Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education

Bodies of Knowledge and their Discontents, International and Comparative Perspectives

André Elias Mazawi, Michelle Stack, André Elias Mazawi, Michelle Stack

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350094284
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Comparative Education

Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education problematizes one of the least researched phenomena in teacher education, the design of course syllabi, using critical and decolonial approaches. This book looks at the struggles that scholars, policy makers, and educators from a diverse range of countries including Australia, Canada, India, Iran, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the USA, and Zambia face as they design course syllabi in higher education settings. The chapter authors argue that course syllabi are political constructions, representing intense sites of struggles over visions of teacher education and visions of society. As such, they are deeply immersed in what Walter Mignolo calls the "geopolitics of knowledge". Authors also show how syllabi have become akin to contractual documents that define relations between instructors and students Based on a set of empirically grounded studies that are compared and contrasted, the chapters offer a clearer picture of how course syllabi function within distinct socio-political, economic, and historical contexts of practice and teacher education.

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Introduction

Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education: Bodies of Knowledge and Their Discontents

André Elias Mazawi and Michelle Stack

What is the Book About?

This book engages one of the least researched aspects in faculties of education and teacher education programs: the designing and enactment of course syllabi. Critical studies of syllabi used in faculties of education and their performative enactment remain scant, particularly when it comes to examining the instructor’s lived experiences. The contributions in this book unpack the inextricable relationships between positionality, power, and knowledge that underpin course syllabi and their performance (enactment) in the classroom.

Our point of departure is that course syllabi—and the wider curricula within which they are situated—represent intense spaces of struggle, characterized by competing claims over legitimate bodies of knowledge, and over visions of schooling, education, and society. In this book, we locate syllabi—and their enactment—at the convergence of four forces that shape their meanings and institutional manifestation:

First, faculties of education are characterized by struggles over who accesses positions of power and influence, and what ought to count as legitimate pedagogical knowledge and professional practice. This is particularly the case when it comes to engaging issues associated with multiculturalism and social diversity more broadly (Acker, 2005; Gore & Morrison, 2001). For example, Anja Heikkinen, Jenni Pätäri, and Sini Teräsahde (2019) argue that, in Finland, “the disciplinarisation or scientification of educational knowledge is not primarily an issue of conceptual and theoretical progress. Rather it indicates relations and power struggles between actors in the academy, politics, economy and practice” (p. 83). Such disciplinary struggles are amplified when it comes to instructors’ engagement with and unpacking of colonial legacies, for instance in South Africa. Linda Chisholm, Michelle Friedman, and Queenta Anyele Sindoh (2018) point to a gap between available textbooks in the teaching of history of education, which “largely use older historiography” and instructors’ teaching contents in the classroom which draws on “more recent historiographies.” Notwithstanding, a review of the literature suggests that how such struggles play out in syllabi used in faculties of education (and more particularly in teacher education programs), and what wider struggles do these syllabi capture in relation to the aims of education and schooling in contemporary societies, remain a rather neglected area of study.

Secondly, the involvement of certification agencies, located outside faculties of education, complicates the issue further by subjecting faculties of education and teacher education programs to external control and regulations.

Thirdly, how instructors experience their struggles over the bodies of knowledge that are represented in their syllabi reflects wider contingencies and entanglements of space, place, time, institutional dynamics, and power politics. Syllabi are not just documentary artifacts intended for procedural and contractual ends. They are saturated with the political contingencies, controversies, aspirations, and agendas that animate the spirit of the time and the ways in which the aims of education are contested, negotiated, and provisionally articulated. The implication is that contexts are central to account for in any attempt to understand how the enactment of syllabi plays out across institutions, national or social settings.

