In our final face to face session, we read and discussed some readings in small groups. The Hyland (1999) and Macfarlane & Gourlay (2009) pieces in particular posed interesting questions about what knowledge is and how it is understood in the university context.
Hyland studied 80 different research papers to understand how citations are employed across academic disciplines. They found that arts and humanities academics used substantially more references than those writing within more empirical subject areas. This points to the community of knowledge that one must participate in by acknowledging others knowledge in order to have one’s own knowledge accepted
The Macfarlane & Gourlay piece likens the reflective aspect of PgCert courses to a reality show where contestants undergo a total transformation. It explores the insidious nature of reflective assessment as a means of control. It is not acceptable to reflect that you that the course has not transformed you. Students must perform a road to Damascus style epiphany about their practice that only could have been achieved through the course. They must then dutifully reflect on this to pass the assessment.
These papers provoke a few thoughts for me, not least this idea of performativity which reminds me of Judith Butler – to what extent do we perform our knowledge in line with societal expectations? For Hyland’s article, it is on the one hand understandable that we participate in communities of knowledge; we learn from each other, and we evidence our knowledge based on what we have read. Thinking critically though, these knowledge communities are not neutral spaces; politics and biases are strong undercurrents in deciding who counts as a knowledgeable member of the club. As Holmwood asks:
What precisely does neoliberal higher education bring into being? And how can we assess its claims to be a system based on merit and individual responsibility rather than group affiliation?
Holmwood (2018)
In decolonising curricula, we confront the institutionalised racism and bias within academia. While we try being critical of our curricula, I wonder how many this action is coming too late for. Equally, the institutions that house these academic communities are symbols of power, privilege, and dominance in the semiotics of the knowledge economy. Shouldn’t elite institutions therefore de-centre themselves to allow others to speak? Couldn’t they use their profits and prestige to empower other knowledge centres rather than pursuing their own endless expansion?
I see connections between Macfarlane & Gourlay’s point around performing knowledge and what Allan Davies says about learning outcomes in art and design education. I explore Davies’ article further in this blogpost, but in sum Davies argues that art and design skills develop over time and they resist being captured within a specific assessable event. Our learning from this PgCert is similar, it informs our practice in a gradual sense. Yet can our knowledge be said to have been achieved if it is not performed in an assessable way?
Macfarlane and Gourlay wrote their piece in 2009, to what extent have things changed? There still is a need for teachers to assess their students’ knowledge and for students to participate in the performance of knowledge in order to be accepted into the academic fold. And as Gourlay states in their more recent text Posthumanism and the Digital University (2021):
the VLE can be critiqued as a technology of surveillance, which is used to discipline students into a very particular form of digital textual performance. It is common to ask students to ‘reflect’ on their learning on VLE discussions boards, and relate the content of the course to themselves in some way. As I have argued elsewhere (Macfarlane & Gourlay 2009), reflection may appear to be highly personalized, but can in fact be used as a disciplining practice, corralling participants into a narrow band of acceptable ways of expressing their subjectivity. It may also be used to quantify student engagement in terms of the frequency of logins and length of time spent on the VLE.
Gourlay 2021
As a learning technologist, learning analytics are part and parcel of my role. The assessment of frequency of logins and time spent as an indicator of knowledge or worthiness of knowledge therefore rings alarm bells for me. In my context, learning analytics help to assess when necessary activities, such as health and safety inductions, have been completed. But the reduction of a student’s learning to numerical data and stats is dehumanising and serves as a potential tool to further grease the wheels of the neoliberal university.
References
Holmwood, J. (2018) ‘Race and the Neoliberal University.’ In Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds.) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press, pp.37-52.
Gourlay, L. (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hyland, K. (1999) Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20 (3), pp.341-367
Macfarlane, B., & Gourlay, L. (2009) The Reflection Game: enacting the penitent self, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (4), pp. 455-459