Trans-discipline

Making the Implicit Explicit

So your university is requiring you to undertake some form of assessment. It usually comes down as a mandate loaded with jargon like outcomes, rubrics, assessments, etc. It is usually feels like you are being asked to prove you are a good teacher and your students actually learn something in your classes. It all seems like an imposition, a demand to prove yourself after years of academic work as if you are some newly-minted teaching assistant. So what to do?

Start with what you already have, what you already know, and what you already do. Imagine your typical grade book. A column of names down the left-hand margin; a row of criteria or assignments across the top; a matrix of scores and grades littered between. What kinds of assignments are listed there? What kinds of marks are recorded there? Are there any patterns that emerge? Imagine. A professor uses a grade sheet to notice that there is a consistently weak aspect of student performance: the research paper. This is a good start, since writing a good research paper is a course expectation. If she has more detailed records of how students did on various aspects of the paper: organization, thesis, use of evidence, strength of argument, etc., she might be able more clearly to pinpoint the source of the problem.

She could also ask and see if other professors have similar issues (which we all usually do over a beer or a cup of coffee). She could ask her students what they find difficult about the assignment (what some edu-pros call an indirect assessment). She could take this information and then change her approach to teaching the research paper, repeat the analysis on the next term or terms, and see if there is a result (a process of revision we are all familiar with).

Going further, she could ask her colleagues to save copies of their students’ research papers (they are all probably buried in the e-mail archive or on their hard drives anyway). They could look at their common student work (and maybe their common grade books) seeking common strengths and weaknesses. They could put their heads together to come up with new, innovative and creative strategies to address their findings.  They could create common criteria and levels of performance (what some of those same edu-pros call a rubric). Lastly, they could put their observations, conclusions, and recommendations into a brief report (or program review, so to speak) and refer back to it in a year when they gather again to see if their innovations created any significant change in the quality of their students’ work.

The point I'm trying to make is that even when given what seem to be external demands irrelevant to our chosen profession and driven by political winds, we should have the power to choose how we respond to those pressures, how we answer those calls, and how we reach into already established practices to answer them. In turn, we need to keep an open mind as to how these demands may reveal for us ways we can do what we already do better, ways we can make our implicit expectations and evaluations more explicit (to ourselves, our colleagues and perhaps more importantly our students), and ways we can assit our students to actually learn better the ideas, skills and values we hold dear and what have lead us into the professoriate in the first place.

Scylla and Charybdis

Change may be eternal, but it is not defined by jumping from stage to stage; it's more like navigating a dangerous course among different challenges. One doesn’t “get to the next level” (please tell me if anyone has ever concretized exactly what this means beyond serving as a rhetorical cudgel to bash the brains out of anyone who stands in the way of a change we want make happen) and leave the old level entirely behind, basking in the glow of a new found idyllic condition, as much as one might want to. The previous stage persists in innumerable ways, which is not always a bad thing.

Take for example organizational structures in higher education, which are remarkably like small states or societies. Many are characterized by what one may call "patrimonial administration." Decisions are made and controlled personally, through oral communications and defined by custom. Leaders’ discretionary powers are wide and subordinates are more like a personal staff than anything else. Oral tradition as shared guidebook, power wielded through exercising historical consciousness, and flexibility and rapidity in response to crises and opportunities mark this power regime.

Even when organizations move to a more “bureaucratic administration,” where office holding primarily confers authority, where written communications and rule-bound order prevail, and where technical, impersonal and legalistic practices determine the limits of discretionary power, patrimonial characteristics continue to exist. Policy manuals as action guides, legalistic citations as rhetorical power, and thoughtful and many-sided considerations of responses may be more characteristic here, but one needs only to reflect on the role of charismatic leadership in this setting to see the continuity of certain elements of a patrimonial regime. (See the notes on Weber’s sociology of bureaucracy here.)

Add to this a more recent “post-bureaucratic administration” where common responsibility for the success of the whole, not just for my small part, is stressed, leadership exercises authority through consensus making among stakeholders, and structural development occurs through a meta-process of deciding on how the rules will be written and enforced. This post-bureaucratic world exists along side the bureaucratic one, the same way post-modern and modern uneasily cohabit our cultural world.

More accurately, all three forms of organization exist along side and intermingled with each other: patrimonial, bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic. The result is that there are contingent and context-driven associations and groupings within the organization along with periodic and dynamic reformulations of organizational structure that may conform to one any of these models at any given time. (On the post-bureaucratic, see Heckscher’s  paper here.)

The transdisciplinary perspective here is not about railing against the persistence of the paternalist old regime, or the mind-numbing and Byzantine delays of modern rule following, or even the unfairness of the current order’s privatization of profit and socialization of risk. It is about successfully discerning the dominant operating mode in any given situation or organization, developing an awareness of when the other two crop up or control circumstances, and imaginatively navigating a path through, around and among these reefs and shoals. It may feel like getting away from Cyclops only to be confronted by Scylla and Charybdis, and then once finding dry land again realizing one is back on the island of the Cyclops, but that would be submitting to pessimism. Instead, the power of these three may be strategically harnessed and used in transformative and even transgressive ways. That is the challenge.