Fourthly, and most importantly, course instructors are not passive providers of knowledge mandated by course syllabi. Nor are they “reproducers” of inequities and unequal opportunities or “resistant” to institutional policies. Rather, they actively negotiate their course syllabi—in terms of professional and locational identities, curriculum leadership, teaching approaches, and ontological and epistemic choices they make. Far from lacking objectivity, the narratives assembled in the present volume are narrated from a subjective “I” standpoint that emphasizes what Sandra Harding (1993) refers to as “strong objectivity”: the narratives are “embodied and visible”; they are located within the wider contexts of classroom and institutional power dynamics that shape them as “objects of knowledge”; they are community based in terms of the knowledge they generate; and, they represent “multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory or incoherent” standpoints, which mirror the multiplicity of locations from which the different instructors negotiate the enactment of their syllabi (Harding, 1993, pp. 63–65). Seen from this lens, chapter contributors bear witness to the located entanglements—individual, professional, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical—within which they enunciate their beliefs, aspirations, and visions of teacher education and its aims. These entanglements compel contributors—as interpellated narrators—to interrogate, not so much the features of the ideal or optimal syllabus—if ever there were any—but the phenomenological and aspirational aspects that animate their respective lifeworlds.

At the juncture of the above four convergences, this book illustrates how the contributors, as differentially located instructors, dwell in their respective syllabi, inhabit them, and what underpins their engagements, feelings of alienation (estrangement) or hopeful empowerment regarding the corpus of knowledge which they seek to impart to students.

What Does a “Syllabus” Stand for within the Wider Order of Things?

In their book, Designing A Motivational Syllabus: Creating a Learning Path for Student Engagement, Christine Harrington and Melissa Thomas (2018) identify three core purposes of the course syllabus. First, the syllabus represents a “communication tool” which ensures the transparent setting of course structure, goals, and expectations from students on the part of the instructor. The syllabus can thus “prevent or at least minimize confusion or conflict.” Secondly, the course syllabus repres ents a “planning tool,” and a “road map” that outlines “the steps that students will need to take to be successful in the course.” Here, a well-designed syllabus allows instructors to “share not only the learning outcomes but also the direct connection between the learning tasks and assignments and the identified learning outcomes,” designing the course “backward,” “with the end in mind.” Thirdly, the course syllabus represents “a motivational and supportive tool” that provides “students with action-oriented learning goals and information how to meet these goals with success.” A “teaching philosophy” section in the syllabus can communicate to students specific “high-level beliefs” of the instructor which could “translate into high levels of academic achievement” on the part of the student. Motivation can further be enhanced if the syllabus offers choice options with regard to activities and assignments. Linda Nilson (2007) goes farther, suggesting that the syllabus stands at the intersection of scholarship and teaching. She observes:

A syllabus reflects the professional judgment of faculty in higher education, a group of individuals who are notorious for forging their own pathway. What instructor with any classroom experience prefers to be handed a syllabus to teach from that has been developed by a committee or colleague? We tend to believe that a syllabus should be a personal creation that reflects one’s intellectual viewpoint on the subject matter. So, instructors spend hours, even days, designing a course and its syllabus, as well as pouring through books for the syllabi that most closely mirror their preferred organization and slant on the material.

In a deep sense, a syllabus is a piece of scholarship, one that brings the scholarship of integration of teaching. . . . For any given course, your syllabi display your conception of how a field or subfield is organized—or should be organized for the purpose of communicating it—and how students can best master its knowledge and skills. Your teaching philosophy is readable between the lines of your syllabus, as well as in parts of the text itself. The document, especially your assignments and class-time plans, is a window to your theories of teaching and learning, whether you see yourself as a knowledge transmitter, a resource, a facilitator, a manager, an experience creator, or an activist. (p. 7)

As an established higher education institution, the course syllabus has long histories, whether as tables of contents, as an outline of a program of study, or as a list of lectures (Parks & Harris, 2002, p. 55). In the English language, the term “syllabus”—of Greek and Latin origins—has been in use, under different meanings, since the mid-seventeenth century (p. 55). Practices associated with the syllabus, in its different formats have been historically recorded across cultures throughout the world. In the English language, syllabus (plural: syllabi) literally signifies indexical lists or documents that compile the labels attributed to various works. Syllabi represent a space that identifies canonic texts, establish relationships and genealogies among them, and connect contributions to human knowledge that have been made over time. A full historical account of syllabi transcends the bounds of the present volume. Here, suffice it to note that syllabi contain informative entries that classify bodies of texts according to their pertinence for a particular community of practice, or from a disciplinary (or area studies) point of view. Determining the “pertinence” of the syllabus remains elusive, as the question of purpose further amplifies the tensions that often prevail between “theory” and “practice” and how course syllabi engage their positioning in relation to each other. We argue that disentangling these tensions is particularly relevant, though challenging, when it comes to syllabi in teacher education programs.

