California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: September 18, 1999
Faculty on the Site.

Some of the gifts of hierarchy are certainty, mercy, and forgiveness. Those require someone from above to grant us these qualities. Because the hierarchy invokes a certain irreversible quality associated with the power of the authority to decide, and consequently, to privilege, certainty and mercy require a certain passivity on our part to accept the power of sovereignty over us. I would not include forgiveness, since we have more control in our own forgiveness, though forgiveness would apply if what we seek is forgiveness of some Other.

The analysis that Anderson did of the Story of O suggests that O was trying to escape the existential angst of individual responsibility in suffering the abuse heaped upon her, in the hope that some abusive act would so demean her that her captors would no longer require her consent to the abuse. Such an attempt to avoid choice is what the existentialists described as man's angoisse. This is one plausible explanation for the non-aggressiveness of the abused, sometimes resulting in the "battered wife syndrome."

I would like to draw a parallel here to any abuse engendered by the arrogance of hierarchy, and I would like to point out that we train for passivity. The whole of behaviorism is based on the assumption that man is passive, that if you wait long enough man, like the pigeon, will do something in the direction you want, and you can reinforce that step, and man will eventually be "conditioned." Our psychology books rarely speak of the rat that refuses to run the maze. We rarely hear mention of the famous white-footed mice. If one assumes the philosophical position that man has will and is respnsible for his/her choices, then, like O, man cannot escape angoisse by consenting to that point of abasement at which consent no longer matters, and it is someone else's fault.

Nonetheless, rewards are seductive and omnipresent. And that is part of why Alfie Kohn speaks of rewards as punishment. To condition anyone to accept a reward in response to any performance is to attempt control, to remove choice, to falsely replace angoisse with control. Sartre, Gordon, would say that is not possible. You cannot escape the ultimate essential accounting of your actions. And so O's project failed dismally.

But this is the same with our authentication of a student's competence. The student, as well as the teacher, must accept the angoisse of authentication, not because we demand it, not because our standards dictate it, but because that is the nature of accepting responsibility for who and what we are, and in the academy, for the narrative of our learning identity. To refuse to accept that responsibility is not to evade it. In the end, such a project must fail.

I am particularly distressed that so many of our good students are so unaccustomed to openly discussing the quality of their work that when I write glowing recommendations for them, they sit and purr, and thank me! No, no, no. Those recommendations come from my apperceptive mass, from the midst of hundreds of students per semester, and from what I could recall of our shared experience. They have a different life space. From that perspective they should be able to, and should demand, politely, but firmly, to include the incidents and situations that mattered to them, that formed the narrative of their learning identity. One student, one, this year came with her own ideas of what her competencies were. And they did not fit in a one-to-one correspondence with those I had catalogued. But that was a statement for an application, and they know they are to write those. An accounting of their own education they have not learned to take part in.

Assessment and authentication of competence, and documentation of the narrative of learning identity are life-long self-images. We must teach our students to resume both respect and responsibility, for we cannot aid them in the evasion of that responsibility. I remain enough of an existentialist to believe that ultimately such evasion of angoisse is impossible.

With our certainty that we can trust the authentication of our competence by an Other with the hierarchical authority to judge, we grant "disciplinary" authority over us. (See Covaleskie on disciplinary power.) Such power, unlike sovereign power, which is recognized as having the potential for injustice and arbitrariness, is subtle and gives the overt and false appearance of being neutral and objective.Thus when the label does not fit, when we are uncomfortable with what the label imposes, we are restive, frustrated, and lash out at what is an uncomfortable situation. That is one of the costs at vesting disciplinary power in a non-learning auto-poietic system.

Someone labelled a C student from the first moment the instructor lays eyes on that student, or from the student's first utterance, may well be someone whose validity claim in never heard in good faith. Cost of a system in which hierarchy is allowed to become elitist and to privilege its subjectivity. That which would be judged patently unfair in a grounded system, is seen as acceptable within the hierarchy because the hierarchy is not a reflexive system, often allows "bullying," even as part of its training you in toughening you up to deal with the vicissitudes of the real world, (See Duncan Kennedy) and the ethics become relative depending on where you are in the hierarchy, rather than depending on the validity of the claim made.

