Dear all
I’ve been away recently but have followed this thread ‘from afar’ – it helped me in my thinking for drafting an opinion piece I was writing for the Journal of Pedagogic Practice – here’s a little bit of it in case anyone would like to comment:
... by way of a contrast to Graham Gibbs’ statement that improving learning “is not to do with improving teachers or curricula”, back in the early 90s, Stella Cotterell, David Gosling and colleagues at the University of East London recognised that the changes needed in HE were not to remediate deficient students, but rather to improve how the whole university system worked. If we were indeed to have an HE sector open to all with the ability to benefit, changes would be required at all levels - we needed to address admissions, induction, progression routes and modes of assessment - but even more fundamentally, approaches to teaching and learning and curriculum development needed attention.
As the social model of disability shows, promoting inclusivity is not about how disabled individuals need to adapt to a society designed for the able-bodied, but how society itself needs to change to meet the needs of all its members. In the same way, promoting widening participation in HE means ensuring that courses, assessment modes and academic practices themselves do not unfairly disadvantage the non-traditional students. This is not a matter of 'dumbing down' or lowering standards but about ensuring standards are appropriate, criteria for assessment and success are transparent, and that support is provided where needed in order that we take advantage of, and receive the social and intellectual benefits from the full participation of all our students. For example, this means enabling those from working-class backgrounds and those for whom English is not a first language to participate in learning activities on a more level playing field. Conventions of academic life that may have seemed clear to traditional HE students, such as notions of academic referencing, critical thinking and formal styles of writing in English, need to be made transparent and/or adapted for the wider range of students attending university in contemporary times.
Gibbs rightly points out that learning at university is not about acquiring a set of discrete skills; and that, in fact such skills cannot easily be learned out of context of the discipline, and then transferred to other situations. For this reason he promotes “metacognitive awareness and control”, for learning about learning as “… the most influential of all aspects of “study skills”. Improving students appears to involve raising their awareness of what they are doing.”
Whilst I think he has a good point about the ineffectiveness of much that goes under the banner of study skills, Gibbs’ alternative – the concern with metacognition – risks locating the ‘problem’ at the level of the individual unless it is seen through the lens of the social structure – including the power relations - of university life, as exemplified in the discourses and practices of subject disciplines. It is aspects of academic culture – the ‘how we do things around here’ of university life - that is most likely to affect inclusion or exclusion, success or failure, or to advantage or disadvantage certain groups of students.
...
thanks to all contributors to the thread so far
John
From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gary Riley-Jones
Sent: 10 June 2013 15:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?
Hi Everyone,
Like everyone else, I have found this a fascinating thread and I particularly enjoyed John Sutter's comments. I'm also new the list and come from an English for Academic Purposes background teaching predominantly international Art and Visual Cultures students at Goldsmiths. One of the comments that John concludes with is the implication of a skills-based approach towards 'Critical Thinking' and this is something that I'm very interested and spoke about at the recent ALDinHE conference in Plymouth (so apologies if this sounds rather familiar to those who attended!).
I believe that Critical Thinking (CT) can not be taught as a skill, or rather, it can be if one accepts certain theoretical underpinnings which are generally left unstated. Worse than this I would argue, the theoretical underpinnings of CT have become so valourised within Western thought they have become 'commonsensical' and naturalised to the point that it is not questioned.
The following is my response to a blog set up by the tutors of the MA in Teaching English for Academic Purposes at the University of Nottingham entitled 'Teaching EAP' (available at: http://teachingeap.wordpress.com/about/) and the blog itself asks for responses to Atkinson's critique of CT entitled 'A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL' (1997) (available at:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3587975?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102089099993). My amended response is below (Alex is the blog writer):
1) CT is often presented as ‘commonsensical’ and ideologically neutral. This supposed neutrality is born out of CT’s historical origins which ultimately lie in Enlightenment rationalism which itself is based on a linear understanding of logic; a form of logic that has become ‘naturalised’ in the West. So, rather than an ‘either/or’ as presented by Atkinson, CT is paradoxically both commonsensical and rational at the same time.
