blog traffic analysis
This is http://www.essayz.com/a9404263.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %STUDENT EVALUATION PROFESSOR TEACHER OBJECTIVE+940426 %REFLEXIVE PARADIGM CHALLENGE EMBARRASS BIAS FEAR 940426 It is useful to ask why professors who are supposed to be dedicated to the dispassionate search for unbiased truth are so often opposed to procedures whereby their students in colleges and universities might inform them and their administrators of their (the students') views of the instructional quality of the institution. There is often some suggestion that the students are not well informed, knowledgeable, unbiased, competent, or otherwise qualified to offer an opinion. We will do well to consider some of the possible alternative explanations: 1. The professors are dedicated rather exclusively to an objectivist paradigm which entails collusive games of mutual self deception about the transcendence of bias. Taking students' views seriously is a challenge to the exclusive objectivist's paradigm. Doing so reveals that the student-professor relationship is a reflexive relationship. The professors' emotional responses to the threats of evaluation clearly indicate that the relationships between them and their students is a reflexive relationship---in spite of all pretense. 2. Not all truths are equally welcome. Truths that the professors are not as successful as they would like to think are not welcomed truths. The truth that the students are not as satisfied with their relationship with their professors as their professors would like to think, is not welcomed news. The truth that the students do not value what the professors value is not welcomed news. Avoiding evaluation procedures is one way of avoiding the receipt of the unwelcomed news. 3. By insisting that only properly trained and fully qualified adults be allowed to participate in the evaluation of faculty procedures, the professors insure that only people who have been properly qualified and accepted into their collusive games of mutual self deception have a chance to evaluate them. This strategy becomes problematic as more and more adults become students in colleges and universities. 4. Insisting that evaluations be based upon fully objective criteria, is a way of postponing evaluations indefinitely---because it is impossible to agree upon meaningfully objective criteria in terms of which evaluations of faculty can properly be carried out. Teaching and professing are not objective processes. Professor-student relationships are not objective relationships. Central to the educational processes are ideals, values, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs and personal relationships which are reflexive---not objective. This makes it impossible to generate a meaningful consensus regarding what objective criteria should be used in the evaluation of the non-objective processes and relationships which are essential to true education; educement which is the drawing of students out and into reflexive dialogue. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================