Mercy, which we seek for having violated the rules of the institution, which are placed by the hierarchy, guarded by the hierarchy, and judged by that same hierarchy, is a quality for which an affirmative defense must be asserted. That is, the system doesn't offer mercy, the errant one must request it. For such an affirmative defense to be made, a validity claim must be heard in good faith. If there are unstated assumptions that certain groups are less worthy of a good faith hearing, are more likely to depend on "excuse abuse," and are less trustworty, less "serious," this will all affect the extent to which an affirmative defense is given a good faith hearing by the very people who set up the climate in which unstated and unquestioned assumptions dictated the rules of the institution. Catch 22: if you know enough to ask for an exception to the rule, you must have known enough not to violate the rule, which shows an attitude which led to the making of the rule in the first place, ignorance of the law being no excuse in the first place, so you must not be taking this institution and its rules seriously enough in the first place, which is why we take ourselves and our rules seriously.

Notice that the maintenance and definition of authenticity of competence by teachers and supervisors in positions of disciplinary power is not unlike the maintenance, definition, and enforcement of criminal law by those in positions of enforcement authority. Notice that withe the national emphasis on academic integrity (of students) that we have moved into a disciplinary mode in which faculty discipline and punish. O, Foucault.

More on this later. But the general idea is that the institution seems to remain oblivious (a non-learning sub-system) to the extent to which it privileges its perceptions over those of its students. In forgiveness, the institution assumes a moral superiority to the student, whom it presumes it may forgive. When institutions presume moral superiority over individuals, one wonders how we can avoid Hal of the movie 2000.

Forms to Guide Us was the first piece of this draft. In that draft we relied on our own sense of what our students had shown us as evidence of their learning. But those few measures, though helpful, don't begin to adequately measure anyone's learning. They are perhaps indicators along the way to students who have not yet developed such indicators for themselves.

Learning, because it takes place in the midst of everything else going on, is not neat, linear, simple even to understand, never mind to measure. Let's take a simplistic example. Vocabulary. Most K-12 teachers give vocabulary tests, or used to in my day. There are hundreds of vocabulary books. Ten words a day, and you shall be the master of the written universe. Hah! I don't think I ever got past the second chapter. I particularly liked "I always look up the word Egregious," but I didn't go through it. Not then. Not ever. I just taught my students the word "egregious."

Studying vocabulary doesn't work for me. And I believed every one of those persuasive arguments about how important a large vocabulary is. I just couldn't find the motivation to learn with what was offered. But then in law school I discovered that I didn't have to learn vocabulary their way. A German friend and I were so desperate we carried pocket dictionaries about. Unfortunately, almost none of the words they used were ever in the dictionary. But she was learning English, and I was fascinated. Since I had this dictionary always with me, I put a little check mark beside each word I looked up. As I had suspected, I was looking up some of the same words, like "egregious," time after time after time. And soon, I learned that about the 17th check mark, I didn't have to look it up anymore. The word was mine! I had discovered a measure of my own latent learning. Now when there were eight check marks by a word, I could tell that that word was 8/17 mine. No more affect. No more guilt. I knew now that every time I looked the word up, it went a little deeper into my apperceptive mass. That's a measure of learning. Not one your teacher is likely to use on a test, but one that will give you much greater assurance that you ARE learning, and WHAT you are learning, compared to you, and you alone.

Once I've discovered such techniques, I can share them with you, and maybe they'll work for you. Only you can be the judge of that. But if you manage to articulate such measures, you will be much more convincing when you claim that a test has incorrectly measured what you have really learned.

The matter is one we discussed in another piece in this series. We will link to it later. Nag us. That is, that students often know they have learned "something," know that they "studied," but don't have a good measure of that "something" even for themselves. That was my problem with vocabulary. Once I found a way to measure it that fit with my needs for vocabulary, I was comfortable letting the learning take its natural course. And with that comfort came the ability to explain to you what that measure was. Before that all I could do was take vocabulary tests, which never seemed to make me feel any more confident even when my test scores were good.

That's because having someone give you a ranking of Fair, Good, Excellent, having someone tell you how well you tested on their instrument is conclusionary. It doesn't give you the kind of feedback that 8/17 of the way to owning that word gave me once I understood it. Many students complain that the comments on their papers don't help them. They are conclusionary. Something like "not college writing" doesn't help a lot, when you're trying to figure out whether you're 3/17 or 6/17 or 15/17 of the way there, wherever there is. Conclusionary. No evidence to support the conclusion, and none that will help you figure out even if you're on the right track, never mind how far along that track you are.

In law, we teach that adversarial argument must balance statement of the facts, which, of course, includes an interpretive perspective, and statement of the law, which includes an interpretive perspective to the way the law should be interpreted. Law, facts, law, facts. Learning should be treated in the same way. Learning: I have gained confidence. (conclusion) Facts (how I know that): can read faster now, understand some concept better and can state it succinctly now, fear less intimidated by it (affect is a valid component of learning).

