The Wrench, a new MSc in Engineering Education, and Blogging as reflective practice

During the International Symposium for Engineering Education 2018, which has taken place at UCL over the past two days, I have recommended The Wrench by Primo Levi to two engineering educator colleagues, so I'm including it here too - one of my favourite books, essential reading anyway in my view, but it happens to be about the trials, tribulations and achievements of an engineer, the main protagonist....a wonderfully wise and life-affirming novel (?) which I have written about before.

My Optimistic but Sceptical blog has never exactly become extinct, but I have made very few posts over the past five years.  I am hoping to be able to post more often now, for a number of reasons: first, I have come to the end of my stint as Programme Leader for the Institute of Education post-compulsory PGCE, and second, I am teaching and leading one of the core modules for an exciting new MSc here at UCL Institute of Education, in Engineering Education.

The first change means I expect to have a little more space and time for musing and reflecting on the issues and ideas that arise from my work, and for sometimes at least writing them down.  The second development has come about as a result of my Ed D thesis study, now completed in draft, and awaiting the final stage of formative feedback before formal submission in September.  This study is about the contribution of informal aspects of workplace life and activity to effective practice, practitioner learning, and innovation.  My research sites included a Further Education college and the R&D division of a large engineering company.  My department at the Institute of Education has teamed up with the UCL Faculty of Engineering in a number of different projects, one of which is this new MSc, and I am leading one of the core modules, on Engineering and Education: Practice, Innovation and Leadership. 

This module will cover such topics as:

• Persuading more girls to study engineering

• Organisations and change: the engineering workplace as a site for learning and innovation

• Preparation for C21st engineers: innovative design in UG and PG engineering programmes

• Apprenticeship as a model for learning engineering in times of change

• Approaches to leadership in multinational engineering partnerships

• Policy development and organisational strategies for an uncertain future

Anyone interested in finding out more about this programme should contact me here.

A third reason for coming back to my blog is that one of the stand-out findings of my research is the importance for effective practice, and especially for innovation, of 'writing' on the one hand, and of 'peer review' on the other.  By writing I mean any form of representation of any aspect of practice, including the most informal or temporary incidences of writing - doodles and scribbles for example, also notes, drafts, rough drawings or charts, and more formal types of writing such as reports or position papers, hether or not for publication.  By peer review I mean any kind of evaluative feedback, whether formal and written, or informally and unplanned as part of a conversation. Organisations which enable and encourage these practices as key elements of work, in terms of making space and time available for them, are likely, my study suggests, to be more effective and more innovative.  A blog is both a platform for writing in different degrees of formality, and a medium for sharing and potential evaluative feedback.  So I'm aiming to practise a little of what my study appears to teach.

My final reason for taking up the blog again is that my colleague working on the new MSc, Abel Nyamapfene, blogs regularly about Teaching and Learning in Engineering - see the link over on the right - and I like the idea of occasional blog conversations, especially as we work in different buildings!

Primo Levi

Walter Benjamin - the work of learning: writing and thinking as collecting

'Benjamin, always working, always trying to work more, speculated a good deal on the writer's daily existence.  One Way Street has several sections which offer recipes for work: the best conditions, timing, utensils.  Part of the impetus for the large correspondence he conducted was to chronicle, report on, confirm the existence of work.  His instincts as a collector served him well.  Learning was a form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to friends.  Thinking was also  form of collecting, at least in its preliminary stages.  He conscientiously logged stray ideas: developed mini-esays in letters to friends; rewrote plans for future projects; noted his dreams (several are recounted in One Way Street); kept numbered lists of all the books he read.' (Susan Sontag: Introduction to One Way Street and Other Writings, Walter Benjamin, London: New Left Books, 1979)

