[The Montana Professor 23.1, Fall 2012 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Alan Weltzien, PhD
Professor of English Literature
University of Montana-Western
I have taught fulltime at two baccalaureate-granting institutions in two different states for over three decades, long enough to watch sundry higher education fashions wax and wane, like necktie widths. One of these, the outcomes assessment movement, has not waned and for many, it has tremendously complicated our professional lives and compromised our loyalty to our disciplines and our pedagogy.
When I was young in this line of work, I remember being sent to Alverno College, in suburban Milwaukee, for one of their intensive "A Day at Alverno" sessions. This Roman Catholic-affiliated school gained great reputation by the 1980s for breaking new ground in a holistic outcomes assessment program focused upon every student. They attracted many grants, churned out slick publications, and gained great public relations savvy. While impressed with some facets of what they were able to do, generously supported by external funds, I wondered back then what kind of time was dedicated to actual disciplinary content on the part of faculty and students. It seemed to me they were so busy measuring each student that her progress in mathematics or biology or political science would be checkered if not adulterated.
My Day at Alverno served, for myself, as prelude to a movement that, at the hands of regional (or national) accrediting agencies, threatened and threatens to bury our business under this newer, thickening layer of documentation. As a trusted colleague more or less remarked many years ago, I'm so busy now trying to assess my students in a lot of ways I've not done before, I no longer have time to teach chemistry. He was exaggerating, of course, yet to the extent that the outcomes assessment movement has been embraced by typically ignorant state legislators, the result can be the "teaching to the test" phenomenon overcoming many K-12 districts and balefully influencing higher education. Too often the movement poses yet another example of top-down mismanagement; of sources of power external to our enterprise wresting its definition and praxis away from those who know it best: the professoriate.
More than ever, various entities outside our peculiar institution try to control our agendas and pedagogy as though they know them as well as we do. How exactly is the outcomes assessment movement a qualitative improvement over traditional tests, papers, projects, portfolios, and the like? I'm unconvinced that it is. In fact all these measures assess outcomes sans the newer buzz language. So how do current examples of specific course "outcomes" substantively differ from earlier modes of evaluation, and whom do they serve? I do not think they necessarily serve the students and professors immediately involved.
Obviously, many modes of evaluation have long been central to our work; equally obviously, many faculty have eagerly embraced outcomes assessment. In theory, it facilitates ongoing self-study and curricular revision, and enables us to do what we do better. In fact, too often it strikes me as yet another tail wagging the academic dog. As one who practices interdisciplinarity whenever possible and who interrogates pedagogy continually, I resent what too often comes across as officious meddling. I remain skeptical of how the addition of outcomes assessment (or the MUS's common course descriptions and numbers) has improved the quality of my work. I'm doubtful, and suspect that outcomes assessment most satisfies constituencies beyond a given classroom. Perhaps the greatest example of that meddling is linguistic.
In my admittedly limited experience, I find the language of outcomes assessment more than unfortunate; in its abstractness it numbs as it homogenizes. It rests upon a certain core lexicon which threatens if not accomplishes a kind of bland standardization antithetical to our business. Most course outcomes I've seen sound similar (apart, of course, from discipline-specific concepts or processes, e.g., in conservation biology), as though we're all singing in F (or G Minor). Again, who is served by this blurry boilerplate? I suspect many students and faculty, at least, do not measure their given course experience by consciously rehearsing its set of outcomes—a set that, after all, sounds similar to several other sets they've encountered. If outcomes language tends towards standardization, then institutional and individual distinction is sacrificed—rubbed out, as though personality matters less than common performance. In fact, the argument could be made that, to the extent that outcomes assessment language serves standardization, it also feeds the accelerating corporatization of higher education. If our "products" are interchangeable, then students and others have every reason to regard themselves as consumers (with inalienable rights, of course).
I might argue that the best of what happens in my discipline resists outcomes assessment because, as with most seminal experiences in undergraduate education, it eludes quantification, facile or otherwise. Those classroom experiences most transformative for students in art or music or history do not lend themselves to sound-bite-sized outcomes, particularly dressed in the kind of homogeneous language I've seen. While this movement holds moderate promise in moderate doses, it seems to me it has swollen, over the past two decades, to the point of obscuring rather than enhancing that which is most distinct in college teaching.
A few months ago on the back page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, longtime English professor (and AAUP President) Cary Nelson published an essay, "Keep Your Hands Off The Fierce Humanities." Nelson describes a course in Holocaust poetry he has taught at the University of Illinois, off and on, for years. The course exacts an emotional toll on his students and himself as it fundamentally, painfully questions those very traits most of us regard as human. Nelson suggests that students emerge from this class deeply changed, with a new identity if not new path through college, and it is those very changes that outcomes assessment, in his estimation, trivialize. The specific course outcomes attached like leeches to this course do not enhance its content, its felt experience. Arguably, those outcomes, products of outcomes assessment language, bear no vital relation to the course.
In many undergraduate courses, that which is most potentially transformational for students eludes the kind of quantification and product mentality the outcomes assessment movement too often assumes and depends upon. It's no surprise that disciplines largely dependent upon qualitative experience are badly served by evaluative systems based upon numbered bullets or chunks. Many folks want to measure, in a common system, the elusive and ineffable. Such systems, of course, appeal to parents or legislators or accreditors or administrators who subscribe to the belief that undergraduate education should be hurried, should minimize general education, and should prepare one for work—and not necessarily the rest of one's life. If a bachelor's degree represents a product (or cumulative list of products) more than a cumulative experience, then course outcomes make sense.
Undergraduate education is more experience than product. I wish outcomes assessment, in its language and praxis, better served the kind of experiences characteristic of the best undergraduate education. Many years ago I published in College Teaching a long profile of the two best professor-teachers I studied under. In it I attempted to define great as opposed to "merely" good college-level teaching, and I claimed (and still claim) that great teaching is rare and unpredictable. From what I've seen of outcomes assessment over the years, I don't think good or great teaching is well served by such a system; instead, other constituencies outside the classroom are thus served and in the process, faculty expertise and distinction are threatened if not diminished. I want ongoing evaluation as much as the next guy, but I don't see the peculiarly potent art of teaching enhanced by what has become commonplace in the academy.
[The Montana Professor 23.1, Fall 2012 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]