By the way, Alex, in one of your later comments you say: ‘… critical thinking is often portrayed as this pernicious, culture-bound, Enlightenment way of thinking…’. In fact, I very much feel that it has become culturally unbound and I believe it is very difficult to state in any meaningful way what the influence of ‘culture’ actually is in terms of criticality (I'm thinking here of conceptions of globalisations and Said's Orientalism).
2) I don’t think CT in itself is ‘exclusive and reductive’. It is more a question of what constitutes knowledge and who has access to that knowledge and it is this (of which CT is a symptom) that is itself exclusive and reductive.
3) The argument that CT is challenging to ‘non-native speakers’ and is not a universal. Again, CT is presented as ideologically neutral while at the same time presents a reality based on binary opposition (as reflected in the language that Atkinson's uses such as ‘diametrically opposed’ and ‘non-native speaker’) and presents a deficit model of the foreign other and the female other where, it appears ‘commonsensical’ that ‘they’ cannot think like ‘us’. Thus, although I might regard Atkinson’s argument as ethically unsound, it is actually ‘correct’ in terms of the reasoning it is based on; it is not Atkinson’s reasoning that is ‘at fault’ but rather the precepts upon which that reasoning is based.
4) Perhaps surprisingly from what I have written so far and despite its ‘pernicious’ nature, I believe that there are two very good reasons for teaching CT. The first is for the simple reason that the precepts upon which CT is based are so powerful, and they are so powerful because historically they have been so successful. The real issue for me is that these precepts have become naturalised and valourised to the point that they have acquired the position of being the only way one can think where, in fact, they should be seen as just one of many ways available to us in an understanding of reality. The second concerns disciplinary epistemology (see e.g., Gimenez, 2012) where, in my interviews with Fine Art lecturers, the term ‘criticality’ implies a theoretical position predominated by such thinkers as Foucault (1997), and Butler (2002).
What I have discussed so far is very much a critique of CT but where does this leave us if one starts to question the validity of CT? Very briefly, one option is Critical Pedagogy which is very closely associated with the Frankfurt School and pehaps most famously with the thought of Gramsci. In practical terms, it is most closely associated with the work of Freire. The difficulty I have with Critial Pedagogy however is that, similar to CT, it is a form of modernity based upon the precepts ultimately of the Enlightenment and thus it falls into the same trap as CT.
I should now go into a discussion of the views of Foucault and Butler but I'm aware that this piece is getting quite long and has turned into more of a critique of CT. So I'll stop and save the post-modern 'alternative' for another time. Coincidentally, whan I looked for my earlier blog on CT on the Nottingham site, I came across the following video of a series of mini presentations on what lecturers thought and it's fantastic in terms of reflecting many of the (unquestioned) difficulties I have mentioned above. The link is: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pesl/internationalisation/teaching/criticalthinking/. The video is interesting as throughout CT is presented as a 'good thing', it doesn't actually deal with any theoretical underpinnings (but that might be a product of the question asked) and there is an underlying assumption that international students can't do it - so lots of polite/hedged deficit modelling in a video which is part of a wider project on internationalisation. This research also uses Ronald Barnett (who is an excellent read) and with the video there is an accompanying article. However, Barnett is problematic in the sense that his writing is very paradoxical as although he will use post-modern theory to support his argument, his ultimate position is a modernist one. His view of reality is 'what you see is what you get'.
I'll stop there. I've oversimplified, misrepresented and condensed many big ideas in this piece so if anyone would like to contact me either on this site or privately, please do. The key point, however, is that ultimately I do not believe that criticality can be taught as a skill or regarded as a competency (not directlty at least). It is a state of being not a skill set which you can pick up in a book or even through the best efforts of a tutor (although the tutor does have the 'power' to direct). Criticality or critique comes from within not from without, it is in constant flux and occurs throughout our lives; it is not something that teachers 'have' and something which students 'lack'; and not just something that occurs within the confines of the Western university. Ultimately, it is how an individual views the world around them and how they perceive reality. Thus, CT paradoxically, in my opinion, closes people's minds down. It only presents a (limited) version of reality.
