‘We should resist the
temptation to continue looking for a mechanical explanation for something which
plainly is not mechanical in nature’
Jacques Bouveresse (1999)
This
essay began as an exploration into the rigours of data and the pedagogy of
audit. I was interested in understanding where the current audit model of
education comes from and whether it was in any way appropriate to apply to
teachers and students as a method of assessing quality teaching and learning. Through
my research, dialogue with professionals, stakeholders, managers and pedagogues
it has become an argument against this aforementioned pedagogy of audit and
this age of measurement we live in.
Currently,
most things are aligned to progress, which is seen as a form of profit, and
presented as statistical data. We are managed by what experts of data tell us
or by what critics of data say. Progress is, by definition, ‘a forward or
onward movement’ and in educational terms it is expected to always show an
upward trajectory. As national education systems are increasingly dominated by
their position in the international league tables and jostle with educational
competitors, the expected approach to measuring progress has become
increasingly linear. All current methods of measuring progress are applied to a
narrow set of statistics; Mathematics, Reading and Scientific Literacy (PISA
2012) and it is making extreme demands of the entire sector. The problem with
this approach, be it measuring the student, the teacher, the institution, the
local area or the national education system, is the application of a form of
analysis that does not actually take into account what Bourdieu (1990) in his habitus
calls, the ‘sens du jeu’ or ‘feel for the game’. This pedagogy of pedagogy is
currently dismissed and in its place the pedagogy of audit stands with only its:
‘capacity to generate an infinite number of
grammatically correct phrases and assign semantic interpretations to them by
means of purely formal rules [involving] nothing which would intrinsically
surpass the possibilities of a mechanism.’
Bouveresse (1999, p.54).
The
teaching of Art, Craft & Design is under pressure to conform to this
approach of mechanical measurement through targets set by student performance
in literacy, numeracy and science results at key stage 2. This in itself is
causing problems but before I begin unpacking this theme in detail I want to
provide an example of a learning experience where measurement is hard to
provide.
Recently,
I made a year 11 photography GCSE class undertake a two-hour drawing workshop
with a local artist who specialised in hyperrealism techniques. This particular
photography class is a fractious group of students with several different
social divisions within it. They spend a lot of lesson time reacting to
something that another group of students may be discussing and regularly
quarrel. They were reluctant to undertake the workshop, which removed them from
their usual classroom environment and I made an agreement that they must spend
one hour working with the artist before making their own decision whether to carry
on for the second hour or to return to the classroom and work independently on
their exam prep. At the end of the hour less than half of the class left the
workshop to return to their own endeavours, leaving a more condensed splinter
group of the mixed social categories. The remarkable thing was that they
decided, en-mass, to move more closely to the imagery they were working from
and sit in a tight, close-nit semi-circle as they drew. Dialogues began to
ensue regarding methods of improving one another’s drawings, equipment was
shared and as the lesson came to an end they requested, as a collective, the
opportunity to continue working through their break time to finish the
exercise. It became the most collaborative experience this class had undertaken
since the beginning of their GCSE sixteen months earlier. In terms of measuring
this success however I had nothing to show. The drawings were not particularly
impressive (in relation to the theme of the workshop) and they had still quite
a long way to go to be considered ‘finished’ (I use this term loosely although
in this instance they did need some additional time on their study). The work
itself had very little to do with their own particular photography pathways so
did not necessarily support their exam prep in an obvious or literal way either.
Yet it was the most successful learning environment that these students had sat
through and, as Atkinson (2011) asserts, the ‘disturbance[s] of practice’
allowed us, me as teacher and they as learners, to ‘learn the value of
difference… expand our understanding of practice…’ and witness ‘…how people act
and conceive in different and legitimate ways that often do not subscribe to
normalizing frameworks’ (p.4).
I
will explore this tension between the pedagogical approaches often seen in the
classroom of the artist teacher and the pressure for such a subject to conform
to the rigours of data through the current narrow statistical analysis and ask
the question: What does progress look like in the art classroom and how is it
measured?
