Teacher evaluation in higher education in

Flanders: The construction of quality

Mathias Decuypere (Presenter), Maarten Simons and

Jan Masschelein (Co-authors)

Laboratory for Education and SocietyCenter for Education Policy and Innovation

Center for Philosophy of Education

Overview

• Background: University of Leuven• Quality assessment and assurance:

• A concrete framework…• …put into practice

• Focus• Devices and technologies• A rationale of teacher evaluation• Privatizing tendencies• A compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’

Background: University of Leuven

• Situated in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (“Flanders”)

• 34,940 Students• 4,410 Junior researchers• 1,423 Senior researchers

(academic staff)

• 62 Undergraduate (Bachelor) programs

• 120 Postgraduate (Master) programs

Quality assessment and assurance: A concrete framework…

External evaluation

Visitation

Accreditation

Internal evaluation

Totality of the

curriculum

Periodical Ad hoc

Separate courses

(i.e., evaluation of academic staff)

Quality Assurance Quality Enhancement

Periodical

(once per two years)

Ad hoc

Quality assessment and assurance:…put into practice.

• Biennial survey concerning the quality of education given by academic staff

• This survey is filled in by students who followed the course

• Purpose: making educational quality transparent in order to

• Recognize & reward good practices• Adjust & remedy possible

bottlenecks

• Lecturer can contextualize the evaluation of each course given

• Those results are transposed to her/his personal file

http://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/evaluatie/folder_onderwijsevaluatie.pdf

Focus

• Not a plea for or against teacher evaluation as such• Instead: a (theoretical) focus on rationales, technologies

and devices used…• … resulting in an alternative conception of teacher

evaluation.

A concrete example

(Faculty of psychology and educational sciences as a whole, course-specific information not disclosed…) http://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/kwaliteitszorg/kwaliteitsgarantie/

resultaten/evaopo/evaopo-ppw.html

Devices and technologies

This way of evaluating is dependent on the production of solid facts (and corresponding values) in order to obtain legitimacy. This is effectuated by means of:

• Calculative devices (Callon & Muniesa, 2003)• Calculation: the perceiving and grading of differences, which leads to

estimations of courses of action associated with the perceived differences (means, standard deviations)

• Calculative devices: devices that aim at rendering things more scientific (or enacting particular versions of what it is to be scientific), inspiring more evidence-based action

• Evaluation of quality of teaching tries to differentiate (scientifically) and to trigger specific actions based on this differentiation (cf. ‘recognizing and rewarding’ vs. ‘adjusting and remedying’)

• Inscriptive technologies (Latour, 1987; Law, 2004)• Inscription: the transformation of certain aspects of reality into figures,

diagrams, texts (the practice of a one-year course into one table)• Inscriptive technologies: technologies that aim at visualizing (scientific)

results, hence inscribing themselves into reality (e.g. table)

The rationale of teacher evaluation

Objective/scientific data ‘Matters of Fact’

(teacher evaluation by group of students)

Subjective opinions ‘Matters of value’

(individual lecturers and students)

Final results inform

Statistical analysis results in

The modern Constitution

NatureAssembly of objects

Assembly of humans

Society

Two-house collective

Archetypical for modern ways of thinking

Nature-collector lodges ‘matters of fact’: objective facts and objects (Latour, 1993; 1999/2004a; 2004b) vs. ‘matters of value’ in society-collector

Privatizing tendencies

• Dealing with teacher evaluation in this modern way gives way to privatizing tendencies:• A complete cold-shouldering of the constructed character of the

quality obtained (e.g. calculation, inscription)• The power of numbers (‘M’ and ‘SD’ as embodiment of the entire

teaching process) (cf. Rose, 1999)• The power of expertise and the inability of the tutor (who can be a

professor in statistics…)• The opportunity to contextualize results, this is the opportunity to

attach values to facts, only allowed post-hoc

• Despite all contestations within the University of Leuven, evaluation has to be conducted this way (and no other)• This privatizes the process: other possible ways of (and opinions

about) evaluation are being ignored and no (longer) welcomed• Secondly, this process also establishes a responsabilization of the

teachers: ‘keep up with the rest’, ‘do better than the rest’

An other, non-modern way: Teacher evaluation as a compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’?

Students Lecturer

Staff

Other spokesmen

Statistician

What constitutes a

good teacher?

“Thing”

An other, non modern way: Teacher evaluation as a compositionist ‘Parliament of Things’?• This Parliament has to be understood as ‘the place to

make some-thing public’ (thus not in classical institutional meaning of the word)

• Representation:• Traditionally understood in terms of legitimacy of the

representing spokesmen (students, staff, lecturers, etc.)• This proposal however needs a second kind of representation

as well: are the things one talks about accurately represented, e.g. do the spokespersons of the numbers obtained speak in name of those numbers (≠ do they consider them to be a mirror of reality, but: do they report of what those numbers mean (and what not), how they were constructed (and how not), what are their capacities and limitations, etc.)

• Letting numbers ‘speak for themselves’ is something totally different than letting a spokesmen make an argument (or ‘composition’) based on those numbers

Readings…

• Callon, M., & Muniesa, F. (2003). Les marches économiques comme dispositifs collectifs de calcul. Réseaux, 21(122), 189-233.

• Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Latour, B. (2004a). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy (C. Porter,Trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1999)

• Latour, B. (2004b). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248.

• Law, J. (2004). After method. Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.

• Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mathias DecuypereLaboratory for Education and SocietyVesaliusstraat 2 Box 037613000 LeuvenBelgium

mathias.decuypere@ped.kuleuven.be