And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass.
—René Descartes
As you know, I teach philosophy at Irvine Valley College.
I’m a member of one of ten “schools” of the college, namely, the glorious and abiding School of Humanities and Languages.
I’m one of two senators representing H&L in the Academic Senate, a body of about twenty souls who represent faculty on, well, academic matters. (The union represents faculty on contractual matters, God help us.)
Over the years, I’ve generally made a point of keeping senate affairs out of the blog, but, for various reasons, I’ve decided to reverse this policy. And why not? We all believe in transparency, don’t we?
Yes we do.
TODAY’S SENATE MEETING:
So, today, the Academic Senate met (it meets every second Thursday from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.), and the meeting, with its new President, went well.
At one point, an instructor who helps direct and “facilitate” our college’s efforts to “implement SLOs” (student learning outcomes), gave a brief demonstration of software designed to assist instructors in this, um, implementation.
What are SLOs? Nope, they’re not anything common sense might gravitate towards. (“Stuff students learn.”) They’re balderdash. I won’t even bother to define SLOs. It would be pointless.
Nevertheless, the ACCJC, our accreditor, requires of colleges that they provide “evidence of the achievement of student learning outcomes.” The accreds regard this as a matter of “institutional effectiveness.” (And what’s that? Don’t ask.)
I like the two instructors who facilitate this SLO thing, but, when they present at Senate meetings, I can’t help but react to the absurdity and idiocy of it all. It is as though we were Scholastics charged with determining how many succubi can ravish a turnip on the head of a pumpkin.
Today, one of the SLOers demonstrated accessing a program called eLumen, which is supposed to assist faculty in doing those things that must be done re SLOs for courses/programs.
I asked a series of peevish questions about the unavoidable ugliness of the verbiage and forms projected upon the screen (alas, I even used the word “incoherent”), and this clearly pissed off the SLO maven. Later, I made a big show of saying (as an aside) that I sometimes overreact to SLOs (mea culpa), owing to their hideous, spirit-sucking, counter-productive quality and the similarity of this whole dang SLO initiative to the events of dystopian novels such as 1984. (Well, I didn't really say all that, but I thunk it.)
She seemed to accept this as an apology. I was glad.
No matter, the SLO freight train was unstoppable and flew headlong through the bureaucratic intestine (er, I’m experiencing metaphorical confusitude) until it ended up at long last as a highly dubious set of “standards” demanded by ACCJC, an organization presided over by that notorious pinhead and jackass Babs Beno.
OK, maybe I’m wrong (don’t thinks so), but any decent and intelligent person would at this point reject, condemn, curse, and generally piss upon this SLO business and all of the forms and tasks and reassigned time with which it is associated.
But no.
Today, at the senate meeting, Ms. K got out her soapbox, climbed upon it, and then declared that she is no friend of SLOs. Still, said she (with a palpable high self-regard and an aura of imminent self-contradiction), you can approach these SLO requirements as crap and get nothing out of it—or you can embrace them and let them do the good and wonderful things they were designed to do.
Yeah, it’s like getting handed a sack of cat poop to, say, wash your hands. Now, you can curse the sack—or you can be mature and good and do the dang hand-washing. With that poop.
STRATEGIC PLANNING: We had an interesting—even a good—discussion about the College-wide Strategic Planning process. (These processes, too, are demanded by the Accreditation Pinheads.) Somebody yammered about that for a bit.
Then, essentially, I asked: OK, is this more bullshit, or is this stuff for real?
Once again, soapboxes materialized and were mounted. You’ll never get anywhere not participating. You’ve got to participate, or shuddup. People are so cynical. Do a good turn daily. Every vote counts.
“Yeah, but no freakin’ wonder people are cynical,” said someone. Mr. T then referred to our college’s “dark period.”
It’s been tough believing in anything here at IVC.
On the other hand, Mr. J (an often sensible fellow) seemed to think that there are real opportunities here to make good things happen. Someone else expressed her distaste for those hinky backroom deals we all heard about in the dark days (and even recently). Participating in the planning process is a way of being transparent and avoiding all that. It’s a good and open process. So everybody should get on board.
“Doors are now opening,” said someone.
“Things are changing,” said Mr. S, earlier during the meeting.
“Oh, yeah? What do you mean?”, I asked.
Um, well, uh, they’re changing is all. You know.
Believe it.
Yeah, but I want particulars. I’ll accept vague ones. Winks and nudges even.
In the course of today’s meeting, I was assured that IVC’s Accreditation steering committee—the one including Wendy, Don Wagner, Tracy, Lisa, et al.—is moving along nicely and Don (that former basher of faculty) is still showing up and taking faculty remarks seriously.
All is well, I was told.
OK, guess so. And I mean that.
SOME BACKGROUND (AN OLD DtB POST):
SLOs: “We think this is crap,” says the respected conservative scholar (7/21/08)
From Inside Higher Ed: Could the Wrong Assessment Kill the Liberal Arts?:
Unlikely critics gathered Friday to offer strong criticisms of the Education Department’s push for assessment using standardized instruments.