Gary
Gary Riley-Jones
Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes
RHB213
Centre for English Language and Academic Writing
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
T 020 7919 7569/7402
F 020 7919 7403
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web Site: http://www.gold.ac.uk/eap/
From: learning development in higher education network [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of John Sutter [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 04 June 2013 12:53
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?Hello all,
This is a fascinating thread! I'm also new to this forum, and come from an adult language/literacy teaching background, where there's also a growing degree of scepticism about 'skills-based' approaches to learning. So the article which kicked this discussion off seemed very familiar to me in it's critique of 'skills'- yet also extremely conservative in terms of conclusions, in particular:
'The educational interventions that make most difference to student performance are not to do with improving teachers or curricula, and certainly not with policy or organisational changes, but involve improving students'
In my field, there's already been something of a swing towards more socially-situated views of learning and a social practices approach, very much emphasising the importance and particularities of the context(s) in which students encounter new language and literacy practices. Much of this swing has been provoked by some of the theoretical and research literature around literacy/social practices - e.g. Brian Street's seminal work (one item already mentioned in this string I think) on how literacy practices are 'ideological', the New London Group, James Paul Gee's "Social Linguistics and Literacies" and Alastair Pennycook's work on language practices, as well as growing awareness of the multimodality of 'real' communication, academic or otherwise (ie it's not just the words or the texts, but all the other elements through which humans interact - visuals, sounds, the body, physical environment etc). But twinned with this, there's also been a growing disillusion amongst many language and literacy teachers with the skills-based national curricula currently used (imposed) in Adult education, where, for example, complex activities such as 'reading' are broken down into ever smaller decontextualised and 'transferable' 'sub-skills'. This 'skills' approach has been further officially reinforced (unfortunately!) in FE with the arrival of 'Functional Skills' quals, which explicitly test the students' ability to 'transfer' skills in language or maths from one context to another. A 'practices' approach (as well as a lot of research) casts doubt on the tranferability of skills from one context to another, - and casts doubt of the very existence of decontextualised 'skills' in any meaningful sense. In other words, it's all about learning/joining/engaging with the 'practices' one meets in different contexts - and the old idea of a university as representing one context in which there is a particular way to do 'academic' talk or writing is hopelessly naive: universities contain a huge multiplicity of different contexts and practices that can't be reduced to a set of 'skills'. This connects with why, as Gibbs says, 'good' writing or note-taking on one course may not be considered 'good' writing or note-taking on another (in terms of success in getting high marks).
The other key factor a practices-based view of learning brings in is power. If all 'practices' are socially situated, they are 'neither natural, nor universal, nor ideologically neutral' as Kern puts it, but are culturally constructed. So if we find that some 'dominant' social or academic practices effectively disadvantage some students, our real energies ought not to be going into remedial teaching, (which could be read as a kind of Foucauldian 'disciplining') but asking why, and into reshaping (and helping students to reshape) the practices themselves. This means focusing our attention on the curriculum and on the course teaching as much as on 'supporting students' - the opposite in fact, of Gibbs's claim above, though funnily enough also arrived at through a critique of 'skills'.Of course, this presents us with a whole other set of problems: but it's what many universities are struggling with around inclusion, internationalisation and WP, where increasingly we're finding whole groups of students who are effectively 'othered' by the dominant academic practices they encounter. (E.g. - to be provocative! - why should curricula and assessment practices be so potentially fraught for dyslexic students - couldn't things be done differently? (going further than just 'alternative assessments for dyslexic learners'). Shouldn't a properly internationalised university also be a multilingual university? Why should academic writing be 'impersonal' or detached', when such claims rather contradict the essence of much of the postmodern theory our students are asked to engage with?) In other words, we (and students) need to ourselves take a critical approach to concepts like 'critical thinking', 'academic writing', 'research' 'objectivity' etc.....
phew! - seems like enough for now...
all best to all
John
John Sutter
Programme Manager, EAP
University for the Creative Arts
Falkner Road
Farnham
Surrey, GU9 7DS
UK Tel: +44 (0) 1252 892991Mob: 07813 836559
Skype: jssutter
On 4 Jun 2013, at 11:44, Norman, Kay wrote:
My first post ---- a newbie
Dear Jeanette
I wholeheartedly agree with you; how are they supposed to 'be able to do' or 'know' something that they have never been introduced to before. So many mature learners come forward embarrassed that they don't have certain 'academic skills' (actually, most of the younger learners don't either, but they aren't reflective enough to realise and admit to that until later on in the course.. another story!) that they can apply successfully to the different modules and assessments they face.
