Freedom to Learn

The threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed

Bruce Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415729154
• eBook ISBN: 9781315529431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The freedom of students to learn at university is being eroded by a performative culture that fails to respect their rights to engage and develop as autonomous adults. Instead, students are being restricted in how they learn, when they learn and what they learn by the so-called student engagement movement. Compulsory attendance registers, class contribution grading, group project work and reflective learning exercises based on expectations of self-disclosure and confession take little account of the rights of students or individual differences between them. This new hidden university curriculum is intolerant of students who may prefer to learn informally, are reticent, shy, or simply value their privacy. Three forms of student performativity have arisen - bodily, participative and emotional – which threaten the freedom to learn.

Key themes include:

• A re-imagining of student academic freedom
• The democratic student experience
• Challenging assumptions of the student engagement movement
• An examination of university policies and practices

Freedom to Learn offers a radically new perspective on academic freedom from a student rights standpoint. It analyzes the effects of performative expectations on students drawing on the distinction between negative and positive rights to re-frame student academic freedom. It argues that students need to be thought of as scholars with rights and that the phrase 'student-centred' learning needs to be reclaimed to reflect its original intention to allow students to develop as persons. Student rights – to non-indoctrination, reticence, in choosing how to learn, and in being treated like an adult – ought to be central to this process in fostering a democratic rather authoritarian culture of learning and teaching at university.

Written for an international readership, this book will be of great interest to anyone involved in higher education, policy and practice drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary literature related to sociology, philosophy and higher education studies.

Chapter 1

The hidden curriculum

What is needed is a new academic professionalism based upon a more generous and expansive notion of academic freedom as freedom for others: the responsibility of academics to ensure that others have the responsibility to speak their own minds, to learn in accordance with their own interests, and to enjoy a secure framework within which to learn.

(Nixon et al., 1998: 278)

Introduction

I believe that the freedom of students to learn at university is under threat. By this I mean that the right of students to develop and learn as they wish as autonomous adults is being seriously undermined. Ironically, while students have never been as free to make choices in the way they conduct their private lives as adults, they have never been as unfree to learn at university in the ways in which they might prefer. The book will seek to substantiate this claim and outline what can be done to reassert the centrality of student academic freedom in terms of the ‘freedom to learn’ at university.

First, I will contend that university students are now subject to participative, behavioral and emotional expectations that inhibit the development and expression of their academic freedom. These expectations treat university students as children rather than adults and the extent to which they can genuinely develop as independent learners is restricted as a result. What I call student performativity will be illustrated by reference to requirements that students publicly demonstrate the way in which they are learning through a regime of participative processes (participative performativity, see Chapter 5), the growth of an attendance culture at university (bodily performativity, see Chapter 6), and the increasing importance attached to the sharing of personal feelings and emotions in learning and assessment practices, including the espousal of certain politically correct values (emotional performativity, see Chapter 7). These three forms of performativity constitute a hidden curriculum that the contemporary university student needs to navigate and represents a serious undermining of their freedom to learn.

The phrase ‘hidden curriculum’ is one originally coined by Philip Jackson (1968) to refer to the ways that schools socialize pupils by rewarding them for complying with certain dispositions, values and behavioral norms such as waiting quietly, keeping busy, being respectful toward teachers, and generally being cooperative, courteous and punctual (Jackson 1968: 10–33). In a higher education context the hidden curriculum may be understood as a set of social rules and academic conventions that both teachers and students learn in order to survive and succeed (Bennett et al., 2004). Conventionally, this is interpreted in terms of acquiring social capital and rote and surface learning techniques to pass examinations. Yet it is now increasingly represented by a different kind of performative game in which students need to be able to understand and respond to a changed set of professorial assumptions and values (Snyder, 1971). The values and behaviors expected of students in a contemporary higher education context may be a little different than those expected of school children during the 1960s but the process of socialization that Jackson identified is still occurring. Some aspects of the new hidden curriculum at university, such as the emphasis now placed on punctuality and compulsory attendance at classes, look very similar to those originally associated with schooling by Jackson, while other elements, such as the stress now placed on active participation in the higher education classroom, represent the way some conventional expectations have been turned on their head.

