Grade obsession springs from failure fear that also grips professors

Evidence

Fear of losing control in the classroom often leads individual professors to fall into a conventional teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively. It is this fear that leads to collective professorial investment in bourgeois decorum as a means of maintaining a fixed notion of order, of ensuring that the teacher will have absolute authority. Unfortunately, this fear of losing control shapes and informs the professorial pedagogical process to the extent that it acts a barrier preventing any constructive grappling with issues of class. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 377 (#expands, via linked claim)

In The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity, Stephen Ball (2003) describes the reform and standards movement as a process of “re-regulation” (p. 217). This re-regulation of schooling means that not only have curricula and assessments been re-regulated into a system focused primarily on productivity and performance, but the teachers have as well (Ball, 2003). The constant judgment of a teacher’s outward performance, stemming primarily from evaluations that focus on accountability standards, creates a sense of instability and insecurity for the teacher (Ball, 2003). What often results are fabricated performances that exist to meet the standards but result in a loss of the teacher’s inner self (Ball, 2003). These performances do not represent a teacher’s true self, but rather a self that exists to be accountable to the system. As Ball (2003) states, “These technologies (of market, management, and performativity) have potentially profound consequences for the nature of teaching and learning and for the inner-life of the teacher” (p. 226). Thus, as a teacher attends to the outer demands on her performance, she loses a connection to her inner self and her inner energy—the energy behind her reason for becoming an educator. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 675 (#expands, via linked claim)

So much of intellectual and activist life today is about credit claiming. I do it; I’ve done it repeatedly in these pages. I wrote that. I said that. That’s my phrase. My buzzword. My hashtag. I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column—“as I wrote here [link] and here [link].” Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: “As I wrote here” … “See my earlier tweet” … “Just bumping this up.” We have to do it, or so many of us believe—we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 221 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fear of losing student respect drives professors back to traditional teaching — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 274; Professors’ fear of losing control blocks any class critique in the classroom — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 377; Intellectual culture’s self-citing stems from a fear of being forgotten — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 221 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Professors’ fear of losing control blocks any class critique in the classroom #expands (0.78) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 377
• Accountability-driven evaluation forces teachers into fabricated performances that erode their sense of self #expands (0.75) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 675
• Intellectual culture’s self-citing stems from a fear of being forgotten #expands (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 221