The Alberta Teachers’ Association

The Incompetency of Hope

“II futuro ha un cuore antico.”
(The future has an ancient heart.)
                   —Carlo Levi (1956)

There is a bittersweet irony as I write this, my last column, in an issue whose theme focuses on the future forces shaping public education. I am wrapping up 20 years with the Alberta Teachers’ Association, preceded by an equal amount of time as a classroom teacher. In many respects this has been four decades working through the recognition that teaching has always been about foresight, described by Parker Palmer as the call for teachers to engage daily with their students on the question, “what does it mean to listen to a voice before it is spoken” (Palmer 2017, 47). The labour of teaching remains enigmatic and unfinished as students present, along with their teachers, as unfinished selves.

Parker Palmer’s imperative of “listening to a voice before it is spoken” represents an equally enigmatic and compelling invitation to consider the years ahead through the lens of the Association’s research efforts and its international partnerships. Driven by the Association’s strategic plan, the networks of schools and researchers initiated by the “great school for all” framework (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2012) now reaches across the globe to include New Zealand, Finland, Iceland and Norway.

These partnerships and the global challenges in which they’ve been engaged were recently reviewed by a panel of researchers brought together by the Association at the Twin Peaks international summit held in Banff in April 2018:

Austerity (framed as “doing more with less”) and resistance to reforming outdated test-based accountability regimes sit in stark contrast to policy pronouncements from the OECD and education ministries, including Alberta’s, promoting bold and innovative educational change through a “future ready” curriculum.

Globally, the transfer of public assets to private “edupreneurs” is increasingly evident in schools with the commercialization of educational products and services in areas such as learning resources, growing “big data” analytics infrastructures, and classroom assessment tools. Meanwhile, here in Alberta, class sizes continue to rise while growing numbers of students with special needs go unsupported.

The teaching profession itself is challenged by efforts across the OECD to standardize practice and reduce teaching and learning to a set of so-called “transparent” practice competencies. All of this risks the conflation of standards with standardization.

Developments in artificial intelligence are only beginning to be understood in terms of efforts to instrumentalize assessment practices and diminish the role of professional judgment.

One of the most significant challenges ahead remains the growing influence of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) and global learning metrics (GLMs) that are increasingly shaping the reform agendas of governments and elite policy brokers. The growing data architectures of the OECD members are being used to legitimize a variety of often contradictory and paradoxical “educational policy reform agendas” (Fischman, Topper and Silova 2017, 10).

The consequences here in Alberta are very real. For example, while the profession has been assured that we are not assessing competencies in the new programs of study, the risk is that the recently launched OECD Global Competency Framework will confuse and distract efforts at curriculum redevelopment. By assessing global competencies in the PISA 2018 program, Alberta will further implicate itself in the culture of competitive comparison that inevitably leads to an effort to “rank up” among OECD education ministries (Sorensen 2017). As two of our international research partners argue, the misguided effort to assess global competencies on large-scale assessments such as PISA fails to recognize “that there is no such object as ‘global competence’ that we can empirically validate—leading us to the problem of ‘dynamic nominalism’—that the international assessment invents global competence as a physical object that will then influence education systems across the globe” (Rutkowski and Thompson 2018).

The challenges we face—environmental collapse including climate change, automation of work, deskilling of jobs, increasing population—demand a different kind of response from our governments than the framing of education as the development of human capital. As with any policy aspiration, the focus on global competencies is typical of most policy making: to achieve “visions of education and the imaginary futures that nations seek to make reality” (Zhao and Gearin 2018). Yet, as with all visions, the potential is to create both dreams and nightmares.

Time and again our international partnerships have demonstrated the need to articulate the case for a recommitment to a values-based school system that seeks a just, resilient and vibrant civil society. This was reinforced in the international partnership network at a major summit in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 2017. Titled More Than Your Evidence, the summit brought together an international research team of experts, school leaders and teachers from Iceland, Norway, Alberta and Finland, along with 20 former high school students from the Association’s FINAL and NORCAN partnerships, to consider the impacts of the experiences of being involved in school development efforts through the international partnership initiatives. With their high school experiences behind them and the benefit of two to three years in post-secondary education or the workforce, the youth participants offered their perspectives on the benefits of being involved as leaders in educational change. The issues young people discussed ranged from precarious employment, student debt load, environmental collapse and growing psycho-social issues.

