Thread by @johnarmstrong5

My new paper published today looks at attempts by the Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA) to impose ideas from "critical pedagogy" across university curricula in the UK, and looks at what happens if you follow their advice... 🧵

bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/be…

The QAA insists that all university subject areas cover Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education (EEE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

The EDI theme is the most obvious concern. For example:
Economics courses should show zero tolerance for microagressions.
Mathematics courses should teach that some mathematicians were Nazis, but aren't asked to teach that some mathematicians were persecuted by Nazis.

The Education for Sustainable Development theme is also worrying. The theme comes from the UN who want to "reorient education to address sustainable development". This means inserting political content into all courses across all educational institutions in all countries.

As an example, the UN recommends that you should have students in music classes write songs about water conservation.

The inspiration for such innovations comes from the Marxist educator Paolo Freire, the father of "critical pedagogy", a postmodern approach to teaching, which sees questioning dominant power structures in society as the central task of education.

Paolo Freire has an almost mythical status among educationalists. It is claimed he taught 300 adults to read and write in 45 days.
Sadly nobody seems to have attempted to reproduce this remarkable result.

In fact, the literature on critical pedagogy is remarkably uninterested in whether it is an effective way to teach. They are more interested in the moral imperative to bring about political change.

The QAA is proposing that the academic community embraces critical pedagogy and incorporate political content across curricula. Yet they do not point to any case-studies at all to show the effectiveness of their approach.

However, one case study does now exist. A module called "Gateway to King's" was piloted at King's College London. It was designed to introduce all first year students at King's to topics which map closely to each of the QAA's required themes.

The plan was to roll the module out as a compulsory module for all first year students. However, the module was canned after the pilot. 1657 students were eligible to take the course, 366 enrolled and 42 completed it.

I argue that the reason the course failed is that the QAA's recommendations are fundamentally flawed.

University students want to be taught high quality content by renowned experts. They do not want bland platitudes about citizenship, regurgitated myths about unconscious biases, indoctrination in postmodern politics.

Nor do students want to pay the opportunity costs of pursuing someone else's hobby horse. Maths students want to study maths, music students want to study music, and it is politics students who want to study politics.

We should not allow quangos to determine what we teach.
Instead we should pursue academically led curriculum development, guided by the individual research expertise of academics.
This is the route to high quality Higher Education.