They are the ones I've got such reward seeing 'transform' as they so often already have life skills to realise that they are 'lacking' something and endeavour to fill the gap. Just showing them how to apply reflective/critical skills to their studies transforms their whole approach and understanding of HE and their role within it.
I am currently in the situation where I may (through force of numbers) have to focus on the 'remedial' rather than coach the self-selecting, and I'm a little apprehensive....
Kay
Study Coach
Anglia Ruskin
-----Original Message-----
From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Janette Myers
Sent: 04 June 2013 11:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hhhmmm?
Dear Kal,
this is a really interesting point which kept me occupied on my new exercise regime which involves walking to a much further tube station!
I think you're right in that part of my problem with 'remedial' is that I simply don't like it, it is a knee jerk reaction. It has all sorts of connotations which a background in adult ed brings up. It's used a lot in medical education and also in dealing with doctors whose performance is sub standard. (incidentally it's interesting that the discourse around underperforming doctors is around identification in order to remediate, whereas that around underperforming teachers is of identification in order to sack- but that's another story) However, I would take issue that difference in what people are able to do leads to remediation issues. I think that many of the things students have to do in HE are new, we wouldn't expect them to have acquired high level criticality through pre HE study, or knowledge about certain discipline areas and we wouldn't expect them to have certain practical skills, such as suturing. This doesn't make them 'remedial', but 'lacks' in other areas do, and I don't know how or why we choose those areas as the ones we expect them to already know, but not others. At the very least we should be able to clearly articulate that and we by and large don't. Does it make a difference in an Eng lit course if students are already familiar with texts? Does being unfamiliar make you remedial? Does not knowing that you don't just talk about what you liked and hated in a text make you remedial? What is the role of the programme of study in conveying a body of knowledge production and outcomes?
I'm starting to burble now, so will stop. Many thanks for posing such a provocative question Regards Janette
On 03/06/2013 16:51, [log in to unmask] wrote:
Hi,
I'm also relatively new to this list, and enjoy the conversations and
resource sharing.
I agree that this article makes good points, and with the sentiments
about the embedded, metacognitive and transformative nature of the work.
I have a question though.
I'm guessing that most would agree that some students are in more
needed of learning development than others - some are already
competently reflective, self-regulatory, critical learners; others are
less so.
So surely, the remedial piece is a part of LD work. Not all, clearly,
but surely 'remediation' is a term that shouldn't be considered a
dirty word, isn't it? After all, helping those students who have
encountered barriers they struggle to overcome, or who have failed
courses, is perhaps the most challenging and interesting aspect of
learning development work. And if we don't help them, who will?
Why is it so common to deny the remedial part of LD?
Really curious,
Kal Winston
Study Adviser,
Bangor University
Quoting Janette Myers <[log in to unmask]>:
Thanks for circulating this Gordon. I thought it a very positive
piece, making some succinct key points. It will be of use to me in
supporting some of the things I try to convey about embedding,
metacognition and the non-remedial (and transformative Sandra!)
nature of LD
regards
Janette
On 03/06/2013 13:11, Gordon Asher wrote:
*Raising awareness of best-practice pedagogy*
30 MAY 2013
Graham Gibbs asks what ‘study skills’ consist of and whether they
can actually be learned by students
SOURCE: *ALAMY*
Tunnel vision: giving students ‘how-to’ guides to learning does not
encourage the kind of flexible thinking that is required to get the
most out of higher education
When I was at The Open University in the 1970s, I tried to teach
adults who were studying for the first time in their lives what they
needed to do in order to learn effectively. When I was based at
Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) in the 1980s, I
was teaching students whose study habits had got them through their
A levels but were unequal to the larger and more complex tasks of
higher education. And when I later worked at the University of
Oxford, students were still asking for help with “study skills”.
Their intelligence and achievements were intimidating, so what was
the problem?
The educational interventions that make most difference to student
performance are not to do with improving teachers or curricula, and
certainly not with policy or organisational changes, but involve
improving students: changing what it is they do in order to learn.
For example, teachers can often help students more by encouraging
them to tackle feedback differently than by altering the feedback
itself.
