Tutors and Students meet as equals

Raymond William's famous open letter to WEA tutors back in 1961 is appended to the WEA's tutor handbook. You can read it here (Download Raymond Williams an open letter to WEA tutors). One paragraph in the letter refers to:

"the claim that, in the WEA, tutors and students meet as equals. Of course the tutor knows his own discipline better, and wants to help the students to learn it, but he may not know how his dis­cipline looks to people outside it, may not know the gaps between academic thinking and actual experience among many people; he may not know when, in the pressure of experience, a new discipline has to be created."

That expression - 'in the WEA, tutors and students meet as equals' - seems as important now as ever to me. If we respect adults and their voluntary interest in learning then that equality must be central in our work. What does it mean in the 21st Century WEA?

I was interested to read research summary called 'Inside the Black Box' (click here to read it). This publication, from 2001 by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam from King's College London School of Education, looks hard at what formative assessment means in school teaching. It is also centred on fairness and the importance of the relationship between teacher and pupils. It says:

“In this paper, the term ‘assessment’ refers to all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by their students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet the needs.”

The report sees the managerial role of assessments as presenting difficulties:

“• Teachers’ feedback to pupils often seems to serve social and managerial functions, often at the expense of the learning functions.

• Teachers are often able to predict pupils' results on external tests—because their own tests imitate them—but at the same time they know too little about their pupils’ learning needs.

• The collection of marks to fill up records is given greater priority than the analysis of pupils’ work to discern learning needs; furthermore, some teachers pay no attention to the assessment records of previous teachers of their pupils.”

This (eight years ago) is an important caution around the purpose of learning and assessment and still seems as problematic as ever. We can see it in qualifications and in assessing non-accredited courses.

We spend a lot of time in the WEA monitoring our provision to be sure we don't exclude adults from our courses. We have good evidence of equality of opportunity and fairness in terms of who participates in our provision, but what about fairness in our relations between tutors and students? That can't be considered through management or monitoring. It has to be explored by tutors individually and, perhaps better, together.

I will be writing to the WEA Tutor Network to see if we can set up a 'Meet as Equals' project to learn how tutors make real this commitment in their teaching now. I think we have a lot to learn from each other and hope as many colleagues will want to get involved in this over the next few months.