Friday, April 20, 2012

How much do students learn?


"How much do students learn? How do you know?" are the final two sentences of today's NY Times column by David Brooks. Brooks gashes many academic sacred cows in this column: the idea that college makes you a better person and never mind the content, that college advances you from the hormonal confusion of high school to the ethereal thoughts of ivy towers, that students actually learn something in exchange for a decade of student loan payments.

The challenge, he writes, "is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It's mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that's real and transparent to outsiders."

I suppose that as an instructor at a technical college I sit smug in my office knowing that in our case, students do learn because our learning product is easy to see and measure: you either learn how to run a CNC machine or you do not; you either learn how to find a vein and drawn blood or you do not; you either learn how to clean the back molars or you do not, you either learn how to produce a profit and loss statement or you do not. Our assessments are rather cut and dry. And, in my case as a basic ed instructor, my students either pass the GED tests or they do not. My instructional colleagues and I are able to point the projects, portfolios, and presentations of our students and say, "Yes, they have learned the material." Our job, we think, is much easier than, say, a French medieval scholar, a business leadership theorist, or even a tenured education professor.

Yet, Brooks challenges this complacency by asking if in addition to teaching students how to create and use widgets, do our students graduate into the workforce with the communicating and thinking skills necessary for employment as well as being contributing members of society. Gulp. He points out that studies show that nearly half the students (albeit he is talking four-year+ degrees here) "show no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years of college."

Assessment of things and activities are relatively easy. Assessment of critical thinking and communicating skills are much more difficult. The challenge, I think, is first to incorporate these critical skills in all curriculum (which we do on paper) and then work out ways to assess the learning of these skills. That is a continuing challenge for all educators. I don't consider the Brooks column as an indictment of education as much as a challenge, a challenge education needs to accept.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Losing language, losing a people

News item from Indian Country Media Network, "Alaska Native Language Loses Last Native Speaker." "The world and the Holikachuk Athabascan language suffered a great loss with the passing of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon on March 10, 2012. He was 86."

The loss of language coincides with the loss of the soul of a people, in my opinion. We are what we think and what we think is coded through our native (and sometimes acquired) languages. When the fluency of a language is lost, the language becomes a museum piece, a dusty exhibit visited only by equally dusty scholars but is, essentially, dead -- a shell of a way of life that can no longer be described. That loss is sad. Native people have long recognized the importance of native languages and have fought to retain their language as a mark of their identity. Here in Northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee and Oneida tribes work to carry on their language through the next seven generations, as they say, though that is hard to do in an overwhelming, encroaching white culture.

Julie Raymond-Yakoubian, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, described Mr. Deacon: "He strongly identified his life with the traditional, now-abandoned village of Holikachuk on the Innoko River in interior Alaska, where he was born. Tiny spent many years hunting and trapping in the forests of the Innoko River region and possessed an almost unimaginable wealth of traditional knowledge about the land the its inhabitants."

As a comparison of the importance of language, I think of the changes to the Catholic Church in the 1960s brought about not only by the Second Vatican Council, but also by the change from Latin to the vernacular at Sunday Mass. Once the mystery and music of the Latin prayer were replaced by the clanging sounds of English among other languages, the Church was bound to change, because the way we described and thought about the central weekly sacrament had changed. Change the language and you change the core of people. Lose the language, and the people and all they stand for fade away into history.

I mourn the loss of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon, but also of the Holikachuk way of life that has been lost.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Moving beyond the classroom

The two line summary beneath the blog title has bothered me since I started writing this in January. Do I limit myself to education and teaching, and if I do, will I be violating the privacy my students for the sake of a blog?

As you can tell, I have been a bit self-conscious about speaking on behalf of the school I work for. I think I have gotten over that. What I see in the classroom is important, and my opinion about the importance of continuing adult education stands fast and will likely continue to inspire reflections. That is, however, only part of who I am, and if this blog is to have a life beyond the rhythms of the college semester, my subject matter needs to expand into all areas that I am interested in.

I spent the last three years developing creative writing chops in a graduate program. It seems a shame to submerge them back under an undergraduate journalistic voice, the unbiased reporter of rhe mundane. So, rather than limit myself to teaching and education, I choose to expand into other subjects. A single line about exploring "the nature of things" will be more complete than what the blog had been titled. The writing may still be boring, but it will no longer be limited.