Post date: Aug 11, 2015 4:32:06 AM
The time for distributing new syllabi nears, and with it reflections about the growing administrative push to plan courses around "learning outcomes." In this post, I try to articulate part of what I find objectionable about this push.
Learning outcomes (LOs) for a course characterize what a student should know or be able to do upon successfully completing the course. (At least, this is what I glean from this overview [PDF].) I'm thinking of LOs as a component of a function: the instructor provides some inputs (lectures, assignments, feedback, etc) into a student; the student processes the feedback; successful processing yields the LOs as additions to the student; unsuccessful processing does not. So, for example, if I took a writing composition course as a college freshman with a learning outcome of "Construct definitional arguments," my instructor might provide for me inputs about definitional arguments, assignments to make such arguments, feedback on those assignments, and so on; were I to succeed in processing the inputs, I'd then be a person better skilled in constructing definitional arguments.
LOs need not be measurable. Moreover, whether someone achieves an LO is independent of whether the person is able to demonstrate achieving that LO. So grades, on this way of thinking, indicate how well the student demonstrate assimilating the measurable LOs. For example, F indicates *either* unsuccessful processing for nearly all measurable LOs *or* inability to demonstrate successful processing for nearly all measurable LOs. Apparently the standard way to have grades match what students are able to demonstrate regarding LOs is to use "authentic assessments," which stimulate contexts and conditions under which students would use the LO-based knowledge and skills; and the standard way to have grades reflect non-measuable LOs is to allow for instructor's expert judgments in assessing knowledge and skills that evade metrics. This is all well and good, I suppose. But there is something the LO-approach to course design misses.
I came across this omission during some internet meandering. I encountered a transcript of some lectures that Alain Badiou delivered in 2010 under the title "What Is Philosophy?" The lectures are slow going -- they remind me of reading Heidegger on similar topics, because Badiou uses strange framing to spin on trivialities without really giving illustrative examples to tether what he is trying to say. So be it. To each their own style of speaking and thinking. But, eventually, Badiou gets around to saying something provocative about the point of philosophy -- and, I imagine, the point of many other humanities-centered disciplines. I say "provocative," for two reasons: I hadn't thought to think like this before; and I'm not quite sure what he means to be saying, but what he says inspired an idea about (part of) what I find off-putting about LOs. Here are some relevant parts from (the transcript of) Badiou's lectures (with citations to page numbers of the PDF linked above):
If the only possibility of the world is to continue the world as it is, then there is no real future, no real future. What is a real future? A real future is something different. If we do not have the possibility of something different, then we do not have a real future, we have, rather, a continuation of the present, a sort of enormous present.... So we can define one goal of philosophy -- if philosophy is something useful, if it is something else than an academic exercise, if philosophy is really something useful to our life: philosophy must propose the possibility of a real future, or to examine the conditions for the existence of a real future.... (Day One, pp23-24).
The question of philosophy is the question of creating a new desire -- it's not just to give answers to some problems. Naturally we propose some answers to some problems, but that's not the goal of philosophy. The goal of philosophy is not like the goal in mathematics -- to explain a problem and a solution of the problem. The goal is not as it is in empirical questions either -- to learn something new, concerning the geography of some country, or history and so on. It's not to know the laws of the world, like in economy, for instance, and so on. It is really to create in everybody [attending the course] a new desire. And if we create a new community [during our lecture meetings], it is because there is something in common -- and not only between the professor and students -- which is precisely the possibility of that new sort of desire.... And so ... the goal of philosophy is not the production of knowledge, but a qualitative subjective transformation, by way of the creation of a new common desire. (Day One, pp25-26).
Badiou's idea, I think, is that one goal of delivering a philosophy course is to create in students (and perhaps also oneself) a desire for a real future. That sounds good. I don't know what it means, because I don't know what he means by "real future." But I understand the contrast between aiming to give students new knowledge or new skill in creating/discovering knowledge, on the one hand, and aiming to give students new desire, on the other hand. And, insofar as I understand, I agree: one of my goals in teaching philosophy is to give students a new desire. Maybe not the desire Badiou has in mind: I want students to develop a desire for learning about different possibilities, for discovering different ways of living, for understanding the unfamiliar on unfamiliar terms. Call this a philosophical desire. This is not a desire to reject what one receives from tradition – if desiring a real future means desiring a break with the past, I'm departing from Badiou here. But it is a desire to reflect upon whatever it is one ends up accepting and endorsing as one's own, even if that's the same stuff with which one begins.
There are some skills, and maybe some knowledge, that should get produced as a side effect of developing such a desire: finding limits along with strengths, thinking about what gets excluded and how/why, relating to others with less hostility and more humility. These side effects are the sort of thing one might characterize as a learning outcome. But I'm not so sure that the responsible philosophical desire is a proper learning outcome. For one thing, the desire is neither knowledge nor a skill. For another, the desire doesn't have the right relationship to grades.
I can elaborate on that second reason. It should be possible for a student to pass the course without also acquiring the philosophical desire. Desires grow slowly, and almost certainly they often have gestation periods of more than 10-15 weeks. Desires also compete with each other, and I make no claim that the philosophical desire I aim to create in students is or ought to be more important than many other worthy desires students might have. So if grades should be based on success in achieving learning outcomes, but success in developing the philosophical desire should not affect grades, having the philosophical desire is not a learning outcome.
I hadn't thought about course aims and outcomes in terms of desire-creation prior to reading the Badiou transcript. But now that I've read it, I find that a lot of what I'm up to in a philosophy course is about making opportunities for students to acquire certain kinds of philosophical desires. I don't much care about whether, ten years after they graduate, they can say smart things relating how ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese thinkers appealed to chariot analogies for metaphysical purposes. But I do care about whether they have a desire to reflect upon the analogies that inform their own orientations toward the world.
So here's what I think the LO-based approach to course design misses: it misses out on the desires instructors seek to create in their students. And here's (part of) what I find objectionable about the push to design courses around LOs: they encourage instructors to design courses around side-effects of what makes college courses in the humanities valuable. The side-effects are knowledge and skill. But what makes the course valuable is the transformative opportunity, the chance to acquire new desires that enrich one's life in a certain way. In the case of philosophy, these desires (for me) center upon understanding possibilities and limitations; in other humanities courses, I imagine the desires might have different foci. (Maybe courses in math and science aim to create similar desires; if they do, I object to LO-based course design for them too.)
Potential compromise: keep the LOs on syllabi to satisfy administrators, but use desire-based design for course structure/content/assessments instead of LO-based design. Worries about the compromise: it misleads students about what's important and significant about courses; maybe desire-based design misleads students too, insofar as the marketing they receive gives the impression that college is about upgrading skills/knowledge rather than (also) opening oneself to the possibility of personal transformation.