The Authentication of Knowledge in the Academy:
Grades and Letters of Recommendation

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: June 28, 1999
Faculty on the Site.

There are some solid theoretical reasons for preparing attestations of competence (awards, honors, letters or recommendation) interactively. By "interactive" we mean that both students and faculty must actively contribute their perceptions, perferrably at the discourse table. When the teacher attempts to assess who knows what, there are impenetrable barriers. Peer knowledge is very different from the front stage behavior exhibited to teachers as is also the dyadic behavior exhibited by a specially chosen student to mentor. Ryan's research, going way back to the early 70s, showed how unable teachers were to predict who would choose to work with whom. Students are people. They are complex. They are many shifting images of their identities, not all of which the teacher has the chance to see. The commuter campus of the millennium is particularly a problem, since our students are more turn by different facets of their identity than ever before.

The teacher catches one image. The persona to which she/he has been privy, and that as one of the many students with whom she/he has interacted. A theory as old and classic as Kurt Lewin's psychological life space is adequate to remind us that the student sees his/her own interaction differently, as placed at center stage. For the teacher trying to fit evaluative reports or letters of recommendation into a crazy quilt of other tasks, that student is peripheral. Thus, a fair and accurate authentication is more likely to come of shared perceptions.

But this is the same advice we gave years ago on career planning. If you do not tell your supervisor, in clear terms that he/she cannot be hear, how well you are doing, when time comes for promotions, your name is less likely to come up. Books by the American Management Association will tell you that one of the great myths of the market place is work hard and you will be rewarded. Make sure that your supervisor knows that you work hard, and that that hard work fits into his/her agenda, and you will be rewarded. Well, maybe, depending on lots of other variables.

On the job, ratings are often more informal. You'll have to do them over coffee. But if you've thought them out as thoroughly as a request for a recommendation, then you'll be able to take advantage of the time shared over that next cup of coffee. Surely you would not say to your supervisor, "Well, whatever you think of my work." And let it go at that? No, no, no. You want input. Well thought out, concise, honest input. Preferably over time, not the day you here a promotion is coming up.

We'll gradually add detail to this section. The following sources will be cited in detail, though most of you will recognize them as works to which we regularly refer in the discussion of discourse skills.

• Ryan and teacher evaluation, teachers poor predictors of sociometric kinds of learning - teachers often unaware of who likes working with whom and who really gets the work done - ditto for supervisors. i.e., teachers poor at assessing collaborative work, which is the most important skill we have to teach
• papers and performance may not accurately reflect learning - this is why we get into such boondoggles over cheating
• Amacom - who gets promoted is he who places himself in eyes of beholder - true with supervisors, and also true with teachers.
• herbartian apperceptive mass - can't rely on apperceptions in which attestee is not the focus - Lewin's field theory - role of student to provide a description of context in which student is central - only student can reliably present that context - Freire recognized this in ascription of importance to listening to the one we purport to help - the laying on of alternatives - teacher more likely to describe his/her own alternatives, given the data, even when these may not be alternatives for the student. One major problem here is arrogance and self-esteem. Arrogance will ascribe alternatives to another the other does not in fact perceive, usually because of self-esteem interference. Then arrogance will judge the other for failure to take advantage of the non-existent alternatives. And alternatives are not in fact alternatives if they cannot be perceived.
• privileging of subjectivity - Freire would say we are not teaching if we dictate what they need to know, for their situation is different - they do have voice. They are screaming. (just read somewhere someone's comment that description of poor as having no voice is dreadfully inaccurate - can't remember where I read it) They have just forgotten how to scream at us. And we have forgotten that it is part of our job to hear them. In good faith.
• fails as feedback to institution if student has no input - for only as the narratives fail to fit the normative stories will we become aware of change - it's when it doesn't fit that they squirm and make us uncomfortable.
• O'Donnell - Avatars of the Word - if you have to give a test you have not taught well - and if all you do is test, then how can you authenticate competence?
• Guilford on the nature of human intelligence - there are many ways to express intelligence. modern literature deals with different factors of intelligence, no overall g factor - but essence is, there's no single over-riding factor of competence or intelligence.

