Absolutely dead right, David. I saw the blurb and viewed.... and would
not put that in front of the folk on the PG Cert here at Leicester,or
indeed anyone who didn't have a good working knowledge of the ideas on
which it is nominally based. Not only would any newcomer to the
literature get a cartoonish view of constructive alignment, but a
similarly distorted view of the 'approaches to learning' literature.
Whatever happened to the approach to learning being depending on context?
Here Robert is an irretrievable surface learner, and good old Susan
unremittingly 'deep'. And these 'characteristics' seem to feed through
automatically into their level of achievement. Nothing here about
mitigating features such as differential levels of organisation or
ability; no, a deep student will perforce do better than a surface one. I
remembered that a Robert and a Susan are sketched in right at the
beginning of 'Teaching for Quality Learning at University', so went back
to have a look at how Biggs deals with them there. In the book they are
not 'deep' and 'surface' but 'Academic' Susan and 'Non-Academic' Robert
(capitalisation and inverted commas as in the text). The transposition of
those terms to 'deep ' and 'surface' is for me far from trivial, and
serves to confuse issues further in the film. It's certainly a puzzle why
Biggs allowed the endorsement.
Like you I'm very critical of the apparent excision of the idea of human
agency in learning, and was also drawn up short by the idea that 'Whatever
happens he ends up learning what the teacher expected'. It's as if humans
don't bring pre-existing ideas, conceptions and prejudices to their
learning which they use to create their own meaning out of the material
presented by the teacher. Often they do learn what the teacher expects,
but along with the intended learning comes that which does not necessarily
cohere with the intentions of the teacher. This reductionist account
seems to relegate the student's own meaning making beneath the superior
will and intention of the teacher. Of course, students can't be directed
and redirected, but the intersection of teacher intention and student
learning is far more complex and interesting than the film indicates.
I guess you could use the film as an analytical exercise after people had
been introduced to the ideas; for example by asking them to critique the
film in the light of their understanding of the issues. I'd hope they
would point out its oversimplification and reductionism. But as a guide
to the ideas for the uninitiated, I don't think so...
Bw
Derek
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