The
current application of educational policy is resulting in government ministers,
headteachers and other bodies of inspection such as Ofsted acting as agents,
applying rules and conditions to what is perceived success in pedagogical
practice. Atkinson (2011) rightly reflects on how in ‘the last two decades
teaching practices, curriculum content and teacher education in England have
been subject as never before to centralised state control and intensive systems
of regulation… which have become increasingly subjected to the hegemony of
audit cultures’ (p.1). These current measurement techniques are presenting findings
of an unnatural pedagogical approach by seeking evidence of quality teaching through
the monitoring of data and the assessment of pedagogy from afar.
The
DfE stated on 27th July 2012, in their paper ‘Increasing the Number
of Academies and Free Schools to Create a Better and More Diverse School System’
that: ‘All schools will continue to be held accountable for the quality of
teaching through Ofsted inspection and the publication of school performance
data’ (Gov.uk).
This
has led to schools becoming ‘terrified by the need to get good SATs results and
have [therefore] narrowed down the primary school curriculum’, (as quoted by
Baroness Sharp of Guilford from the Lords Hansard text from 27th November
2014). I think this comment is pertinent enough to be applied to the wider
educational context of all year groups.
This
audit approach is also raising thorny questions from front line practitioners
regarding how this data is driving teacher’s appraisal cycles and as a result, seeking
to distinguish between effective and ineffective pedagogical approaches where
using frequent data drops, standardised test scoring and measures such as
value-added become a convenient snapshot of perceived progress, that
deliberately ignore other classroom dynamics that are perhaps less easy to
quantify resulting in:
‘a description of the
practical knowledge that makes possible the practice in question risks being in
the final analysis not very different from an appropriate description of the
practice itself.’
Bouveresse 1999, p.52
It
strikes me that this approach has become a popular method of scrutinising teacher
effectiveness simply due to its ease for observation purposes. For example, if
an inspector or a member of the school senior leadership team looked into a
lesson and could see the lesson objective written on the board it quickly
provides a quantifiable measure that the teacher is doing something to ensure
learning is taking place. It has led to an effective way to control classroom
activity. Now, with big data and ‘the coming renaissance in assessment’, Barber
& Hill (2014), what need is there to even enter the classroom at all when
measuring a teachers success? OFSTED
acknowledge this concern on page 19 in their 2015 response to the most recent
consultation regarding inspections and say:
‘respondents were
concerned that we would look only at published assessment and examination data
when judging outcomes for children and learners. While inspectors will use this
data as a starting point in all cases, they will reach the final judgement by
considering the information and context of the school or provider.’
Whilst on page 28,
‘Inspectors currently
make use of a range of available data before and during inspections. They use
this to inform, but not determine, their judgement of the provider. They will
continue to do so in full and short inspections.’
Although
this goes some way to try and alleviate fears from within the sector, it still actively
detracts from Bourdieu’s ‘sens du jue’. Sadly, however, current Secretary of
State for Education Nicky Morgan immediately dismisses any hope there may be to
open up a broader requirement for monitoring teacher effectiveness and pupil
progress when she unapologetically stated:
‘I know that many
have worried that some of our reforms seem too harsh, that the focus has been
on too narrow a set of academic indicators, that young people are trapped on an
exam treadmill. Let me say again, I make no apology for the early focus of our
reforms’
Our Plan for Education speech 27th November
2014
Deleuze
and Guattari (1987), are critical of this sort of simplicity that dismantles the
more substantive nature, of the attributes of pedagogy in this particular
instance, through its disconnection from the heterogeneity of the process by
the fact that they are ‘not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a
language to the semantic and pragmatic contents’ (p.7) of successful teaching
and learning.
