Does it really matter whether or not you can reliably demonstrate the effects of this or that course or curriculum on the students? Presumably you think it’s important to teach THIS, and not THAT, even when you cannot reliably demonstrate the effects of your teaching on your students?
This is a debate about values. Should we be attempting to inculcate this set of values, or perhaps this other one? Sneering at the (obviously theoretically naïve) proponents of the other set of values is perfectly understandable, though maybe not so smart.
This is sticking with me, because it's important. I would never quarrel with someone saying "What I teach seems important to me, and what is important about it to me is something that I hope will remain with students and inform their lives and work". And it's a short jump from there to say "And I believe also that many of my colleagues at other institutions teach similarly and I hope that collectively we are moving some kind of dial that matters". I might say in that vein: "I hope that teaching about African history will positively erode many existing stereotypes about African history, and thus perhaps unravel other ideological and social prejudices that are contained within those stereotypes".
Where I think you incur a burden that might well draw critical comments legitimately is: a) putting the cart before the horse by saying "We are or have been teaching X thing that has had Y effect (good or bad)" without having any evidence or proof of that; b) calling for X thing to be taught (in an underspecified way) in order to bring about Y change without taking on the burden of explaining why you're confident that teaching X thing in a particular way has that effect.
Those are hard arguments even when they're relatively technical and measurable at one end--say that teaching reading in a particular fashion will improve literacy overall--let alone when you move from the measurable thing (literacy) to the less measurable good that literacy supposedly secures. But people in those kinds of debates accept that they've got to show that the cost of changing pedagogy and curricula is worth it in terms of the outcomes as well to show that the change actually works as advertised.
I would not quarrel with a professor who has a personal conviction about reading in their course and a personal sense of how individually they want to teach reading. I might lightly question that professor if they're sure that if only everybody was like them, the world would be better, but if that was a relatively vague, personal and recursively skeptical/self-examining claim--essentially the Mark Edmundson style--then fine. But I would quarrel with a professor who is sure that if only reading were taught in a very particular format as it once was taught (supposedly) which just so happens to be the way that professor teaches it, we would be living in a utopia right now. There's not only an unseemly incuriosity (and arrogance) in imagining that one's own teaching is exactly what was once a common norm but that moves into extraordinary claims-require-extraordinary proof territory.
Does it really matter whether or not you can reliably demonstrate the effects of this or that course or curriculum on the students? Presumably you think it’s important to teach THIS, and not THAT, even when you cannot reliably demonstrate the effects of your teaching on your students?
This is a debate about values. Should we be attempting to inculcate this set of values, or perhaps this other one? Sneering at the (obviously theoretically naïve) proponents of the other set of values is perfectly understandable, though maybe not so smart.
This is sticking with me, because it's important. I would never quarrel with someone saying "What I teach seems important to me, and what is important about it to me is something that I hope will remain with students and inform their lives and work". And it's a short jump from there to say "And I believe also that many of my colleagues at other institutions teach similarly and I hope that collectively we are moving some kind of dial that matters". I might say in that vein: "I hope that teaching about African history will positively erode many existing stereotypes about African history, and thus perhaps unravel other ideological and social prejudices that are contained within those stereotypes".
Where I think you incur a burden that might well draw critical comments legitimately is: a) putting the cart before the horse by saying "We are or have been teaching X thing that has had Y effect (good or bad)" without having any evidence or proof of that; b) calling for X thing to be taught (in an underspecified way) in order to bring about Y change without taking on the burden of explaining why you're confident that teaching X thing in a particular way has that effect.
Those are hard arguments even when they're relatively technical and measurable at one end--say that teaching reading in a particular fashion will improve literacy overall--let alone when you move from the measurable thing (literacy) to the less measurable good that literacy supposedly secures. But people in those kinds of debates accept that they've got to show that the cost of changing pedagogy and curricula is worth it in terms of the outcomes as well to show that the change actually works as advertised.
I would not quarrel with a professor who has a personal conviction about reading in their course and a personal sense of how individually they want to teach reading. I might lightly question that professor if they're sure that if only everybody was like them, the world would be better, but if that was a relatively vague, personal and recursively skeptical/self-examining claim--essentially the Mark Edmundson style--then fine. But I would quarrel with a professor who is sure that if only reading were taught in a very particular format as it once was taught (supposedly) which just so happens to be the way that professor teaches it, we would be living in a utopia right now. There's not only an unseemly incuriosity (and arrogance) in imagining that one's own teaching is exactly what was once a common norm but that moves into extraordinary claims-require-extraordinary proof territory.
They are the folks arguing for extrinsic effects of those classes, not their intrinsic worth. That is the problem.