Grit: I can do nothing for you, son

from Quartz at Work magazine

 

Grit is on the up. You may have come across articles like ‘How to Be Gritty in the Time of COVID-19’ or ‘Rediscovering the meaning of grit during COVID-19’ . If you still want more, there are new videos from Angela Duckworth herself where we can learn how to find our grit in the face of the pandemic.

Schools and educational authorities love grit. Its simple, upbeat message (‘Yes, you can’) has won over hearts and minds. Back in 2014, the British minister for education announced a £5million plan to encourage teaching ‘character and resilience’ in schools – specifically looking at making Britain’s pupils ‘grittier’. The spending on grit hasn’t stopped since.

The publishers of Duckworth’s book paid a seven-figure sum to acquire the US rights, and sales have proved the wisdom of the investment. Her TED talk has had over 6.5 million views on YouTube, although it’s worth looking at the comments to see why many people have been watching it.

The world of English language teaching, always on the lookout for a new bandwagon to jump onto, is starting to catch up with the wider world of education. Luke Plonsky, an eminent SLA scholar, specialist in meta-analyses and grit enthusiast, has a bibliography of grit studies related to L2 learning, that he deems worthy of consideration. Here’s a summary, by year, of those publications. More details will follow in the next section.

We can expect interest in ‘grit’ to continue growing, and this may be accelerated by the publication this year of Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms by Sarah Mercer and Zoltán Dörnyei. In this book, the authors argue that a ‘facilitative mindset’ is required for learner engagement. They enumerate five interrelated principles for developing a ‘facilitative mindset’: promote a sense of competence, foster a growth mindset, promote learners’ sense of ownership and control, develop proactive learners and, develop gritty learners. After a brief discussion of grit, they write: ‘Thankfully, grit can be learnt and developed’ (p.38).

Unfortunately, they don’t provide any evidence at all for this. Unfortunately, too, this oversight is easy to explain. Such evidence as there is does not lend unequivocal support to the claim. Two studies that should have been mentioned in this book are ‘Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature’ (Credé et al, 2017) and ‘What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know’ (Credé, 2018). The authors found that ‘grit as it is currently measured does not appear to be particularly predictive of success and performance’ (Credé et al, 2017) and that there is no support for the claim that ‘grit is likely to be responsive to interventions’ (Credé, 2018). In the L2 learning context, Teimouri et al (2020) concluded that more research in SLA substantiating the role of grit in L2 contexts was needed before any grit interventions can be recommended.

It has to be said that such results are hardly surprising. If, as Duckworth claims, ‘grit’ is a combination of passion and persistence, how on earth can the passion part of it be susceptible to educational interventions? ‘If there is one thing that cannot be learned, it’s passion. A person can have it and develop it, but learn it? Sadly, not’. (De Bruyckere et al., 2020: 83)

Even Duckworth herself is not convinced. In an interview on a Freakonomics podcast, she states that she hopes it’s something people can learn, but also admits not having enough proof to confirm that they can (Kirschner & Neelen, 2016)!

Is ‘grit’ a thing?

Marc Jones, in a 2016 blog post entitled ‘Gritty Politti: Grit, Growth Mindset and Neoliberal Language Teaching’, writes that ‘Grit is so difficult to define that it takes Duckworth (2016) the best part of a book to describe it adequately’. Yes, ‘grit’ is passion and persistence (or perseverance), but it’s also conscientiousness, practice and hope. Credé et al (2017) found that ‘grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness’ (which has already been widely studied in the educational literature). Why lump this together with passion? Another study (Muenks et al., 2017) found that ‘Students’ grit overlapped empirically with their concurrently reported self-control, self-regulation, and engagement. Students’ perseverance of effort (but not their consistency of interests) predicted their later grades, although other self-regulation and engagement variables were stronger predictors of students’ grades than was grit’. Credé (2018) concluded that ‘there appears to be no reason to accept the combination of perseverance and passion for long-term goals into a single grit construct’.

The L2 learning research listed in Plonsky’s bibliography does not offer much in support of ‘grit’, either. Many of the studies identified problems with ‘grit’ as a construct, but, even when accepting it, did not find it to be of much value. Wei et al. (2019) found a positive but weak correlation between grit and English language course grades. Yamashita (2018) found no relationship between learners’ grit and their course grades. Taşpinar & Külekçi (2018) found that students’ grit levels and academic achievement scores did not relate to each other (but still found that ‘grit, perseverance, and tenacity are the essential elements that impact learners’ ability to succeed to be prepared for the demands of today’s world’!).

There are, then, grounds for suspecting that Duckworth and her supporters have fallen foul of the ‘jangle fallacy’ – the erroneous assumption that two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labelled differently. This would also help to explain the lack of empirical support for the notion of ‘grit’. Not only are the numerous variables insufficiently differentiated, but the measures of ‘grit’ (such as Duckworth’s Grit-S measure) do not adequately target some of these variables (e.g. long-term goals, where ‘long-term’ is not defined) (Muenks et al., 2017). In addition, these measures are self-reporting and not, therefore, terribly reliable.

