a cat and mouse chase

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Dec 20, 2006 - recognition of prior learning (RPL), portfolio-based experiential learning courses are ... project which investigated the promotion of prior learning in the School ..... communication of portfolio writing, which keeps criteria of recognition invisible. .... reporting with evidence counted as strong justification.
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Invisible criteria in a portfolio-based assessment of prior learning: a cat and mouse chase a

Yael Shalem & Carola Steinberg

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University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg, South Africa Published online: 20 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Yael Shalem & Carola Steinberg (2002) Invisible criteria in a portfolio-based assessment of prior learning: a cat and mouse chase, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 10:3, 425-448, DOI: 10.1080/14681360200200152 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681360200200152

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Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Volume 10, Number 3, 2002

Invisible Criteria in a Portfolio-based Assessment of Prior Learning: a cat and mouse chase

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YAEL SHALEM & CAROLA STEINBERG University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT Institutions of higher education in South Africa have been encouraged to find ways of recognising the informal learning of historically disadvantaged adult learners. In order to facilitate the process of recognition of prior learning (RPL), portfolio-based experiential learning courses are advocated. These courses are expected to give RPL candidates an opportunity to revisit what they know and articulate it into academic modes of knowing. The article critically evaluates the capacity of the assessment processes involved in such courses to transmit clear sets of criteria for what an RPL candidate is required to demonstrate. The article draws on Bernstein’s (1996) distinction between two pedagogical types, ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, and analyses the instructional logic of the pedagogy used to recognise prior learning in a portfolio-based assessment. This analysis is used to reflect on our pedagogical experiences of running a portfolio development course, with a view to highlighting the ways in which some of the demands of prior learning assessment constrained our ability to specify the criteria for the learning we set to recognise.

In her recent article on educational assessment, Caroline Gipps (1999) argues that assessment plays a crucial role in identity formation and is influenced by the power dynamic in the teacher-student relationship: Because of the public nature of much questioning and feedback, and the power dynamic in the teacher-student relationship, assessment plays a key role in identity formation. The language of assessment and evaluation is one of the defining elements through which young persons form their identity, for school purposes at least. The role of assessment as a social process has to be acknowledged in this sphere: identity is socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially transformed. (Gipps, 1999, p. 383)

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In view of the social and cultural processes that have been shown to have an effect on assessment, educational research has begun to highlight the importance of learning environments in which a communicative climate promotes open and fairer processes of assessment (Broadfoot, 1998). It is generally argued that integrated forms of assessment such as portfolios help to create ‘collaborative assessment environments’ (Gipps, 1999, p. 377). Portfolios have been singled out as a mode of assessment in which learners can both show a rich picture of their development over time and engage reflexively with what they have learnt. Implicit in this is the assumption that continuous informal dialogue between teacher and students enhances students’ understanding of, and respect for, the knowledge base of what they do and so empowers their social identity (Borthwick, 1995; Shulman, 1998; Wolf, 1998). This article investigates a particular case of portfolio basedassessment, namely assessment of prior learning. It reflects on a research project which investigated the promotion of prior learning in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.[1] Recognition of prior learning, or RPL as it is commonly called, has been highlighted in South Africa’s newly developed National Qualifications Framework, which stresses the need to compare ‘the previous learning and experience of the learner, howsoever obtained, against the learning outcomes required for a specified qualification and the acceptance for purposes of qualification that which meets the requirements’ (South African Qualifications Authority, 1997). Recognition of learning acquired outside higher education institutions is politically and socially important in a country where people were deliberately deprived of opportunities for formal learning but developed their skills through self-study or work experience. In line with the new policy, formal credit may be granted to candidates whose portfolios show equivalence of competence for the appropriate level of credit. This process of assessment enables candidates to proceed on a qualification route without unnecessary wastage of effort, expenses and time (Department of Education, 1998, p. 33). Much current research and policy on RPL is premised on a notion of ‘experiential learning’. In broad terms this article provides a critique of ‘experiential learning’ (Kolb, 1984; Boud et al, 1985), in particular the view which suggests that learning from experience can be made equivalent to a disciplined academic way of learning (Usher & Edwards, 1994; Lather, 1992; Michelson, 1996a, 1996b; Beckett & Hager, 1999). It examines the social relations of assessment that develop in a portfolio development course between the teacher/assessor (who is located in an academic field of practice) and the candidate for RPL (who attempts to demonstrate the knowledge she/he has gained from experience). Portfolio development courses are noted critically for the extensive time and for the level of academic skills they require (Michelson, 1997a; Harris, 2000);

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nevertheless, there is generally agreement amongst proponents of RPL that through the right kind of assistance from the assessor, portfolio development courses can empower candidates to ‘find’ knowledge in what they already do and to understand it in a new (academic) way (Mandell & Michelson, 1990; Stuart, 1996). For example, the assessor can help the candidate to translate everyday experiences and modes of speaking into academic concepts (Peters, 2000). A ‘portfolio’ is considered a flexible tool of assessment (Harris, 2000, p. 122), a mode of assessment that ‘can tap learning derived from many sources’ (Michelson, 1997b, in Harris, p. 121), a tool for reflexive engagement or a means for an interface between previously acquired competencies and academic knowledge. Portfolio development courses are usually given to candidates for RPL in the year before entering a qualification-based course and are used either as an access route or for advanced standing. In these courses candidates are given an opportunity to revisit what they (are supposed to) already know, albeit in an embedded way through their work experience, and, through series of situated learning activities, to articulate what they know into academic modes of knowing (Osman et al, 2000). In the first part of the article, drawing on Bernstein’s (1996) distinction between two pedagogical types, ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, we analyse the instructional logic of the pedagogy used to recognise prior learning in a portfolio-based assessment. We employ this distinction to explain the specific social logic that underpins the invisible pedagogy of portfolio-based assessment of experiential learning, focusing primarily on the distribution of power in the pedagogical relationship, its assumptions with regard to knowledge specialisation and thus its implications for the learner’s acquisition of knowledge. The second part of the article examines some of our pedagogical experiences running a portfolio development course, with a view to highlighting the ways in which some of the demands of prior learning assessment constrained our ability to specify the criteria for the learning we set out to recognise. The central claim of this article is that since the pedagogical interface between the experiential knowledge of RPL candidates and the academic knowledge of portfolio development courses is structured by hybrid forms of pedagogy that are predominantly invisible, both the candidate and the teacher/assessor are being positioned in different forms of powerlessness: the candidate is positioned in an intense state of perplexity, not knowing which ideas matter more or how to access the ways in which ideas are selected and combined, whereas the teacher/assessor, who is clearly located in a field of knowledge that is structured by certain criteria of specialisation, is dominated by the personalised forms of communication typical to portfolio development, and cannot find any systematic way to transmit criteria to the candidate.

