How does change happen? I mean we can let out a good scream, but what good
does that do? If we think the current system is messed up, what do we do? My
impression is that folks creating and "inspecting" these standards believe
in what they are doing. Schools should help people learn things. It ought to
be possible to specify what those things are and measure whether they have
been learned. Is the problem that we haven't done a good job of specifying
those learnings or measuring their attainment? Then we need to fix that. If
the problem is that our whole conception of schooling is wrong, then we need
to show compelling examples of where we got it right. Most folks, myself
included, are going to keep doing things the way they always have unless
they can be shown compelling examples of something better. So if WE (XMCA)
ruled the world, what would those examples look like? And how would we know
they were better?
djc
-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hayward
[mailto:geoff.hayward@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 2:40 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Education reform, was Re(3): job
Ah Jay but Martin has not told you the half of it. We also get inspected,
line by line, against those 'standards' even when everybody involved
recognises it is a meaningless process and have to deal with inane questions
of when exactly do we do X when X is embedded throughout a programme of
teacher education. You spend your life ticking lists rather than thinking
much harder with colleagues in schools how to educate beginning science
teachers (in my case).
Geoff Hayward
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jay Lemke" <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 3:05 AM
Subject: Education reform, was Re(3): job
> AAAAAAARGGH !
>
> Is that a good approximation to a scream of exasperation? ... more likely
> just a generic scream of release ...
>
> I suppose I should thank Martin for the link below to the UK's version of
> teacher education standards. I scream in part because I actually looked at
> two of the documents ... mainly out of morbid fascination born of my own
> two years overseeing the compliance of my former teacher education program
> with the similar standardization enterprise of New York State.
>
> I read the voluminous NYS standards several times in their entirety, never
> once finding I could make entirely consistent sense of them, or even parse
> the text in many places. My eyes tended to glaze over, my being rebelled
> against the language, the genre, the register, the meanings, the very fact
> that such documents would exist in a world of serious educated people, the
> implications of their existence for the terminal deadend of modernism's
> strategy for solving real human and social problems.
>
> Have a look, and realize that THAT is what governments today throughout
the
> English-speaking world (at least) consider to be the appropriate response
> to the need for better teachers. Did I say before that modernism has a
> machine-logic in its technologies of social organization? Read some of
this
> stuff and you will get a sense of just how literal I was being. This might
> be how you would program a computer to simulate the most obvious surface
> phenomena of teacher education, without any underlying reality ... as you
> can program a computer to talk back to you like a simulation of a Rogerian
> therapist.
>
> Regulation. Standardization. But only in form ... there cannot of course
be
> any such actual standardization in real institutions that continue to
> function ... the indexed features are so trivial that the best and the
> worst programs could have exactly the same description in these terms.
>
> The language ... the forms of language ... are not ones in which it is
> POSSIBLE to say anything useful or significant about education. They are
> the forms of language in which you can provide specifications for
plumbing,
> though they would be equally irrelevant to any useful account of how
> plumbing actually gets done or how to tell good plumbing from bad. They
> derive of course from legal discourse, but they have no grasp on the
> phenomena they are about ... education is only trivially about what people
> know, it is mainly about how we recognize what needs to be known and about
> how we decide how to help people learn. It is about the quality of How,
not
> the quantity or specification of What.
>
> And everyone in the whole history of western civilization who has ever
> written anything taken seriously by experienced educators has known this
> and said so. So this application of modernism is not even modernism at its
> best. It is modernsm at its most mindless, its most frightened, grasping
> for control when it knows things are out of control and that to admit it
is
> to lose at the next election.
>
> Conversely, of course, all these efforts at regulation cannot have much
> real effect. But they deflect effort and attention from any real efforts
to
> improve education.
>
> Resign, Minister! You are either a fool or a knave.
>
> How do we say this not to a man, but to a social technology whose era of
> usefulness is now so clearly past?
>
> JAY.
>
>
> At 02:18 PM 8/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>
>
> >We in the UK have been under a number of waves of teacher education
reform
> >in the UK since 1977. The current iteration (with competence based
> >curriculum) is up for renegotiation. The current picture is on
> >http://www.canteach.gov.uk/info/itt/requirements/index.htm
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>
>
>
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