Week 10 (October 20) |
4:00-4:20p |
Gather Yourself Up
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4:20-4:30p |
Connect
Zoom room opens so that we can say hello and enter as fully as possible in such a space. |
Opening |
1. Announcements, Reminders & Check-Ins . . .
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Next Week's Class: Start reading your book. On Monday, I will send an email asking that you read the introduction of your book. REPLY ALL to that email by Tuesday at 6:40 with a paragraph letting us know where you be, how you be, what book you chose & why, and what you thinkin so far. That is the RR for next week and that is our class. Rest, rejuvenate... we are winding down the semester. We meet again on Election Day (11/3) when you should have the whole book read.
Syllabus
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BREAK: 5:43-6:00pm
Syllabus
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More on OA
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"My experience as a writing program administrator (WPA) and an assessment consultant for several English departments and writing programs suggests that OA harbors each of the tendencies Dewey mentions. In many programs, outcomes become isolated, over time, from the ongoing activities of teachers and students. Whether administrators and faculty begin with great enthusiasm or great skepticism (or, most likely, a mix), outcomes, once expressed, often stay in place for years, even as programs change. Teachers may dutifully reproduce those outcomes on a syllabus or assignment, and students may dutifully provide evidence that they've achieved them in their work products, but rarely do the outcomes become a meaningful and intimate part of teachers' and students' experiences. In these programs, outcomes—whether the hard-won result of intense consensus building or an administrative hand-down—tend to become enshrined in the bureaucratic machinery. Though some proponents of OA are careful to suggest that outcomes be revisited and perhaps revised regularly, many institutions and programs—whether out of ennui, conflict aversion, or a less than fully developed assessment process—ignore this recommendation. Rather, outcomes statements take on an aura of finality, of achieved and unimpeachable institutional authority. Thus, the outcomes on the books remain the central focus of assessment and documentation efforts, with little attention paid either to the always-evolving context in which those aims are pursued (shifts in student demographics, staffing policies, institutional resources, and the like: what OA enthusiasts sometimes derogatorily identify as "inputs") or to unforeseen and unexpected results of unfolding educational experiences. Under these conditions, teachers and students merely receive the outcomes; they experience them as imposed, whether they were formulated by a distant regulatory body, a professional group, or some earlier incarnation of the local faculty.... Measuring, documenting, and reporting outcomes—pegged to bureaucratically defined units (courses, programs, courses of study)—serves prevailing academic management priorities such as accreditation reporting and other forms of public accountability, strategic planning, and the identification of "programs of excellence." As Shari Stenberg and Darby Arant Whealy suggest, outcomes function within an "efficiency model" that privileges measurement for institutional purposes, often at the expense of inquiry for pedagogical purposes (684). Moreover, the insistence among proponents of OA that we shift our attention from "inputs" to "outputs" clearly serves the interests of academic management."
~Chris Gallagher, "The Trouble with Outcomes: Pragmatic Inquiry and Educational Aims" (2012) [click here for excerpt] |
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