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The Dilemma of the RPL Assessor’s Authority In their recognition of prior learning, assessors have to diagnose two very different aspects of a candidate’s competence: the candidate’s capacity to demonstrate competence already acquired and the candidate’s readiness to join a qualification or to learn at an appropriate level in a particular learning programme. The process of recognising prior learning involves the simultaneous enactment of two very different forms of action: retrospective and prospective. ‘Recognition of previously attained learning’ is a retrospective action, in that it aims to establish the presence of a person’s accomplishment, acquired in a specific area of specialisation at work. ‘Access to further education’ is a prospective action;[2] it is a futureoriented action and is expected to prepare a person for a learning programme presented in a particular context of specialisation. In the case of portfolio development courses assessing experiential learning, both of these actions form necessary parts. Nevertheless, each draws on very different conceptual resources and embodies very different power relations between the assessor and the candidate. In the retrospective action, the authority of well-researched knowledge and rational argument is subordinated to political and ethical imperatives, and the pedagogical authority of the assessor is ‘invisible’ (Bernstein, 1990). In the prospective action, the assessor is positioned in a field of specialisation, which admits that academic recognition must be granted by the specialised authorities of the field, in accordance with the regulatory and constitutive logic of that field. In the prospective action, the pedagogical authority of the assessor is ‘visible’ (Bernstein, 1990). The most common practice of prior learning assessment is some form of examination of the competence tacitly embedded in a specific performance. As part of an introspective action, candidates may be asked to write a standardised test on labour relations and collective bargaining; do a clinical performance assessment in ‘Nursing Care’; write a short biographical essay with a focus on the experience of teaching young children; or present a written portfolio which includes life history, an essay or workplace evidence of effective school management (Joint Education Trust, 2000). Reading a candidate’s competence from such performances involves projection of similarity between what the candidate writes and what the assessor knows. For example, an assessor in New York [3] wrote that: Although Mr. Makalani does not use the terminology, he discussed management activities within the familiar functional framework of planning, organising, staffing, leading and controlling.

The assessor went on to speculate on the candidate’s knowledge, although it was beyond the candidate’s work experience:

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Although his (Mr. Makalani’s) experience is within relatively small organisations, he is aware of the consequences of size in terms of information flow, functional differentiation of activities, and control.

In order to value the learning he found, the assessor refuses the evaluative gaze of academic knowledge:

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Mr. Makalani’s learning is very substantial although sometimes difficult to force into conventional academic categories.

The retrospective action of assessing competence gives primacy to ‘similarity to’ relations (Bernstein, 1996, p. 64). It uses pedagogical strategies to assist candidates to recognise and express similarity relations. Strategies include training candidates to use certain words and expressions to describe their experience; taxonomies for breaking down experience; terminology for generic skills; and even supplying candidates with a sort of ‘identity kit’ ‘which comes complete with the appropriate instructions on how to act, talk and write so as to take on a particular role that others will recognise’ (Peters, 2000, pp. 7-9). The retrospective action of similarity relies on an epistemological critique of rationalism by postmodernist constructivists (Harding, 1991). Human beings, Fulwiler argued, find meaning in the world by exploring it through ‘their own easy, talky language, not the language of textbook ... or teacher’ (Mezirow et al, 1990, p. 216). At the heart of this critique is the view that ‘different knowledge is available from different “standpoints”, that is from social and historical locations’ and that assessors need to relinquish the image of ‘the rational consciousness constructing knowledge in detached and splendid isolation’ so that they will be able to see that all knowledge (academic and experiential) is invariably partial (Michelson, 1996a, p. 192; Hager, 1998; Harris, 1999). This opposition to rationalism is typically articulated through questioning the epistemological authority of the field of academic practice: What has become clear is that RPL cannot be separated from broader epistemological, political and ethical issues. Questions such as ‘Whose knowledge is important? Who benefits from RPL, and who is disadvantaged and how? Who acts as gatekeepers and on whose authority? Whose standards and outcomes are used, and how are they arrived at? How are assessment methods arrived at, and what kind of inputs do adult learners have into the use of those methods and the assessment process itself?’ point to the fact that constructions of knowledge, what is worth knowing, and (then) how knowledge is assessed, reflect particular power relations in society. (Ralphs & Buchler, 1998, p. 12) In the process of accreditation of workplace experience the pedagogy of experiential learning can indeed be liberating, empowering and free

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of ‘discipline(s)’ ... part of the process of creating ‘active subjects’. (Usher & Solomon, 1999, p. 162)

