Less Than Disinterested Observers

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor

—Campbell’s Law, 1988, p 360

We must educate people on what nobody knew yesterday and prepare people in our schools for what

no one knows yet, but what some people must know tomorrow.

—Margaret Mead

Noticing and Challenging the Magic Counting Dragon

We do not write as disinterested observers of the Magic Counting Dragon described in our first essay. We are colleagues (husband and wife), one of us an anthropologist, both of us sharing an interest in the development of the college competencies described in Part One. We share an office, often mentor students together regardless of the courses in which a student may be enrolled, and we team-teach. In our experience, which we will likely be unable to document until after retirement, the current preoccupation with counting short term, easy to measure attainable goals is a barrier to learning about and understanding the goal of developing critical collegiate competencies for the 21st century. Teaching in a small rural community college, our experience concurs with research associated with programs in strained institutional settings; what appears to be a less than successful undertaking when assessed in the short term is something altogether different when assessed with different metrics in the long run.

High Demand x High Support Pedagogy: More Challenge and More Support

During the past almost thirty years we have incrementally built a High Demand x High Support (HD x HS) teaching pedagogy designed to challenge more than accommodate common limitations of entering college students. Although we do not know if our interpretation of HD x HS is exactly what educator Nevitt Sanford (Where Colleges Fail: A Study of the Student as a Person, 1967) had in mind when he described HD x HS in the 1960s, we believe that the pedagogy bears sufficient resemblance to bear the name. The pedagogy represents the foundational anatomy in all the 20+ courses that we teach spanning the biological, physical, social/behavioral sciences. Importantly, as there are alternatives at our college to courses taught in the HD x HS format, student enrollment and retention in these courses reflects choice and decision-making

As the label implies, the demands of HD x HS courses are considerable when compared with the expectations and experiences of most students. However, as the label also implies, support in the interest of authentic student success are also diverse and generous. Feedback from students who have completed these courses and moved on from our institution routinely endorses the support as the most supportive or among the most supportive of environments they have ever experienced, in fact many continue to draw upon the HD x HS environment after leaving

HD x HS and Misleading Measures

Our experiences with HD x HS courses strongly suggest that measuring short term, easy to measure, attainable goals is misleading. When viewed from the perspective of the currently in place counting model the HD x HS approach is a failure; enrollments are often low and drop rates are invariably high. However, when assessments of HD x HS courses are counted in other ways the picture is more complex. Regardless of whether they perform well from the start (a small but consistent minority of individuals who have often not been traditionally successful) or initially experience bouts of course avoidance, dropping, inconsistent performance, and failure (the most common model) those students who persist in two or more HD x HS courses often move on from our institution to beat the odds on multiple fronts. These students chart pathways that would not be expected from backgrounds marked by rural conditions, starting college at a small rural community college, and often a variety of social challenges as well. In fact, these individuals are poster children for why short term assessments of student performance in community colleges should not be cast-in-stone indicators of student ability and/or motivation. And, conversely, they also demonstrate why course expectations should not be dumbed down in order to manufacture short term success.

What we have learned about individuals who avoid, drop and/or fail HD x HS courses is also instructive. Virtually all are, at the time, socially and/or developmentally strained. Affordable housing, transportation, work, and caregiving demands are among the common social strains in our small rural community. Common symptoms (eg, poor impulse control, authoritarianism) that some may associate with Arrested Adulthood (Côté, 2000) and others may associate with mental illness (Morrow, Mental Health of College Students, 2008) also mark this population. Many of these individuals self-report earning better than average, if not exceptionally high, grades elsewhere.

Another way in which the currently in place counting model misleads is via assumptions about professional commitment and effort. Small enrollments and high drop rates are assumed to reflect low levels of professional investment, even professional incompetence and/or lassitude. Once again, the truth of the matter is more complex; if HD x HS classes attracted more persisting students we would be hard pressed to know how we would meet their demands. If otherwise ignored indicators were counted and presumed to matter, the professional involvement and/or commitment picture would look quite different. For example, otherwise hidden and presumed not to matter in the existing assessment culture are such indicators as time with students outside the classroom (we each hold at least 30 office hours per week and those hours are invariably filled with one or more students), time spent with students after transfer, and substantial personal funding in the absence of institutional support.

