Another Gray Day

In an earlier post I wrote about the need for educational research to move into a new space. Currently, there is a tendency for research to focus on school performance, school improvement, teacher efficacy - all very worthwhile but missing the point. Schools onlyaccount for part of the difference in pupil achievement between the top and bottom groups. The rest, perhaps as much as 85-90%, comes from pupil background. And what is going to change that? Even within schools we know that disruption and the underachievement of a minority of pupils are a major problem.

The problem is that research is much easier inside schools than outside. Schools keep records, produce statistics and often produce tea and coffee for meetings. They can also use their status as research sites or subjects as evidence of a commitment to excellence (or similar phrase). For everyone else research is a nuisance - intrusive, time consuming, guilt-inducing, etc. Or is it? Surprisingly (or not), most people enjoy being heard, and problems arise in research because they aren’t. Completing an ‘instrument’ designed through the responses of american college students doesn’t count as being heard. Having a conversation with a real listener, who is in a position to make things happen - that counts.

Perhaps the first stage in this process is to ask pupils - politely - what they think. This is beginning to happen, and it is the first stage in getting into a new space. Let’s get on with it.

“Leading something” is esentially a spatial metaphor. We talk about “leading from the front”, “top-down decision making” and so on. The leader is positioned geometrically, at the centre of a circle or the apex of the pyramid. What does this mean in organisations? As a member (or ex-member) of a University, how did I position myself in relation to its “leader”? The first problem in answering this question is that the leader was largely invisible. Although I knew who she was and what she looked like, it was not a visible relationship in the way that say, McCoy Tyner is in relation to his trio (currently playing “Up ‘gainst the wall” from the “remembering John” CD). An organisation such as a University is of course much larger than a Jazz Trio and functions much like a compost heap - things happen messily but predictably so long as certain kinds of inputs continue.

So how can one individual organism function as leader of the heap? Perhaps she only performs a symbolic function, turning up at graduations, weddings and funerals? Or perhaps she fights battles for the continuing supply of potato peelings and orange peel? Well, of course she does, being on endless commitees goes with the job. But just as compost heaps need to be constrained, so that their components can interact successfully, so it is with Universities. There needs to be some linearity about the flow from input to output. So the leader needs to mark out direction in some way, which in turn requires visibility.

In a lesser-known disaster movie called “The Core”, on of the characters, a patronising Air Force/NASA commander, tells an up-and-coming woman astronaut “Leadership isn’t just about ability, it’s about responsibility”. Whilst he had obviously been reading too many instant management books, it’s a useful line for deconstruction. Perhaps it could be written as
“Leadership is about ability, responsibility and visibility, not about potato peelings”.

Here’s another pointless speculation: is DIY the meaning of life? Perhaps we’re here just in case someone from central universe needs an M6 x 30 socket screw, preferably in stainless steel, and if you’ve got a set of Allen keys that would be useful too. Which brings me to a point about education, and how narrow the school curriculum is, compared to the range of knowledge that’s out there. Aha, but school is about learning to learn, nowadays (at least in the UK, sometimes). Yes, but that’s OK if you know what you don’t know. Heidegger uses the term ‘dis-stancing’ or ‘deseverance’ (depending on translator) to refer to the way the world shows up for us (Dreyfus’ term). Some things are within our range of concerns and some things aren’t. Increasingly the internet makes it possible to widen our range of concerns, which is another way of saying ‘enriching the information landscape’. But, in relation to schools (and universities) , there’s a danger that too much focus ends up being counterproductive - destroying curiosity in return for standards. Bah, humbug!

In the old days (before printing) university libraries were special, a few hundred books at most, all hand-copied and annotated.So they had to be carefully controlled and guarded against dishonest students. The attitude has not died out - universities and publishers are still concerned to keep knowledge locked up behind Athens passwords and all the rest of it. This is nonsense. The vast majority of University research is paid for out of public funds, and should therefore be in the public domain. Academics do huge amounts of unpaid work writing, editing and reviewing, and the only people who profit are the big publishers. The persistence of prestige - being published in Nature, rather than the Journal of underwater knitting research - means that universities are unwilling to let go of the whole peer-review, two years to get published if you’re lucky, process.
The big publishers do a nice job with production and circulation but who knows what the actual audience is? Citation indices are not a good way of assessing impact, which is not really a measurable quality anyway. I’m interested in doing some research on this, so if you have been influenced by academic articles (as distinct from citing them because you have to), get in touch.