One of the participants in the gathering was Peter Wood, the executive director of the conservative National Association of Scholars, which has pressed for greater rigor in college curriculum. He is no fan of the DoE’s approach:
The department’s insistence on testing for specific learning outcomes … provide what he called a “severely impoverished view of what higher education should be.” The push to focus on learning outcomes at the college level, according to Wood, are “a distraction and, at worse, a menace” for instructors. Promoting learning outcome assessments, Wood said, assumes all collegiate courses have a specified skill-set of knowledge that can be identified in advance of having these courses instructed.Wood noted that instructors often simply ignore SLOs:
“We bluff,” Wood said of some instructors who identify quantifiable sets of skills or knowledge, noting that accreditation reviews typically verify only what a college sets out to accomplish. “We think this is nonsense. We think this is crap. We put on paper what we’re going to do and then do something else anyway.”See also Outcomes Based Assessments are Destructive of a Liberal Education written, it appears, by a conservative.
Making sense of SLOs, a recent DtB post
P.S.
I've already heard from some faculty who share my low regard of SLOs. They write:
• Your comments on [SLOs, which are now part of Program Review] were so cathartic. I have to do the damn thing but just reading your notes made me feel a sense of relief. I always feel that I am betraying someone when I dis the whole process. It has already taken far too much time and energy that could be spent improving my classes....
• I loved your take on SLOs! I have attended a few mind-numbing workshops on SLOs and always managed to leave more confused than when I arrived. They piss me off and make me brain dead at the same time, and I know they have no bearing on my teaching and less bearing on the results from the student side. They just take up even more time that I could spend developing great classroom materials. I finally decided to suck it up and tackle them and just give them what they want....
9 comments:
Your senate meetings sound interesting.
Bottom line for all of us wherever we work: SLOs should NOT be part of the evaluation process for individual faculty members.
Never. Ever.
--100 miles down the road
Glad to hear of new directions for IVC's Academic Senate. We'll all need new directions given the condition of our national and state economies.
I'd like to invite our IVC Senate colleagues to our Spring In-service Academic Senate meeting where we'll be reviewing, in part, our Accreditation drafts [and what we write does have bearing on IVC, especially where District Goverance is concerned (Standard 4) and ATEP (standards 2, 3, and 4)].Our AS meetin will be the Wed of Inservice from 3-5 (after our Faculty Association's presentations).
Ya'll come. Food, drink and merriment will be available. And we'll have N O talk of SLOs.
SLOS make a lot of people a lot of money - take tons of our time - AND CHANGE NOTHING WE DO IN THE CLASSROOM.
It's another damn hoop, people.
Now JUMP.
I, too, found your "SLO" post cathartic, Roy. Once again, too, I found comfort in the company. Our private institution is going through all of the same processes and debates--even the language (an *opportunity*--yeah, that's it!) is strikingly similar. (We gotta do it, or WASC won't re-accredit us, is the story--probably true.)
My department found itself the other day asking ourselves, "Okay; how do we assess whether we have met our stated aim [in our last self-study] of cultivating responsible and critical citizens, so that our graduates won't be the type to fall for demagogues or tyrants?" Hmmm. Do we go out to see if they vote? Okay; we can do some things to see if they are engaged: do they do community service? Are they serving in government (and does that show good qualities, or bad ones?!)? Do they write op-ed pieces? Even as we went through the hoops, I know we were all also thinking: *Who are we kidding?* Some excellent, reflective citizens may do none of those things. Some awful people *will* do those things. Good lord; what a charade!
There is ONE thing that makes me happier about the assessment stuff. I have a colleague who is one of those absurdly, fantastically popular guys who has nearly cult status on our campus. He is enormously entertaining--better than a stand-up comic--in the classroom. Students do a lot of yelling, he stirs them up, they all feel heady and sophisticated. Then, later, they land in my classes (and others'); we find that they can't write coherently--nor think coherently. They FELT great in those prior classes; but it seems that nothing at all stuck with them once they were out the door.
I have to admit that I'd love to systematically *show* that this winner of numerous teaching awards has, in fact, taught many of them very little.
I don't know if that will actually be an "outcome" (yuck!) of this process. It would be cool, though, if it were.
Yours in revulsion at the times we live in,
MAH
All this stuff does is make a few people look good - the rest of us just keeping doing what we have to do.
100 miles,
As a postscript to my other post, we are all agreed at my place (admin and faculty all) that the assessment project should absolutely NOT be a part of faculty evaluation--both for utilitarian reasons (people will be too scared to do it honestly if they think it might reflect badly on them) and for sensible other reasons: student "outcomes" depend on a lot of factors beyond faculty control----duh!
All the best, MAH
Jeez, MAH, I hear you, but what makes you think that Professor Fantastic is entirely responsible for his students' poor skills? Didn't his students have dozens of teachers before they got to his classroom? And is it possible for one person to "cure" the semiliteracy of a hundred-and-some students in a single semester all by himself?
100 miles
Oh, Professor Wonderful is, of course, NOT entirely responsible for the students' poor skills.
What bothers me is that around here, the most *entertaining* people in the classroom are the ones whom students consider to be great teachers----not necessarily the ones who might teach them the most in terms of either skills or content.
And actually, I think this guy (whom I actually like a lot, personally) does harm: he instills a wholly unjustified confidence in students that they are now skilled philosophers----when in fact, they are often simply loud, overconfident people who (still) have awful writing skills!
MAH
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