The end of accreditation?
A guest piece by Jason West of English Out There:
“In my opinion accreditation is now an anachonism. The path that most ‘self-regulating’ accrediting bodies take is counter productive to their collective and continued good health. When you get a protracted period of protectionism masquerading as professionalism the end result is self-destruction. You just have to look at a few books on economics. It goes back to Adam Smith and as a professor of economics and political science at Columbia University has written recently:
“Economists typically have the national-efficiency case in mind when they discuss the advantage of free trade and the folly of protectionism.”
OPEC only works because it really does have very tight control of a finite resource. The teaching of English is not a finite resource, nor is it controllable.
Scientific advances such as brain-imaging (see Kuh. P, ‘A new view of language acquisition’ ), are
showing us that the reality of language acquistion is quite different from the ‘best practice’ of TEFL teachers working under the umbrellas of most accrediting bodies. Their doctrines of what does and does not consitute a quality learning experience are, put simply, out of date. History is littered with the remains of industries and empires that sought power and profit through the prescriptive control of practice and supply.
Innovation, the life-blood of industry, suffers when fear of change and control of resources, power and influence is limited to a self-appointed and out of touch ‘elite’. In the age of the Kindle, iPhone, free global video calls and virtual and augmented reality how can you seriously shortlist a dictionary for an innovation award (UK ELTONs 2010 shortlist)? How can the majority of shortlisted entries to an innovation awards system, since it was launched come from just five or six of the biggest companies in the industry?
Edmund Conway, economics editor of The Telegraph newspaper hit the nail on the head this year when he wrote,
“Protectionism also goes hand-in-hand with nationalism and international political aggression, by giving an economic grounding to perhaps instinctual human fear of otherness”
In the context of ELT that is fairly ironic, don’t you think?
Whilst we contemplate the extinction of the dinosaurs of ELT in the after-shock of the technological hurricane that is about to hit us let us learn from this wise counsel,
“..protectionism simply isn’t as viable or practical an instrument or a tool as it used to be – one of the dividends of globalisation and global supply chains. Open trade remains the single most important way we know of expanding economic opportunity in our country, in Europe, and in the world, and lifting people and societies out of poverty… the real long term risk … lies in protectionism somehow taking on a new veneer of respectability in the current economic crisis. Open trade therefore needs defenders now more than ever.”
Those are words from a recent speech by Lord Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, and Secretary of State for Business for the UK.
Again, how ironic…or as Machiavelli once said, “Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime.”
Not sure what I made of all that, but bracing as ever- which is why I keep on nagging Jason for guest pieces. Comments on this one below, and more Jason West on TEFLtastic here:
Interview- Jason West dishes on Guardian languages and sets the TEFL world to rights!
January 30th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Very good call on the self-congratulatory ‘ELTONs’.
January 31st, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Hmm… yes , Jason, I like hearing your call-out on the ELTons as well as the rest of your article.
Like David, I’ll zoom in on the ELTons as it’s well-timed.
It’s a very difficult thing to comment on but something I have pondered on since seeing the list.
On the one hand if you question it and their choices for ‘innovation’, do you say that the previous winners didn’t deserve to win – are you saying that what they produced had no value?
Or that there were, at the time, other materials available of greater value?
Do you put someone down for his hard work and take away the glory of his prize?
When you hear things like “it’s tough to win an ELTon” as if it’s an Oscar :-))), what does this do, psychologically, except place an enormous value on what is basically, just someone’s inhouse / incompany prize system?
This year’s choices are indeed interesting.
One in particular clearly shows innovation, daring, striking new ground and a lot of hard-work but will he win? I sort of doubt it (though it’d be nice to be wrong). Others in the list aren’t.
Others hardly fall under a banner or extreme creativity and newness – which is how the word innovation should be translated and instead appear to be… selected for politico reasons.
It smells a bit.
The main problem with things like the ELTons (and the David Riley Award) amongst others is that because they’re geared at inner circles, we in the international scene get confused.
Until you realize that the ELTons (the main one) is actually just a British prize.
Perhaps if they were simply and honestly presented as some random company’s staffroom selections then these questions wouldn’t be raised…
Confusingly there are 2 other categories given through the ELTons, via 2 ELT publishing houses, yet that’s actually more of the same, if not worse, riding on the back of an award which has gathered for itself a “name” in the market – using the word “international” but very much taking care of its own and smells even worse, a prize for commercially psychological reasons and little else.
Another trouble with awards of this ilk, is that if you come out of the closet and say you have questions about the validity of the process and the merits involved in selection then perhaps you are coming across as being niggly and mean… so you shut your mouth.
(Until someone blogs about it and you consider writing anonymously because the flak on this could hurt people’s feelings considerably and then, ya think, ah heck…)
To be honest, this is not the first time I am questioning an “award.”