Advocates of a postmodernist view of competence reject notions such as ‘a correct position’ and ‘a proper methodical stance’ (Johnston & Usher, 1997, p. 140), which require candidates to transcend their particular experiences in order to rationally and critically reflect on them. Such relations, they argue, force the personal meanings that candidates bring into a paradigm of ‘sameness’ in which they have to resemble ‘predefined categories of knowledge’ and thus prevent RPL candidates from discovering their own voice. This conceptual resource burdens the retrospective action: it highlights pluralism of knowledge and assessment, social interests and power, while it marginalises disciplinary knowledge, criteria for assessing what counts as good knowledge and reliability of assessment methods. The instructional logic of the pedagogy employed in portfolio development courses also includes a prospective action of reading a candidate’s readiness for new learning through assessment of her/his performance during socialisation into a programme of learning. Unlike the notion of ‘previously acquired competence’, which downplays the difficulty of transferring competence from the vocational to the scholastic discourse, the notion of ‘access to further education’ introduces academic specialisation. This suggests that in assessing performance, the assessor must consider those criteria that she/he believes are necessary for performance of the particular tasks or skills associated with the knowledge practice to which the candidate applies for access. Specialisation recognises that the assessor draws on a field of knowledge, as in ‘regional fields’ (Bernstein, 1996), such as sociology of education or language and literacy. It recognises that there are certain debates and a preferred perspective peculiar to the knowledge area that the candidate claims to know about. It also recognises that, as an academic practitioner, the assessor is bound by the social logic that regulates her/his field of practice. The prospective action recognises that different forms of knowledge have serious consequences on how they are acquired (Breier, 1998); that different pedagogical paths enable or constrain ‘epistemological access’ (Morrow, 1993); that some instructional methods and technologies of delivery are more appropriate for enhancing learning than others (Muller, 1998); and that the logic of a field of practice regulates the ways an academic recognises another practice or assesses the value of specific elements within it (Shalem, 2001). Specialisation accepts stratification and grading of the different practices, and it calls for rules of classification between them. Thus the prospective action accommodates pedagogies that can recognise that two fields of practice must find ways to work through ‘boundary objects’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 106).

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Taken together, the weak classification implied in the retrospective action and the stronger classification called for by the prospective action place the assessor in a contradictory position, with profound implications for portfolio-based assessment of prior learning. The retrospective action regulates the assessor to try and find [4] the competence, even if it is tacit and does not resemble the traditional paradigm of university knowledge (Ralphs & Motala, 2000, p. 7). Hence, we see attacks on ‘the language of the textbook’ (Mezirow et al, 1990) and preference for life history and biographical approaches (Stuart, 1996; Harris, 2000). No specific criteria that candidates must satisfy should be predetermined. In fact, in the retrospective action, criteria bind the assessor only. When assessing, she/he is expected to focus on what is present in the acquirer’s product: to downplay propositional knowledge, to equalise the relationship between theory and learning from experience, to offer a great deal of support to candidates so that they ‘learn the rules of the game and how to apply it to their own personal situations’ (Peters, 2000, p. 4) and to look for broad equivalence rather than direct equivalence between candidates’ display of learning and academic knowledge (Harris, 2000). In the prospective action, on the other hand, the assessor is much more careful not to give a false message about simple equivalence between experiential learning and formal conceptualisation. Potentially, prospective action can be used to develop a more explicit set of criteria and practices for recognition, in that it is based on clear epistemological distinctions and does not conflate empowerment with recognition of ‘prior learning in and of itself’. The problem, however, is that in a portfolio development course the prospective action is only partially specialised because it is heavily dominated by the personalised mode of communication of portfolio writing, which keeps criteria of recognition invisible. In a portfolio development course the assessor knows on what knowledge she/he is drawing, and so she/he does not avoid assessing ‘absences’. But because the forms of communication are over-determined by the need to affirm presences (through continuous informal commentary and assistance in the articulation of meanings), they leave invisible the specialised set of criteria operating in the performance mode of assessment. This increases the risk of mis-recognition. It does so because it dictates a horizontal level of engagement that denies that the ideas which make up the slice of the region dealt with in the course have a specialised structure and that their acquisition requires a certain instructional sequence and order. To illustrate this dilemma, we turn now to an example drawn from our pedagogical experience in running a portfolio-based assessment course for assessment of experiential learning.

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Enabling Inter-subjectivity: from me (my story) to mine and your story (the case of Lindiwe) In this section of the article we follow the analysis of the two actions involved in assessment of prior learning, using a short case study from our course. Initiated by the Joint Education Trust (JET), our portfolio development course attempted to bring the knowledge base of field practice and that of academia into dialogue. We recruited students by advertising for educators who wanted to enter into a postgraduate Bachelor of Education (BEd Honours) programme, but who did not have the appropriate qualifications and were willing to try the RPL route. We accepted six candidates, most of them principals or schoolteachers of many years standing. Once recruited, the candidates attended a onesemester portfolio development course, at the end of which they could apply for access into the BEd Honours programme or for advanced standing. The course engaged with two topics, school culture and accountability, selected from the field of sociology of education and relevant to the practices of all the candidates. Much of the academic activity in the course took place around the feedback given to the candidates in writing their personal portfolios. Initially we had planned to read about ten articles during the course, but we changed this plan in response to a claim made in RPL workshops at JET that a focus on texts overshadowed the candidates’ experience, and also because of the extended time that candidates would have needed to understand the texts. In the event we read two articles during the six-month course. Our reflection here is based on a range of data: videotapes of seminars, copies of candidates’ assignments, portfolio drafts, our formative feedback (recorded) to the candidates, and our analysis of the development manifested in one particular candidate’s assignments and portfolio drafts, through which we examined classroom discussions and the ways she responded to our formative feedback. What follows is an analysis of the assessment work we conducted with Lindiwe, a 49-year-old primary school teacher, whose 22 years of teaching experience included five years as principal of her school. In the analysis of the constitutive aspects of the communication that ensued between Lindiwe and ourselves, we try to avoid otherising or undermining ways of engagement brought by each side. Our analysis works with what Wenger calls ‘fundamental duality’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 65), a conceptual position advocating pedagogy that aims to unveil the presuppositions hidden by the knowledge practice of each side. In this way we try to offer an alternative view to the oppositional and antiacademic stance taken by current research on RPL, dominated by the competence model of pedagogy. We do not believe that furthering the ethical project of RPL is served by the simple antagonism created in the current debate, which fetishises notions such as ‘domination of the academy’ (Michelson, 1996a, 1998) and ‘inequalities of cultural capital’ 432