Learning is difficult to prove in an adversarial climate, for there are so many immeasurables. All of status characteristic theory supports that people perform as we expect them to perform, and that we experience negative affect (meaning that we are annoyed) if they do not perform as we expect, even if their performance is better than we expected. (Katz, Bi-racial Groups, Cohen, Elizabeth, at Stanford) This means you may be stating your validity claim of learning to someone whose expectations you are going to violate. That's adversarial. And you will be more convincing if you give solid factual detail to support your claim.

This means that your job in a class is to think hard about what you are learning so that you will be able to communicate that learning effectively. It helps if you do this in a collaborative environment. Sometimes what works for others will work for you. But not always.

This is who you are. How open to learnng you are and choose to remain. This is your identity. That part that defines your learning, but nonetheless and importantly a part of your identity. To the extent that you accept the passive measures of the Other you have attempted to deny your own responsibility for defining that learning identity. Such denial is a project that must fail, for it is your identity and no Other can define its essence. Only you.

The easiest way I know to find measures that work is to tell the story of your learning. If you tell was what happens to you, how it feels, in sufficient and focussed detail, sometimes we can help you conceptualize the measures. That is what we call the in depth piece of good faith listening. When you listen to a validity claim in good faith you try to help the Other communicate that claim in terms that the community can relate to.

Our exercise on the final evaluation of learning was written in the summer, before this semester of classes. We have all learned much in the course of the semester. This section has been added to aid you in planning the interaction necessary to complete your course grade.

First, in listening in good faith to one another, which does take time, we have broken down the elements we believe go into the final grade for the course:

Competency

By competency we mean that you have e-mailed us some evidence that you understand and can take part in discussions on the basic concepts of the course. Over the course of the semester we have been able to identify some very specific guidelines for communicating competency.

• Contextual recognition.

  By contextual recognition we mean that even though you may not feel comfortable enough to rephrase the concept in your own words, you are comfortable with our use of the concept in class lectures and discussions, and are able to follow those discussions without feeling at a loss over the concept. (Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives sites recognition as the first level of understanding. Here, we are attempting to measure this effectively at what often remains a latent level.)

  What do you say when you want to convey contextual recognition?

  1. You start with something like "I am now comfortable with the concept of 'hypothesis' at the level of contextual recognition."

  2. Then you add some detail from a class or group discussion that involved the concept and that you understood. For example, if the concept is "hypothesis," you might tell me that your group discussed the hypothesis that females were genetically superior at math, and that that was based on the old hypothesis that males were genetically superior at math. From the example you give of the discussion we can see that you have the idea.

• Reformulation of the conceptual definition

  By reformulation of the conceptual definition we mean that you are putting the concept into your own words. This is an important step in making the concept your own. You will find the concept useful to you in the future only to the extent that you have reformulated in words that will pop into your mind when you need the concept. Also this is an important step in clarifying whether you have a schemata, part of the idea, or whether you have grasped all the essential elements of the concept.

  It is to this level of understanding that Jerome S. Bruner refers when he says that if you really understand your topic well, you can manage to teach it to fourth graders. A part of that skill is the ability to let go of the big professional words that fourth graders would not understand and the ability to explain the idea in plain English. This is when 25 words or less comes in handy.

  What do you say when you want to convey that you are reformulating the concept definition?

• You start with something like "A reformulation of the concept 'hypothesis' that works for me is that a hypothesis is like an educated guess about what I expect the data to show, how I expect the study to turn out."

• Comparing and Contrasting the Concept with Another

  By comparing and contrasting the concept with another what we mean is that you recognize that somehow the concepts are related, and you are trying to distinguish between them. Again, this is an important part of learning. When you compare and contrast several of the basic concepts from a course you are actually reviewing the course material in a way that permits you to develop an overview, and to see the way that the concepts fit together into the theories that shape that area of the discipline. To perform this kind of analysis is to take the first steps toward the eventual grasp of criticism you will want to have as you finish the course.

  What do you say when you want to convey that you are comparing and contrasting concepts for a better grasp of an overview of the course?

• You start with something like "Measures of association are related to tests of significance, right? Like a measure of association would be a t-test."

  Now right there I get to stop you. For a t-test is a test of significance. Perfectly clear to those of us who are statisticians, but not an everyday fact that's likely to pop into your mind.

  In the classroom, we are able to get the two concepts separated out. But it takes courage to be willing to make such mistakes orally. Please remember that the mistakes do a lot more than tell us that you don't have something straight. They let us see which parts you do have straight and how to teach you the rest of the concept. The wrong answer "t-test" told me that Maria was focused on the right section of the course and precisely where her confusion was. Now I can write an explanation of these two concepts that will help the whole class get these concepts straight.