Referring to more general approaches to character education, one report (Gutman & Schoon, 2012) has argued that there is little empirical evidence of a causal relationship between self-concept and educational outcomes. Taking this one step further, Kathryn Ecclestone (Ecclestone, 2012) suggests that at best, the concepts and evidence that serve as the basis of these interventions are inconclusive and fragmented; ‘at worst, [they are] prey to ‘advocacy science’ or, in [their] worst manifestations, to simple entrepreneurship that competes for publicly funded interventions’ (cited in Cabanas & Illouz, 2019: 80).

Criticisms of ‘grit’

Given the lack of supporting research, any practical application of ‘grit’ ideas is premature. Duckworth herself, in an article entitled ‘Don’t Believe the Hype About Grit, Pleads the Scientist Behind the Concept’ (Dahl, 2016), cautions against hasty applications:

[By placing too much emphasis on grit, the danger is] that grit becomes a scapegoat — another reason to blame kids for not doing well, or to say that we don’t have a responsibility as a society to help them. [She worries that some interpretations of her work might make a student’s failure seem like his problem, as if he just didn’t work hard enough.] I think to separate and pit against each other character strengths on the one hand — like grit — and situational opportunities on the other is a false dichotomy […] Kids need to develop character, and they need our support in doing so.

Marc Jones, in the blog mentioned above, writes that ‘to me, grit is simply another tool for attacking the poor and the other’. You won’t win any prizes for guessing which kinds of students are most likely to be the targets of grit interventions. A clue: think of the ‘no-nonsense’ charters in the US and academies in the UK. This is what Kenneth Saltzman has to say:

‘Grit’ is a pedagogy of control that is predicated upon a promise made to poor children that if they learnt the tools of self-control and learnt to endure drudgery, then they can compete with rich children for scarce economic resources. (Saltzman, 2017: 38)

[It] is a behaviourist form of learned self-control targeting poor students of color and has been popularized post-crisis in the wake of educational privatization and defunding as the cure for poverty. [It] is designed to suggest that individual resilience and self-reliance can overcome social violence and unsupportive social contexts in the era of the shredded social state. (Saltzman, 2017: 15)

Grit is misrepresented by proponents as opening a world of individual choices rather than discussed as a mode of educational and social control in the austere world of work defined by fewer and fewer choices as secure public sector work is scaled back, unemployment continuing at high levels. (Saltzman, 2017: 49)

Whilst ‘grit’ is often presented as a way of dealing with structural inequalities in schools, critics see it as more of a problem than a solution: ‘It’s the kids who are most impacted by, rebel against, or criticize the embedded racism and classism of their institutions that are being told to have more grit, that school is hard for everyone’ (EquiTEA, 2018). A widely cited article by Nicholas Tampio (2016) points out that ‘Duckworth celebrates educational models such as Beast at West Point that weed out people who don’t obey orders’. He continues ‘that is a disastrous model for education in a democracy. US schools ought to protect dreamers, inventors, rebels and entrepreneurs – not crush them in the name of grit’.

If you’re interested in reading more critics of grit, the blog ‘Debunked!’ is an excellent source of links.

Measuring grit

Analyses of emotional behaviour have become central to economic analysis and, beginning in the 1990s, there have been constant efforts to create ‘formal instruments of classification of emotional behaviour and the elaboration of the notion of emotional competence’ (Illouz, 2007: 64). The measurement and manipulation of various aspects of ‘emotional intelligence’ have become crucial as ways ‘to control, predict, and boost performance’ (Illouz, 2007: 65). An article in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Belfield et al., 2015) makes the economic importance of emotions very clear. Entitled ‘The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning’, it examines the economic value of these skills within a benefit-cost analysis (BCA) framework, and finds that the benefits of [social and emotional learning] interventions substantially outweigh the costs.

In recent years, the OECD has commissioned a number of reports on social and emotional learning and, as with everything connected with the OECD, is interested in measuring ‘non-cognitive skills such as perseverance (“grit”), conscientiousness, self-control, trust, attentiveness, self-esteem and self-efficacy, resilience to adversity, openness to experience, empathy, humility, tolerance of diverse opinions and the ability to engage productively in society’ (Kautz et al., 2014: 9). The measurement of personality factors will feature in the OECD’s PISA programme. Elsewhere, Ben Williamson reports that ‘US schools [are] now under pressure—following the introduction of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015—to provide measurable evidence of progress on the development of students’ non-academic learning’ (Williamson, 2017).

Grit, which ‘starts and ends with the lone individual as economic actor, worker, and consumer’ (Saltzman, 2017: 50), is a recent addition to the categories of emotional competence, and it should come as no surprise that educational authorities have so wholeheartedly embraced it. It is the claim that something (i.e. ‘grit’) can be taught and developed that leads directly to the desire to measure it. In a world where everything must be accountable, we need to know how effective and cost-effective our grit interventions have been.

The idea of measuring personality constructs like ‘grit’ worries even Angela Duckworth. She writes (Duckworth, 2016):

These days, however, I worry I’ve contributed, inadvertently, to an idea I vigorously oppose: high-stakes character assessment. New federal legislation can be interpreted as encouraging states and schools to incorporate measures of character into their accountability systems. This year, nine California school districts will begin doing this. But we’re nowhere near ready — and perhaps never will be — to use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers and schools. We shouldn’t be rewarding or punishing schools for how students perform on these measures.