Second, I will argue that university students should primarily be regarded as novice scholars, not as ‘customers’. They are autonomous adults who have chosen to further their education at university for a variety of reasons. Yet their primary identity as novice scholars is being submerged beneath a new identity as a managed customer, one of several so-called stakeholders that higher education institutions seek to satisfy and placate. Ironically, beyond the rhetoric and marketing hype, this identity weakens rather than strengthens the rights of students as learners. They are domesticated, or made docile, in their roles as managed ‘customers’ and subject to constraints as learners rather than as adult members of an academic community. While it is popular to contend that students enjoy heightened rights as customers, the reality is that their rights as student members of an academic community are in retreat. It is not just students who face performative demands though. These are also encountered by what I call the performative university. This phrase is used as a shorthand to describe the way that the values of higher education institutions are now shaped by the instrumentalism of governments that increasingly view education, and especially higher education, in terms of a preparation for employment.

Finally, in response to these trends, I outline how student academic freedom can be re-claimed. I will initially demonstrate how academic freedom has long been interpreted as an exclusive, self-regarding privilege of the professoriate. In rebalancing matters I will outline how student rights need to be understood as about building the capacity of learners. This will draw on an approach derived from the work of Amartya Sen (1999) and others such as Martha Nussbaum (2003) in urging a focus on the development of positive ‘capabilities’ in students. Such an approach can help refocus our understanding of student academic freedom as about capacity building. A series of student rights will be identified which I believe can help restore the importance of student academic freedom, respecting their adulthood and enabling them to develop as independent learners. This is, in a nutshell, my argument. Hopefully, what follows in the book will help to convince you, the reader.

Student academic freedom

There is a voluminous literature about academic freedom. If you type the phrase ‘academic freedom’ into the internet search engine Google it results in millions of hits. Numerous articles, websites, university policy statements and discussion forums focus on issues relating to the rights of academic faculty working in universities around the world to free expression and enquiry. By contrast, the phrase ‘student academic freedom’ produces around three times fewer hits. One might conclude from this quick and crude comparison that there is three times more interest in academic freedom for faculty members than for students but on closer inspection the difference is even starker. The vast majority of web links referencing student academic freedom as a search term tend to relate to the generic concept and seldom, if ever, refer to students in any detail whatsoever.

This simple search illustrates a key point: the study of academic freedom rarely connects with the freedom of students. Instead, it focuses on freedom for academic faculty. Academics who write about academic freedom are largely writing about the importance of a protection that they assert for themselves (e.g. Nelson, 2010). The literature is, in essence, self-referential. Indeed the rights of academics are taken as more or less synonymous with the concept of academic freedom. A number of books about academic freedom fail to mention students at all (e.g. Russell, 1993). It is almost as if academics have forgotten that students are also members of the academic community. Or, perhaps, the truth is that they do not regard them as such. As I hope to make plain in what follows, the neglect of student academic freedom is an oversight that needs correcting.

Conventionally, where student academic freedom is characterized it is in terms of students being represented in the governance of an academic institution and in being allowed to freely protest and publicly campaign on issues of concern to them. The student radicalism on campuses in the 1960s might be seen as a high point of student academic freedom on the basis of this interpretation. Threats to student academic freedom have tended to be interpreted as censorship in the classroom or students feeling too intimidated to voice any opinion contrary to that of their professor (Weber, 1973a; Horowitz, 2002; AAUP, 2007). This is called self-censorship and is a concern I will consider in the chapter that follows (see Chapter 2).

