Personal Submission to
Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy
Professor Michael Jackson
Department of Government
University of Sydney 2006
michaelj@bullwinkle.econ.su.oz.au
I make three points about teaching.
1. Social and cultural functions of universities.
All universities must preserve and promote knowledge, and no knowledge is more
important than useless knowledge. Useless knowledge is about meaning in
our lives. It is useless in that it does not relate to career, work,
employment, or such practicalities. It does bear on how and why we live. For
more detail see below.
2. Provision of higher education in the next generation.
The number of students in a class room is not itself an indication of quality.
Preserving small tutorial groups is not itself a virtue. What is important in
any classroom is what the students are doing and why they are doing it. What
is important are their actions and intentions. These lead to learning.
For more detail see below.
3. Relation of teaching and research in universities.
Some universities must have the mission of undergraduate teaching from a
research base. Not every university must contribute to research, and not every
member of staff at a so-called research university must continually contribute
to research. But students must have the option nationally of attending a
research university for an undergraduate degree. Some students must learn
with native speakers of the language of research. Consider an analogy.
Undergraduate study at a research university is learning the language of
research with a native speaker of research. In this case the language is
theory, method and practice of creating and evaluating knowledge, and its
native speakers are those who create, test, and criticise knowledge. For
more detail see below.
Each of these three is detailed below.
1. Useless knowledge.
Useless knowledge is a treasure beyond even Olympic gold. A
Canberra civil servant asked poet A. D. Hope, 'Surely Professor Hope poetry has
no practical importance. What can it do for Australia?' Hope replied, 'Poetry
gives it meaning.' There is no resource more scarce than meaning.
What is the purpose of higher education? It is that higher education's
purpose is to possess the next generation of the social, political, scientific,
technological, and cultural heritage of our world. Possessed of this heritage,
the next generation tests, applies, creates, and rejects parts of it. That
heritage is not merely technical or vocational; it is also moral.
Without moral meaning the egg cracks, and the energy within escapes. What we
take for granted in everyday life, a theorist, a poet, or a novelist tests to
the limit. They find the meaning of the shell, and sometimes can even restore
the energy and repair the shell.
These and other miracles are classics. What makes a book classic? According
to Mark Twain it was a book educated people had heard of, but not read. There
is more to that definition than wit, even from an author of classics!
- Novelist Henry James said a classic is thick. He meant the density
of its discourse, not its girth on the shelf! Much goes on in every line.
Every sentence, and paragraph contains an idea. Pages bristle with them.
These ideas sometimes collide with a bang and at other times converge in a
lift-off.
- Historian Jacques Barzun (from whom much of this discussion derives) added
adaptable. He meant a classic serves purposes beyond the original.
- A classic gathers to itself enough votes to be openly, publicly called a
classic. Dissent tests and strengthens the claim. Atheism, Marxism,
Modernism or Post, Eurocentrism, Sexism -- they come and go; the classics
endure. Long after today's 'isms' are spent, Plato will beguile and compel
readers.
- A classic has tap roots in a past. It is both foreign and familiar.
Though rooted in the past, a classic speaks to the universal within us. More
than that, classics span worlds. Plato is at once occidental and oriental.
Readers must approach his work on its own terms, and that is slippery ice. It
must be read with care, unlike this submission!
We can only avoid repeating the mistakes of the past if we understand why they
did not seem to be mistakes at the time. We must enter into the past and let
it enter into us.
- A classic discharges high energy, scattering fallout in the
vernacular. Phrases like the Golden Mean, crossing the Rubicon, a judgement of
Solomon, and the like settle to the ear.
A Perth millionaire described his multi-million dollar home as 'a fine and
private place.' Did he know he was quoting Andrew Marvell's description of the
grave?
What did economist John Maynard Keynes say? Every pragmatist repeats a
garbled theory from yesteryear as if it were commonsense. These are the
leaders who boast, privately if not publicly, of not reading. They think it
needs to be said when it is perfectly obvious.
