Reclaiming Opportunities for Effective Teaching: An Institutional Ethnographic Study of Community College Course Outlines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dunn, Mary Ellen (2015). Reclaiming opportunities for effective teaching: An institutional ethnographic study of community college course outlines. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pages: 153. Price: $102.96 CDN (hardcover).The genesis of this book is doctoral thesis focused on the standardization of Ontario community college teaching through an examination of course outlines. The study, an institutional ethnography, was conducted 2006-2010 exclusively with teachers (both new to and experienced with course outlines), at two Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs), across four academic semesters, and involving text analysis related to union negotiations as they influence course outline workload.Author Mary Ellen Dunn is upfront stating this is a harsh critique of the use of course although they are not inherently bad (Dunn, 2015, p. xvi). Her foundational observation is that systematizing course outlines across programs and institutions effectively devalues, commoditizes and impersonalizes post-secondary education, aligned with privatization, profit-leaning motives. Professors are losing control of their freedom to develop curriculum and assessment as managers require faculty to follow prescribed processes and monitor compliance with the ordered standards. Professors are experiencing more work at faster pace, with decline in opportunities to use their professional judgment to address the needs of their students.When forced upon faculty, who are not always involved in their development, course outlines become ideological texts and instruments of oppression (Dunn, 2015, xvi). They also conflict with the academic employees' collective agreement, which calls for college faculty to foster an effective learning environment for students. On the flip side, the agreement does not address how managers are expected to cultivate an equally effective teaching environment for faculty (Dunn, 2015, p. 55).As full-time professor at major Ontario college, with prior experience at another large college as partial-load instructor for cumulative 13 years, I have direct and extensive knowledge of this subject although not every aspect covered (notably, Workload Preference Listings and Course Picks Lists). While this review is meant to provide an unbiased overview and assessment of the author's research methodology, comments and conclusions, I can attest to the advantages and disadvantages associated with course outlines and their impact on academic freedom, teaching and learning. (Ironically but not coincidentally, one research informant identified throughout the text is also named Lydia, interviewed at Humberview. Moreover, I reside in this area of Toronto and work at an institution with similar name. However, I hereby confirm that the named Lydia is not me nor does she reflect my experiences.)Written in solidly academic style reflecting dissertation, the book is thematically structured, starting with sample course outline presented alongside excerpts from participant interviews, followed by review of the macro setting for teaching, then micro processes and procedures anchored in labour relations dictates that are highly prescriptive. The writing is clear. The attendant illustrations, charts and graphs are relevant and appropriately placed to corroborate key arguments.The second chapter takes large-scale view, mapping the ideological setting for course outlines. The discussion features various theories anchored in business orientation, notably, human capital, human resource management and economic growth theories. The author reviews the college funding formula, student recruitment marketing tactics, strategic enrolment targets and college application forms. She notes that in today's post-secondary environment, colleges are behaving like business competing with and against each other for students and funding that is based on student enrolment numbers. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".