Bourdieu
goes further when exploring the importance of creative aspects of practice and
attacks the idea of ‘practice as simple execution’, cited by Bouveresse (1999, p.53),
which can perhaps be equated to the coalition government’s decision to remove
the necessity of qualified teacher status in order to allow more non-qualified
teachers into the classroom (a 16% increase in England in 2013). There is currently a war of words between the
government’s approach and the teaching unions regarding the importance of QTS
with arguments regarding the ‘dereliction of duty’ by the government, as argued
by Christine Blower (2012), General Secretary of the NUT whilst an NASUWT union
member claimed the move resulted in ‘children being taught on the cheap. It’s
part of the privatisation of education’ (2013). Indeed the General Teaching
Council, abolished by the current government in 2010, had described teaching as
‘never simply an instrumental activity, a question of technique’.
In
response, the government argues that it opens up the possibility of bringing
other skilled workers into the classroom. Although there may be truth in this
argument it is the dumbing down of subject-based pedagogy that concerns me, the
idea that anyone can execute high quality pedagogical delivery, regardless of specialism.
Bouveresse (1999) again, as he cites Bourdieu, explains:
‘It is easy to see
how absurd is the cataloguing which leads people to subsume under
structuralism, which destroys the subject, a body of work which has been guided
by the desire to reintroduce the agent’s practice, his or her capacity for
invention and improvisation. I should recall that this active, creative,
inventive capacity is not that of the transcendental subject of the idealist
tradition, but that of an acting agent’ (p.53).
The
main cause of tension between current policy and art pedagogy stems from the
invisible sense of development, of successful attainment, through the long term
progress seen in the art classroom that exists without the same need for the
immediately quantifiable, formalised assessment that demands a fit with
school-wide, national and international measurement tables. In the current attempts
at determining what is deemed successful pedagogy, intuitive learning is
dismissed and subjects such as art become devalued because the ‘sens du jeu’
approach that permeates most art lessons is at odds with the culture of immediacy
and the attaining of a particular result that may be expected over the course
of an hour or two. The intuitive discovery of a learner is harder to understand
as a closed form of measurement and it therefore becomes marginalised simply
because of its less uniformed learning methods. It is harder to gauge ones
progress in a snapshot when a lesson objective may be hidden, shared at the end
of a lesson or seen to unfold over several hours of lesson time through a
constant flow of dialogue, formative assessment techniques and the reflection
of ones development during teacher and student conversations. All of these are
standard forms of pedagogical practice in the classroom of the artist teacher. This
form of practice is analysed by Baham, (2013), when citing Kent, (2012) through
discussing the relational aspect of learning:
‘The premise of all
‘our relations’ with both artists and audiences contributing to art allows not
only the connecting of the local to the global, the juxtaposing of diverse
cultures, but also the promotion of interrelation. Juxtaposition, in this model
does not intend confrontation and elimination. But generates conversation and negotiation bringing forward the
possibility of illumination [my italics]… I am speaking about a much larger
concept, in which the individual sensibility of art and deeper themes that flow
through art come to the fore…’ (p.94).
How
this approach is misunderstood in the current neoliberal climate often results
in frustrating debate for the art pedagogue where discussion usually has less
to do with the approach or impact of their practice and more to do with how it
can be described or named, Baham (2013), within the structure of perceived
efficiency that the pedagogy of audit demands.
This
is not denouncing the need for assessment within the art classroom but it does
provide reason for a strong difference of opinion. Teachers, not just artist
teachers, tend to stand against the neoliberal model of education because they
are spending all of their time and energy working with the individual, whereas
the wider international picture is based on a narrow statistical brush which
demands ‘clearly discernable and therefore, measurable, qualities in things in
order for them to have any currency.’ Hickman (2007, p.77). Regardless of any cultural,
social or moral background, this approach deliberately ties perceived immediate
educational success to the countries standing in the economic global market. As
the Prime Minister, David Cameron says:
‘if countries are going to win the global race
and children compete and get the best jobs, you need mathematicians and
scientists – pure and simple… [t]his is all part of our long-term economic plan
for Britain.’
8th December 2014.
The
Warwick Commission Report (2015), challenges the governments stance and argues
in response that:
‘Our national
education and skills offer should not be judged against the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings alone. It is equally important
that the UK ranks highly in terms of enterprise and creative achievement
measured through indicators such as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM),
which assesses the national level of entrepreneurial activity in 70 countries’ (p.45).
