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A useful exchange ...
Has begun at Timothy Burke's blog. "Withywindle" writes:
Tim: I still await your answer on some questions I had the last time around:"Do I take it correctly that you accept 1) that academia, in principle, does and should incorporate mutual monitoring as an aspect of its professional ethics; 2) that academia could, in principle, extend this monitoring to include aspects of classroom pedagogy including encouragement of free inquiry by their students (no agit-prop) and intellectual openness (no partisan narrowness)? If you are willing to accept these two principles, then I would encourage you, as said before, *to develop yourself* an institutional system of monitoring that takes into account your worries about mutual respect and proportionality …. Let us grant there is no current standard of pedagogical malpractice; let us grant it will be difficult to develop one; do you believe it is impossible? Do you believe the profession shouldn't even try?"
Not to beat a dead horse, but you are still writing on the same subject, and I do think your answers to these questions are relevant.
Burke responds:
I think yes, we could have some form of monitoring or quality assessment that we do not presently have. I think we could look for encouragement of free inquiry and intellectual openness in that process, but I don't accept your parenthetical definitions of those two values, for reasons I made clear in the other thread and in this one. I think the thing to think about is how to make teaching more visible and shared as an activity: I think a system of monitoring that involved a designated monitor coming in to a classroom to watch and record a given teaching session would be: a) extraordinarily expensive if it was done on the scale required to be fair; b) intrusive and artificial. As you noted with the other examples of professional monitoring, most monitoring of doctors and lawyers happens as a routine outgrowth of the kind of work they do (e.g., surgery or diagnosis often happens in the presence of other professionals, a paper trail is created that's extensive; law often happens in a courtroom, and records of legal consultations are often created as the consultation occurs). So that's really what we need, rather than people with notepads sitting in the back of classrooms. How do we get it? How about making publically accessible class weblogs an expected or conventional part of most courses, for one example? Encouraging team teaching would be another possibility (though it's extremely expensive to do routinely). Posting of detailed syllabi as a requirement. And so on: doing what we can to make teaching transparent and transcribed would, for me, be enough to constitute a useful system of monitoring.
This looks promising. Here's hoping the discussion develops, maintains its present temperate tone, and involves a range of contributors.
Posted by acta online at May 30, 2006 09:56 AM
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Comments
I think you missed the previous 70-odd comments thread that was temperate, involved a range of commentators, and (in my view) developed.
Does "temperate" in your dictionary mean, "Agrees substantively with my point of view"? Because I think it's fairly rare that anything at my blog is anything but temperate, comments or my own entries.
Posted by: Timothy Burke at May 30, 2006 08:27 PM
Timothy,
Yes, your blog tends to be temperate. That's something I admire about it. Your discussion struck me as a nicely temperate contrast to that which took place at IHE over the weekend, and so I complimented it. Nothing more.
Posted by: Erin O'Connor at May 30, 2006 11:10 PM
Erin:
You're more charitable than I am, by an order of magnitude. If I were in your place, I would have cut his cajones off.
Mr. Burke created a Straw Man (unintentionally, I believe) with his criticism of the ACTA report. That criticism defined the report as something I believe it was never intended it to be -- a full and complete academic study -- and many of those who posted comments here, on IHE and elsewhere have mindlessly followed that lead to savage the report, Anne Neal and some of us who have defended it for what it is.
Moreover, the language Mr. Burke used in his strawman criticism was condescending, angry, unmannerly, provocative and entirely unprofessional. His post was anything but temperate, and it set the tone for the debate that ensued.
And if that's not enough, Mr. Burke now bashes you personally for paying him and his blog a compliment.
Mr. Burke is tone deaf in the extreme. He should be ashamed of himself for his destructive errors, and he owes you and ACTA a public apology.
Posted by: Clawmute at May 31, 2006 12:00 AM
Claw, You are one of the problems in these discussions. Look up the word "temperate." You appear not to know its meaning.
Posted by: Ralph Luker at May 31, 2006 01:07 AM