Diane Ravitch (Ravitch, 2016) makes the point rather more forcefully: ‘The urge to quantify the unmeasurable must be recognized for what it is: stupid; arrogant; harmful; foolish, yet another way to standardize our beings’. But, like it or not, attempts to measure ‘grit’ and ‘grit’ interventions are unlikely to go away any time soon.

‘Grit’ and technology

Whenever there is talk about educational measurement and metrics, we are never far away from the world of edtech. It may not have escaped your notice that the OECD and the US Department of State for Education, enthusiasts for promoting ‘grit’, are also major players in the promotion of the datafication of education. The same holds true for organisations like the World Education Forum, the World Bank and the various philanthro-capitalist foundations to which I have referred so often in this blog. Advocacy of social and emotional learning goes hand in hand with edtech advocacy.

Two fascinating articles by Ben Williamson (2017; 2019) focus on ClassDojo, which, according to company information, reaches more than 10 million children globally every day. The founding directors of ClassDojo, writes Ben Williamson (2017), ‘explicitly describe its purpose as promoting ‘character development’ in schools and it is underpinned by particular psychological concepts from character research. Its website approvingly cites the journalist Paul Tough, author of two books on promoting ‘grit’ and ‘character’ in children, and is informed by character research conducted with the US network of KIPP charter schools (Knowledge is Power Program)’. In a circular process, ClassDojo has also ‘helped distribute and popularise concepts such as growth mindset, grit and mindfulness’ (Williamson, 2019).

The connections between ‘grit’ and edtech are especially visible when we focus on Stanford and Silicon Valley. ClassDojo was born in Palo Alto. Duckworth was a consulting scholar at Stanford 2014 -15, where Carol Dweck is a Professor of Psychology. Dweck is the big name behind growth mindset theory, which, as Sarah Mercer and Zoltán Dörnyei indicate, is closely related to ‘grit’. Dweck is also the co-founder of MindsetWorks, whose ‘Brainology’ product is ‘an online interactive program in which middle school students learn about how the brain works, how to strengthen their own brains, and how to ….’. Stanford is also home to the Stanford Lytics Lab, ‘which has begun applying new data analytics techniques to the measurement of non-cognitive learning factors including perseverance, grit, emotional state, motivation and self-regulation’, as well as the Persuasive Technologies Lab, ‘which focuses on the development of machines designed to influence human beliefs and behaviors across domains including health, business, safety, and education’ (Williamson, 2017). The Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford is Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the most influential educators in the US. Darling-Hammond is known, among many other things, for collaborating with Pearson to develop the edTPA, ‘a nationally available, performance-based assessment for measuring the effectiveness of teacher candidates’. She is also a strong advocate of social-emotional learning initiatives and extols the virtues of ‘developing grit and a growth mindset’ (Hamadi & Darling-Hammond, 2015).

The funding of grit

Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab (‘Our mission is to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive’) is funded by, among others, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Bezos Family Foundation and Stanford’s Mindset Scholars Network. Precisely how much money Character Lab has is difficult to ascertain, but the latest grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was worth $1,912,000 to cover the period 2018 – 2021. Covering the same period, the John Templeton Foundation, donated $3,717,258 , the purpose of the grant being to ‘make character development fast, frictionless, and fruitful’.

In an earlier period (2015 – 2018), the Walton Family Foundation pledged $6.5 million ‘to promote and measure character education, social-emotional learning, and grit’, with part of this sum going to Character Lab and part going to similar research at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Character Lab also received $1,300,000 from the Overdeck Family Foundation for the same period.

It is not, therefore, an overstatement to say that ‘grit’ is massively funded. The funders, by and large, are the same people who have spent huge sums promoting personalized learning through technology (see my blog post Personalized learning: Hydra and the power of ambiguity). Whatever else it might be, ‘grit’ is certainly ‘a commercial tech interest’ (as Ben Williamson put it in a recent tweet).

Postscript

In the 2010 Cohen brothers’ film, ‘True Grit’, the delinquent ‘kid’, Moon, is knifed by his partner, Quincy. Turning to Rooster Cogburn, the man of true grit, Moon begs for help. In response, Cogburn looks at the dying kid and deadpans ‘I can do nothing for you, son’.

References

Belfield, C., Bowden, A., Klapp, A., Levin, H., Shand, R., & Zander, S. (2015). The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 6(3), pp. 508-544. doi:10.1017/bca.2015.55

Cabanas, E. & Illouz, E. (2019). Manufacturing Happy Citizens. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chaykowski, K. (2017). How ClassDojo Built One Of The Most Popular Classroom Apps By Listening To Teachers. Forbes, 22 May, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/05/22/how-classdojo-built-one-of-the-most-popular-classroom-apps-by-listening-to-teachers/#ea93d51e5ef5

Credé, M. (2018). What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47(9), 606-611.

Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492. doi:10.1037/pspp0000102

Dahl, M. (2016). Don’t Believe the Hype About Grit, Pleads the Scientist Behind the Concept. The Cut, May 9, 2016. https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/dont-believe-the-hype-about-grit-pleads-the-scientist-behind-the-concept.html

De Bruyckere, P., Kirschner, P. A. & Hulshof, C. (2020). More Urban Myths about Learning and Education. Routledge.