I want to approach student academic freedom from a fresh angle, one that is a little different from these previous interpretations. Instead of thinking of it as someone being prevented from speaking freely I will seek to analyze what needs to be done to enable students to fully enjoy their academic freedom. Put another way, students need to be afforded the capability to be free. This is more than a semantic point and requires an approach based on positive as well as negative rights. Well-known examples of positive rights include the right to education, basic health care and employment. Positive rights are generally associated with a more radical agenda for change in society. Adopting a positive rights perspective is partly about shifting the language. Rather than thinking about what students should have freedom from, we should focus on what they ought to have freedom to. It is a more action-oriented approach and necessitates steps to be taken to bring about student academic freedom. In other words, it is inadequate to baldly state that students are not prevented from freely expressing their ideas.

Student performativity

I am advocating a positive agenda to help students develop and realize their capabilities (Nussbaum, 2003) and to gain the necessary self-confidence to fulfil their potential as learners and as thinkers. Few would probably disagree with this sentiment but there are significant barriers in practice preventing the achievement of this goal. The first is embodied in the phrase ‘student performativity’. This refers to the way that students are evaluated on the basis of how they learn – and are seen to learn – at university. Conventionally this might be taken as meaning passing their in-course assessments or final examinations.

Here, though, I am referring to a much broader set of expectations about the way students are expected to behave, demonstrate their commitment to participate in class, to assessment practices involving their peers or involving personal ‘confession’, and to an enthusiastic adherence to certain values associated with the contemporary university. There are values long associated with student learning in a liberal higher education such as tolerance of the opinions of others or openness to criticism (Barnett, 1990). These are essential to the functioning of learning in a liberal university. Yet, there are now further expectations associated with performativity that go well beyond co-operating with the basic conditions necessary for higher learning. These demand that students show evidence of their learning that can be easily audited as it occurs in the public space of the classroom or online forum. Such expectations have become an integral part of university life, justified by the student engagement movement in terms of evidencing the time and effort which students put into their studies and the benefits they are said to derive from doing so. Such demands represent a natural extension of the audit culture identified by Michael Power (1994, 1997) and others and threaten student autonomy, privacy and learning diversity in the sense of students being allowed to choose how they prefer to engage as learners. This represents an important part of my argument and demonstrates the way that learning at university has changed over the last 20 years or so.

The phrase ‘student performativity’ may be new to readers who may be more familiar with the term ‘teacher performativity’ (Ball, 2003, 2012). This refers to the world of targets, evaluations and performance indicators that apply to schoolteachers and university professors. In a higher education context, individual academics encounter a range of measures that purportedly measure the quality of their performance. These include research audits assessing their research publications, course experience questionnaires evaluating the quality of their teaching, and income generation targets. The mantras are about ‘teaching excellence’ and ‘world-class research’. The latter is often narrowly characterized as about publishing in high impact international journals on the basis of research funded by prestigious grant-awarding bodies. In complying with such demands, academics need to do so in word as well as deed. It requires a casting aside or suppression of personal views and demands a ‘playing of the game’. This implies, among other things, publishing early and often in the research cycle even when this might be at the expense of longer-term goals and teaching responsibilities. Working in a performative environment leads to inauthentic attitudes and behavior as individuals endeavor to conform to such expectations. In research terms it results in a move away from certain types of publication outputs such as books or book chapters, less willingness to undertake service activities for the benefit of the wider academic community, and increasing rates of research grant applications and publication output in international journals. Those who try to resist by refusing to ‘play the game’, by not adjusting their behavior toward the goals and targets set, are punished by failing to gain promotion, being moved onto a teaching-only contract or losing out in other, more subtle ways, in an increasingly competitive and performative academic culture (Lucas, 2006).

