The field of education has been overrun by the assessment of other’s work by means of the rubric. I first hated them for the simple human reason that the first person who promoted them to me was an irritating woman with an excessive ability to whine, even words she liked. So, I heard the word rubric always in her nerve damaging voice.
Then art, music, and writing teachers in my Masters classes as students, taught me how these simple descriptive and point assigning devices could be used not only to grade large quantities of work (which says something in itself about the current nature of what passes for education), but also to define the acceptable characteristics of quality work in a manner which would allow the student to know exactly what was expected and free the instructor from charges of biased grading. So, for a time, I have advocated them to at least some people in some settings.
Then I read my friend’s comments about his university’s insisting on constant rewrites of rubrics. I read my own dean’s vision of the future, with better rubrics to ensure higher academic standards. Today I finished Ryszard Kapuscinski’s small book The Other.
After decades of traveling the world and meeting others in some of their most disturbing times and circumstances, he tries in these lectures to bring to bear the work of philosophers and theologians on the significance of encountering both ourselves and others, in our interactions with anyone who is an ‘other’ to us.
And, I think I see a connection that may or may not make sense here without reading the entire book or some of the original authors. We used to encounter the other as groups of different race, religion, and culture. Now the lines are blurred and we encounter others more as individuals different from our selves. Central to the idea that these encounters are important is the idea that we also become more aware of our true selves when we have meaningful encounters, including open dialogue, with the other. Set against this, is the idea of mass society where we are all swept along the same, and worse, totalitarian mass society where we are ordered to conform to the sameness.
Now what about the classroom where students are to engage new knowledge, new forms, new possibilities of combination? Does it not require conversation with others who do not think like us? Who do not agree with us? Who do not conclude what we conclude presented with the supposed same prompts? Who may have grown up in our same city with an entirely different (other) view of how the world is put together (aware of it or not)? What does the introduction of a grading rubric do to this setting?
Can it be written in such a way as to value the sharing and the disparity of answers needed to have meaningful dialogue between others? If the bottom line is a certain product, produced and presented to please a predetermined scale of measurement, will it not force that which might be other than the propher’s desired view to flee and hide? How can I encounter the difference in you if you are pursuing the points on the same rubric I am, and vice-versa? How can there be any chance of a new construction based on a dynamic of group encounter with many facets of the same truth if the rubric is written in advance? And if it is not only written in advance by an instructor (who could later negotiate its change), but also passed up the ladder to ‘authorities’ who will declare its worthiness or unworthiness for use, is it not a tool to allow only common speech and thought? Has it not become a deadening hammer of totalitarianism within the confines of a supposedly free academy?
I wonder how many universities would approve rubrics which reward telling us something we have not thought, have not combined as you combine them, have not recognized in ourselves, have not valued in you, which challenge or betray our dogmas in a way which lead to meaningful dialogue without requiring final acceptance of the status quo? No I wish there was still room to wonder. See you on the trail, the proch, or at the pub.
peace