Duckworth, A. (2016). Don’t Grade Schools on Grit. New York Times, March 26, 2016 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/opinion/sunday/dont-grade-schools-on-grit.html?auth=login-google&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad

Ecclestone, K. (2012). From emotional and psychological well-being to character education: Challenging policy discourses of behavioural science and ‘vulnerability’. Research Papers in Education, 27 (4), pp. 463-480

EquiTEA (2018). The Problem with Teaching ‘Grit’. Medium, 11 December 2018. https://medium.com/@eec/the-problem-with-teaching-grit-8b37ce43a87e

Gutman, L. M. & Schoon, I. (2013). The impact of non-cognitive skills on outcomes for young people: Literature review. London: Institute of Education, University of London

Hamedani, M. G. & Darling-Hammond, L. (2015). Social Emotional Learning in High School: How Three Urban High Schools Engage, Educate, and Empower Youth. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

Kirschner, P.A. & Neelen, M. (2016). To Grit Or Not To Grit: That’s The Question. 3-Star Learning Experiences, July 5, 2016 https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/to-grit-or-not-to-grit-thats-the-question/

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press

Kautz, T., Heckman, J. J., Diris, R., ter Weel, B & Borghans, L. (2014). Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success. OECD Education Working Papers 110, OECD Publishing.

Mercer, S. & Dörnyei, Z. (2020). Engaging Language Learners in Contemporary Classrooms. Cambridge University Press.

Muenks, K., Wigfield, A., Yang, J. S., & O’Neal, C. R. (2017). How true is grit? Assessing its relations to high school and college students’ personality characteristics, self-regulation, engagement, and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109, pp. 599–620.

Ravitch, D. (2016). Angela Duckworth, please don’t assess grit. Blog post, 27 March 2016, https://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/27/angela-duckworth-please-dont-assess-grit/

Saltzman, K. J. (2017). Scripted Bodies. Routledge.

Tampio, N. (2016). Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy. Aeon, 2 June: https://aeon.co/ideas/teaching-grit-is-bad-for-children-and-bad-for-democracy

Taşpinar, K., & Külekçi, G. (2018). GRIT: An Essential Ingredient of Success in the EFL Classroom. International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching, 6, 208-226.

Teimouri, Y., Plonsky, L., & Tabandeh, F. (2020). L2 Grit: Passion and perseverance for second-language learning. Language Teaching Research.

Wei, H., Gao, K., & Wang, W. (2019). Understanding the relationship between grit and foreign language performance among middle schools students: The roles of foreign language enjoyment and classroom Environment. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1508. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01508

Williamson, B. (2017). Decoding ClassDojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies. Learning, Media and Technology, 42 (4): pp. 440-453, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2017.1278020

Williamson, B. (2019). ‘Killer Apps for the Classroom? Developing Critical Perspectives on ClassDojo and the ‘Ed-tech’ Industry. Journal of Professional Learning, 2019 (Semester 2) https://cpl.asn.au/journal/semester-2-2019/killer-apps-for-the-classroom-developing-critical-perspectives-on-classdojo

Yamashita, T. (2018). Grit and second language acquisition: Can passion and perseverance predict performance in Japanese language learning? Unpublished MA thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

 

ELT as an Industry

by Philip Kerr & Andrew Wickham

from IATEFL 2016 Birmingham Conference Selections (ed. Tania Pattison) Faversham, Kent: IATEFL pp. 75 – 78

ELT publishing, international language testing and private language schools are all industries: products are produced, bought and sold for profit. English language teaching (ELT) is not. It is an umbrella term that is used to describe a range of activities, some of which are industries, and some of which (such as English teaching in high schools around the world) might better be described as public services. ELT, like education more generally, is, nevertheless, often referred to as an ‘industry’.

Education in a neoliberal world

The framing of ELT as an industry is both a reflection of how we understand the term and a force that shapes our understanding. Associated with the idea of ‘industry’ is a constellation of other ideas and words (such as efficacy, productivity, privatization, marketization, consumerization, digitalization and globalization) which become a part of ELT once it is framed as an industry. Repeated often enough, ‘ELT as an industry’ can become a metaphor that we think and live by. Those activities that fall under the ELT umbrella, but which are not industries, become associated with the desirability of industrial practices through such discourse.

The shift from education, seen as a public service, to educational managerialism (where education is seen in industrial terms with a focus on efficiency, free market competition, privatization and a view of students as customers) can be traced to the 1980s and 1990s (Gewirtz, 2001). In 1999, under pressure from developed economies, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) transformed education into a commodity that could be traded like any other in the marketplace (Robertson, 2006). The global industrialisation and privatization of education continues to be promoted by transnational organisations (such as the World Bank and the OECD), well-funded free-market think-tanks (such as the Cato Institute), philanthro-capitalist foundations (such as the Gates Foundation) and educational businesses (such as Pearson) (Ball, 2012).

Efficacy and learning outcomes

Managerialist approaches to education require educational products and services to be measured and compared. In ELT, the most visible manifestation of this requirement is the current ubiquity of learning outcomes. Contemporary coursebooks are full of ‘can-do’ statements, although these are not necessarily of any value to anyone. Examples from one unit of one best-selling course include ‘Now I can understand advice people give about hotels’ and ‘Now I can read an article about unique hotels’ (McCarthy et al. 2014: 74). However, in a world where accountability is paramount, they are deemed indispensable. The problem from a pedagogical perspective is that teaching input does not necessarily equate with learning uptake. Indeed, there is no reason why it should.