Student performativity is simply the mirror image of teacher performativity. It is just the targets and the performance indicators that differ. The performative demands typically include attending classes punctually, taking part in classroom discussions in order to convey an impression of enthusiasm and commitment, participating in group work and peer evaluation exercises, posting comments to online learning forums, and displaying or espousing the ‘right’ attitudes, such as being committed to ‘global citizenship’. Learning to conform to this set of expectations is an integral part of what it now means to be a university student. This hidden curriculum involves students (and their professors, to some extent) taking part in a ritual of inauthenticity. Lip service is paid to certain elements of the teaching regime, such as the espousal of learning ‘outcomes’, but, in practice, there is limited belief in their veracity. They are simply things that everyone needs to (pretend to) comply with. Those students who do not comply with the performative regime are castigated, and negatively labeled as ‘social loafers’ or online ‘lurkers’. Those discontent with the way in which an individual grade might have been awarded on the basis of a group work project are dismissed as ‘grade grubbers’. Legitimate complaints about a lack of fairness in assessment are condemned as an indicator of rising levels of consumerism among the student population.

The series of behaviors which university students are required to perform in modern higher education have parallels with the world of reality television. Here, contestants compete with each other through their bodily, participative and emotional performance (Skeggs, 2009). They do this, for example, by displaying emotions such as guilt, shame and passion. Many of these programs are premised on the notion of self-transformation. The obese learn how to live a healthier lifestyle and face the reasons why they overeat; hoarders learn how to de-clutter their homes and emotionally let go of their possessions; the poorly dressed are taught how to select clothes that improve their appearance and deal with issues of low esteem in the process. These television programs are not only about cooking, house clearing and ‘lifestyle’. They are more subtly about the public display of emotions. Participants go through an emotional journey that leads them to become ‘better’ or more emotionally self-aware people. There are messages here about self-worth, social class and what it means to be a ‘good’ person demanding loquaciousness and emotional openness in talking about one’s own feelings.

The terminology used by Beverley Skeggs (2009) has resonance in higher education. Bodily performativity occurs in the sense that students are required to attend class or face punishment in assessment grading and emotional pressure where non-attendance is interpreted as a personal affront to the ego of the professor. A participative performativity is about a willingness to conform to learning regimes that emphasize active participation and assessment in peer groups. Finally, emotional performativity is connected with being prepared to conform to a set of values sanctified by the institution and represented through the written and unwritten curriculum. Examples include a desire to be a ‘global citizen’, possess intercultural understanding or espouse the importance of ‘reflexivity’ in professional practice. Here there is an expectation that higher education is a personally transformative process that makes a positive contribution to wider society. This is a laudable goal but is inappropriate in developing higher education students as independent learners with the right to make their own choices about what to believe in. It imposes a particular view of the world on students. Hence, it is clear that learning at university is being influenced in ways that increasingly mirror the expectations of reality television. If you think that the analogy between reality television and learning at university is far-fetched, consider, for example, the way in which class or audience response systems are now deployed in higher education classrooms to compel reluctant students to participate (Graham et al., 2007). Such systems do not just provide a means by which students may engage; they build in an expectation as part of the process of socialization. The public sharing or display of certain dispositions, values and emotions is the signature feature of this hidden curriculum.

Engagement and ideology

Some readers might wonder what is wrong with expectations that students ought to attend class, participate and demonstrate a preparedness to make a positive contribution to the world in response to its problems. Indeed, there is a growing body of literature about student engagement that advocates its benefits. This phrase is widely invoked in international higher education circles evidenced by an increasing number of academic papers, books and university policy initiatives. It implies a learning environment where participants, drawn from diverse backgrounds, are actively engaged in a participatory culture and experience an adequately resourced and interactive approach to teaching (Newswander and Borrego, 2009; Fredricks et al., 2004; Haworth and Conrad, 1997: 553).

The conceptual basis for this belief is connected to the work of thinkers and educational psychologists such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Carl Rogers. They believed that learning should be an active and social process. Sometimes this is described as it being child-centered or, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Freedom to Learn
• Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Hidden Curriculum
• 2 Student Rights
• 3 A Paradox
• 4 The Performative Turn
• 5 Participative Performativity
• 6 Bodily Performativity
• 7 Emotional Performativity
• 8 Reclaiming Student-Centered
• References
• Index