I once wrote an essay on Walter Benjamin.   I argued that his characteristic style of writing, collecting wreathes of aphoristic, tentative and often gnomic paragraphs which delineate his themes as it were from the outside, indirectly, rather than presenting them descriptively and directly, could be compared to a gestural, bodily style of communication as opposed to the more direct and familiar use of spoken language. He believed that copying a text was the best way to understand it, as a landscape is best understood by walking through it rather than by flying over it. 'All the decisive blows are struck left-handed'. Benjamin's work first suggested to me an idea which has come to seem more and more important in my work as a teacher: that writing (or drawing, composing music - the making of any cultural artefact, or as Raymond Williams and Stephen Yeo would say, cultural production) - is a mode of thinking and therefore of learning.  But should 'copying' be seen as production in its own right, or merely a stage or tool of the production process?  Ultimately there is no difference - copying is always a process of re-creating, re-contextualising.  My smallest utterance, in whatever form, is both completely original and a 'copy' of other people's work, made new by the act of my uttering it, and the context in which I am uttering it.  All work consists both of archeology and craft, and as well as existing for itself, it also exists to be recycled



Another mystery philosopher of education

Here are some more provocative quotations from yet another mystery thinker about education, another whose work should be better known in my view:

All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is provisional, and always will be. We cannot prove that what we know is true, and it may turn out to be false.  The best we can do is justify our preference for one theory rather than another.....of course, we assume the 'truth' of our existing knowledge for practical purposes and are quite ready to do so; but we must be ready for it to be superseded....we cannot be sure that we have the truth: we can, however, systematically eliminate error.  the way we eliminate error is by testing.

Of course there have been many people with a sense of unease about the practice of education.  most important, there have been many teachers who have either instinctively or after worrying thought tried to organise learning rather than teaching.  They have encouraged 'discovery methods', project work and independent learning.  But they have been under attack, partly because these methods still sit uneasily in the rest of the system (how, for example, does one examine such work?) and partly because they have been unable to give as coherent an intellectual account of themselves as is claimed by traditional academics. This insecurity is no longer justified.  It is the traditional academic practice which needs to be defended.

What we have, in fact, is a continuum of learning, whose logic is the same, from the new-born babe (indeed, from the amoeba) to the research worker on the frontiers of knowledge.  Each is engaged in the formulation of problems, in solving them and in testing the solutions.  Most people will formulate problems that have been formulated many times before.  Their proposed solutions will be familiar; their tests commonplace.  But they will learn by this activity.  They will not learn better or faster if we parcel up received solutions to problems formulated by others: indeed this is an anti-learning process.  Moreover it inhibits the possibility of progress, because it is always possible that someone will formulate a common problem differently, will propose a different solution or a more effective test.

What is important is not a particular fact or even a particular ordered collection of facts, but method.  It is method rather than information which gives mastery, and it is method which must be the chief business of education.

The presentation of knowledge as bodies of organised facts is a way of ensuring its unhelpfulness to most people.

Since criticism is of the essence of the method, education must offer opportunities for students to be critical and to use criticism. 

Clue: All these quotations come from the same book, published in 1977.  They still appear to me to represent a radical critique of the basic assumptions of our entire education system, perhaps even more so now than when they were written.  Any ideas?  Answers in a day or two.

Mystery educational philosopher

All these quotes are from the same thinker, someone I didn't realise had written about education.  I will shortly be posting a review of the book I discovered them in.  Can you recognise the author?

I may be wrong, and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment.

(Picture by Chris Bradey)

We learn only through trial and error.  Our trials....are always our hypotheses.  They stem from us, not from the external world.  All we learn from the external world is that some of our efforts are mistaken.

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same.  It is imaginative criticism.

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised.  Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change.  But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected.  It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities.  I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

[If] we produce many competing ideas, and criticise them severely, we may, if we are lucky, get nearer to the truth.  This method is the method of conjectures and refutations: it is the method of taking many risks, by producing many (competing) hypotheses; of making many mistakes; and of trying to correct or eliminate some of these mistakes by a critical discussion of the competing hypotheses.

Does this last one give it away?

Bad Science, Leonardo, and professional learning

Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist, is taking a holiday to write a book!  Not Science Fiction, surely, Ben?  I'm sure it will be worth waiting for, but how the hell will we manage in the meantime without you looking after things in the Truth Dept?