  It also takes courage, for some of us more, for some of us less, to make that mistake in writing. But mistakes are an important guide to our learning. Maria did not lose points by that mistake; she gained points for her willingness to let us see her learning. If I don't know what you're thinking, I can't direct your thoughts where they need to go.

Consistency

By consistency we mean that you have stayed in touch with us by e-mail, so that we did not have to wonder whether you were a field mouse. Some of you have stayed in touch by face to face interaction either in class or in the hallways throughout the semester. We are pleased to report that our e-mails with phrases like "need a face to go with the name" have actually resulted in our seeing more faces after class, in our offices, in the hallways and at lunch.

For more detail on how to communicate consistency see Very Important Message on Staying in Touch.

Creativity

By creativity we mean the same qualities that give an A to a term paper or a project or any other indeavor:

1. Choice of topic

   1. Well delimited, so you can say something meaningful in ten pages or so. Juvenile delinquency is not a well delimited topic. Entire courses and books are included in the topic. You need to delimit to something you can manage: antecedents of delinquency as experienced by class members with juveniles in their families. You might have some difficulty getting people to tell you about their families, so the sample is probably unrealistic, but the topic is small enough.

   2. Topic in which you yourself are interested, so that you will be willing to read or interview in good faith.

   3. Topic that will somehow add to the knowledge we have of the field. Local, personal data might add to our knowledge because we could see to what extent it fits with theoretical studies and publications.

2. Methods

   1. Adapted realistically to the time allowed for the paper or project.

   2. Knowledge of sampling, whether volunteer

   3. Use of secondary analysis, or public data base where appropriate

   4. Realistic and valid measurement

3. Theory and Expectations

   1. Theoretical basis for approach taken
   2. Dummy tables or discussion of expected results with some idea of what on earth they're good for

4. Results and Conclusions

   1. Results presented clearly and concisely so they can be grasped by reader easily, preferably through both graphic tables and wirtten explanation.

   2. Conclusions that suggest that the question your study asked was answered within the strict limitations of the context.

   3. Conclusions that suggest that you really wanted the answer to the question and see some validity to further work in that area, or feel the question is adequately resolved.

5. Myriad Choices

   This entire list suggests that we would be grading any term paper or project at every step of its development, and that there would be choices for you to make which could affect your grade at every one of these points. The entire process is fraught with ambiguity, and completing a term paper in no way guarantees a grade of A or B.

   We do not want term papers. They do not fit into the scheme of learning with which we work. If you wish to work as you would on a term paper, then choose one of the conferences available and work on a collaborative professional paper. That does fit with our scheme of learning.

   But we hold you to the same standards. Whatever you do, do something that is well delimited, something that will help you answer a question to which you really do want an answer, or something about which you really do want to say something. Then evaluate and use good academic resources for whatever you say. Say it clearly, in plain English. And, for us, make it brief enough that others can and will read it. That means keep it as short as you can, put in links to references, and think about what you are saying. Say it to your colleagues on the site.

Cooperation

By cooperation, we mean give us a good faith hearing. Instead of telling us how you've always done it, try doing it our way. As Ph.D.s, trust us, we know how you've always done it, and it hasn't worked. Maybe it worked for you to get As, but it hasn't worked to produce an educated populace with strong competencies, able to build strong social bonds and to effectively use public discourse to manage the tension between freedom for the individual and the good of the society. Question that? Look around you or read a newspaper or listen to TV news, in authentic good faith.

By cooperation, we also mean give your fellow students and fellow citizens a good faith hearing. Do not assume that your teachers have the answers. If we did, we'd make it work. The answers to the questions we're asking depend on all of us, interdependently, and on our good faith towards one another.

Work with others to whatever extent you can. "No man is an island." None of us hold all the cards, know all the stories, even understand all the questions. Groups in our courses are amorphic. The group's lifespan exists only for that work session. At other work sessions, others may join or leave the group. As often as we've said that, I still hear people giving other people assignments for a group meeting. If we refuse to set up time barriers, you set your own? Someone is bound to not get the work done on time. It is structurally violent to force each other into such situations. Try not to do that. Just work with those who are there, at whatever level they are, with whatever work they have done. You may discover skills they have you never dreamt of. Or you may provide the acceptance that makes a stay in school/leave school decision swing in favor of staying. It is to the advantage of us all that each of us get all the education we can.

Recognize that your teachers are trying to form a dialog with you. Try to include them. Both by e-mail and in face-to-face interaction. Include them as colleagues, and let them be tired, let them not know sometimes, accept them, too. School will definitely be better off if they decide to stay.