Monday, February 18, 2013

priming the double take

An academic list I subscribe to had been talking about moocs one day and someone posted a comment suggesting that although someone might learn in a mooc they couldn't be educated in one.

At the time this struck me as either deeply cynical or horribly mistaken -- much like Gardner Cambell's colleague who said "It may be learning but its not academics." Cambell's Open Ed 12 keynote

 

 

helped me see the argument we were having as evidence of the double-bind of Higher Education: we want students to learn, but the need to assess and credential that learning (often) makes it harder for students to learn. And the kinds of learning we're most thrilled by often don't fit our rubrics or assessment tools (although I suppose we can always slap a gold star on it).

We find ourselves in countless double-binds in higher education. The glorious "doubletakes" that help us pop out of the double bind and up in Bateson's hierarcy of learning happen most easily in upper level classes (grad classes and upper division undergrad). But they can be hard to come by in first-year writing classes and especially hard in basic writing classes because it is there that instructors are frequently so committed to the class (the people, relationships, and goals of the class) that the conflict between creating opportunities for rich, personal learning seems most in conflict with the pressures of assessment and credentialling -- giving students what they need to 'prove' they belong in the institution.

All of that would seem depressing as hell--is depressing as hell. Except for the window Campbell gave us to his students' double takes. Because although his class was one of those awkward-to-teach hybrid upper level undergrad/grad classes, he and his students acheived a number of double takes despite the doublebind. And if it can be done in the context of the weird hybrid undergrad/grad class, it can be done in basic writing. In fact, I think it is vital that it be done there and perhaps one way to do it would be to talk and write about the doublebind of higher education and see if together we could pop.

 

 

 

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