I actually felt the same way during the edublogs award – when I discovered them to be a trite way to spread the EduBlogs logo and name to the community (for student blogging purposes)…
I refrained from blogging about it as I didn’t want to appear to be niggly and mean… however, the thing is the questions came after making my nominations of the blogs I really admire. Basically, I dug deeper into the process given that so many of those I’d nominated didn’t make the cut and I wondered why (the excuse given was that they could hardly list all the ones that were nominated, hmmmm), the lack of transparency regarding which were indeed selected rang alarm bells, the leaning to and favoring of those of commercial potential, the cheap call for the bloggers themselves to go out and raise votes – it all raised numerous questions and despite being nominated myself, I both opted for neither placing the badge on my blog nor participating in any public call for votes.
You do have to ask questions about the commercial benefits of attaching prizes on to books or materials or blogs or any such thing due to the ‘kudos’ that goes with (because you yourself know that when you’re on Amazon and you’re trying to figure out what graded reader to recommend to your students, that the one with the LLL prize gets chosen – without knowing whether or not it’s better than another, the assumption being that some group of judges somewhere will have told the truth) and yet…?
- but what can we do, this is the world we live in.
Cynically, though, when you know this, you just can’t help but wonder whose hands are washing whose… and calling out for clarity.
Karenne
January 31st, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Good point about Edublogs, I had the same questions, and also about the other language learning blogs one (Who won that one I wonder??). With Edublogs, seems that only nominees who mentioned the competition on their blogs got into the final list. My policy was to thank people who nominated me and then not to take part myself, but that was partly because I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone I didn’t nominate.
Getting back to accreditation- surely the latest financial problems have convinced us all that we need better regulation rather than less regulation? As narrow minded as English UK with schools and Cambridge ESOL with CELTA courses might be, getting rid of accreditation hardly seems likely to improve standards.
February 1st, 2010 at 9:38 am
I guess the question is: are any awards really 100% fair? Behind most award systems there is some sort of nepotism of one kind or another, or in the case of edublogs the marketing issue. They are rarely done or organised with 100% impartiality and simply for the good of those being nominated. Even with much larger awards like the Noble prize – well the fact that Obama won it must be the biggest rat in the kitchen ever! I agree with your position Alex – I wouldn’t want to dampen anyone else’s right to be part of an award cycle, and have always given a big pat on the back to anyone I know who has won such awards, but I don’t really want to take part in them myself, either as a vote, assessor or nominee (the latter being the least likely luckily so will unlikely be put in that position!). But I think we need to approach this critically and see it for what it is – protectionism (as already pointed out) and the competition of meritocracy and then I guess it comes down to our individual conscience whether we question. I think Karenne has a fair point though, that to do so one risks being thought of as mean in some way.
I get what you mean Alex about whether abolishing accreditation will cause standards to drop as that is sort of a logical step forward from the current fused together system where accreditation has emerged at a huge rate over the last decade. But I personally feel that as long as the current system is there to fulfil an obsession with accreditation stamps (that is basically used as a marketing tool again to attract new students) and also in exchange for very high fees, can we really believe that such schemes are doing what they say they are doing? There are so many ‘gaps’ in the way they are carried out, not to mention the value of being able to assess an entire educational organisation in 2 days or whatever the short amount of time set aside is. We know that it is possible to ‘doctor’ certain parts for appearance sake too, and we also know that the process leaves out really significant areas like teacher pay and conditions (often).
So much like the oscars, which when you watch them you think that they tend towards the big blockbustery type films and actors, perhaps our own version of that, in whatever form, is a reflection of the shortcomings of our field. Personally, my ideal would be a world where there wasn’t any need for accreditation or awards – perhaps that seems like a dream. But maybe asking the question why isn’t that the case, takes the whole discussion in a new direction worthy of some thought? Those awards and accreditation schemes are there for a reason – they tell us what is good/bad and worthy of emulation. But are the models being promoted always ones that we agree with?
Food for thought!
February 1st, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Of course, when it comes to awards TEFL.net can’t be throwing stones…
http://edition.tefl.net/awards/global/
February 4th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
No, the TEFL awards are different – as are Babla’s.
1. TEFL picks them and all of a sudden you get a nice surprise that you’ve been recognized.
2. Babla.net – not really selling in the same way that EduBlogs do, offer a language portal with loads of really useful language related articles – you didn’t have to do a big promo stunt to be a part of it – they asked if anyone wanted to nominate other blogs (which I did) but directly on their site… the voting very much a combination of them and some polling, guess not explaining it, I thought that was fine.
That’s why they’re the only two I post up on my site…
And then, there’s the one-stop with their magic formula. Sleeping with the boss.
Karenne
ps. sorry macmillan people I don’t mean it.
p.p.s. Jeremy Day, it’s a wind-up, okay – :-).