In advancing this part of our argument, we build on Helma Oolbekkink-Marchand and her colleagues’ (Oolbekkink-Marchand, Hadar, Smith, Helleve, & Ulvik, 2017) use of the notion of “professional space,” which represents “a significant aspect of teacher leadership” (p. 37). “Professional space” refers to the “‘amount of say’ teachers have in their own teaching practice” (p. 38). The notion of “professional space” is not limited to physical or social aspects of the classroom or institutional context. We extend this notion to the design and enactment of syllabi they are either entrusted with, or that they come to design, and how instructors in teacher education programs come to enact “their personal teaching goals” (p. 38).

The creation of syllabi—as the delimitation of canonic corpora that delimit an instructor’s “professional space”—is not without challenges and contingencies, however. The designing of course syllabi is entrenched in epistemic politics. In as much as syllabi offer a space for the informative listing of entries regarding pertinent readings on a theme, they also actively exclude particular entries, eventually erasing (or deleting) authors’ names and works deemed fraught or misaligned with the disciplinary or thematic doxology of the day. In that sense, syllabi operate as power instruments and as material artifacts that are part of coded forms of power. Their compilation of sources should be understood in relation to these coded forms of power, whether in their explicit or implicit articulations. The epistemic selectivity—and the determination of what deserves to be remembered by a particular community—means, as Michel Foucault’s (1980) elaboration on the intersections of knowledge and power posits—that syllabi are always already constructed simultaneously in relation and in opposition to imagined political orders. It is in relation and opposition to these political orders that syllabi find their fulfillment. Understanding how instructors navigate these contingencies offers insights into the epistemic politics associated with the enactment of syllabi.

The syllabus—as both an institutional feature of teaching and a cultural artifact associated with its practice—has not remained frozen over time. Jay Parks and Mary Harris (2002) observe that “syllabi seem to vary in two fundamental areas: (a) the apparent reasons for writing the syllabus and (b) the material that it contains” (p. 55). In recent decades, the syllabus used in faculties of education (though not exclusively) underwent significant shifts in terms of its status, roles, and physical appearance. These shifts, we argue, cannot be disconnected from the wider political economies within which higher education as a whole has become entangled (Slaughter, 2014). With the privatization, modularization, and commodification of educational programs, the purposes of the syllabus shifted in their emphases in at least five respects:

First, syllabi have come to assume a contractual status (Parks & Harris, 2002). Darlene Habanek (2005) emphatically points out, “The syllabus provides an important, and maybe the only, vehicle for expressing accountability and commitment” (p. 63). As a contractual document, the syllabus has a binding force attached to it that dictates not only its narrative and editorial structures but also the very performances it seeks to engage in the classroom, and under which learning would be deemed satisfactory. Thus, for instance, at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada), Senate Policy V-130, approved in January 2019, a course syllabus is understood as

the document provided by the course instructor which communicates the course instructor’s course design to students including organization, policies, expectations, and requirements. (University of British Columbia, 2019; italics in the original)

The policy goes on to delimit the functions of the syllabus in the classroom and the conditions under which subsequent changes can be introduced once the course has started. While the policy remains flexible on the narrative style and formatting of the syllabus, it establishes what could be interpreted as a “line of command” that “entitles” students to voice their “protest” against “a change” they perceive as “detrimental to their academic progress.” Thus, Section 9(b) states:

Any student who sees the change to the syllabus as detrimental to their academic progress is entitled to discuss the case with the course instructor and seek a resolution. Where student and instructor cannot agree, students are encouraged to take their protest to the head of the department concerned and then to the dean of the faculty responsible for the course in accordance with the Academic Calendar regulation...