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(Stuart, 1996; Harris, 2000). In the following we describe some of the productive practices as well as the obstacles that continued to stand in our way, for reasons of the invisible modality of pedagogy used in the course. In his analysis of ‘learning in practice’, Wenger brings to the foreground three dimensions of learning that develop in the course of an ongoing practice (Wenger, 1998, p. 95). He argues that in the process of their engagement in the day-to-day events of the practice, practitioners develop mutual relationships with others in the practice: they learn who can help them in specific situations and how, who co-operates with them and on what conditions, and who it is particularly hard to get on with. Through mutual engagement they develop ways of working together and forms of alignment and accountability, which are developed in order to create a shared understanding of the enterprise. In line with their particular position within the enterprise, practitioners are inserted into a set of meanings to which they have to align their roles and responsibilities, as well as the mode in which they engage with these. The process of attuning to the sense of the practice is very difficult because the meanings of the practice, which are mediated through various interpretations and interests, do not form a coherent and homogenous whole. Lastly, since the core of the activities of a community of practice is formed around a particular enterprise and since the meaning of the enterprise is constantly changing, practitioners find themselves all the time negotiating meanings, inventing new terms and cultural tools, adopting new strategies, and creating new routines. Wenger’s analysis leads towards the claim that, through day-to-day involvement, practitioners cultivate an embedded sense of their practice, and thus develop context-specific, hence responsive, competencies, which are directed towards specific goals: There is a match between knowing and learning, between the nature of competence and the process by which it is acquired, shared, and extended. (Wenger, 1998, p. 102)

From the perspective of the retrospective action this suggests looking for pieces of learning: segmented pieces of knowledge. The role of the assessor here is therapeutic, in the main, praising and identifying certain expressions and statements made by the candidate. From the perspective of the prospective action, however, the segments need to be joined together through the structuring operations of the specialised language of the area, which the candidate is not aware of, but nevertheless makes claim to. The role of the assessor here is to select a conceptual unifier with which to drive the process of construction of a narrative, pointing to what can go together, and in which order and form. We will look at this process more closely, by following some of the steps we took in our work with Lindiwe.

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Lindiwe began articulating her experience in what we termed ‘a private conversation’. She described the difficulties encountered in obtaining her post as principal, describing how she was ‘robbed’, because, although the interview panel chose her as an applicant, the job was given, initially, to a male head of department at the school. She lodged a complaint, made public the documentation of the interview panel and eventually got the job. She described the previous principal as a ‘power-hungry man’ and mentioned the conflicts she has had with him since. She backed her judgement with anecdotes, such as ‘when he was acting vice-principal, he called himself “the principal”!’ Telling this story was negotiated through a few questions, which we and other students addressed to Lindiwe. When she was asked a question, Lindiwe responded by filling in more details and sometimes apologising for not telling the relevant details at the right time. Nevertheless, her main focus was on telling the chain of events that together portrayed ‘the defence’ for her harsh judgement on her colleague. Lindiwe told her story with minimal interruptions from us or from other students. She told it without any particular requirements (criteria) on how to convey the evidence on which her story drew, when it was most needed and what kind of reporting with evidence counted as strong justification. Although our understanding required details that were missing and although the (few) questions she received suggested that order and evidence were too condensed, nevertheless telling her experience of conflict required that she trusted that we heard her story. Too much interruption could have, at this stage of the process, undermined Lindiwe’s story or our mutual care for the problem she shared with us. Telling ‘a story from experience’ was thus a kind of duality between opposites, ‘interruption’ and ‘flow’. A balance was negotiated through what we did not ask, through the silence of what was to remain unchallenged, i.e. that Lindiwe’s not clearly articulated and undeclared perspective on what had happened was trustworthy. To use power and agency terms: the moment of the personal story in the pedagogical discourse of the course was a moment of the academic assessor being the prisoner within the teller’s framework of meaning. The confessional mode controlled us.[5] Our participation in her story was enabled, ironically, on condition that we truncated our specific context (and its history) from which we negotiated her message to us. The balance between ‘flow’ and ‘interruption’ continued to form a very tenuous (and at times even fragile) pedagogical relationship throughout the six months that we worked with Lindiwe on her portfolio. Lindiwe’s selection of the topic ‘Professionalism and Discipline’, with the specific focus on ‘lack of co-operation from a staff member and staff dependence on her constantly pushing from behind’, is meaningful within the learning that evolved in her day-to-day engagements as a school principal. We refer to this as ‘appropriate selection’.[6] Through the

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‘private conversation’, it became clear that Lindiwe was facing difficulties which mattered to her from her vantage point of being a principal in a specific field of practice (teaching and school management) and in a specific historical context (a complex process of transition characterised by teachers’ demoralisation and breakdown of authority relations in many state schools). From this vantage point, Lindiwe stated her goal in writing the portfolio quite explicitly: ‘I should be able to make my teachers do everything without me pushing them from behind.’ With reference to Wenger’s claims about learning in practice, we may assume that Lindiwe’s democratic goal conveyed that, had she been asked, she would have agreed that ‘the practice of running a school, requires (some kind of) “mutual relationships” and “alignment” among the staff and between the staff and her’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 95). We would treat Lindiwe’s ‘democratic goal’ as a segment produced by the retrospective action. The retrospective action continued in Lindiwe’s formal presentation of the first draft of her portfolio. In her formal presentation, Lindiwe created a diagram of concepts, a web of ideas which she presented as the main components of professionalism: • • • • • •

Care Empathy Innovative development Relevance Commitment and involvement Performance