Drawing on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for inspiration, new performance scales have emerged in recent years. These include the Cambridge English Scale and the Pearson Global Scale of English. Moving away from the broad six categories of the CEFR, such scales permit finer-grained measurement and we now see individual vocabulary and grammar items tagged to levels. Whilst such initiatives undoubtedly support measurements of efficacy, the problem from a pedagogical perspective is that they assume that language learning is linear and incremental, as opposed to complex and jagged.

Given the importance accorded to the measurement of language learning (or what might pass for language learning), it is unsurprising that attention is shifting towards the measurement of what is probably the most important factor impacting on learning: the teaching. Teacher competency scales have been developed by Cambridge Assessment, the British Council and EAQUALS (Evaluation and Accreditation of Quality Language Services), among others.

The backwash effects of the deployment of such scales are yet to be fully experienced, but the likely increase in the perception of both language learning and teacher learning as the synthesis of granularised ‘bits of knowledge’ is cause for concern.

Digital technology

Digital technology may offer advantages to both English language teachers and learners, but its rapid growth in language learning is the result, primarily but not exclusively, of the way it has been promoted by those who stand to gain financially. In education, generally, and in English language teaching, more specifically, advocacy of the privatization of education is always accompanied by advocacy of digitalization. The global market for digital English language learning products was reported to be $2.8 billion in 2015 and is predicted to reach $3.8 billion by 2020 (Ambient Insight, 2016).

In tandem with the increased interest in measuring learning outcomes, there is fierce competition in the market for high-stakes examinations, and these are increasingly digitally delivered and marked. In the face of this competition and in a climate of digital disruption, companies like Pearson and Cambridge English are developing business models of vertical integration where they can provide and sell everything from placement testing, to courseware (either print or delivered through an LMS), teaching, assessment and teacher training. Huge investments are being made in pursuit of such models. Pearson, for example, recently bought GlobalEnglish, Wall Street English, and set up a partnership with Busuu, thus covering all aspects of language learning from resources provision and publishing to off- and online training delivery.

As regards assessment, the most recent adult coursebook from Cambridge University Press (in collaboration with Cambridge English Language Assessment), ‘Empower’ (Doff, et. Al, 2015) sells itself on a combination of course material with integrated, validated assessment.

Besides its potential for scalability (and therefore greater profit margins), the appeal (to some) of platform-delivered English language instruction is that it facilitates assessment that is much finer-grained and actionable in real time. Digitization and testing go hand in hand.

Few English language teachers have been unaffected by the move towards digital. In the state sectors, large-scale digitization initiatives (such as the distribution of laptops for educational purposes, the installation of interactive whiteboards, the move towards blended models of instruction or the move away from printed coursebooks) are becoming commonplace. In the private sectors, online (or partially online) language schools are taking market share from the traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.

These changes have entailed modifications to the skill-sets that teachers need to have. Two announcements at this conference reflect this shift. First of all, Cambridge English launched their ‘Digital Framework for Teachers’, a matrix of six broad competency areas organised into four levels of proficiency. Secondly, Aqueduto, the Association for Quality Education and Training Online, was launched, setting itself up as an accreditation body for online or blended teacher training courses.

Teachers’ pay and conditions

In the United States, and likely soon in the UK, the move towards privatization is accompanied by an overt attack on teachers’ unions, rights, pay and conditions (Selwyn, 2014). As English language teaching in both public and private sectors is commodified and marketized it is no surprise to find that the drive to bring down costs has a negative impact on teachers worldwide. Gwynt (2015), for example, catalogues cuts in funding, large-scale redundancies, a narrowing of the curriculum, intensified workloads (including the need to comply with ‘quality control measures’), the deskilling of teachers, dilapidated buildings, minimal resources and low morale in an ESOL department in one British further education college. In France, a large-scale study by Wickham, Cagnol, Wright and Oldmeadow (Linguaid, 2015; Wright, 2016) found that EFL teachers in the very competitive private sector typically had multiple employers, limited or no job security, limited sick pay and holiday pay, very little training and low hourly rates that were deteriorating. One of the principle drivers of the pressure on salaries is the rise of online training delivery through Skype and other online platforms, using offshore teachers in low-cost countries such as the Philippines. This type of training represents 15% in value and up to 25% in volume of all language training in the French corporate sector and is developing fast in emerging countries. These examples are illustrative of a broad global trend.

Implications

Given the current climate, teachers will benefit from closer networking with fellow professionals in order, not least, to be aware of the rapidly changing landscape. It is likely that they will need to develop and extend their skill sets (especially their online skills and visibility and their specialised knowledge), to differentiate themselves from competitors and to be able to demonstrate that they are in tune with current demands. More generally, it is important to recognise that current trends have yet to run their full course. Conditions for teachers are likely to deteriorate further before they improve. More than ever before, teachers who want to have any kind of influence on the way that marketization and industrialization are shaping their working lives will need to do so collectively.