The Harm of Misleading Indicators

Those most harmed by the short term, easy to measure, attainable rather than desirable goal approach to assessment are those individuals more willing and able to commit and engage as well as those on the cusp of doing so. Contrary to the assumptions of some, this is not an elitist perspective. Both groups can represent a wide range of demographic backgrounds. Also contrary to some assumptions, these groups are not fixed and concrete. Individuals can and do change, the more willing and able includes those who at earlier times were less willing and less able, often demonstrably so! Sometimes such change emerges from improved life conditions (eg, work, family, transportation, health), from what appears to be internally driven reassessments of life commitments (eg, “when I was in your class right after high school I was mostly there because my friends were there.”) and sometimes from the HD x HS experience itself. Some of the most amazing stories in the long run would have been difficult if not impossible to predict from short run performance assessments.

Others harmed by the short-term approach are the institutions themselves. Populations that consistently show up (that includes those who have avoided, dropped and/or failed previously) in the HD x HS courses provide a glimpse of ways in which community colleges (perhaps parts of higher education in general) might redesign a vision of themselves in the 21st century. As many if not most students on our campus go out of their way to avoid HD x HS courses, those who do otherwise might shed light on new direction possibilities.

There are also costs to society in the current magic counting system. Talent development not only takes time, it is not always a smooth unfettered journey. A preoccupation with short-term, quick and uncomplicated fixes represents a failure to invest in long term talent development, what might be called The Long Now, thinking in the future tense. Furthermore, as Marc Freedman, author of The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage beyond Midlife (2011) reminds us, the readiness to embark on the development of talent is not as tied as it once was to the younger periods in the life course. Given the nature of current novel conditions, decisions about success and failure based on short term, easy to measure attainable goals have limited traction for individuals, institutions and society.

HD x HS and Damned Strange Coincidences

A final point about the HD x HS teaching pedagogy and its association with otherwise unexpected success stories. While the correlation between unusually successful outcomes and persistence in HD x HS courses does not constitute ‘causality’ in the technical sense, the association does represent what Paul Meehl (American Psychologist 50 [266-275]) and Wesley Salmon (Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, 1984) would describe as “damn strange coincidences,” or alternatively what Bent Flyvbjerg (Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, 2001) describes as “critical cases;” instances that may have strategic importance to a general problem. In other words, while HD x HS may not represent cause in the technical sense, it is likely of “strategic importance” to the general problem of learning about desirable outcomes from otherwise strained institutional settings and populations (eg, in our situation, a small rural community college). This observation is particularly likely as the unusual successes associated with HD x HS do not represent isolated instances but rather a small but nonetheless steady stream of similar successes over a period of now almost fifteen years. While the HD x HS approach may not be a sufficient condition for launching unexpected successes, it may very well represent a necessary condition for understanding them. Standing in the way, of course, is the magic counting dragon.

We did not develop the HD x HS approach with a deliberate oppositional goal in mind. Rather, it was developed in order to provide individuals with both the burden and the privilege of addressing widely recognized limitations to success, in education and elsewhere. Over time we found ourselves in the midst of the tensions between what is counted as institutional success and what we were learning from the HD x HS approach. Our third and final piece offers suggestions about what anthropology can and should do in order to contribute to an understanding of this dilemma.

Paula K Clarke (clarkep@yosemite.edu ) received the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology in 2008. W Ted Hamilton (hamiltont@yosemite.edu ) was named Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2004.

This is the second of the three-part essay “The Value of Anthropology” by Paula K Clarke and W Ted Hamilton. To read the next installment, “What Anthropology Can and Should Do: Notice and Witness Magic Counting” visit the Academic Affairs section of anthropology-news.org in late January. AAA members are invited to post comments to continue Clarke and Hamilton’s discussion online, and anyone can rate, share, or just read the series through April.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/15/less-than-disinterested-observers/