Your sign-off column this weekend is a beautifully succinct series of nuggets of wisdom - the most important one in my view being:

'everyone needs to understand how we know if something is good for us, or bad for us. The basics of evidence-based medicine, of trials, meta-analyses, cohort studies and the like should be taught in schools and waiting rooms.'

I fear this is not what Michael Gove has in mind for the central element of the English Bac....

Also this weekend I listened on the radio to a heart surgeon reminding us that while no one is perfect (so things may go wrong for even the most skilled and experienced practitioners of any craft or occupation), it is still true that when working in highly complex situations which in a real sense are unique every time, then more experienced practitioners, assuming they are working with the best available knowledge, are a better bet than relative novices, however brilliant those novices may be.  He was talking in the context of a discussion about the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, and suggested that surgeons are researching and learning their craft every time they perform their work, just like Leonardo, who never stopped enquiring into nature, never stopped making descriptive notes and drawings, writing down thoughts and hypotheses, and then testing his new ideas to see what would happen; though with him it was in dozens of different disciplines. This is a perfect description of professional learning: practice on its own doesn't produce learning - it needs to be accompanied by reflection, and probably discussion with colleagues (something Leonardo may not have much opportunity for), but also crucially it needs to be made explicit in the form perhaps of writing, or of drawings, so that it can be returned to, re-evaluated, and repeatedly tested to see if it stands up to scrutiny.  If it survives this examination, then it might be reliable enough to be incorporated into future practice.

There's also a mouth-watering review in today's paper of a book on this topic by Daniel Kahneman, called 'Thinking, fast and slow', enquiring into the processes by which people make decisions, how learning contributes to these processes, and how and why even experts make unaccountable mistakes.  I hope it's out in paperback soon.  Meanwhile here's the link for a terrific TED talk by Kahneman on why we should stop using the word happiness!

Professional learning by deliberately cultivating the unexpected

“He that confines himself to one book at a time, may be amused, but is no student.  In order to study, I must sit in some measure in the middle of a library.”

William Godwin, The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, Vol 81, 1818

I take this to suggest that 'students' need to do more than focus on and work directly at the subject of their studies; they must enrich this direct approach with other ideas, stimuli, experiences, so as to allow and encourage surprises, unexpected insights; in short, serendipity.  This might be boringly described as 'reading around your subject', but I think Godwin means something much more than that: something more like Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of the senses', so as to try to be jolted out of one's preconceptions. 

I am pleased with this idea, as it aligns well with something I wrote recently about the messiness of real teaching and learning (Derrick 2010):

In the dominant model of public sector professionalism today, accidents are seen as prima facie evidence of failure: if unexpected events do occur, it must be due to inadequate preparation or human error. This view of practice assumes that in principle the job and skills of a teacher, social worker, parent, etc, can be defined in detail, without ambiguity, and therefore codified precisely. Regulation and quality assurance of these roles, it follows, is a straightforward process of checking that there is no variation from the code. The training of such professionals is also seen as straightforward, based on a well-defined, unproblematic body of knowledge and an accompanying skill-set that hardly changes over time. This positivist view of practice derives from a positivist view of learning, in some versions almost identical to behaviourism, in which the individual learner is seen as a passive recipient of pre-defined knowledge and skills, which are acquired usually through processes of memorisation and repetitive practice....