References

Ambient Insight. 2016. The 2015-2020 Worldwide Digital English Language Learning Market. http://www.ambientinsight.com/Resources/Documents/AmbientInsight_2015-2020_Worldwide_Digital_English_Market_Sample.pdf

Ball, S. J. 2012. Global Education Inc. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Doff, A., Thaine, C., Puchta, H., Stranks, J. and P. Lewis-Jones 2015. Empower. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gewirtz, S. 2001. The Managerial School: Post-welfarism and Social Justice in Education. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Gwynt, W. 2015. ‘The effects of policy changes on ESOL’. Language Issues 26 / 2: 58 – 60

McCarthy, M., McCarten, J. and H. Sandiford 2014. Touchstone 2 Student’s Book Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Linguaid, 2015. Le Marché de la Formation Langues à l’Heure de la Mondialisation. Guildford: Linguaid

Robertson, S. L. 2006. ‘Globalisation, GATS and trading in education services.’ published by the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK at http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/people/academicStaff/edslr/publications/04slr

Selwyn, N. 2014. Distrusting Educational Technology. New York: Routledge

Wright, R. 2016. ‘My teacher is rich … or not!’ English Teaching Professional 103: 54 – 56

 

 

Boosterism and doomsterism

Back in the Neanderthal days before Web 2.0, iPhones, tablets, the cloud, learning analytics and so on, Chris Bigum and Jane Kenway wrote a paper called ‘New Information Technologies and the Ambiguous Future of Schooling’. Although published in 1998, it remains relevant and can be accessed here.

They analysed the spectrum of discourse that was concerned with new technologies in education. At one end of this spectrum was a discourse community which they termed ‘boosters’. Then, as now, the boosters were far and away the dominant voices. Bigum and Kenway characterized the boosters as having an ‘unswerving faith in the technology’s capacity to improve education and most other things in society’. I discussed the boosterist discourse in my post on this blog, ‘Saving the World (adaptive marketing)’, focussing on the language of Knewton, as a representative example.

At the other end of Bigum and Kenway’s spectrum was what they termed ‘doomsters’ – ‘unqualified opponents of new technologies’ who see inevitable damage to society and education if we uncritically accept these new technologies.

Since starting this blog, I have been particularly struck by two things. The first of these is that I have had to try to restrain my aversion to the excesses of boosterist discourse – not always, it must be said, with complete success. The second is that I have found myself characterized by some people (perhaps those who have only superficially read a post of two) as an anti-technology doomsterist. At the same time, I have noticed that the debate about adaptive learning and educational technology, in general, tends to become polarized into booster and doomster camps.

To some extent, such polarization is inevitable. When a discourse is especially dominant, anyone who questions it risks finding themselves labelled as the extreme opposite. In some parts of the world, for example, any critique of neoliberal doxa is likely to be critiqued, in its turn, as ‘socialist, or worse’: ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’.

When it comes to adaptive learning, one can scoff at the adspeak of Knewton or the gapfills of Voxy, without having a problem with the technology per se. But, given the dominance of the booster discourse, one can’t really be neutral. Neil Selwyn (yes, him again!) suggests that the best way of making full sense of educational technology is to adopt a pessimistic perspective. ‘If nothing else,’ he writes, ‘a pessimistic view remains true to the realities of what has actually taken place with regards to higher education and digital technology over the past thirty years (to be blunt, things have clearly not been transformed or improved by digital technology so far, so why should we expect anything different in the near future?)’. This is not an ‘uncompromising pessimism’, but ‘a position akin to Gramsci’s notion of being ‘a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will’’.

Note: The quotes from Neil Selwyn here are taken from his new book Digital Technology and the Contemporary University (2014, Abingdon: Routledge). In the autumn of this year, there will be an online conference, jointly organised by the Learning Technologies and Global Issues Special Interest Groups of IATEFL, during which I will be interviewing Neil Selwyn. I’ll keep you posted.

EdTech and neo-liberalism: fragment of a network

In Part 9 of the ‘guide’ on this blog (neo-liberalism and solutionism), I suggested that the major advocates of adaptive learning form a complex network of vested neo-liberal interests. Along with adaptive learning and the digital delivery of educational content, they promote a free-market, for-profit, ‘choice’-oriented (charter schools in the US and academies in the UK) ideology. The discourses of these advocates are explored in a fascinating article by Neil Selwyn, ‘Discourses of digital ‘disruption’ in education: a critical analysis’ which can be accessed here.

Stephen Ball includes a detailed chart of this kind of network in his ‘Global Education Inc.’ (Routledge 2012). I thought it would be interesting to attempt a similar, but less ambitious, chart of my own. Sugata Mitra’s plenary talk at the IATEFL conference yesterday has generated a lot of discussion, so I thought it would be interesting to focus on him. What such charts demonstrate very clearly is that there is a very close interlinking between EdTech advocacy and a wider raft of issues on the neo-liberal wish list. Adaptive learning developments (or, for example, schools in the cloud) need to be understood in a broader context … in the same way that Mitra, Tooley, Gates et al understand these technologies.

In order to understand the chart, you will need to look at the notes below. Many more nodes could be introduced, but I have tried my best to keep things simple. All of the information here is publicly available, but I found Stephen Ball’s work especially helpful.

People

Bill Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

James Tooley is the Director of the E.G. West Centre. He is a founder of the Educare Trust, founder and chairman of Omega Schools, president of Orient Global, chairman of Rumi School of Excellence, and a former consultant to the International Finance Corporation. He is also a member of the advisory council of the Institute of Economic Affairs and was responsible for creating the Education and Training Unit at the Institute.