So what does “improving students” actually consist of? “How to”
guides on study skills – how to take notes, how to structure an
essay and so on – contain what appears to be sound enough advice
(although the similarity between them is both striking and
suspicious).
However, attempts to back up this consensus with evidence of the
effectiveness of the techniques described have had little success.
Students’ scores on “study habits inventories” – questionnaires made
up of lists of the kinds of things contained in these books – hardly
correlate with examination performance at all. An exception is how
to be organised (by managing one’s time, for example).
“Organisation” predicts performance where the use of most “skills”
does not.
Students also rarely use the methods they read about in how-to-study
books or are taught on study skills courses, and for all kinds of
reasons. Most importantly, the skills may be too rigid to span the
range of demands that students actually face.
For example, lectures may primarily convey facts, or explain
procedures, or exemplify the use of the discourse of the discipline,
and so on. Each requires a different kind of note-taking, and
students have to be able to spot these varied demands and do
something different in response, not simply use the same methods
every time. Disciplines also vary in their demands and conventions:
a student studying sociology and history may find that their
writing gains good marks in one but not the other.
*Fit for purpose*
It appears that successful students (and successful academics for
that matter) do an extraordinary variety of things when they take
notes or set about writing. They have found, often through trial and
error, idiosyncratic ways that work well enough for them, given
their purposes and the particular learning tasks in front of them.
It is possible to train students to use specific technical skills,
but they transfer very poorly from one context to another (for
example, from a training course back to everyday study, or from
studying one subject to another). It is much better, instead, to
develop a learner’s ability to study a subject within that subject.
For example, efforts at some Ivy League universities to improve
students’ writing by hiring experts in communication who run generic
courses in how to write have tended to be abandoned. Instead,
postgraduates within subjects are trained to give feedback on
assignments that leads students to reflect on their writing, rather
than only on the content of the assignment.
When I acted as a “study skills counsellor” at Oxford Polytechnic, I
noticed that many of the bewildered students in my caseload were
unable to describe what they did when they were studying (such as
reading a chapter in a book, for example). Their studying was
habitual and unreflective. In contrast, effective students can tell
you all about how they go about their task, have a sensible
rationale for doing so and change what they do when they notice that
the context or task demands are different.
In the educational literature, this is termed “metacognitive
awareness and control”, and it is the most influential of all
aspects of “study skills”. Improving students appears to involve
raising their awareness of what they are doing, increasing their
repertoire so that they can choose to do different things when it
seems appropriate and tuning them in to task demands so that they
can recognise what is required.
*Right answer, wrong approach*
Two crucial aspects of studying effectively are not about “skills”
at all but about understanding. Research at Harvard University into
why its very bright students sometimes study in unintelligent ways
has revealed how important it is for students to understand the
nature of knowledge and what they are supposed to do with it.
The study found that unsophisticated students would try to spot the
right answers in lectures, which they would note down in order to
memorise for a test, a method described in the literature by the
phrase “quantitative accretion of discrete rightness”. They were
fantastically efficient at this and it had served them well at
school, but it was the wrong thing to do at Harvard.
Similarly, studies at the University of Gothenburg have revealed
that students have quite different conceptions of what “learning”
means, and these conceptions evolved through experience until,
ideally, learning is seen as attempting to “apprehend reality”.
Skills have to serve the purposes associated with these evolving
conceptions of knowledge and of learning: without appropriate
purposes, the skills can be worse than useless.
PRINT HEADLINE:
Article originally published as: /Self-reflective improvement/ (30
May 2013)
AUTHOR:
Graham Gibbs is professor of higher education at the University of
Winchester.
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I work Mon-Thur at St George's
Dr Janette Myers SFHEA
Senior Lecturer in Student Learning and Support,
Division of Population Health Sciences and Education,
Section for Medical and Healthcare Education,
6th floor Hunter Wing,
St George's, University of London
Cranmer Terrace
London
SW17 0RE
020 8725 0616
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I work Mon-Thur at St George's
Dr Janette Myers SFHEA
Senior Lecturer in Student Learning and Support,
Division of Population Health Sciences and Education,
Section for Medical and Healthcare Education,
6th floor Hunter Wing,
St George's, University of London
Cranmer Terrace
London
SW17 0RE
020 8725 0616
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