She used these components together with concrete examples to convey her message that ‘teachers do not care’. During her presentation, Lindiwe went through her categories one by one. She did not, in fact, analyse what they meant within a view of professionalism, but rather used them to repeat her message. Her use of this message over-determined the meaning of each category. For example, she did not differentiate between time and context. Lindiwe lumped the last decade’s and today’s teachers together, presenting the government-teacher relationship as a continuum, while ignoring the specific state of emergency in South Africa during the struggle against apartheid in the mid-1980s. She did not specify any reasons why teachers resorted to actions that she categorised as ‘lack of care’. Through the use of the pronoun ‘they’, she positioned teachers as ‘the other’. In condensing the specific meaning of each category into the statement ‘teachers do not care’, she betrayed her aim to create a differentiated picture, suggested by the use of a mind map.[7] Nevertheless, we read the selection of the map artefact as recognition of a boundary. We read the mind map as a positioning device, offered as a ‘boundary object’ (Wenger, p. 106) that conveyed to us not only what Lindiwe knew but also that she recognised preferred ways of knowing. We began negotiating possible symmetry between (our) invisible criteria of

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specialisation and (her) symbolically constructed presence of competence. In our assessment of Lindiwe’s prior learning, we used epistemological means to classify how she knew the components of her message (the different facets of professionalism) and the extent to which she was aware of the relationship between them. The classification was invisible; on the basis of our specialisation we classified what Lindiwe knew. What Lindiwe heard, though, were questions that we (and other students in the group) posed to her. Here is an example of how our invisible act of classification worked: Lindiwe: I know that from 1985 onwards, teachers and students mobilised and went on strike, salaries deducted only from MATU (not TUATA) teachers. In 1989 teachers dumped preparation files at Church Square, SADTU formed in 1990, leading to strikes, no order in schools and pupils idled about, state of Emergency, children taught under surveillance of the police.

We heard this message within the framing device of propositional (empirical) knowledge. Lindiwe gathered empirical data in what she saw as support for her message. She used it to highlight the description of ‘no order in the school’. We, on the other hand, knew these propositions through our knowledge of their historical context. For example we knew that each of the teachers’ unions mentioned by Lindiwe (MATU, TUATA and SADTU) held a very different kind of ideological affiliation, and we understood these affiliations in their context: the political contests which took place at the time in an attempt to win teachers’ collaboration with the anti-apartheid social forces. All this knowledge is put into the background as formal academic knowledge is replaced in portfolio development courses with experiential learning. What that meant is that once Lindiwe’s presentation was completed we could only demand more explanation, more details and more examples. In the context of the above over-determining message of ‘teachers do not care’, we wanted Lindiwe to rethink her selection of empirical data and rearticulate its meaning. We wanted her to reflect on her harsh judgement about teachers today ‘not caring’. We asked her: ‘What do you think: why are teachers not caring, why do they not have empathy, why are pupils “idled about”? Lindiwe: According to my findings, I should think that they are demoralised, about socio-political things that are happening around them, you see. Because there are lots and lots of things. There is that redeployment and people are stressful because there is no money and then others have got their own personal problems and then such things I should think they demoralise them. And moreover, this OBE, it is new to the teachers and the teachers they don’t know it, so when

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they do something which is new, you know, it is a problem again to them.

Our questions elicited another kind of fragmented response about ‘lots and lots of things that demoralise teachers’, but it helped Lindiwe to slowly move to another evaluation: ‘teachers are demoralised’. The removal to the background of our specialisation constrained our educational authority, as we did not have control over the conceptual path Lindiwe was taking. With limited amount of time for ‘prospective’ actions, we did not know how we were going to reposition her fragmented reading of teachers’ struggles during the 1980s. We needed a learning programme to show her the impact of these historical events on teachers’ professional identity today; we needed ‘a correct position’ and ‘a proper methodical stance’ to help her select appropriately one of the two very different conceptions (‘teachers do not care’; ‘teachers are demoralised’) she was holding about teachers. Were we supposed to recognise the presence of empirical data in Lindiwe’s message despite the clear absence of an informed frame (specialised skills of historical/sociological reading)? Another example follows: Lindiwe: A professional should have good morals, prepare work, report to parents, form good relationships with pupils and teachers, take care of and guide pupils, display empathy for clients, be innovative, develop gradually, try different methods, be committed, be involved in work and perform accordingly.

We heard this message with the framing device of propositional knowledge (normative judgement). We knew, from our area of specialisation, that a descriptive statement about ‘what is a professional teacher’ was radically different from a normative judgement on ‘how a professional should behave’. Our area of specialisation also told us that the description of ‘the professional teacher’ is contested in the literature and is shifting in view of specific historical developments in education at large and, more specifically, in relation to the way in which these developments take shape in our young democratic society. We knew that we needed to work on this with Lindiwe, as the difference between normative and descriptive statements is quite fundamental in academic areas of practice. We needed to focus on the above list of labels (things ‘a professional should have’) and transform this list into a web of conceptual meanings that could show the complexity, the ambivalence or even the contradictory relations embodied within the web. We were concerned, though, that Lindiwe’s prescriptive style of writing was not coincidental and might be linked to her leadership style and her nonreflective view of discipline. Could we have separated, in the retrospective act of assessment, problems of mis-recognition (e.g. her unfamiliarity with distinctions that are common to the specific practice of 437

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academic analysis) from personal styles of practice that seemed too authoritarian? From a pedagogical perspective our challenge was to convey our presuppositions (criteria) to Lindiwe and to help her understand the specific meanings that she attached to what we read as autocratic assumptions about school management. We had to do this, though, in a discursive context, which refuses explicit differentiation between knowledge areas and between modes of specialisation, and in which we had very weak control on the sequencing and pacing of the conceptual communication which developed around portfolio writing. Lindiwe’s formal presentation was dominated by a very prescriptive, judgmental style. We asked her to try to discriminate between good and bad teachers, to account for cause and effect by explaining why teachers did not care and to periodise by examining how the attitude of teachers has changed over time. Our central aim here was to regulate what was legitimate to say and what was not. We asked her to account for her perspective: Carola: If you had all the power in the world, where would you begin? You said you want to develop them and you do that by telling them what is expected, so it’s like you’re telling them from an outside authority what they have to do. Then you say code of conduct. That again is something that is expected. Then you expect them to implement. In that process there’s no negotiation. I’m not talking about this particular person that is resistant to you. I’m talking about it as a general approach to motivating teachers ... I mean, Themba said earlier teachers don’t do what is agreed in meetings. So, maybe what you need to think about as part of your portfolio is how do you negotiate with the teachers, how do you persuade, how do you get them to think that it’s their idea? ... At the moment I hear you saying: the department is saying this and so I must pass it on to teachers. I’m not hearing Lindiwe’s power as a principal where you decide how strictly you’re going to implement policy or not.