Wallin (in press) sees many of the psycho-social issues young people encounter within the broader contexts of making meaning in the age of the Anthropocene, where there is “no longer any more room for nature,” where it has been projected that up to 50 per cent of all animal species will face extinction by midcentury. In Wallin’s view, young people today are living at a nexus point in history where tectonic shifts related to looming environmental collapse are being satiated by an almost relentless “exploitative cheapening of life” through the “re-enchanted world” of video games such as Pokémon GO, and where screen time is increasingly pushing out the messy materiality of the community and civil society.

Moving beyond the OECD’s global competency framework being constructed by policy makers to “rank up” through data infrastructures, we need to attend to the growing body of scholarship and work such as the More Than Your Evidence summit by inviting students and teachers to offer their conceptions of well-being and wellness in ways that are often disruptive and destabilizing of the status quo.

To allow teachers’ care for students to be replaced by the hollowed-out ciphers of GLM rankings dressed in the guise of competencies—all mobilized by the attenuated global metrics of data dashboards and “ranking up”—is to silence what good teachers have always aspired to do: nurture other people’s children.

I am reminded from one of the most influential scholars of our present generation, Bill Pinar, that perhaps Alberta’s future is one that acknowledges that “education is a private engagement in a public world for the redemption of both (Pinar cited in Block 2001, 37).¹

At a recent meeting of our New Zealand school partners grappling with the assaults on public education, a principal called for teachers and school leaders “to move beyond seeing hope as a form of optimistic moaning.” While critique of and resistance to the global forces of datafication and neoliberal reforms are important, teachers and their organizations must offer concrete examples of how positive change can be driven by networks of schools committed to a great school for all. The continued support by Alberta teachers for the international network of students, teachers, school leaders and researchers will offer both hope and possibility as a different story than one told by the OECD and the culture of competitive comparison.

Perhaps it is time for teachers to rekindle the invitation from 30 years ago in Madeline Grumet’s (1988) invocation in Bitter Milk:

Our silence certifies ‘the system’ and we become complicit with theorists and teachers who repudiate the intimacy of nurture in their own histories and in their work in education (p. xvi).

References

Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA). 2012. A Great School for All: Transforming Education in Alberta Schools. Edmonton, AB: ATA.

Block, A. A. 2001. “Ethics and Curriculum.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 17, no. 3: 23–38.

Grumet, M. 1988. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Fischman, G., A.M. Topper and I. Silova. 2017. “An Examination of the Influence of International Large Scale Assessments and Global Learning Metrics on National School Reform Policies.” Centre for Advanced Studies in Global Education Working Paper #2. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University.

Levi, C. 1956. II Futuro Ha Un Cuore Antico. Turin, IT: Giulio Einaudi Editore.

Palmar, P. 2017. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Wiley.

Rutkowski, D., and G. Thompson. 2018. “Measuring Global Competence—Some Thoughts on PISA 2018.” Presentation at uLead Conference, Banff, AB, April 16.

Sørensen, T. B. 2017. “Work in Progress: the Political Construction of the OECD Programme Teaching and Learning International Survey.” PhD dissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain. www.researchgate.net/publication/
318529888_Work_In_Progress_The_Political_Construction_
Of_The_OECD_Programme_Teaching_And_Learning_
International_Survey (accessed May 1, 2018).

Wallin, J. in press. Catch ‘Em All and Let Man Sort ‘Em Out: Animals and Extinction in the World of Pokémon GO.

Zhao, Y., and Gearin, B. 2018. Imagining the Future of Global Education: Dreams and Nightmares. New York: Routledge.

Dr. J-C Couture is the associate coordinator of research for the Alberta Teachers’ Association.