Curios of the week #123

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week, I have mainly been moving house. This is a stressful endeavour at the best of times, but when you have two lethargic teenagers with no—absolutely none whatsoever—sense of urgency, then it becomes both stressful and frustrating. There is the Sisyphean labour of taping boxes together, filling them, emptying them and then breaking them apart. There are the dray, sandpaper hands. And there is backache that results in walking like one of the Gallagher brothers. But enough.

This week has also been the first week of our two-week term break, hence the moving. It is winter here and the leaves have gone from the imported deciduous trees. Australians think Ballarat is cold. It’s not properly cold. It’s not cold like the North of England. It’s not even cold like the South of England during a cool snap. But it’s cold enough.

This week’s Curios include a loophole, a phonics test, some racists and much more.

Grumpy academics of the week

Last week, I noted that KPMG were running an evaluation of the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and I encouraged you to take part in their survey, which you can do by following this link.

If you have not done so already, I strongly urge you to devote the seven or so minutes needed for filling it in. If you’re unfamiliar with AERO, its work and its resources for teachers then you can take a look here. It is essential that KPMG hear from teachers, independent researchers and enlightened academics who value what AERO does, because it is certainly going to hear plenty from unenlightened academics. The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), the failure of which to provide practical advice to teachers created the need for AERO, has been running a campaign against AERO on its blog and encouraging people to complete the survey.

The main charge levelled against AERO seems to be that it favours ‘evidence-based’ practices in education. We can quibble about terms—I prefer ‘evidence-informed’ for reasons too esoteric to sidetrack into here—but this is basically a good thing and a reason why AARE has gone wrong.

In a piece this week for the AARE blog, Rachael Dwyer, Brad Fuller and James Humberstone engage in furious hand-wringing about evidence. As may be expected from those who train teachers, they are touchy about criticism of teacher training and they try to cast doubt on cognitive load theory. Following a recent pattern, they cite a paper by de Jong and colleagues without ever noting that this was a response to a previous paper and was, in turn, replied to by the authors of that paper. It’s almost as if some academics who don’t like cognitive load theory will grab for any lifeline. And in a turn that will prompt flashbacks to 2005, they even discuss critical thinking as a ‘crucial skill’ needed for the 21st century and, ‘for a world we can’t yet imagine’. There’s a whole post in just deconstructing that idea.

However, the central point is that evidence-based medicine as a model for education is flawed because it is preceptive:

“The version of evidence-based practice promoted by AERO reduces evidence to prescription, positioning teachers as technicians. This is not what David Sackett envisaged when he first articulated evidence-based medicine: that professionals make decisions in uncertain, complex, and relational contexts by drawing on research, experience, and the needs of those they serve.”

This is not an argument against anything. Top down prescription could be right or it could be wrong—as it has been for most of my career. Yes, it is true that there is now some buy-in to explicit teaching from politicians in Australia, but for most of the time I have lived and worked here, this has been an underground agenda pursued through blogs like this and organisations like researchED. For academics, so inclined to tell teachers what to do, to now complain because they don’t like these new initiatives, is too much to take.

The authors return to this point—one they must think is a killer argument—in an unnecessary second post on the AARE blog:

“Evidence-based practice in education didn’t emerge through a tradition of reflective professional judgement, as it did in medicine. Instead, it was imported through policy mechanisms, often driven by governments seeking scalable solutions to perceived educational problems.”

Again, it does not really matter how it emerged, it matters if it is effective or not. Nevertheless, I do not recognise this story. We have had years of reviews into teacher training and the curriculum that have changed precisely nothing. Evidence-based practice in Australia emerged from lots of independent commentators and teachers using social media to talk to each other and bypass the usual gatekeepers. If anything, government is catching up. The AARE folk just don’t like the fact that their impractical advice has been sidelined and they have lost some prestige. Tough luck. Do better.

The authors go on like this, trying to position themselves on the side of teachers and their professionalism. No doubt, some teachers will agree because we are not a homogenous profession. However, it is teacher professionalism that has led them to look at the alternatives to the tropes they were taught when training. It is teacher professionalism that AERO speaks to. Over here, we have been by making ourselves a profession in the teeth of opposition from academics and bureaucrats and education is all the better for it.

Again, you can complete the KPMG survey here.

AI-based argument of the week

I have a number of RSS feeds that I monitor for new academic papers and it is fair to say they have been inundated with papers arguing that the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes necessary something the author was always in favour of. Some of this is good; some is bad. So, it was interesting to read a paper in the former camp.