Albrecht-Crane
and Daryl Slack (2007), perceive the current tensions between big data and the
pedagogy of audit, the ‘thisness’ of lessons and the ontology of the individual
at play in the ‘social space of the classroom [that] is a rich and complex
arena in which much more happens than is generally acknowledged’ (p.99). They
refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) project of rhizomatics and the socius through
the mapping of three types of line: molar lines, molecular lines and lines of
flight. Throughout analysing the mapping of these lines in relation to the
argument of pedagogy, and art pedagogy in particular, it is worth noting the
relationship it has with Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus.
These
mapped lines can be used to represent the art classroom and its relationship
with the wider institution. The molar lines represent the larger workings of
the school, or perhaps even the larger government body, which ‘operates to
order a system’ where ‘this power is put into action’ (p.101) through the
molecular lines; an application in each classroom of the school or governments
ideology through discipline, delivery of expected trends in pedagogical
approaches, current theories, the focus for observations etc. This was picked
up by Simon (1981) and cited by Smith (2012) that through ‘growing government
intervention there was much less emphasis on intellectual growth and much more
on containment’ where governments first became keen to constrain teacher
activities through the adherence of preferred pedagogies.
The
key to the ‘sens de jeu’ teaching and learning appear to be the lines of flight
where:
‘the political
potential of desire and lines of flight lies in their capacity to undermine the
working of the social machine, to open up flows beneath the social codes that seek
to channel and block them’ (p.102).
In
1967 Bourdieu wrote an article entitled ‘Systems of Education and Systems of
Thought’ that explored how the school was responsible for channeling the
demands of the culture it found itself in:
‘… in a society where
the handing on of culture is monopolized by a school, the hidden affinities
uniting the works of man (and, at the same time, modes of conduct and thought)
derive from the institution of the school, whose function is consciously (and
also, in part, unconsciously) to transmit the unconscious or, to be more
precise, to produce individuals equipped with the system of unconscious (or
deeply buried) master patterns that constitute their culture’ (p.345).
Here
we see an explanation of how these molar lines influence teacher-student
relations, perhaps through the application of the educational policy of the
system and puts into action the molecular structure of deep rooted territorial
patterns where the ‘individual is utterly unaware of this organization and is
constrained completely within unbreakable bounds’ (p.346).
However,
the line of flight (the deterritorialisation of the more rigid constraints) creates
opportunity for learning to develop in a deeper and less formulaic way. The artist
teacher regularly explores this pathway to learning through critical practice
or the questioning of parameters of teaching and learning through risk taking
in the specific learning context, which ‘suggests a pedagogy that is not
totally controlled by specified learning outcomes.’ In turn ‘[e]ncouraging
learners to take risks in that they have to be able to ‘let things happen’;
they have to be able to facilitate these learning pathways without a clear
sense of outcome.’ Atkinson (2011, p.3 & 6). As Bourdieu (1967) suggests
‘[t]o see the differences, you need a guide, otherwise everything looks the
same’ (p.346).
I am
certainly not suggesting that this sort of asignifying rupture only takes place
within the art classroom but this approach, as standard, can make quantifying
success difficult through current forms of measurement and testing. As Hickman,
(2007) explains:
‘Testing refers to a
process for obtaining data, while measuring deals with quantification, and
grading is usually concerned with assigning a symbol which stands for judgement
of quality. Examination refers to a formal process whereby a student’s
achievement over a specified period of time in a particular place is measured
against stated criteria’ (p.78).
When
reflecting on the audit culture surrounding pedagogy and the data demands that
trouble it, it is necessary to question the reliability and validity of testing
so we can at least defend our position and justify our pedagogical approach. I
do not think that we can totally remove this approach to measuring success but
to consider how ones own subject approaches it throws up some interesting
findings. When one does so it only helps support the importance of the approach
of the artist teacher and the validity of the assessment that is currently applied
to the GCSE and GCE art exams and its potential for delivering accuracy in
assessment, therefore placing him and her in a position of strength within the
audit culture, which is what I want to move on to consider now.
