Audits of Learning

I've been reading widely across the blog posts this morning - affect, emotion and learning, deep learning versus surface learning, race - and also reflecting on the WAC workshop I ran last night for people teaching WI classes for the first time and our conversation there about ESL student writing and our collective difficulty in addressing ESL student texts in ways that (we hope are) productive...

part of that conversation revolved around the emotional states of ESL students and the level of comfort (for lack of a better word) that ESL students do or do not feel vis-a-vis working in English...

and thinking, as well, about a conversation I had with one of my classes about "how they are doing" (seriously, that is what I asked one morning) and after a few moments of awkward silence, they spilled

I  started thinking (again) about how we audit the learning going on in our classes:

I guess I'm thinking here not only about tests or quizzes that we may give (I gave a "pop" quiz on an essay I asked my class to read the other day, not only to make sure they read the assignment but also to gauge their understanding of the essay in context of the larger issues of the class), but the other ways we audit the learning (a colleague next door to me is meeting with his students in one on one conversations, for example). 

So I have several questions: what kinds of audits do we use? how do we use them? do they combine auditing not only the..."factual" learning of a class but also the affective domains, as well?

Peter

Comments

[John Talbird]

Thanks, Pete, for bringing up these issues, both now and at the last seminar.

This disjunction between the affective and fact (or content) is, I am beginning to think, perhaps a false one? When I've taught WAC workshops, one of the major concerns (outside the usual ones that our students can't write/read/cite sources correctly/etc.) is that if we teach "writing" then we won't have time to "cover content." In addition to the concern that profs in disciplines outside English aren't "qualified" to teach writing, there is hand-wringing about "content." It's often a popular belief that writing should be taught in a course w/out "content," first-year writing (composition). And it's true, that writing is the main "content" of a composition course. But writing about writing only gets you so far. The STUFF of writing is content (i.e. you must write ABOUT something). But conversely there is no content w/out language. You must be able to say back (to teachers, classmates, oneself) what you know (or say in able to know what you know--as I am somewhat sloppily and wordily trying to do now).

I argue that whenever I teach writing I am also teaching content. If a student is writing about a poem (or about the death penalty or about what they did for summer vacation), they're learning what they know about a certain subject (or what they may NEED to know (via research, writing, or just more thinking)) in order to better say what they want to say. It's not impossible to teach writing w/out content (witness the proud history of grammar drills and diagramming sentences), it's just been shown not to be very effective. Historically in English studies there used to be the general consensus (which still exists in some English depts., but not here at QCC) that profs should "cover" as much as possible of the material. Even before the canon was opened to include women, ethnic/racial minorities, gay people, etc., many in English studies were recognizing the futility of "covering" 1200 years of white male writing in 14 weeks (and that's only if you count the work written in (old) English and after).

All right, why all this blah, blah, blah about writing and English? We're supposed to be an interdisciplinary forum exploring issues of pedagogy. Well, going back to my claim that the disjunction between the affective and content is "false," perhaps I should qualify or change that statement. It's "false" in the sense that maybe there's no good reason for it, and yet it's truly there. Just like hook and Scapp say, there is a disjunction between the body and the intellect and there's one between content and the PERFORMING of that content...

And yet, we value some kind of performances of content. It seems we value the types that we can affix value to: exams and graded assignments. What about the other performances though, especially those that are less easy to fix a value (grade) to: note taking, talking, performing, free-writing, improv, etc. I don't want to downplay the importance of Pete's question. Few would argue that we as teachers need to have some idea about the results of what we're doing in the classroom. However, I wonder about even that term, "auditing." It's got such economic roots. An IRS audit does/can show what someone spent and earned over a year. Is the same type of audit possible in the classroom? Is it desirable? These are real questions, not rhetorical devices. And I'm not arguing, nor do I think, that it's impossible to gauge the affective mood of our classrooms. But maybe it's a limitation in ourselves as academics (and maybe it's a deeper, societal limitation) that we feel a need to affix value. (If it doesn't = something, does it exist?)

Enough from me. Sorry for the long post--probably a combination of my interest in this topic and guilt about my silence on this medium until now. Have a good break everybody.

John.

[Pete Gray]

Let me riff off of "audit" a bit. It is an interesting term, certainly heavy with economic roots. My use comes out of the work of Anne Berthoff and her book, Audits of Meaning. I'll go back and look specifically at how she attends to choosing that word and get back to you all.

I went back and used the hypertext dictionary that Belle originally put in an different thread and found this definition that works for me:

2: a methodical examination or review of a condition or situation;

[though I like the Milton reference, as well, though it doesn't really have relevance here; I just like the usage:
Audit \Au"dit\, n. [L. auditus a hearing, fr. audire. See {Audible}, a.] 1. An audience; a hearing. [Obs.] [1913 Webster]
He appeals to a high audit. --Milton. [1913 Webster]

So I want to hold onto the "audits of meaning" because it challenges me to attend to how students are making meaning/ making knowledge in my classrooms. It also seems to set aside the grading/evaluative aspect in order to foreground the process of review/reflection of meaning making/meaning made -- something I want to encourage as distinct from grading, a process worthy of our time for it's own ends.

Pete

[Megan Elias]

yeah, now I'm thinking: can we apply audits to moments of apparent disjuncture? That as John says the assumption that affect and content, or--to connect to a post by Susan--feeling and thinking are different is itself an actual feeling and thought. Maybe understanding is not all smooth planes but also some canyons or chasms? So the trick is to navigate it as disjunction rather than staying on one side or the other OR trying to reconnect the two sides? Sorry, have just returned from very rocky Innismor, so am being geologic in my thinking!