There is little room in the positivist view of practice for the idea of teaching as an art, or as a craft, something honed and fashioned over time in the context of a ‘community of practice’, and which takes for granted that changing circumstances and new learners will produce new problems for the teacher, who therefore needs the capacity to respond to new and unexpected situations.  Recent research shows clearly that teachers need to be ready at times to abandon their detailed plans and ‘go with the teachable moment’, not just as a response to difficult situations, but as an optimal strategy when things are anyway going well. Nor can the positivist view encompass the idea of the learning process as active, combining research, creation and re-creation by groups as well as by individuals, with a range of possible outcomes and wider benefits at the level of the individual learner, the group, the community and society in general . It does emphasise the role of the learner in choosing programmes of learning to enrol on, just as a shopper chooses products from the shelves of a supermarket, but this can only be equated with active learning from a reductionist, behaviourist viewpoint....[This] echoes Donald Schön’s famous distinction between different types of professional problem:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern.  (Schön 1983)
This view suggests that a crudely positivist philosophy and policy of learning, teaching, and teacher development, whatever its intentions, will be damaging both to society and to individuals. In particular, it will lead to deskilling: it nurtures in professionals a passive, bureaucratic and parochial version of their work, which over time leads to diminishing interest in, curiosity about, and capacity to deal with unexpected situations, or even to imagine crisis scenarios so as to prepare for them. Specifically it leads to diminution in preparedness and of the capacity to make judgements about the best course of action in the difficult, complex situations to be found in classrooms everywhere.
Richard Sennett (1970) argues that everyone needs to experience living and coping with the uncertain and the unfamiliar, of managing and dealing with life in complex and unpredictable situations without being in control of them, in order to reach full psychological maturity. If state-supported education seeks to eliminate the uncertain, the debatable, the unexpected, he suggests that it is condemning people to a kind of passive and frustrating adolescence, whatever their biological age.
Avoiding these problems, and harvesting the full potential of learners and teachers to enrich their practice for the economic, social and cultural benefit of society in general, will mean taking a quite different approach to learning in general, and following its implications through in terms of curriculum, the organisation, funding and accountability systems for state-supported learning, and of course to the formation and ongoing development of teachers.
References:

Derrick J (2010) The messiness of real teaching and learning, in Derrick J, Howard U, Field J, Lavender P, Meyer S, von Rein EN, and Schuller T (eds, 2010) Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett.  London: Institute of Education

Schön D (1983) The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Maurice Temple Smith
Sennett R (1970 - 2008 edition) The uses of disorder – personal identity and city life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Does investing in computers produce better test scores?

Well, no, probably: see
http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/denying-the-facts-investing-in-computers-and-higher-test-scores/

Larry Cuban's piece is brilliant on the way blind prejudice often determines policy, rather than good research.  But who wants better test scores anyway?  Do better test scores mean better learning and better educated students?

Well, not necessarily.  Standardised testing is a good way to evaluate the outcomes of a process intended to produce millions of identical items to the same objectively measurable quality standards, as efficiently as possible.  It's good for mass production processes, for making knives and forks, for example, or cars, or washing machines.  But citizens?

Education processes produces voters, citizens, members of communities and families, workers, and this is one factory where we don't want identical products.  In fact, we probably don't want a factory at all: see Ken Robinson's brilliant animated lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.  So why do policymakers persist in applying mass production methods, such as standardised testing, payment by results, league tables, and command and control inspection systems, to learning?

Dumbing down - a complaint from 1621

'Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers that either write from vainglory, need, to get money, or as parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men.'
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Nothing new there then...

Education for the Good Society; Compass Conference

EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY CONFERENCE
10.30am – 4.00pm Saturday 5th March at the NUT, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD

The Education for the Good Society Conference will bring together those on the democratic left to discuss alternatives to the current neo-liberal education settlement.

The limitations of New Labour’s education project and the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government, with its agenda of austerity, markets and traditionalism, means that we have to ask fundamental questions about the purposes of education and its role in building the Good Society.

Conference speakers will include specialists from education and those involved in wider democratic left politics –
Prof. Richard Sennett, Fiona Miller, Neal Lawson, Prof. Tom Schuller, Prof. Ewart Keep, Prof. Ken Spours, Martin Yarnit, Prof. Jane Martin, Prof. Gary McCulloch, Prof. Michael Fielding, Dr Tom Sperlinger, Matthew Horne, Dr Jeremy Gilbert, Rhona Downie, Donna Hayter and representatives from Labour’s education team (tbc).

