulty) or worse, be inimical to the interests of the school.
So how does a school improve? It is possible for a school to improve by evolution: what works and what doesn't work eventually ought to result in a larger proportion of what works if sufficient penalties for bad stuff and rewards for good stuff are available. It is possible for a school to improve by incrementalism: adding more of the same or adjusting the same things in very small ways in a fixed policy direction that just happens to be right.
But neither of these methods is superior to a real, deep, searching appraisal that can identify systemic problems and attempt to clear them up. So why don't we do such appraisals, why don't we 'downward bend [a] burning eye'?
The first part, identification of problems, is already seen as negative and hence is not likely to be supported. Risk-averse people call them 'areas for improvement' because this allows you to believe they are good and can be better (rather than bad and can be made good). A variant of this is the 'we can't do anything about it anyway, so why bring it up?' response.
The second part, clearing them up, will always bump into smoke, bushes and other obfuscatory devices. This is because survival in the original situation probably requires people to learn survival skills which they are too heavily invested in to throw away. It's like clearing rocks away to make a space available for agriculture. The organisms who live under the rocks and benefit from the rocks are likely to be very upset.
Over the last few weeks, I've heard all this from some people who are not so happy that I am doing research at all. But my history of research (short though it may be) shows nothing but a respectful approach to the institutions in question. Yes, I do recommend improvements; quite often, I highlight what can be learnt in a positive fashion from what I have found. I have never engaged in destructive research simply because that's not what education is about. People who suggest, either implicitly or explicitly, that I will do such things regardless of what I have actually done are actually defaming me.
And so, we live in interesting times. Despite what some people think, I am not averse to engaging legal opinion or adopting a martial stance. It is even more interesting to see that when I do this, people who have been harassing me take offence at my decision to draw a line. That way is the way of bullies and opportunists.
My grandfather once said, "If people don't make use of you, you must be useless." I totally agree; my problem here is with people who would like me to be useless in the first place. That, I will not be. As an educational researcher, one of my duties is to the useful truth; substance that can be used to make people's lives better, stuff that can be used to improve teaching and learning. Why would anyone not want that?
etched with acid at 10:38:00 am
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