Baby with the Bathwater: Reflections on “The reflection game: enacting the penitent self”
This 2009 article by Bruce Macfarlane and Lesley Gourlay in Teaching in Higher Education spoke directly to one of my ongoing and longstanding questions about my teaching whenever I am preparing assessment assignments and doing the actual grading myself. Macfarlane and Gourlay look at PgCert programs (how meta!) comparing the expected journey self-reflexive pedagogues are expected to undergo through the course to the transformational journeys found on reality TV: from insecurity covered with arrogance, breakdown, epiphany, grateful and groping towards the new light of a better day, changed for the better from the experience.
Macfarlane and Gourlay are correct that we must alert to this narrative on all fronts: as teachers and as institutions and as students, for numerous reasons. One danger of course, is that smart students understand this narrative and therefore consciously but perhaps more insidiously unconsciously perform this narrative for teachers. I think the conscious and strategic playing of this part is less of a danger—for those wanting to game the system there will always be a way (hello, ChatGTP!).
Subconsciously, there are more dangers to be alert to. Emotionally, a narrative of growth and transformation is extremely gratifying for all parties involved. Students need to feel that they have “grown” through all of this expenditure of effort. Teachers need to feel that they have been rewarded for all of their labor. Institutions need students to feel “satisfied” and that they have received good “value” for their money. So it is a narrative that can leave everyone feelings positive.
But there are problems here. How can we be sure that there is genuine and long-lasting enquiry? Must all learning and growth be “transformative”? Can’t it just be, well, work? Practical? Mundane? Must it form to a Judeo-Christian paradigm of guilt, sin, and redemption? Also, most problematically, does it not re-inscribe the teacher as the figure of authority, knowledge, and power? The judge, the scholar, and the priest-function? Does this not cycle of ego-gratification, of “transforming students” not become a form of addiction, the emotional measure of assessment for success? Of having another conform to your priorities, your values, your vision?
AND YET. Education needs to be emotional. To be inspiring. To be challenging. To have triumphs and setbacks. Is this not the content of what we teach in the arts, the very content of our pedagogy? So how could our content not inform our methods?
I think the best we can hope for as teachers is a self-reflexivity, a self-monitoring, and self-questioning to our own behaviors and patterns and preferences. To make sure we are not just rewarding those who espouse our values, but instead insist that we see self-criticality in other narratives than “overcoming challenges” or “seeing the light”; that sometimes learning can be practical, slow and steady and banal, maybe even easy. While still allowing that for some students, it can also be transformative.
This made me think a lot about a common comment from an academic I work with who has noted that students whose grades and course involvement sits more at the median of the course group, often have better (whatever that means) progression outcomes. It makes me reflect that actually complete and unquestioning engagement in the system may lead to a destructive level of internalisation and ultimately rob individuals of the opportunity to set their own agendas, success criteria and terms of engagement.
I agree that it is important to think about the systems of thought and paradigms that regulate HE, particularly linearity and transformation narratives. I recommend treating yourself to Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as an antidote, and also finding a version that has an introduction from Donna Haraway if you feel up to it.
Also thanks for the note on how I’m interpreting the word ‘performativity’. That’s food for thought.