Conference themes, based on commissioned papers, will include:

Education for the Good Society
Education and fairness
Schooling for the Good Society
Lifelong learning
Education and sustainability
Education, skills and the economy
Education and democracy
Education for inclusion
Education and innovation
A curriculum for the Good Society
Visions of higher education

The conference will be organised around plenary sessions and workshops and there will also be a special session on ‘Schooling in Alberta’ with Rhonda Evans of the Guardian in conversation with Fiona Millar.

The final conference session will discuss how we develop what some all the ‘triple agenda’ - a long-term vision for change, influencing the policies of Labour and other progressive parties over the next few years and, crucially, connecting with professionals and the wider public around key campaigning issues.

Participants will be asked to contribute £10 on the day towards the hiring of the venue.

If you are interested in attending and reserving your place, please email - info@compassonline.org.uk

Is our culture's obsession with educational grading a sign of its democratic deficit?

This post connects with an earlier one questioning the view that 'Talent is Scarce'. Educational systems, particularly those in Britain and America, are more and more focussed on, and driven by, the awarding of grades for every kind of achievement. The key success indicator for secondary schools here in the UK, the one that decides how far up the comparative league tables they come, is the proportion of students who gain 5 GCSE passes (including English and Mathematics) with grades of A*, A, B or C. Passes at D and E actually count against the school, even though they are passes for the individual. For sixth forms and colleges it is A level successes, measured not just in passes, but in grades. Primary school children are assessed in English, Mathematics and Science as being at different levels, some being seen as 'below the average for their age', others as above. Educational providers in the post-compulsory sector following OFSTED inspections are awarded a complicated array of grades, including 'outstanding', 'good', 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory'.

Now, no one would disgree with the idea that we need systems for assessing whether or not individuals are suitable and qualified to work as plumbers, brain surgeons, solicitors, airline pilots, car mechanics, teachers or gas engineers, but it is not immediately obvious why within those systems we need a range of different grades. What is wrong with simple pass or fail outcomes?

One possible answer is that grading provides a reassuring justification for the obsessive 'over-selection' that our system engages in, as pointed out by Richard Sennett, referenced in my earlier post. The numbers project a veneer of objectivity to relatively subjective, unreliable and sometimes invalid assessment and marking processes, and thus assure us that the selection processes for which the grades are used - getting into or failing to get into university, or getting or being rejected for a new job or promotion, or in the case of educational institutions the chance or not to access special funding streams, are also objective and so seem to have been fair.

'Fairness' is stated by all parties to be a key objective of current political activity, but as it is not a well-defined category, it needs an apparatus which dresses up these imprecise processes as objective and not subject to potentially partial judgements by individuals, however expert or distinguished. It is felt that without this apparatus, these decisions would depend rather too clearly on the decisions of individuals and return us to a system of patronage, bribery, corruption, etc, in which to look for any notion of fairness would be beside the point. The argument therefore goes: we need fairness or at least an appearance of fairness, so we need a technical apparatus - examinations, grades, rubrics, transparent assessment criteria, etc - to eliminate as far as possible favouritism, any form of prejudicial discrimination or corruption, so that we can all be satisfied that access to jobs and professions is (a) fair and (b) only admits people with the requisite competences and skills.

A system in which access to all professions, jobs, exam success, universities, was governed entirely by 'pass/fail' outcomes, would be one that demanded trust in the systems and the people working within them. And for me this is the connection with the democratic deficit. Onora O'Neill, in the Reith lectures she gave in 2002, demonstrated clearly how systems characterised by bureaucratic accountability assume low trust and actually intensify low levels of trust between individuals, and by individuals in public institutions and in the society as a whole. This lack of trust breeds the cynicism which leads first to democratic inertia and then increasingly to loss of faith in the democratic ideal itself.

Quote for the day

'Learning is a liminal process, at the boundary between control and chaos'
Dylan Wiliam, 2007 at www.alt.ac.uk/docs/altc2007_dylan_wiliam_keynote.pdf