- Useless knowledge is the capital investment in the most precious
resource -- ourselves. A friend of the classics finds wise counsel when
love, joy, divorce, death, adversity, sorrow, failure, misfortune, hard times,
and other impracticalities strike.
Reader, which is the greater loss? The university graduate who cannot
read, a phenomenon often bewailed by our leaders? Or the university graduate
who does not read the classics? This latter category includes many of the
leading bewailers.
2. Activity and Intention in the Class room.
A substantial body of research on learning in higher education
exists, and Australian researchers have been among it foremost contributors.
The finding of interest to every class room teacher is that the students
learning is shaped by what they do and why they are doing it. Teaching for
learning aims at students' actions and intentions.
Teaching for learning makes students conscious of how they learn.
Consciousness of learning does not come easily or naturally. Good teaching
helps students develop this consciousness, and it transcends graduation.
We do not need a black-box teaching recorder to know that learning comes from
what students do and why students are doing it.
Learning does not arise from good teaching itself, or the number of students
in the class room. Student activity and intention combine in learning.
Student activity and intention are both more important than the number of
students in the room, or the sophistication of the software on the screen.
I offer five postcards on teaching for learning.
- Teaching that promotes learning allows students to make choices.
It also allows them to experience the consequences of those choices.
These degrees of freedom can take many forms, including the choice of elective
subjects and not just a degree of compulsory requirements. It also means the
freedom to choose topics for reports, papers, or experiments and not just
responding to set questions with a set apparatus or bibliography.
Choice should start from day one. We learn by choosing; we do not learn to
choose.
- Teaching that promotes learning develops self-evaluation.
Self-evaluation does not come easily to any of us. Some teachers boast of
their 30 years experience. Without self-evaluation that might be one year of
experience repeated 29 times.
Teachers can help students work toward self-evaluation in far more ways than
can be suggested here. Examples include looking at specimen work, keeping
logs, concept maps, reflective paragraphs on their own work, and the like.
- Teaching that promotes learning offers a variety of experiences,
beyond the steady diet of lectures more lectures, and further lectures called
tutorials, and even more expensive lectures called multi-media.
Students can learn from play readings, from teamwork, from mock experiments,
from lectures, from peer evaluation, from team work - the list goes on.
- Teaching that promotes learning has a feasible workload.
This does not come naturally for universities, which fill timetables but do
not manage them, nor to lecturers who create requirements but do not consider
the impact on students.
There is a hard working teacher who gives students 18 written assignments in a
14 week semester. She is frantic in setting them, collecting them, grading
them, and recording them. Students work on these assignments repeatedly
disappoints her. They do each one quickly, superficially to manage the
volume.
Students have very definite ideas about appropriate workload based on the
credit points of each course and Higher Education Contributions Scheme costs.
A teacher has but to ask.
- Teaching that promotes learning is teaching that offers timely
feedback. Effective feedback comes quickly or not at all. Too often
papers submitted by students in October have a ritualistic return in January in
card board boxes lining hallways, making a smooth transition to recycling.
There is no formative assessment in intellectual property that is not returned
to students.
One modest way to improve teaching would be for teachers to be aware of and
practice the distinction between formative assessment and summative assessment.
This might start by explaining the distinction to students. Formative
assessment is the advice a coach offers an athlete in training. Summative
assessment is the score that judges at events offer.
Teachers may also use self-evaluation, peer evaluation, evaluative pro formas,
model work, and the like. The possibilities are many. The last point is that
feedback does not have to be through assessment.
3. The language of research.
If the next generation is to take possession of the heritage of our world, it
must have the capacity to test and reject, as well as accept, that inheritance.
Some members of that generation must learn what the creation of knowledge is
like, say, by completing an honour degree at a research university. In that
environment the creation of new knowledge and the evaluation of existing
knowledge is a part of the university's culture.
There students will learn both explicitly and implicitly what, how, and why
knowledge is as it is. Much of what they will learn will be as subtle as the
accent language students learn from a native speaker of the target language,
and as explicit as the slang a native speaker imparts.
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