BY JOHN SCHLUETER
As I was writing my recent article for Academe, “In Search of What We Do,” my college was in the throes of reaccreditation, and faculty were tasked with standardizing their assessments of student work based on outcomes revised with the help of Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, for me—and I would venture to guess the same was true for the majority of my colleagues—the most valuable part of this process was not revising or creating new outcomes, or reviewing assessment and reporting procedures; rather, it was the conversation that happened when we digressed from these very tasks. For instance, I had an impromptu talk with two of my colleagues in the English Department, which led to an exchange of ideas and materials regarding how to teach sentence clarity in ways students can apply immediately to their writing though they lack knowledge of English grammar. After ten minutes, though, we were whisked back to the task of establishing better processes of data collection.
I know that the work involved in accreditation and the time I might spend speaking with other teachers about how to teach are not mutually exclusive activities. However, when I think back on this experience Elliot Eisner’s words again come to mind. Eisner argues that when we instrumentalize education, we replace “what is insignificant but comparatively easy to measure or observe…with what is educationally significant but difficult to measure or observe.” Accreditation, though necessary, certainly pushes us towards this replacement. Consequently, fruitful discussions about teaching among teachers are squeezed in (if at all) in the cracks between the hours we commit to institutional and professional “development.”
Substituting what is really important with the veneer of importance is a trap into which we easily fall—teachers included. For example, this happens when we substitute the achievement of outcomes for the relational experience that is teaching and learning. What we do when we do this was made brilliantly clear to me while reading University of Chicago Philosophy Professor Agnes Callard’s recent book, Aspiration, in which she explores how we transform ourselves (and it’s free online!). For Collard, we must learn to distinguish aspiration from ambition. Ambition, as she defines it, is the desire to achieve a stated outcome. So, the “ambitious” student is one who sets out to earn an “A” in her college class (and is “successful” if she does so). Aspiration, on the other hand, involves a process of self-transformation wherein the aspirant wants to become something other (or more) than what she currently is. So, for example, a student might take a field trip to an art museum, and she might be impacted in such a way that she desires to become an art-lover or connoisseur. However, in her current state, she does not know enough about the history of art or art itself to consider herself so, which is why she now aspires to gain that knowledge and expertise. The difference, then, between aspiration and ambition, is the difference between what is easily measured and what is difficult to measure, between what’s important and the veneer of importance. And, perhaps most importantly, it is the difference between the “science of teaching” and the “art and craft of teaching.” As Collard notes in her book, “turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher.” In other words, it is a big part of the untold story of “what we do.”
Also, before you say to yourself, “sure, ‘aspiring’ is great, but students need real world skills for real world jobs,” consider the argument Callard makes in a paper on aspiration and liberal education: “The problem with portraying college as a rational skills factory is not only that the education has an intrinsic value that we ignore by instrumentalizing it as skill-acquisition; it’s that the very acquisition of those skills seems predicated on not taking skill-acquisition as one’s goal.” In other words, when students decide to become skillful in a certain area—to persist in a college education—they do so not because of ambition, or because gaining such skills are a means to a achieving a stated outcome (getting a particular job); it is because they have decided to aspire to become someone who they value, even if they aren’t sure who that person is quite yet. Consequently, our value as teachers, is not that we are conduits for skill acquisition; in fact, as I argue in my Academe article, the more teachers are seen and see themselves as such, the less we are valued. Rather, we are valuable, and extremely so, because we are aspirational guides, mentors, and exemplars. And as we inevitably go on to revise outcomes and assessment processes, we must never forget to remind ourselves, and those around us, that we are far, far more than the sum of those parts.
Guest blogger John Schlueter teaches English and composition at Saint Paul College.
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