Comments for Academic Reading

Comment on Recent policy in teacher education by Elaine Knox

Elaine Knox — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:37:16 +0000

Please can you send to my email all information.

Comment on Recent policy in teacher education by Ian Phillips

Ian Phillips — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:04:06 +0000

I was unaware that what Gove and Gibb are proposing can be described as policy, more like uninformed prejudice, based upon their own experiences of selective schools, teachers and teaching from a bygone age which they assume was golden – on the spurious assumption that if it worked for them it must work. Gibb famously remarked that he would prefer his children to be taught science by someone from a ‘good’ university with no teaching qualification rather than someone with a teaching qualification from a ‘new’ university.
Those of us leading secondary subject PGCEs will shortly be asked to design ‘new’ programmes that might enable us to anticipate Gove’s and Gibb’s rancid thought processes for courses which might pass their ‘Schools Led’ criteria.
What they are proposing is the equivalent of turning medical education over to St John’s Ambulance Brigade: ‘you know how to stop bleeding – we’ll let you train up the new generation of vascular surgeons, you can put a sling on – do you fancy teaching orthopaedics?’
Yet they fail to appreciate the idiocy of their prejudices, the teaching methods they were subjected to in that remote golden age were probably new and radical in a very different post war world. If they were true conservatives perhaps they ought to be hankering after the monitorial system. I suspect that both Sir Keith Joseph and Sir Edward Boyle would have nothing but contempt for Gove and Gibb, their ill informed idea that pass for policy and the way they pander to the lowest common denominator: the ignorance and prejudice of Daily Mail readers. I’m actually quite glad to be the age I am and can get out soon but I will bitterly regret the lasting harm that they will do to teacher education, to secondary subject communities and to history teacher education in particular.

Comment on … and the three most motivating factors are … by MP

MP — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:34:00 +0000

When english is taught as a secondary language one of the assessment level criteria by which they are judged (at quite a low level) is if their communication causes irritation to the listener. It is not the fault of computer audio reading that an educational article accreditation can stunt communication so effectively.The previous motivation artical that you mention here was very interesting though

Comment on Food for thought, this autumn by Tim Cain

Tim Cain — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:52:26 +0000

Many thanks for a stimulating conversation. So I think we’re agreed,

- educational theory is mostly rhetoric
- educational practice is a craft
- all research monies should go to the philosophers

Isn’t it lovely, to feel that you’ve solved the world’s problems?

Have a good weekend,

Tim

Comment on Second-marking and External Examining: wasted resources? by Damien Shortt

Damien Shortt — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:34:39 +0000

You may be a better marker after your deliberations, Matt, but what does the student get out of the moderation process? If you and the second-marker to and fro over a few marks, how is the student’s learning enhanced? If an assignment is moderated as a 55 instead of a 53, where’s the benefit?

Comment on Second-marking and External Examining: wasted resources? by Matt Cochrane

Matt Cochrane — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:40:55 +0000

I actually enjoy quibbling over a few marks! It sharpens my thinking nicely. But I’ve never considered it wasted energy – in the end the convention is to go with the original marker unless there’s a compelling reason not to, though I’ve often ended up somewhere in the middle as a happy (and quickly-agreed) compromise. And afterwards I think I’m a better marker.

Comment on Second-marking and External Examining: wasted resources? by Damien Shortt

Damien Shortt — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:30:59 +0000

To both Matt and Rob:
The assumption that the purpose of second-marking is to inflate grades is not really Bloxham’s point: rather, her worked example is merely to highlight that second-marking and moderating at the level of individual assignments has no real impact upon the final degree-classification. Thus, all the quibbling over 1, 2, or 3 percentage points is, it seems for her, wasted energy.

As regards moderation and external-examining serving to assure parity of assessment across all institutions in the UK, she appears to have doubts about its ability to achieve this. I guess, to put words in her mouth, she is saying that external-examining can, at best, merely assure that a lone acadmeic working at another institution has confirmed parity of assessment. But to make the argumentative leap from this to the conclusion that this ensures parity across every institution in the UK is a leap too far.

@ Rob:
If you disagree with Bloxham about the point of marking being to improve the quality of the student’s work, then what is the point of marking? Your final statement actually relates closely to Bloxham’s parting shot about the epistemological questions with which we ought to engage: how did we come to a consensus about the published criteria against which we assess students? Who agreed to them? On what authority? Do students engage in these epistemological debates?

Comment on Second-marking and External Examining: wasted resources? by Rob Spence

Rob Spence — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:03:36 +0000

It’s persuasive, but in a climate where we are urged more and more to award specific marks for specific outcomes, a return to a system where a bunch of people decide on the basis of what is essentially a gut reaction what a degree category should be seems open to all kinds of questions. I would expect lots of work for m’learned friends. I sympathise with Bloxham’s point, but she assumes that the point of marking is to improve the quality of the student’s work, rather than to come to an agreed and defensible assessment of that quality against published criteria.

Comment on Second-marking and External Examining: wasted resources? by Matt Cochrane

Matt Cochrane — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:19:53 +0000

But the purpose of moderation is not to increase anyone’s mark – it’s to see if we’re all marking at the same level. It’s enormously important to the integrity of a course that the mark you have just given them is broadly the same as the mark they would have obtained at the University of X. The last thing we want to say is ‘if you’d come to our university you would have got a first’. A swing of the magnitude described only ever comes about when somebody misses a whole paper out.

Comment on Following-up Derrida by Linda Dunne

Linda Dunne — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:43:22 +0000

Poststructuralism is commonly associated with the philosophical works of figures such as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Lyotard, and may be regarded as a movement of thought that embodies different forms of critical practice. It is concerned with, amongst other things, difference, language, power and discourse.
It is often associated with attempts to de-centre and deconstruct discourses and practices that are taken as natural or as ‘given’. In this respect, it lends itself very well to an analysis of taken for granted or ‘common sense’ practices of schooling. Often we ‘just do it’ and in the doing or performance of it we do harm.
A poststructuralist analysis could indeed seek to show that there is no ‘centre’ in the school system and that the concept [teacher] is a discursively produced object. It can flag-up instances where people are making essentialist assumptions about what it means to learn, or what ought to be studied, or what it means to teach. It can reveal how certain ideologies seek to interpellate (Althusser, 1971) subjects into thinking and behaving in certain ways. But it would question the notion of ‘emancipation’ and ‘emancipatory’ research. A theory or research paradigm that has an emancipatory desire to be ‘right’ can contain a will to power and therefore a will to a particular truth. An emancipatory discourse, as it becomes established as mainstream, can itself become a ‘totalizing’ or imperialist one. Youdell (2006) suggests that poststructuralism retains but re-situates what may be termed rights – based, emancipatory work.
As an additional set of conceptual, analytical and political tools it may be very useful to pursue avenues for change. Those who seek fixed, definitive ‘truths’ or absolutes may indeed regard poststructuralism as anarchic or nihilist. However, a research approach that abandons notions of fixed particular truths ‘urges us to think, to opt for questions rather than answers, and to critique and seek possibilities rather than crave control’ (McWhorter, 2005, p.xvi). Poststructuralism provides space for us to think about what and who we are, in relation to others, as an ethic of the self.

Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays Monthly Review Press. Available online http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/1970/ideology.htm. Accessed 12 June, 2007.

McWhorter, L. (2005) Forward, in: S. Temain (Ed.) Foucault and the Government of Disability (USA, University of Michigan)

Youdell, D. (2006) Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and Student Subjectivities (Dordrecht, Springer).