or Fashion Victims
… and I am not talking about clothes. Would that I were.
Where I work, our glorious leaders have suddenly discovered the Internet.
And with devastating results. Obviously, we have been sending emails, using
Word documents and Powerpoint presentations for years – some of us have even
ventured into the blogosphere!
But first let us go back in time. Anyone who has had the pleasure of
discovering Silvertiger’s blog
and has taken the time to browse his blogroll would have found this blog on Victoriana and the quack
remedies using the miraculous power of electricity and/or radiation.
We might laugh complacently at the inventiveness of the charlatans and the
ignorance of their victims now - how could they have been so dumb to believe such
arrant nonsense? But take pause. We are not that far away from our credulous
ancestors; today any e- or i- thing[1] is the solution to all of our problems – at the very least.
In the Higher Educational Establishment where I work, the section to which
I belong has had e-learning suddenly thrust upon us by a Technofascist and a Technofashionista.
Obviously, this does not affect their particular sections, but hey, what does
that matter? The whole organisation is suddenly technologically cutting-edge.
Indeed in a rather inaccurate newspaper interview on the changes in our Section – an interview in which the
Section did not participate and did not even know about until it was published
– we learnt that the reduction of face time with our lower-level students (from
3h. per week to 1h. – this also obviously means that the number of groups we
“teach” has been multiplied by 3) would actually result in a closer relationship with them!
So how did this happen?
It was decided for us by other Sections which have a fraction of our
students and a relatively easy time of it. One Section, for example, has one
teacher and 18 students divided over 4 academic years with 18 hours’ teaching
time divided among 4 groups. Our Section has 23 teachers and over 7,000
students. As our American cousins say, do the Math and imagine what that
particular teacher does during the 3-month exam period. Seville, by the way is
only a short drive away from the beaches of Cádiz, Huelva and Málaga.
To prepare for this shift (or should I have omitted the “f” in the last
word?), we have had a single 15-hour course given to the whole section (with
wildly varying IT skills amongst us) over 2.5 days. This supposedly taught us
the basics of how to lay out documents and
upload an online course. We have now got 3 weeks to design online courses for
two different levels.
Not one of us is a course designer.
We are teachers.
And our students?
How did our ancestors learn languages before the Internet?
One of the great enigmas of pre-history. Image courtesy of
ALAMY
|
It is amazing how many lives egocentricity, blind ambition and blind faith
in the latest panacea can blight – even in a supposedly democratic educational
institution.
I truly feel for our Section’s students who need to pass one of our level exams[2]
in order to get their degree, whatever subject they are taking. There are
already thousands – yes, thousands – of graduates in Seville who cannot get
their degree certificate because they need to pass our (largely irrelevant)
exam[3].
This is no doubt true for the rest of Spain as well. For our own students the
task of passing our exams has just got harder, even though this particular
Higher Educational Establishment can now boast of 3 "cutting-edge" online language
courses[4].
On the subject of cutting edges, our students are soon going to find that
their own Higher Educational Establishment’s administration has taken a hatchet
to their future in order to satisfy its own short-term aims.
[1] Perhaps we should pause a moment to consider this: for
centuries Sevillian businesses and organisations have named themselves after
different Saints, statues of Christ or of his mother, probably trying to invoke
their divine intervention and protection.
Then
came the 1992 Expo in Seville. The result? During the late 80s all new
businesses were Expo- this or Expo- that. In the first decade of the new
century, they plumped for Euro-prefixed names.
Now, given the fact that neither divinities, the Expo or even the EU (don’t
make me laugh!) can drag this backward city out of its wilfully egocentric
mire, it seems they are futtocking around with half-baked ideas, invoking the
i- or e- shibboleths for protection instead of actually facing up to the
painful truths and doing something to
solve the problem.
[2] A condition imposed by
the Bologna Process on all of those countries foolish enough to sign up to it.
Thankfully this is one mess that Britain kept well away from, while still
remaining within the EHEA, or European Higher Education Area. The EU has a lot
to answer for.
[3] Learning foreign languages
is all fine and dandy, but I think that to demand a certain level (B1, whatever
that means) of a foreign language to pass a degree in an unrelated subject is
completely ridiculous; why not demand a certain level in carpentry, for
example? Are the signatories to this ridiculous treaty really going to deprive
their countries and the rest of the world of skilled lawyers, engineers, Maths
teachers, doctors etc., just because they can’t speak a foreign language???
Would you suddenly start to question your dentist’s ability to give you a
filling if you discovered he had failed his German GCSE? How many official
foreign language certifications did Einstein, Alexander Fleming or Steve Jobs
have? Indeed, to shape the present and the future of our Society how many did
they need?
[4] One of which (not from
our Section I hasten to add! And in spite of a much longer gestation period) is
plagued with conceptual incongruities, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes
from the initial page onwards. It is downright embarrassing, though a good
laugh for those outside this particular Establishment.
I agree that in language learning, classes with a teacher are of the utmost importance. My experience as both a student and a teacher of languages makes this obvious beyond the reach of any contrary argument.
ReplyDeleteThere is of course an important role for text-based learning and for all sorts of other kinds of resources but plenty of class contact is essential. Replacing class contact with online courses is as silly as giving a thirsty man a picture of a glass of water.
What do the students think of this? They should protest. In my experience of working under a hardline management, student protest was far more effective in changing things than protest by teachers, even when this was backed by the union.
With regard to the secondary issue - the insertion of a compulsory language exam into non-linguistic disciplines - I have to say that I have some sympathy for the concept that all EU citizens should broaden their linguistic ability.
The EU suffers from not having a single official language to parallel the single currency. I understand why this was not implemented but I consider it a serious mistake. It means, in theory, that citizens of one member country can't communicate with citizens of another, while in practice it means that they generally communicate in English but that no one wants to admit this, a rather Alice-in-Wonderland situation.
If the EU can't get its collective mind around the idea of a single official language, then the next best thing is to make EU citizens as multilingual as possible. The question is how you do this and I think that the carrot is likely to be more effective than the stick, e.g. pay professionals more if they have a recognized qualification in another language.
What needs to be done is to create a culture in which learning other languages is generally held to be a good thing to do. I think that imposing a diddy language course on law students, for example, is likely to have the opposite effect.
Unfortunately, I think that the students do not realise the importance of the situation and the protests tend to be more cases of individual or group grumbling at the teacher.
DeleteI too think that the concept of broadening our knowledge of languages is indeed a good one, but the practice is very heavy-handed. I agree wholeheartedly that carrots are better than sticks.
Finally people in Spain do think that language learning is a very good thing. However, as you so rightly said, our students are being given the picture of a glass of water and, figuratively, are going to die of thirst.