Are supporters of AERO far right?
New level of absurdity plumbed in the AERO debate
As regular readers and those active on Australian education social media will already be aware, there is currently a debate taking place about the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) sparked by a review from consultancy firm, KPMG. A reminder: you can contribute to that review here and it takes about seven minutes. No, a survey of this kind is not the most robust way of reviewing a body like AERO but it is the way we have been given.
Today, this debate has plumbed a new depth of absurdity with the publication of an article, again on the blog site of the ever-so-slightly-miffed-with-AERO Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), which represents the traditional interests of university teacher training departments and educational academics. As I have noted before, if the AARE was of more practical use to teachers, Australian government ministers would have had no need to create AERO.
The new post by Professor Linda Graham is a kind of meta-criticism. Graham is not as unhappy with AERO as she is with the people criticising the people criticising AERO. The whole post is unintentionally funny, but a few points stand out.
Apparently, people like me who have sought to defend AERO are guilty of some kind of political betrayal. We caricature academics as ‘ill-informed or worse’—how dare we—and not only is this a bad thing, we are somehow in league with, “US far right figure and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon.”
Labelling everything you don’t like as far-right probably still works well in academia but the rest of us have moved on.
Why do we attract such opprobrium? Apparently, people like me claim teacher trainers are engaged in ‘charlatanry’ that includes discredited concepts like learning styles and brain gym, but we never provide solid evidence to support these claims.
This is a straw man. I haven’t seen anyone, as part of this debate, levelling charges of charlatanry or that teacher trainers and education academics are somehow caught up in brain gym and learning styles. That is sheer projection. I am happy to accept that education academics are mostly engaged in valid forms of research. It’s just that this research is of limited practical use to teachers. The charge is uselessness, not charlatanry.
However, if we want to open that Pandora’s box, a few nasties will fly out. Back in 2016, I was assured by an education academic that Australian education faculties were not promoting learning styles. Within a few minutes of searching the web, I was able to provide plenty of examples of those that were. Victoria University in Melbourne was still at it a year later. Embarrassment means these electronic traces have now thankfully been expunged, but who knows what is being discussed in seminar rooms and lecture halls. I would like to know but nobody will research it. It’s probably not in their interests.
Graham echoes a point made by Dwyer, Fuller and Humberstone in a previous AARE blog post and takes issue with the language that AERO use, claiming it is not academic enough or suitable for peer review. Apparently, AERO don’t hedge their arguments enough with words like ‘suggest’ and ‘indicate’. I would argue that is a major plus. It certainly does not mean that AERO, ‘position teachers as incapable of understanding and interpreting research’. That’s entirely in academics’ own heads. Teachers can read an article and, like all adult humans with functioning brains, decide whether they agree with it or not and how much to take from it. It is a patronising view of teachers to assume we will simply agree with anything put in front of us and so need to be protected. Some teachers—bizarre, I know—are entirely committed to inquiry learning. I meet them frequently online.
Graham has been running a project developing accessible assessment materials that she claims benefit not only students with disabilities, but everyone. That sounds great. She has even considered making them available to teachers:
“We *could* develop a stack of accessible assessment task sheets and even create a commercial enterprise to pump it all out, pronto. Teachers won’t have to do a thing, we contribute to solving the workload problem, and we earn precious research income for all our effort.”
Wonderful. Go for it. But…
“If we did that, we would rob teachers of the knowledge and skills they need to design accessible assessment.”
We would miss out on the opportunity to learn if researchers did this work for us. And then what would we be? Let me see… less busy?
I cannot help observing that setting up a company and producing such resources at scale is an awful lot of hard work. A former colleague of mine, Reid Smith, set up the not-for-profit Ochre Education and I have nothing but admiration for him in doing so. Most of us are not as entrepreneurial.
At every stage, through every paragraph, what comes across is a low regard for teachers, our agency and our intellect. We are to be managed and fed the right ways to think by those who have earned their credentials following the rules of academia. The idea we might have our own opinions is treated as a lack of respect for our intellectual betters.
This is why I have been receiving WhatsApps and emails all day about this article, all with similar takes.
We all see it.
I thought the previous input looking at the medical profession as an example was also a can of worms for the authors.
The level of engagement in practice and with practitioners is way higher in medicine.
Any measure of transfer or communication - journal subscription, conference attendance, academics in practicing roles, would be way higher for medicine.