Teagle Essays

Educational Narratives, or, What do we know and how do we know it?

Donna Heiland

It is my pleasure to be here today, and to talk with you about the changing landscape of higher education as seen from the vantage point of the Teagle Foundation, where Bob Connor's visionary leadership has led us into some of the most contested—also, I would say, most important and most interesting—terrain around. For three or four years now, we at Teagle have been thinking about assessment, asking questions like "What are your goals for your students and how do you know you're reaching them?" And as we've started to get some answers to those questions, we've moved on to a set of issues that seem to us inextricably tied to them, asking colleagues to think with us about how students learn and how can we deploy that knowledge to ensure that they learn still better. I'd like to talk with you about our work in both of these areas, but first I'd like to frame my remarks—and Teagle's work—with a brief discussion of the ways that these issues in higher education have become a subject of conversation not only within but also outside the academy. Perhaps predictably, no less a force than our national government is telling us that we need to be accountable for what we accomplish in our colleges and universities. Rather less predictably—and to me much more interestingly—we also have some pretty powerful voices weighing in on the debate from the realm of arts and entertainment, and it is these voices that I'd like to talk about as a way into my subject today.

Have you read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or perhaps seen the film version of that story, which was released last summer? Preoccupied as Teagle is with issues around student learning and especially outcomes assessment, I couldn't help noticing that the film is about—among other things—exactly those issues. When Professor Umbridge (played by the wonderful Imelda Staunton) is introduced as a new faculty member at Hogwarts School, she begins by saying that "The Ministry of Magic has always considered the education of young witches and wizards to be of vital importance," and while she pays lip service to the traditions of "the noble profession of teaching" (Rowling 2004, 212), she does not hesitate to add that there are going to be changes at Hogwarts: "Let us move forward," she says, "into a new era of openness, effectiveness, and accountability, intent on preserving what ought to be preserved, perfecting what needs to be perfected, and pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited" (Rowling 2004, 213-214). Anyone with an ear to hear them will appreciate the rather ominous undertones of this little speech, but just in case we miss the point, Harry Potter's good friend Hermione—asked for her take on it—says bluntly: "I'll tell you what it means …"It means the Ministry's interfering at Hogwarts" (Rowling 2004, 214). And so we know—if we didn't already—that Harry Potter is against ministerial interventions in education.

Now as it turns out, Harry has company, after a fashion, in Alan Bennett, whose play The History Boys also turns centrally on questions about education, educational outcomes and their assessment. Perhaps some of you know this play (or the recent film version), which is about a group of teachers preparing a class for Oxford / Cambridge scholarship exams in the field of history. At stake is what they teach and how, with the inspired but decidedly unorthodox methods of Hector being played off against those of the sexy, young Irwin and the not—sexy, not young, but ever solid Mrs. Lintott. The play prevents us from easily championing Hector's inspirational mode of teaching by also making him something of a sexual predator, but as far as debates about educational goals, methods and outcomes go, the headmaster—uninspired though he may be—sums it all up perfectly when he says:

Shall I tell you what is wrong with Hector as a teacher?
     It isn't that he doesn't produce results. He does. But they are unpredictable and unquantifiable and in the current educational climate that is no use. He may well be doing his job, but there is no method that I know of that enables me to assess the job that he is doing. (Bennett 2006, 67)

I am amazed when I see these debates cropping up in novels and plays, and while I know that they reflect more immediately on what is happening in Britain than on what is happening here (my knowledge of what's happening in Britain coming largely from a collection of essays by a group of sociologists, called Audit Cultures—see Stratherne 2000), their relevance is still startling. How should we respond to them? Maybe in kind, saying that we don't want the ministry involved in education, that we don't want pedagogical practice dictated by uninspired headmasters, but if we do this, we can't simply stop there. There is a subsequent challenge, namely, can we do better? What would OUR play look like?

And here, I think, is where the work of the Teagle Foundation and all of its grantees comes in. We know we don't have the answers, but we are at least trying to make a space for what I might call new and convincing narratives of education to emerge. Now, you might ask, do we really need new narratives? To that I'd say yes, we do. Because the nature of higher education really is changing.

As Bob Connor has argued, a college degree used to consist of a couple of years of general education courses, which provided the "breadth" of a liberal education, followed by a couple more years of focused work in a major, which provided its "depth," and the overall goal was an education focused on content mastery more than anything else. Now, though, ask an educator what the goals of a liberal education might be, and you'll hear a different story: now the goal of a liberal education is to graduate students whose cognitive capacities are highly developed, who are good writers, skilled critical thinkers, engaged and ethical citizens of the world, and more. As Bob Connor has also said, "The list [of liberal education goals] is an accordion, which each institution can play in its own way, from narrowly defined cognitive outcomes to extended long term aspirations for personal growth and social responsibility" (Connor 2008). And if those are the goals, then teaching methods change accordingly: lectures give way to seminars, classroom experiences sit alongside engaged learning experiences, and so on. We know much and are learning more about what kinds of teaching are most effective in our efforts to accomplish these goals: instruments like the NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement), the CLA (Collegiate Learning Assessment), the pilot instrument that Rachelle Brooks and her team developed to assess the degree to which a classics education contributes to the goals of a liberal education are all generating information about the effectiveness of our teaching practices. The next step will be to use that information: to look at it and say, well, we've done well here, but not here. How can we do better?

