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Overview

Teacher evaluation in higher education in Flanders: The construction of quality Mathias Decuypere (Presenter), Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein (Co-authors) Laboratory for Education and Society Center for Education Policy and Innovation Center for Philosophy of Education. Overview.

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Overview

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  1. Teacher evaluation in higher education in Flanders: The construction of qualityMathias Decuypere (Presenter), Maarten Simons andJan Masschelein (Co-authors)Laboratory for Education and SocietyCenter for Education Policy and InnovationCenter for Philosophy of Education

  2. Overview • Background: University of Leuven • Quality assessment and assurance: • A concrete framework… • …put into practice • Focus • Devices and technologies • A rationale of teacher evaluation • Privatizing tendencies • A compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’

  3. Background: University of Leuven • Situated in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (“Flanders”) • 34,940 Students • 4,410 Junior researchers • 1,423 Senior researchers (academic staff) • 62 Undergraduate (Bachelor) programs • 120 Postgraduate (Master) programs

  4. Qualityassessment and assurance:A concrete framework…

  5. Qualityassessment and assurance:…put intopractice. • Biennial survey concerning the quality of education given by academic staff • This survey is filled in by students who followed the course • Purpose: making educational quality transparent in order to • Recognize & reward good practices • Adjust & remedy possible bottlenecks • Lecturer can contextualize the evaluation of each course given • Those results are transposed to her/his personal file • http://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/evaluatie/folder_onderwijsevaluatie.pdf

  6. Focus Not a plea for or against teacher evaluation as such Instead: a (theoretical) focus on rationales, technologies and devices used… … resulting in an alternative conception of teacher evaluation.

  7. A concrete example (Faculty of psychology and educationalsciences as a whole, course-specificinformationnotdisclosed…) http://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/kwaliteitszorg/kwaliteitsgarantie/ resultaten/evaopo/evaopo-ppw.html

  8. Devices and technologies Thisway of evaluating is dependenton the production of solidfacts (and correspondingvalues) in order to obtainlegitimacy. This is effectuatedbymeans of: • Calculativedevices (Callon & Muniesa, 2003) • Calculation: the perceiving and grading of differences, whichleads to estimations of courses of action associated with the perceived differences (means, standard deviations) • Calculative devices: devices that aim at rendering things more scientific (or enacting particular versions of what it is to be scientific), inspiring more evidence-based action • Evaluation of quality of teaching tries to differentiate (scientifically) and to trigger specific actions based on this differentiation (cf. ‘recognizing and rewarding’ vs. ‘adjusting and remedying’) • Inscriptivetechnologies (Latour, 1987; Law, 2004) • Inscription: the transformation of certainaspects of realityintofigures, diagrams, texts (the practice of a one-yearcourseintoonetable) • Inscriptivetechnologies: technologiesthataim at visualizing (scientific) results, henceinscribingthemselvesintoreality (e.g. table)

  9. The rationale of teacher evaluation Finalresultsinform Statisticalanalysisresults in

  10. The modern Constitution Archetypicalfor modern ways of thinking Nature-collectorlodges ‘matters of fact’: objectivefacts and objects (Latour, 1993; 1999/2004a; 2004b) vs. ‘matters of value’ in society-collector

  11. Privatizing tendencies • Dealing with teacher evaluation in this modern way gives way to privatizing tendencies: • A complete cold-shouldering of the constructed character of the quality obtained (e.g. calculation, inscription) • The power of numbers (‘M’ and ‘SD’ as embodiment of the entire teaching process) (cf. Rose, 1999) • The power of expertise and the inability of the tutor (who can be a professor in statistics…) • The opportunity to contextualize results, this is the opportunity to attach values to facts, only allowed post-hoc • Despite all contestations within the University of Leuven, evaluation has to be conducted this way (and no other) • This privatizes the process: other possible ways of (and opinions about) evaluation are being ignored and no (longer) welcomed • Secondly, this process also establishes a responsabilization of the teachers: ‘keep up with the rest’, ‘do better than the rest’

  12. An other, non-modern way: Teacher evaluation as a compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’? Students Lecturer Whatconstitutes a good teacher? “Thing” Otherspokesmen Staff Statistician

  13. An other, non modern way: Teacher evaluation as a compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’? • This Parliament has to be understood as ‘the place to make some-thing public’ (thus not in classical institutional meaning of the word) • Representation: • Traditionally understood in terms of legitimacy of the representing spokesmen (students, staff, lecturers, etc.) • This proposal however needs a second kind of representation as well: are the things one talks about accurately represented, e.g. do the spokespersons of the numbers obtained speak in name of those numbers (≠ do they consider them to be a mirror of reality, but: do they report of what those numbers mean (and what not), how they were constructed (and how not), what are their capacities and limitations, etc.) • Letting numbers ‘speak for themselves’ is something totally different than letting a spokesmen make an argument (or ‘composition’) based on those numbers

  14. Readings… Callon, M., & Muniesa, F. (2003). Les marches économiquescommedispositifscollectifs de calcul. Réseaux, 21(122), 189-233. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004a). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy (C. Porter,Trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1999) Latour, B. (2004b). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248. Law, J. (2004). After method. Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  15. Mathias DecuypereLaboratoryforEducation and SocietyVesaliusstraat 2 Box 037613000 LeuvenBelgiummathias.decuypere@ped.kuleuven.be

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