Inclusion, Epistemic Democracy and International Students by Aneta Hayes

Author:Aneta Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030114015
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This book argues that the TEF, AHELO, CALOHEE and even the CLA could constitute such agreed rules which would create obligations for all within universities to realise international students as equals and to insist on the establishment and maintenance of intellectually just conditions for their participation in higher education. Presently however, such obligations do not constitute plans for the final shape of AHELO and CALOHEE, nor are they discussed as possible changes to the CLA (I focus on the TEF in detail in Chapter 5). CLA for instance, which is an already established assessment framework in the US, focuses exclusively on the evaluation of analytical reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving and written communication skills. The nature and scope of the tasks that are used in the CLA to assess these skills are analysed in Chapter 6 (to contrast them with the proposed model for the TEF) but here it is worth highlighting the specific ways in which CLA functions as a teaching assessment tool that frames benchmarked-based understanding of teaching excellence, as it only measures whether students pass a set of minimum standards or not. Quality of teaching under CLA is therefore contingent on students’ performance against benchmarks that subsequently define what high standard of teaching is. But, as explained in more detail in the section below, there is no evaluation of value added, the nature of pedagogy, nor the relationality between them. The outcomes that are measured by the CLA are not in any way related to ways in which universities create conditions for intellectually just, democratic and equitable education for all students. And because such outcomes are not part of the CLA, nobody holds universities accountable for how well they fulfil these conditions.

The influence of commercialisation of multiversities on the CLA is clear in that the exercise seems to be based on auditing university outputs (understood as good performance of their students), which introduces a system of organisational regulation through accountability and performance, and for purposes of competition.The CLA focuses on the institution (rather than the student) as the unit of analysis. (…) The results are intended to send a signal to administrators, faculty and the students about some of the competencies that need to be developed, the level of performance attained by the students at their institution and most importantly, whether that level is better, worse or about the same as what would be expected given the ability level of its incoming students. (…) Because the CLA scores are standardised across administrations, they can be used (along with other indicators) to examine the overall effects on student performance of the reforms and policies an institution implements. In short, the CLA’s main goal is to provide information that will help colleges and universities determine how much their students are improving and whether that improvement is in line with the gains of comparable students at other institutions. (Klein et al. 2007 , p. 418)

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