Author Archives: Michael Brown
February 17, 2011, 3:21 pm
By Michael Brown
Postsecondary education occurs across a variety of different settings, and obviously some of those settings are designed to train people for specific skills, possibly for jobs or credentials. In a way, these settings substitute for an older system of apprenticeship. But there is an important difference.
The older system provided predictable rewards for those who were able to pass their apprenticeship. A plumber’s apprentice would eventually enter the field as a licensed plumber, with a reasonable expectation of a stable working life. Now I fear that people are now being taught specific technical skills that are bound to become obsolete. It may become more and more difficult for individuals who undergo a series of job changes to get the training they would need to continue in the work force at a level that is consistent with their expectations.
For those of us in the human…
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February 7, 2011, 5:02 pm
By Michael Brown
I want to defend the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts as crucial to what we can mean by “education.” However, there are conventional definitions of those “human sciences” that are not consistent with the value of education that I believe those fields embody.
The way I think about the value of education is radically different from the utilitarian values associated with goal-oriented, strictly instrumental reasoning; from the idea of “excellence” associated with the old imperialist idea of “civilization”; and from an endeavor with external standards that are presented as eternal.
The overall significance of education, as I see it, is to the study and improvement of human affairs. The question is how this should be carried out as a curriculum and as a practice. I want to speak to the possibility of connecting criticism as the aim of education with a…
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February 4, 2011, 4:10 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: I think that we need to talk about what we mean when we discuss “education.” We began this blog by making the distinction between the institutional setting of education and educational values and associated practices (teaching, for example). I want to return to the questions surrounding values and the practices related to those values.
By “education” we are ordinarily referring to a set of values tied to self-development and citizenship. This is a fairly conventional definition, but it needn’t be dismissed because of that. The question of what education is for is getting lost in debates over costs and benefits, the management of educational corporations, and the evaluation of courses by measures of “outcomes.” That creates a predicament. To get too caught up in these ostensibly “value-neutral” concerns means that we are losing the…
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January 24, 2011, 6:14 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: There has been a lot of discussion about whether or not students are getting a fair deal when they pay for classes that are apparently neither substantive and rigorous enough nor geared to learning something new.
In that discussion, here’s a key question that people don’t talk about much: Are students paying for a semester that happens to be divided into separate classes, or are they paying for each class that happens to be included in a list defined as a semester?
In the first case, students are analogous to clients; in the second, students are in fact buyers who are consumers of each separable thing that they buy. Of course, different colleges model one or the other of those scenarios, but usually, when we talk about education, we are referring to the client model.
Mary: I agree with that, but I also think we have to be aware of actual…
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January 12, 2011, 12:40 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: I am about to go to my first undergraduate seminar of the semester. In this class, we will be doing a close reading and discussion of the first volume of Marx’s Capital. So, the students will need to read each section prior to class. Will they do it? What will we do if they don’t? I am of two minds here, and each leads me to a different answer to those questions.
On the one hand, it seems important for students to develop some command of the material in order to be able to use it in extracurricular discussions about topics to which the text might be germane, for example the financial crisis or the emergence of social movements.
On the other hand, it seems at least equally important for students to take hold of the text and make it their own, by discovering why the text might have to have been written in the order in which they find it. I…
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December 15, 2010, 5:22 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: Education departments have been denigrated for a long time, often based on the claim that they make a fetish of process and do not adequately take substance into account. But there is a different reason for the defensiveness that often accompanies that judgment: It is primarily in education departments and rarely in other disciplines that faculty are most likely to discuss the relationship between teaching and learning.
Mary: This is related to the fact that so many academic departments seem to devalue teaching. We actively recruit and hire junior faculty members who are able to teach in innovative ways: utilizing global outreach, service learning, and new technologies. But we fail miserably at promoting and retaining these faculty members. We hire them for the “differences” they bring (significantly, many of these new hires are women and…
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December 8, 2010, 2:23 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: I was struck by one comment about our last post, that it might be a good idea to teach less material in order to teach some significant part of it in depth. What would students gain from more depth rather than a survey approach?
It seems to me that standardization, grading, and product- or outcomes-orientation are more compatible with a survey approach than with an emphasis on how a student arrives at the intellectual force of an idea. At best, a survey of a field taught as a subsidiary part of a course can indicate what the teacher believes is the scope of that field. But the important work of teaching happens when there is a focus on one idea or one text. Of course, whether teaching for depth is a good idea depends on what we mean by “depth.”
Mary: Mike, although I agree with your philosophy when it pertains to teaching a single…
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December 3, 2010, 5:05 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: Continuing our discussion from earlier this week, teachers like Cathy Davidson who try to innovate in grading may suffer the same disappointment as reformists have always suffered. The “externalities” are not simply there, like a hill that is familiar in a landscape; they proliferate and expand as management increasingly turns inward and finds reasons to incorporate extra-educational values to determine grades. That makes it difficult for any teacher to use those innovations in other classes, since most educational innovations at some point run up against values imposed from without.
When I say that traditional grading is incompatible with the interrelated processes of teaching and learning, I mean that grading imposes irrational limitations on both teacher and student. Grading does not evaluate the sort of knowledge that is inherent in…
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November 17, 2010, 1:11 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: Our last discussion left an awful lot on the table, especially in regard to the relationship between what I called the “extra-academic” concerns of administration and the academic concerns of faculty. Administrators are constrained by institutional contexts, and this leads to policies that don’t sufficiently support the most important aspects of teaching and research.
As a faculty member, I have little choice but to view the administration as the distributor of resources. That role breeds a “statistical” perspective that results in conceiving of departments as unitary entities for the sake of comparison. It also means that measurable outcomes need to be established so that resource allocations can be justified. That is not the perspective of faculty.
Mary: In our last post, I also mentioned that faculty members need to “push back” on …
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November 10, 2010, 12:03 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mary: Mike, why is it so difficult to get a new course approved? If professors are unable to negotiate the resources necessary to support a new course, then perhaps the support isn’t there, perhaps it has not passed the departmental “peer review” process. I view the creation of a single course to be the purview of departments and programs. Many of our practices assume that academics are objective, but this is clearly not the case. A department has its own self-interest in mind and the more powerful members of the department (typically the senior faculty) will support initiatives that confirm and maintain their own disciplinary practices. This practice extends to tenure and promotion as well.
There are always ways of getting around the department. When I’m walking across campus or having lunch at the faculty center, professors will engage me in…
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