We asked Lindiwe to guard against hasty generalisation: Carola: I think you’ve got to be much more particular. It’s like maybe start with your problem, maybe say teachers at my school, rather than teachers everywhere. Talk only about your school. Teachers at my school have not done these particular things. I expected these things because ... and then you go into your whole thing about what you think is a professional teacher and what does a professional teacher do, it’s like your ideal ...

Stories dominated Lindiwe’s first three written drafts. The first draft focused on her conflict with her colleague and was dominated by statements such as ‘An HOD is undermining me’; ‘I was accused of financial mismanagement’; ‘Young teachers refuse to sign register’; ‘Exams not collected from the office’; ‘Group of junior phase teachers 438

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work hard’, etc. The second was dominated by ‘self-promotion’ anecdotes which echoed an RPL text, given to the candidates, on how to get a college credit. It seems that Lindiwe translated our requests for more discrimination into more anecdotal information. We felt as if we are drowning in the sheer volume of her anecdotes. Her tone was adversarial, positing an unbridgeable gap between ‘these bad teachers’ and ‘the ideal teachers’. We needed to de-position her prescriptive tone to one of analysis, to place the dichotomy into a gaze from which she could selectively examine and order what she knew with some kind of attunement to ‘the other’. In placing her into a gaze we embarked on the prospective action: we began working on getting Lindiwe to examine the forms, the connectedness and the significance of specific segments which we selected and highlighted in our discussions with her. In other words, we began to position her judgement, to open up issues she saw only partially and to strengthen her relationship to issues she already understood. We did that by imposing a conceptual frame we drew from a very loose reference that she made in one of her very early drafts.[8] We drew on the concepts – ‘social order’, ‘rituals’ and ‘continuity’ – that Lindiwe used as placements for her claim that the culture of learning and teaching was breaking down in her school (and in other schools too) and that teachers did not care. We ‘hooked onto’ these concepts in order to bind the loads of information into a frame that could show how over time (from 1978 to 2000) and in relation to specific historical events (state oppression, the teachers’ struggle, liberation, policy transition and school reform) the ‘authority relations’ between the government and the teachers have changed, and how this affected her as a teacher and as a principal. Our framing was invisible. Only we knew the priority of the meanings of ‘social order’, ‘rituals’ and ‘continuity’ for what Lindiwe wanted to show (i.e., that ‘once teachers respected the principal and now they do what they want and as a result I need to push them from behind all the time’). Only we knew that these meanings were conceptual markers which made meaning from within a specialised language (Bernstein’s sociological description within the larger field of sociology of education). Only we knew (as members of the tradition of the sociological region ‘sociology of education’) that in this specialised language, ‘social order’ is neither a set of prescriptions, nor an empirical set of functions, but rather a pattern of social relations embedded in sets of symbolic meanings. Only we knew that these sets of symbolic meanings position social agents, and that this positioning is an ongoing practice, riddled with conflicts, contradictions and ambiguities, but also a source of continuity. The new frame enabled us to work with Lindiwe on the relationship between ‘order’, ‘discipline’, ‘respect’ and ‘participation’. This enabled her to put together discipline, regulation and autonomy, a relationship

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that seemed odd to her in view of common-sense formulations that tend to position regulation and autonomy as opposites. Slowly, Lindiwe moved away from a very prescriptive engagement with ideas. From dictatorial prescriptions about how a principal should manage and how a teacher should teach, Lindiwe, in her eighth draft, began writing with some measure of descriptive elaboration. Although she was not able to analyse tensions and ambiguities in the role of a principal, she began to describe situations that implied them. It also enabled her to replace her view of professionalism, which was ‘hung on’ her conflicts with colleagues in her school, and to start looking at the context of these conflicts, both in terms of curriculum change and her own ways of involvement as a principal. In her last draft she wrote: The seminars had contributed more on my side. I used to take matters personal [sic] and capitalised on that. For example my first writings were composed of issues concerning conflict between the HOD and myself. Gradually I grew intellectually, I had to focus on my management style of leadership accordingly ... my school is gradually progressing well towards a democratic change.

Nevertheless, the invisibility of the frame continued to throw obstacles in our path. The invisibility here was not about us using terminology that Lindiwe had not come across; it was that neither Lindiwe nor any of the candidates could recognise the web of beliefs from which these concepts were drawn. Dominated by an informal/personalised mode of communication (‘therapeutic’; Bernstein, 1996), the prospective action prevented Lindiwe from having ‘epistemological access’ (Morrow, 1993) to rules of combinations between ideas. This gave rise to a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of traditions. In her writings Lindiwe drew on glimpses of our specialised language to explain the relationship between discipline, regulation and autonomy. She used sociological descriptions of ‘social order’, ‘rituals’ and ‘continuity’, together with discredited conceptions of education (e.g. Fundamental Pedagogy/Christian National Education), and learnercentred conceptions of teaching (very popular in South Africa today) derived from the constructivist approach in Curriculum 2005. In her last draft Lindiwe wrote: From Bernstein I know there are school’s rituals, i.e. instrumental and expressive, which are very important in moulding the child to proper adulthood. The child has to be taught as a whole, i.e. holistically. He has to acquire knowledge, skills and acceptable values and norms. The child as a client has to be treated as an individual according to his or her capabilities as children are unique. [Our emphasis]

