Instructional Design

I've been putting together a bunch of stuff for the college on the field of instructional design. It's a bit discouraging on some level because while we are a place where instruction takes place college's are notorious for being places where pedagogy isn't really attended to in any particularly effective manner. It is a general problem. No one is really trained to be a member of the professoriate. Instead one is trained to be a researcher, an engineer, a doctor, a filmmaker or any of the other professions and disciplines that make up a given subject area. Good teaching is not particularly important in college settings and even where it is the practice is not subject to any kind of measures of actual effectiveness and often is reduced to a student survey and a few observations. You are a good teacher if your students report that they believe you to be effective and if your colleagues tolerate the fact that you put as much enthusiasm into the classroom as you would into a conference paper.

This brings me back to the idea that Jerome Bruner has of folk pedagogy. That is most of our ideas of teaching are informed not by examination of practice but by our folk conceptions of what classrooms and schools should be like; how students and teachers should behave. What is a passing grade? This folk pedagogy is backed up by a long tradition going back to at least Plato. We "know" what a college should be like.

This folk knowledge ignores the fact that the lecture, the primary modality of instruction in a college, was intended to be an opportunity for students to copy written works in the absence of printing through dictation. It also seems to forget that the grading system, introduced along with the textbook to the United States by the superintendent of West Point, Sylvanus Thayer, was an adoption of post-revolutionary French techniques to create an aritocracy on merit using mathematical measures and standardized methods. Prior to this college was based on authentic tasks and a form of apprenticeship. You became a master by producing a masterwork. The current systems were built on an absence of technology and a behaviorist system of measures designed to consciously create an elite.

When we look at instructional design we have to challenge folk ideas of how education should be and try to bring back the idea of authentic tasks and apprenticeship. We also have to challenge the in-grown behaviorist conceits that drive so much of what we do.