Good on you, Peter.
When I read the original mail in which the writer said she had been told to
write a paper on 'assessing attendance', my immediate answer was 'tell them
you won't do it'. I wouldn't. What I might do is to point them elsewhere for
they are surely trying to find an answer to the wrong problem.
Being a university teacher has two components: (a) supporting the student and
(b) academic (underlined) rigour. This involves achieving an appropriate
balance between 'trust' and 'control'. Assessing attendance probably displays
a lack of trust or an excess of control or both.
I'm taking the liberty of quoting below, very freely but I hope the gist is
there, from the Annual Report on Staff Development for 1997-98, beautifully
written, as usual, by Colin Evans at Birkbeck College, which says it all
better than I can. Most of the words in brackets are my additions.
"The changing context of higher education in the UK is characterised by a
contest between two value systems - the Implicit and the Explicit.
Thirty years ago going to university was a minority activity with relatively
little financial consequences for the state and the tax payer. The university
operated on a system of implicit knowledge (and trust):
• we all knew what good research was;
• we knew the difference between a first class degree and a second class
one;
• we knew when a lecturer) was spending her/his time profitably and earning
his keep and when s/he was underworking though it (usually) ‘wasn’t done’ to
act on this knowledge;
• we knew that (a higher) education was sufficient unto itself and didn’t
necessarily have to ‘have a purpose’.
Today higher education is a big budget item concerning large numbers of
students and staff who are expected to make a contribution to the nation’s
wellbeing and the exact nature of the ‘value-added’ has to be made explicit
to the ‘stakeholders’ (who include the students).
The language of 'value-added' and 'stakeholders' ..... is that of those who
require explicitness not of those whose sense of identity comes from not
needing to spell things out.
A group (e.g. teachers, students, teachers and students together, etc.) whose
members understand each other implicitly, almost without language, has great
strength. When required to spell things out, to the world or to one another,
it loses that strength, partly because the implicitness and togetherness may
prove to be an illusion (we may not know what ‘graduateness’ is or what a
‘First’ is (or what 'good attendance' and 'poor attendance' imply or mean),
but mainly because the trust on which implicitness depended has been
destroyed, to be replaced by what seems to be an endless, pettifogging,
bureaucratic process of specification.
The whole process of demanding explicitness - RAE, TQA, Appraisal,
Accreditation, Quality Audit, (Assessing Attendance) - entails a very real
loss which has not always been acknowledged. Complaints about the quality
industry (and its various effects on higher education) are not always the
last ditch resistance of people wanting to protect a privileged,
non-accountable life.
They are also essential reminders of the value of implicitness and of the
fact that, not everything can be measured or even articulated and some of the
things that cannot are our most valuable possessions."
Yep, that just about says it for me!
Trevor Habeshaw
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