Michael Barber is Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor and Chairman of Pearson’s $15 million Affordable Learning Fund. He is also an advisor on ‘deliverology’ to the International Finance Corporation.

Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the E.G. West Centre and he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT. He is best known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment. In 2013, he won the $1 million TED Prize to develop his idea of a ‘school-in-the-cloud’.

Institutions

Hiwel (Hole-in-the-Wall Education Limited) is the company behind Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiment. It is a subsidiary of NIIT.

NIIT Limited is an Indian company based in Gurgaon, India that operates several for-profit higher education institutions.

Omega Schools is a privately held chain of affordable, for-profit schools based in Ghana.There are currently 38 schools educating over 20,000 students.

Orient Global is a Singapore-based investment group, which bought a $48 million stake in NIIT.

Pearson is … Pearson. Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund was set up to invest in private companies committed to innovative approaches. Its first investment was a stake in Omega Schools.

Rumi Schools of Excellence is Orient Global’s chain of low-cost private schools in India, which aims to extend access and improve educational quality through affordable private schooling.

School-in-the-cloud is described by Mitra as’ a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online’. Microsoft are the key sponsors.

The E.G. West Centre of the University of Newcastle is dedicated to generating knowledge and understanding about how markets and self organising systems work in education.

The Educare Trustis a non-profit agency, formed in 2002 by Professor James Tooley of the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, and other members associated with private unaided schools in India.It is advised by an international team from the University of Newcastle. It services include the running of a loan scheme for schools to improve their infrastructure and facilities.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a right-wing free market think tank in London whose stated mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The International Finance Corporation is an international financial institution which offers investment, advisory, and asset management services to encourage private sector development in developing countries. The IFC is a member of the World Bank Group.

The Templeton Foundation is a philanthropic organization that funds inter-disciplinary research about human purpose and ultimate reality. Described by Barbara Ehrenreich as a ‘right wing venture’, it has a history of supporting the Cato Institute (publishers of Tooley’s most well-known book) , a libertarian think-tank, as well as projects at major research centers and universities that explore themes related to free market economics.

Additional connections

Barber is an old friend of Tooley’s from when both men were working in Zimbabwe in the 1990s.

Omega Schools are taking part in Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize Schools in the Cloud project.

Omega Schools use textbooks developed by Pearson.

Orient Global sponsored an Education Development fund at Newcastle University. The project leaders were Tooley and Mitra. They also sponsored the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment.

Pearson, the Pearson Foundation, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation work closely together on a wide variety of projects.

Some of Tooley’s work for the Educare Trust was funded by the Templeton Trust. Tooley was also winner of the 2006 Templeton Freedom Prize for Excellence.

The International Finance Corporation and the Gates Foundation are joint sponsors of a $60 million project to improve health in Nigeria.

The International Finance Corporation was another sponsor of the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment.

Part 9: neo-liberalism and solutionism

The drive towards adaptive learning is being fuelled less by individual learners or teachers than it is by commercial interests, large educational institutions and even larger agencies, including national governments. How one feels about adaptive learning is likely to be shaped by one’s beliefs about how education should be managed.

Huge amounts of money are at stake. Education is ‘a global marketplace that is estimated conservatively to be worth in excess of $5 trillion per annum’ (Selwyn, Distrusting Educational Technology 2013, p.2). With an eye on this pot, in one year, 2012, ‘venture capital funds, private equity investors and transnational corporations like Pearson poured over $1.1 billion into education technology companies’[1] Knewton, just one of a number of adaptive learning companies, managed to raise $54 million before it signed multi-million dollar contracts with ELT publishers like Macmillan and Cambridge University Press. In ELT, some publishing companies are preferring to sit back and wait to see what happens. Most, however, have their sights firmly set on the earnings potential and are fully aware that late-starters may never be able to catch up with the pace-setters.

The nexus of vested interests that is driving the move towards adaptive learning is both tight and complicated. Fuller accounts of this can be found in Stephen Ball’s ‘Education Inc.’ (2012) and Joel Spring’s ‘Education Networks’ (2012) but for this post I hope that a few examples will suffice.

Leading the way is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation with endowments of almost $40 billion. One of its activities is the ‘Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program’ which seeks to promote adaptive learning and claims that the adaptive learning loop can defeat the iron triangle of costs, quality and access (referred to in The Selling Points of Adaptive Learning, above). It is worth noting that this foundation has also funded Teach Plus, an organisation that has been lobbying US ‘state legislatures to eliminate protection of senior teachers during layoffs’ (Spring, 2012, p.51). It also supports the Foundation for Excellence in Education, ‘a major advocacy group for expanding online instruction by changing state laws’ (ibid., p.51). The chairman of this foundation is Jeb Bush, brother of ex-president Bush, who took the message of his foundation’s ‘Digital Learning Now!’ program on the road in 2011. The message, reports Spring (ibid. p.63) was simple: ‘the economic crises provided an opportunity to reduce school budgets by replacing teachers with online courses.’ The Foundation for Excellence in Education is also supported by the Walton Foundation (the Walmart family) and iQity, a company whose website makes clear its reasons for supporting Jeb Bush’s lobbying. ‘The iQity e-Learning Platform is the most complete solution available for the electronic search and delivery of curriculum, courses, and other learning objects. Delivering over one million courses each year, the iQity Platform is a proven success for students, teachers, school administrators, and district offices; as well as state, regional, and national education officials across the country.[2]’

Another supporter of the Foundation for Excellence in Education is the Pearson Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Pearson. The Pearson Foundation, in its turn, is supported by the Gates Foundation. In 2011, the Pearson Foundation received funding from the Gates Foundation to create 24 online courses, four of which would be distributed free and the others sold by Pearson the publishers (Spring, 2012, p.66).