And with that statement, I come to the point that undergirds what I'd like to do in the working group that will follow this session. When we ask "How can we do better," we're also asking "What do we know that will let us do better?" and more specifically, "Do we know things about how people learn" that could help us get where we want to go? And the answer, I think, is that we do. Or at least, we know some things and are learning more, with relevant research emerging in fields ranging from neuroscience to education. Tufts' university provost Jamshed Bharucha puts the matter strongly when he writes that "[t]his century will bring forth an explosion of new knowledge on … what and how we learn …" and goes on to ask, "Are we prepared to transform our educational institutions if new science challenges cherished notions of what and how we learn? As we acquire the ability to trace genetic and environmental influences on the development of the brain, will we as a society be able to agree on what our educational objectives should be?" (Bharucha 2006). Those are big questions indeed, and a new Teagle program that will fund multi-disciplinary "Collegia" on student learning at colleges and universities is one place that we hope they will be addressed. The Collegia are still in formation, though, and so I can't yet report on their work.

What I can and will report on is some work going on at Kalamazoo College, work that on the face of it might look rather far from discussions of how we learn, but that—I would argue—is closely connected to it. The short story of what has happened at Kalamazoo (here I draw directly from Sotherland, Dueweke, Cunningham and Grossman 2007 and 2007a) is that, after administering the Collegiate Learning Assessment—a test designed to assess students' overall cognitive skills, analytical abilities, and writing skills—faculty members pushed the test beyond the purposes for which it was designed and took a look at how students were faring by field. What they discovered was surprising: they found marked differences in student performance by academic division, with (you'll be happy to hear) students in foreign languages faring surprisingly well and students in natural sciences at the bottom end of the spectrum. Once they'd learned that, of course, the next question to ask was "why"—what accounts for these differences? The team at Kalamazoo has speculated some about this crucial question, and in so doing has set the stage for what could well be a further stage in their work, namely, looking at what kinds of teaching / learning lead to the best results, taking everything we know about how people learn and using that information to enhance those practices and even go beyond them.

This can sound like a daunting task (not many of us are equipped to take research on neuronal activity in the brain and translate it directly into our classroom work). But we can start small. Bharucha reminds us that we still have a long way to go in integrating "[e]ven current knowledge about cognition (specifically, our understanding of active learning, memory, attention, and implicit learning)" into our educational practices. And there is in addition a great deal of valuable educational research out there, from the work that comes out of centers like the NSSE Institute, the Higher Education Research Institution, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, through work being done by individual researchers like Rachelle Brooks (who we're lucky to have with us) and many others. In short, there is lots to draw on, and—I would add—much still to be contributed to these various literatures on how people learn.

And so in closing, here is the question—or maybe more accurately the problem—I'd like to pose to you. What is happening in foreign language classrooms to produce the kinds of results that we see in the Kalamazoo data? Do you think that a study of CLA results on your campus (if you were to administer it) would show similarly high achievement among foreign language students? Similar levels of achievement among students in other fields? If so, why? You could turn to the research literature for answers to these questions (always a good thing), but I would also encourage you to think from your own experience, taking your own classroom as a source of evidence that—taken in the aggregate—can start to provide data to understand what works and why in your teaching, to understand more—in other words—about how people learn. The kind of work I'm asking you to think about is really a project in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and it will not to be quick or easy. It will, however, be rewarding and I think over time has the promise of transforming how you—and all of us in higher education—do our work.

And with that I'll close, leaving further work for our breakout session. Thank you very much.

Note: Portions of this talk were originally presented at the August 7, 2007 meeting of the Council of Independent Ccolleges / CLA Consortium meeting in Washington DC.

Works Cited

Bennett, Alan. 2006. The History Boys. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc.

Bharucha, Jamshed. 2006. "Education as we know it does not accomplish what we believe it does." Edge. http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_10.html.

Connor, W. Robert. 2008. Remarks at the American Historical Association Annual meeting, Washington, D.C.

Rowling, J.K. 2004. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic Inc.

Sotherland, Paul, Anne Dueweke, Kiran Cunningham, and Bob Grossman. 2007. "Multiple Drafts of a College's Narrative." Peer Review, vol. 9, no. 2: 20-23.

-----. 2007a. "Kalamazoo College Adjusted CLA (mean +/- std error) / 2005 First-Year Students / 2006 and 2007 Senior Students." Teagle Foundation.

Strathern, Marilyn, ed. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. European Association of Social Anthropologists series. London: Routledge, 2000.

Remarks at the 139th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago, Illinois on January 5, 2008.

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