Hence, our interactions came from a background of knowledge and followed its criteria, but Lindiwe determined their sequence. Thus the web of beliefs that our interactions were speaking from was enacted, and their criteria were continuously displaced. Although our feedback was 440

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made from a knowledge area with a privileging text, our instructions were segmented and oriented towards skill rather than knowledge. Most of our interactions were referring primarily to academic and writing skills.[9] The ways in which the concepts framed Lindiwe’s knowledge from experience and how were they positioned vis-a-vis more contemporary ideas could not be made into the subject of the discussion. The unspoken deal was that if Lindiwe bought into our framework (followed the structure we suggested), we would use this joining operation to evaluate her on how she used ideas (is she prescriptive or is she explaining?), how she ordered them (is she linking them logically? is she contradicting herself?), how she positioned herself in relation to the events she is describing (can she see that events can be read differently? is she taking another point of view into account?), and so on. Invisible pedagogy gave rise to quite intense interactions when we had to make decisions whether to disclose the discursive contexts of our comments and feedback and how much, without reference to a body of knowledge that could demarcate a privileged set of meanings. That meant that many times the specialised meaning of the instruction was fenced and Lindiwe would therefore apply it technically and thus inappropriately.[10] RPL and Invisible Pedagogy The pedagogy of RPL is situated in a specific, very complex relationship between two distinct fields of knowledge production. The central pedagogical aim of RPL is to enable access and transition from one discursive field to another. Access and transition should focus on attuning candidates to the differentiation of the knowledge area they draw upon (boundary) and the speciality of the context (frame) to which they bring their knowledge. In portfolio-based assessment of experiential learning, in a course that is located in a regional field of knowledge (such as a BEd Honours), the convergence is even more complex. In broad terms, though, the convergence consists of two kinds of histories of learning, each forming its own respective discourse: ‘vocational discourse’ (knowledge from experience) and ‘scholastic discourse’ (knowledge separated from experience).[11] In selecting a portfolio topic, for example, the candidate offers her ‘learning in the practice’ as an object of evaluation for ‘knowledge from experience’ to the assessor, who works in a field in which the dominant modus operandi is formalisation (Bourdieu, 1998). This relation positions the topic as a potential ‘subject matter’. The moment of selecting a topic is thus a dual moment of recognition: it enables recognition of learning in practice but it also repositions this learning into a performance-based assessment. Both the vocational and the scholastic discourses use terms, concepts and representational forms, that is, ‘reifications’ (Wenger,

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1998); both highlight particular foci and tools of conceptual organisation; and in their interface both put into the background (leave implicit) conceptual resources as well as rationales that inform particular modes of engagement. The degree in which each discourse makes its construction explicit is not defined a priori but depends on which enterprise the discourse is interfacing with. An RPL portfolio-based assessment course for access sets up an enterprise of reading, writing and speaking which dictates, in an invisible way, which statements and expressions of ideas will count as abstractions to be used in order to direct, open or close what can be said, when and how. It does this in an invisible way since it signals a low degree of specialisation: it appears to say that all knowledges are equivalent. Although in the process of translation from one discourse to another, the assessor brings a prospective gaze or judgements according to certain rules that matter in her area of specialisation, these remain invisible because the area of specialisation is not taught. It continues to operate only as background knowledge from which the candidate is separated. Below we summarise some ways in which invisible pedagogy constrains the candidate during the process of translation. When the relationships between fields of knowledge (for example, sociology, management and curriculum) are not classified, it is very difficult for candidates to access how ideas are combined and which idea matters most. This gives candidates a semblance of full participation, as it appears that ideas do not have special membership. When the relationship between fields of knowledge is not classified and when a course draws on a range of knowledge areas and their respective disciplines, candidates find it very difficult to position themselves pedagogically. They often do not know what is appropriate to say and when; they often struggle to demarcate between their issues and the specific message of the text. Their participation (by way of concrete examples or looking for the relevance to their situation) has to be positioned continuously. When the demarcation between the scholastic mode of production of knowledge and the everyday vocational mode of production of knowledge is denied, candidates might realise quickly that assessors want them to stop recycling stories (concrete examples) and frame them in a generalised form, but they do not know how to do it. Because the assessor does not control the order, the pacing and the content of the knowledge brought by the portfolio, and because the assessor can only pace and order her teaching in response to the development of the writing, the instructional order continues to be segmented. This makes it difficult for candidates to access the criterion of when not to fetishise that which has to be differentiated. Put simply, they do not know the form in which they present their ideas in the portfolio and its effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) for knowledge production. Furthermore, from the

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perspective of the assessor, reading chunks of life history can be overwhelming and is often met with very fragmented segmental feedback. Therapeutically, the assessor cannot ignore the stories, but performatively, she can only really respect their significance if they form part of a bigger whole. Hence, the assessor often reifies an anecdotal style with an overall structuring action. When the speciality of each field is denied and yet the assessor works with specialised criteria, albeit in an invisible way, candidates have to guess continuously, as in a cat and mouse chase, the discursive context of the feedback they get (e.g. why have they been asked to engage with a specific idea in a specific way?). This is one of the most difficult aspects of invisible pedagogy, as the pedagogical attempt to read across the two fields (to ‘broker’; Wenger, 1998, p. 108) is inhibited by the loose structure of the pedagogy of the course. Messages about structure and order of ideas in a candidate’s portfolio can only be given retrospectively, in attunement to the accent the candidate constructs and the ideas she selects to attune to. This results in multiple submissions of drafts, each sorting out some problems and revealing others that were hidden before. When the candidate does not have a base from which to evaluate what knowledge was selected for the course (why certain meanings are in the foreground and others in the background), the form of the discussion, the order of the course and the assessment of their participation remain invisible and thus real epistemological access is fenced. The degree of invisibility produced by the mix between what appears to be non-specialisation of knowledge (tacit competence) and specialisation of criteria (performance) prevents candidates from knowing the bases of their assessor’s authority: this is, according to Bourdieu, a case of symbolic violence.[12] At the heart of the argument of symbolic violence are the power relations that develop between social agents. But power relations are accentuated or weakened by the degree to which agents can recognise ‘the speciality of the context that they are in’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. 31), or the degree to which criteria are made visible. These two factors, according to Bernstein, who acknowledges Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, shape how learners recognise the key rules of the practice: The markings of the categories, from the point of view of the acquiring subject, provide a set of demarcation criteria for recognising the categories in the variety of their representations. The sets of demarcation criteria provide a basis for the subject to infer recognition rules. The recognition rules regulate what goes with what: what meanings may legitimately be put together, what referential relations, are privileged/privileging (Bernstein, 1990, p. 29)

