Seeing the Invisible

It is an axiom of psychotherapy that the client cannot change something they are unaware of. If the client is not aware of their own motives, emotions, and thoughts, they have no clear "targets" that they can focus on to produce changes and improvements in their own lives. Put another way, the fish is unaware of the water because it surrounds them, has always been there, and is just a part of their environment, something they are unaware of.

Similarly, faculty are surrounded and immersed in what John Tagg (2003) calls an organizational paradigm -- the Instruction paradigm, to be precise. This paradigm has been around for a long time and has shaped the structure and function of our university and most universities and colleges across the country. We are so used to it that we think this is reality, instead of remembering that this structure, this way of thinking, was a deliberate artifact created by human beings. That means it can be changed. However, it is hard to change something when we are unaware of what it is or how it operates. Barr and Tagg (1995) and Tagg (2003) as well as others (e.g. Weimer, 2002) have described the impact of this Instruction Paradigm and how it pervades and shapes all aspects of how faculty work and how they interact with students. I will be writing more about this paradigm and the need to overthrow it in future blogs, but for now, let me give you a couple of examples taken from Tagg (2003).

1) The IP emerged when colleges were undergoing rapid growth and needed a national framework for transfer of credits and similar course design across the country. This led to the development of the standard credit = 1 hour of class time per week. Tagg then starts to describe the implications of this -- quoting Peter Ewell: "degree levels in this country have become almost exclusively defined in terms of the hours of classroom time required to complete them." Note that this definition has nothing to do with student learning; degrees are awarded mostly for sitting in a classroom and turning in assignments on time.
2) Although some faculty worry about UVU becoming a "corporate university", it has already happened and long ago. Tagg writes that colleges have come to be "factories for the production of full-time equivalent students, transcript-generating machines."
3) The core of the Instruction paradigm college is a view of teaching as the transmission of information from faculty to students. Biggs (1999) stated it this way: "Teaching rooms and media are specifically designed for one-way delivery. A teacher is the knowledgeable expert, the sage-on-the-stage, who expounds the information the students are to absorb and report back accurately, according to their ability, their motivation, even their ethnicity.....The curriculum is a list of content that, once expounded from the podium, have been 'covered'....The language is about what the teacher does, not what the student does...a quantitative way of thinking about learning and teaching."

If we are serious here at UVU about student engagement and student learning, then students, faculty, and administration all need to become more aware of the Instruction Paradigm so that we can see the invisible and work to counteract it.