The campaign to promote online adaptive learning is massively funded and extremely well-articulated. It receives support from transnational agencies such as the World Bank, WTO and OECD, and its arguments are firmly rooted in the discourse ‘of international management consultancies and education businesses’ (Ball, 2012, p.11-12). It is in this context that observers like Neil Selwyn connect the growing use of digital technologies in education to the corporatisation and globalisation of education and neo-liberal ideology.

Adaptive learning also holds rich promise for those who can profit from the huge amount of data it will generate. Jose Fereira, CEO of Knewton, acknowledges that adaptive learning has ‘the capacity to produce a tremendous amount of data, more than maybe any other industry’[3]. He continues ‘Big data is going to impact education in a big way. It is inevitable. It has already begun. If you’re part of an education organization, you need to have a vision for how you will take advantage of big data. Wait too long and you’ll wake up to find that your competitors (and the instructors that use them) have left you behind with new capabilities and insights that seem almost magical.’ Rather paradoxically, he then concludes that ‘we must all commit to the principle that the data ultimately belong to the students and the schools’. It is not easy to understand how such data can be both the property of individuals and, at the same time, be used by educational organizations to gain competitive advantage.

The existence and exploitation of this data may also raise concerns about privacy. In the same way that many people do not fully understand the extent or purpose of ‘dataveillance’ by cookies when they are browsing the internet, students cannot be expected to fully grasp the extent or potential commercial use of the data that they generate when engaged in adaptive learning programs.

Selwyn (Distrusting Educational Technology 2013, p.59-60) highlights a further problem connected with the arrival of big data. ‘Dataveillance’, he writes, also ‘functions to decrease the influence of ‘human’ experience and judgement, with it no longer seeming to matter what a teacher may personally know about a student in the face of his or her ‘dashboard’ profile and aggregated tally of positive and negative ‘events’. As such, there would seem to be little room for ‘professional’ expertise or interpersonal emotion when faced with such data. In these terms, institutional technologies could be said to be both dehumanizing and deprofessionalizing the relationships between people in an education context – be they students, teachers, administrators or managers.’

Adaptive learning in online and blended programs may well offer a number of advantages, but these will need to be weighed against the replacement or deskilling of teachers, and the growing control of big business over educational processes and content. Does adaptive learning increase the risk of transforming language teaching into a digital diploma mill (Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The automation of higher education 2002)?

Solutionism

Evgeney Morozov’s 2013 best-seller, ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’, takes issue with our current preoccupation with finding technological solutions to complex and contentious problems. If adaptive learning is being presented as a solution, what is the problem that it is the solution of? In Morosov’s analysis, it is not an educational problem. ‘Digital technologies might be a perfect solution to some problems,’ he writes, ‘but those problems don’t include education – not if by education we mean the development of the skills to think critically about any given issue’ (Morosov, 2013, p.8). Only if we conceive of education as the transmission of bits of information (and in the case of language education as the transmission of bits of linguistic information), could adaptive learning be seen as some sort of solution to an educational problem. The push towards adaptive learning in ELT can be seen, in Morosov’s terms, as reaching ‘for the answer before the questions have been fully asked’ (ibid., p.6).

The world of education has been particularly susceptible to the dreams of a ‘technical fix’. Its history, writes Neil Selwyn, ‘has been characterised by attempts to use the ‘power’ of technology in order to solve problems that are non-technological in nature. […] This faith in the technical fix is pervasive and relentless – especially in the minds of the key interests and opinion formers of this digital age. As the co-founder of the influential Wired magazine reasoned more recently, ‘tools and technology drive us. Even if a problem has been caused by technology, the answer will always be more technology’ (Selwyn, Education in a Digital World 2013, p.36).

Morosov cautions against solutionism in all fields of human activity, pointing out that, by the time a problem is ‘solved’, it becomes something else entirely. Anyone involved in language teaching would be well-advised to identify and prioritise the problems that matter to them before jumping to the conclusion that adaptive learning is the ‘solution’. Like other technologies, it might, just possibly, ‘reproduce, perpetuate, strengthen and deepen existing patterns of social relations and structures – albeit in different forms and guises. In this respect, then, it is perhaps best to approach educational technology as a ‘problem changer’ rather than a ‘problem solver’ (Selwyn, Education in a Digital World 2013, p.21).

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[1] Philip McRae Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics: This time it’s personal April 14, 2013 http://philmcrae.com/2/post/2013/04/rebirth-of-the-teaching-maching-through-the-seduction-of-data-analytics-this-time-its-personal1.html (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[2] http://www.iq-ity.com/ (last accessed 13 January, 2014)

[3] http://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/big-data-in-education/ (last accessed 13 January, 2104)