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The main point here is that the social space of the academic discourse gives primacy to verticality, which is regulated by tools like classification, hierarchisation and integration. What is not obvious is how the power to use these tools is distributed pedagogically. When the pedagogy is predominantly invisible, the candidates and the assessor are continuously negotiating the timing, the order and the legitimacy of what is being said. An extensive degree of invisibility enhances the captivity of both in the discursive background from which they speak, read or write.

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Conclusion One of the main problems with current research on RPL is that advocacy positions (Michelson, 1996c; 1997; 1999; Johnston & Usher, 1997; Edwards & Usher, 1999) tend to lean toward one pole only (the retrospective action of assessment) and in this way deprive the process of recognition of experiential learning of its real academic complexity. Through our examination of the double action of assessment of prior learning we show that the conceptual difference between the two actions and their coexistence cannot be wished away, and that this has complex ramifications on what can be achieved. From a pedagogical perspective, our analysis critically evaluates the capacity of the assessment processes involved in a portfolio-based experiential learning course to transmit clear sets of criteria on what an RPL candidate is required to demonstrate. Our central aim has been to describe the pedagogical complexity hidden in the experiential learning approach advocated for RPL. This complexity arises from the two very different aims which assessors are expected to attain simultaneously: recognition of prior learning and socialisation into a learning programme. We do not doubt the insights that candidates gain when reflecting on their experience. However, we question the value of the pedagogical type that dominates portfolio-based assessment courses, namely the competence type that foregrounds knowledge equivalence and personalised modes of communication and so obscures the criteria of specialisation necessary for access. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the reviewers of for their discerning comments on an earlier draft of this article. Special thanks also to Shirley Pendlebury for her careful reading of the earlier version. Correspondence Yael Shalem, School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, PO Box 3, Johannesburg, South Africa ([email protected]); Carola Steinberg, School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, 444

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PO Box 3, Johannesburg, South Africa (022stein@mentor. edcm.wits.ac.za). Notes [1] The research project arose out of a joint venture between the School of Education and the Joint Education Trust (JET), a research institute and donor agency for educational innovation in South Africa. [2] We would like to thank Lynn Slonimsky for coining these terms for us. [3] Mr Peter Birckmayer, Empire State College, State University of New York. Memo.

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[4] Note the title selected for a paper by one of the ‘founders’ of experiential learning: ‘Experiential Learning: find it, assess it, credit it. What’s the problem?’. See Evans, 1999. [5] In order to maintain trust we could not ask Lindiwe, who had just shared with us the experience of being ‘done in’ by a colleague, any questions that implied criticism of her. It would have been rude to ask whether there was something that she could have done that might have prompted his resistance or to ask her professional colleague (who was also participating in the course) to verify her ‘facts’. [6] There is a difference between a selection of topics made by an ordinary university student and a selection for portfolio engagement made by an RPL candidate. The difference is that an RPL candidate does not have the normal academic access to an authorised set of ideas and texts (i.e., a university course). When selecting a topic an RPL candidate does not know what core issues the enterprise of the academy considers significant, or what subject matter is worth engaging with. [7] In the everyday life of a school principal ‘condensing’ would prove to be an effective action: starting from the judgement that ‘teachers do not care’, a principal can move to producing an overall strategy or set of strategies which aim to attain maximum co-operation. [8] This was a reference to Bernstein’s argument (1975) that rituals in education serve to maintain social order and continuity, in Chapter 2 of Class, Codes and Control: Volume 3. We read the paper in the first half of the course. [9] We pointed to normative tone versus analysis; awareness of dilemmas versus prescriptive tone of analysis; allowing debate; elaboration on meaning; giving details versus analysis; selection in accordance with themes; contradictions between claims; and appropriate application of the text ‘social order’. [10] In Chapter 1 of her portfolio, Lindiwe presented the narrative of her professional development. In our feedback we suggested that she periodise the narrative, so as to highlight the relationships between the stages of her professional development and the historical changes that took place in South Africa in the political struggle against apartheid. This

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Yael Shalem & Carola Steinberg was meant to build up a relationship between professionalism and social order. She then went on to write Chapter 2, which we had agreed would be her vision of a good teacher. She periodised her narrative (1978-85; 1985-95; 1995-2000) and because she did not construct a view of the role of the teacher, her periodisation took her completely off the focus of her writing. She focused on the teachers’ struggle against apartheid and on the political conditions in which teachers work, without any discrimination regarding the role of the teacher. [11] One of our candidates, Mandla, articulated it metaphorically: ‘So does it mean that maybe if she has done something, maybe unconsciously, she has got to go and dig up those things ...’

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[12] Bourdieu argues that: Symbolic power as the power to constitute the given by stating it, to act upon the world by acting upon the representation of the world, does not reside in ‘symbolic systems’ in the form of an ‘illocutionary force’. It is defined in and by a definite relation that creates belief in the legitimacy of the words and of the person who utters, and it operates only inasmuch as those who undergo it recognise those who wield it. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 148)

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