RE: beeeeutifully said, Genevieve

Helen Beetham (H.Beetham who-is-at plymouth.ac.uk)
Wed, 29 Sep 1999 09:03:33 +0100

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This is my first posting to this list. I'm still struggling with some of the terms used by other members of XMCA and
I apologise if what I have to say is rather inadequately theorised. I just wanted to respond from my own experience
to some recent postings.

Writing from a UK university, I'm not very familiar with the specifics of pre-dissertation coursework and
exam requirements that have been mentioned in the last couple of days. I do know something about what can
happen when universities break
>>with the rigid 'Step A goes to
>>Semester 1, Step B goes to Semester 2 and if you can't
>>follow you fail'
model. We've done it wholesale here in the UK, at least in the 'new' universities which have higher student
numbers and a wider diversity of student backgrounds. It's called modularisation. The rhetoric of modularisation
was that students as consumers could choose whatever chunks of learning they liked to make up their degree.
In practice this has (a) destroyed the cohort effect, isolating students from their peers (b) undermined the
sense of identity which students gained from being members of a specific degree course (c) arguably therefore
weakened the various discipline communities as living communities of thought and practice and (d) weakened the
already tenuous connection between teaching and research within those communities (e) deprived students of any
opportunity to synthesise the disparate bits of knowledge and skill they acquire (or indeed any sense that their own
identity as learners and members of the wider community might involve some work of synthesis) (f) therefore failed
a body of students who are particularly in need of metacognitive skills and enculturation into critical practice (g)
worsened the problems of student diversity for staff, with module tutors unable to predict which modules their students
will previously have taken or even what degree course they are likely to have enrolled on, and (h) helped the consumer
model of education to become even more entrenched in the minds of learners, their parents and teachers.

Yesterday I was talking with a very senior member of academic staff at my university about the (universally
recognised) failure of modularisation and I asked 'why do you all carry on trying to get round this system,
bringing back pathways and progress-based structures by the back door while pretending that these massive
'double modules' and 'module prerequisites' are just different ways of making modularity work?' I knew the answer
of course (though sometimes it's good to ask naive questions). Because modularisation was essentially a top-down,
administrative convenience in the first instance, it was forcibly embedded into institutional structures and procedures.
To undo it now would involve a convulsive effort similar to the one which brought us modularisation in the first place.
Academics are terribly weary of change.

I recognise that the model of enculturation is a divisive one in that at the end of the day it needs to distinguish
those who are proper members of a particular community of practice from those which are not. Surely, however,
education is also about the process of 'graduation' by which a person is helped to acquire the attributes of
community members. At its best, a strength of the academic community is its reflexive capacity to critique its
own values and practices, through research, development and the constant influx of new minds. I don't idealise the
academic communities but I do wonder how we can educate students if we do not offer them ways into those
communities, even if they choose to critique them from the standpoint of other languages and practices including
those of the marketplace. Modular choice doesn't offer students a new identity, language or community; it presents
them with 'learning opportunities' as fast food for the mind.

Helen

'Thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, and indestructible. It pervades the air...
Now she is a flock of birds, flies abroad to all the four winds of heaven, and occupies at once all the points
of air and of space...'
Victor Hugo, on the invention of printing.

Helen Beetham
Senior Lecturer
Educational Development
University of Plymouth
Drake Circus
Plymouth PL4 8AA

tel: +44 1752 232346
fax: +44 1742 232330
email: hbeetham who-is-at plymouth.ac.uk
http://sh.plym.ac.uk/eds/elt/

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