Purposes of authentication: the academy should give first priority to its own needs, which are:

• conveying a sense of exhilaration with learning (Barney Glaser's [Doing Grounded Theory] fussing that too many stop at that point, basking in the joys of conceptualization) - I think the academy should settle for that as a delightful endgoal

• conveying a sense of the importance of delving to unaccustomed depths (Blalock's curses [in Formal Theory that neither students nor the faculty are willing to delve deeply and study the genuine complexity of social problems) - our students will only learn to delve if we make it a core value, which we need to do, anyway, if we are to authenticate real learning

• and the building of self-confidence and self-respect in the identity narrative of learning (all the literature on the importance of self-esteem to learning). If these goals are served, so also will be served the goals of certification. If all we see, within our discipline, is the inadequacy of our students and peers, we damage the discipline immeasurably. Thank goodness, Cohen, in his article on the cup as half full [Formal Theory], gives us back some self-respect. But it will not do to make these arguments at the elite discipline level. We must make our colleagues understand the importance of instilling such self-confidence and self-respect for what in fact our students are really doing. Only then will they have the courage to follow us into the depths of grand theory.

What about cheating? Only likely if you use tests, and we know what we think about tests. Fudging, misrepresenting. If the authentication is developed, as it should be, over time, and if the teacher is an expert in the field, and if the measures we have sought are largely verifiable so that results can be reproduced and predictions made, which is really what industry has been asking for, not grades per se, then cheating is not possible because the authentication is interactive and continuously verified. In Habermasian terms, as I understand them, we will have created a learning as opposed to a non-learningauto-poietic sub-system. That means that when many people fail a given ritualized test, instead of punishing those who fail and those who give the test, we look to the underlying unstated assumptions to develop better measures and conceptualization of the variables. Of course, it is easier to blame the students who fail and the teachers who give the test. Many of them are even unsophisticated enough to agree with you (Blalock throroughly describes the low-quality academic training that leads to this inability to defend their own intelligence); and it is always easier to build a non-learning auto-poietic sub-system. Does away with much of the complexity of thinking and active subjects (or objects, depending on your theoretical orientation).

What about grade curves? Well, if you want to adjudge a small percentage of our student population as As, and recognize that those As are harder to get the more elitist the school because the more support the teachers have, the more homogeneously well-trained the student body, the more discrimination between good, better, best, and leave the rest of the population out there. Go for it. Then you support all the incompetents. That is a patently stupid argument in terms of how the grades are assigned and in terms of their purpose. Wake up!

1. Ryan's work was au courant at UCLA in the mid 60s. It had shown that teachers were highly inaccurate in the predicting sociometric patterns in their classes, such as who enjoyed working with whom, who would be willing to work with whom again. Cohen used some of this in her work with junior high students on altering status characteristic discrimination on the basis of race.

   We need to check recent developments in this area, but the overall predictive ability of the teacher as a face-to-face group member for whom front stage behavior is often reserved, and who is not included in most of the backstage dyadic flow between members, should not have altered. If anything, teachers at all levels, have been increasing the distance between themselves and students, in keeping with the supervisorial trend of the labor market. (References here to David M. Gordon and to Craig Calhoun on the "supervised society".)

Forms to Guide Us Through Interactive Measures

As we noted earlier, learning is a factor in our identity. For one thing, our identity is learned. So how we learn affects who we discover we are and who we become. But in an even more important sense learning, our tolerance of the ambiguity of knowledge, our tolerance of different perceptions, our choices to remain open or closed to other concepts, all are essential components of who we are. And we don't just happen to be who we are, we become who we are within a social context. So there is a narrative for each of us, a narrative that may fit the normative pattern or may not. Certainly there is a gendered narrative that differs from the normative pattern drawn from patriarchal societies, and certainly there is an ethnic narrative that differs from the privileged Western normative pattern.

We, of the Dear Habermas project, must operate to share the skills of public discourse within a limited university support system, and within an educational environment largely hostile to complexity and the sophisticated methodology needed to describe that complexity. It is easier to give a test and have done with it. But that is not our project. On the other hand, we have worked on this project for years, and we have data to guide us. We have listened, carefully, and in good faith, to the narratives of learning our students have told. We believe that, at this point in our development, as a country, and as a discipline, and as participants in a realtively uncharted venture, that the collection of individual stories matters.

Several years ago we convinced our students to write, and they did, and we were inundated, and did not know what to do with the results. But our students were writing, and that was good. Our students have continued to write, but never as we predict. Always we respond, and always they shift once again. We try to focus, for if we are to develop testable hypotheses, we must limit the variables, we must move past the stories. Barney Glaser is right. Story talking is delightful, but we must solve some of the social issues we face, beyond the conceptualization that fascinates us.

