Assessment for the Right Reason The Ethics of Outcomes Assessment

This article employs George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on metaphor (1980) to examine the current use of the term "learning outcomes" within higher education. It argues that "learning outcomes" is an ontological metaphor (education becomes focused on results that one can understand and measure) that resonates with contemporary academic capitalism. Yet because metaphors highlight some things and conceal others, thinking about teaching and disciplines using "learning outcomes" hides other dimensions of academic capitalism and obscures unquantifiable and highly complex aspects of education. Finally, the article explores ways in which an emphasis upon outcomes has consequences for the field of Religious Studies.

Section: Learning Outcomes and Academic Capitalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metaphors We Teach By: The Language of “Learning Outcomes”

Batten

2012

“…Active, student‐centered learning strategies promised a new direction (Barr and Tagg 1995). Moreover, I wanted to encourage such values as freedom, responsibility, and community among my students – values that are foundational to the tradition of covenant community that shapes my worldview (see Glennon 1999, 19–20). In its best communal sense, the covenant tradition recognizes the value of all persons and seeks to generate a community that enables and requires the participation and contributions of all members.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Freedom, Responsibility, and Learning in the Classroom: The Learning Covenant a Decade Later

Glennon

2007

Self Cite

This essay discusses an approach to teaching religious studies in a general education or core curriculum that I have experimented with for the last decade, which I call the "Learning Covenant." The Learning Covenant brings together various pedagogical theories, including transformational, experiential, contract, and cooperative learning, in an attempt to address diverse learning styles, multiple intelligences, and student learning assessment. It has advantages over more traditional teacher-directed approaches to teaching, including meeting student resistance to "required" courses head-on by inviting them to identify learning needs regardless of chosen vocation and meeting them in the context of a religious studies course, recognizing the multiple ways in which students learn and providing a variety of opportunities for students to express their learning, and allowing students opportunity to take increased responsibility for their own learning. The essay will focus on the Learning Covenant's development, components, strengths, and drawbacks.

Experiential Learning and Social Justice Action: An Experiment in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Glennon

2003

Now imagine that you are a participant in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and that you have made a commitment to research the effectiveness of your efforts to enable students to learn more deeply about social justice. What evidence would you provide to demonstrate your success (or failure) in facilitating such learning? What research methodologies or protocols would you use to gather such evidence? This is my situation. I teach such an upper-level religious ethics course in which I use a particular pedagogical strategy to meet the goal of promoting an active commitment to social justice among my students. The strategy has two objectives: to help students develop a more sophisticated understanding of social justice; and to help students develop a stronger sense of themselves as moral agents. I am also a Carnegie Scholar (2001)(2002) and the teaching and learning about social justice that takes place in my classroom has become a focus of my scholarly pursuits, which means employing research methods, gathering evidence, and making that research public and available for peer review.I write this essay to make public this classroom practice and research with a two-fold purpose in mind. First, by discussing in detail the pedagogical strategies (and their assumptions) I used successfully to enable students to develop their commitment to social justice, I hope to demonstrate the promise of experiential learning approaches to teaching and learning about social justice. Second, by laying out the research methodology used to gather evidence about student learning and by providing an analysis of that evidence, I want to advocate the importance of making the teaching-learning environment in religious studies and theology classrooms a part of our scholarly pursuits.Abstract. This essay discusses the process and findings of an experiment on the scholarship of teaching and learning conducted in a religious ethics classroom that utilized an experiential approach to teaching and learning about social justice. The first part lays out the focus of the investigation and the pedagogical principles drawn from experiential learning theory that provided the foundation for the experiment. The second part describes all of the components of the pedagogical strategy used in the experiment, the social justice action project. The third part discusses the qualitative methodology used to gather evidence and the findings drawn from that evidence. What the evidence shows is that an experiential approach to teaching and learning about social justice can be quite effective. The essay concludes with discussions of areas for further study and the implications for the practice of others. (The survey described in this article can be found on the Wabash Center Web site ·http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/glennon .htmlÒ).