But story talking is where it must begin. Let us give you two examples:

• A new logic

  In 1990, in Amsterdam, at the International Sociology Meetings, we presented a paper on our students' learning. We spoke then of trying to explain this learning in terms of normative ordering, for first in college, non-traditional students did not relate to the academy in all the old patterns. They were not always respectful; they were angry, feeling that they were smarter than some of those who had better access, better grades. But they were self-deprecating at other times, recognizing the lacunae in their training. They learned a lot. But they could always be caught out by someone crafty enough to come at them from an unexpected angle. One of the stories from that period involved a young black man who complained that his white professor simply did not understand. There was no way he could explain his research study without the professor twisting his words. "You don't understand our logic," he said. "So you've got some new kind of logic I don't know about," countered the exhausted professor at ten p.m. one Saturday night. Not too long after that incident a feminist scholar published a work on the social construction of reality in which she dealt with this very conundrum: logic is not socially constructed, and we do not get to change logic for different social contexts. Odd, that I didn't see the connection then. I just thought the student misused my language and mis-spoke himself. Not so. He did see the patterns. He did see the logic. He was simply trying to escape all the attendant assumptions that got him into hot water. Assumptions like, if you've done your homework, you'll report to your research professor and get credit for it. Not when you know you're late, aren't quite sure of some definitions, and that you're going to be caught out at that. And not when you finally get up the courage to go to her office and discover that she isn't there. Now good straight logic says you've been had, even if she was in class at the time. So it's not illogical to accuse her of never being available. It fits the trap you feel.

  We would never have thought to write that scenario into the narrative of learning. We did not see it as a narrative of learnng identity when it played out. We needed his story to see this piece of learning. We still are not sure how to measure what he did learn, but that is a step along the way to conceptualization and categorization that will permit verifiable measurement of learning we have rarely measured.

• The 15 minute block of study time. We would also not have ever invented a narrative with 15 minute study periods. Not our generation! Yet stories brought us those concepts.

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  The measures so far:

• sounds like me

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. What was described that is like what you would do? Did that teach you anything? Make you think? Make you wonder or worry? Make you proud?

• explained something to me

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. What did it explain? An event you had wondered about? The way someone reacted to you? The way you reacted to someone? A problem you had thought about?

• wish I'd said it

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. Why? Was it smart? sensitive? a compliment? the remarks of a winner? Could you say it someday? Will you?

• know someone like that

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. Someone like who? Give a few adjectives that would describe this person. Does it help to find people in your readings who are like someone you know? Does it help explain why someone you know may feel the way they do? Does it help explain why you may feel the way you do about them?

• perplexed

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. Is there a word or concept that confuses you? Do you understand literally what the issue or concept is, and yet still feel that you don't quite understand it? Do you think you could identify the concept on a multiple choice test (convergent thinking)? Do you think you could explain the concept in your own words? Do you think you could find applications of the concept in the real world and in other disciplines? Would you be happier if you could find the concept re-explained in different words, another example?

• raced ahead

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. Did you go quickly through a book? over a large site? Was it satisfying to have an overview? Did you already know enough that the overview suffices? Or will you go back to study in more depth? Or do you see that you need to study it in more depth, but will probably not get to go back over it unless you have to for some other reason? Or will you probably not go back because you are anxious to go further, see more?

• went back to fill in

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. What exactly did you go back to? Was it clearer this time? Was it satisfying to get the concept down more thoroughly? Was it frustrating to have to spend the time? Are you likely to go back more often?

• intense excitement

  Give a specific example in 25 words or so. What was exciting? Confirming something you sort of knew, but had never thought through? Finding out that there are many sources that you feel comfortable with? Learning to locate sources, and judge them? Feeling more confident about your knowledge? Is this kind of learning something you would like to keep room for in your life? Can you?

  More later.

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  Sara Scott (1998) 'Here Be Dragons: Researching the Unbelievable, Hearing the Unthinkable. A Feminist Sociologist in Uncharted Territory'
  Sociological Research Online, vol. 3, no. 3, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/3/3/1.html

  Annie Huntington (1999) 'A Critical Response to Sara Scott's 'Here be Dragons: Researching the Unbelievable, Hearing the Unthinkable. A Feminist Sociologist in Uncharted Territory' '
  Sociological Research Online, vol. 4, no. 1, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/4/1/huntington.html

  These two papers, on the issue of ritual child abuse and whether or not it can be shown to actually exist, tangle with the modernist idea that there is somewhere a "truth," and that within the context of that truth personal narratives are either true or not true. Separating out the researcher from the participant from the survivor from the feminist from the academic puts all the questions we consider on postmodernism on the table. The papers are worth reading. jeanne Links added June 22, 1999.

  The relevance of the two papers to this section of our site is the issue of authentication. There is a "discourse of disbelief" surrounding the claim that today's student is as honest, as hard-working, as motivated, as committed to the community as those of the more traditional student populations of twenty to thirty years ago. Soon we will put up another section of the Narrative of Learning Identity that will focus on this "discourse of disbelief." So, here also be dragons, and perhaps ones that it matters more that we slay, and soon.

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