Thursday, August 28, 2008
Disambiguation
Posted May 30th, 2008 by Arnold Aprill
As a total Wikipedia addict, I often encounter the term “disambiguation”, which frequently appears at the top of Wikipedia pages. Here’s the definition : "The process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different article pages which could, in principle, have the same title. For example, the word ‘Mercury’ can refer to several different things, including: an element, a planet, an automobile brand, a record label, a NASA manned-spaceflight project, a plant, and a Roman god.”
Disambiguation is the process of making the ambiguous unambiguous.
As an artist, my line of work requires a certain level of comfort with ambiguity (what the Romantic Poets called “negative capability”), without which there could be no metaphors. (The difference between ambiguities that generate positive resonance between divergent content – stimulating new thought and action, and ambiguity that conflates differences – frustrating new thought and action, will have to be investigated in some future blog-to-be.)
But as an arts education advocate, my work also calls for a certain amount of discrimination- of clarity of language – when arguing for policies and practices that could catalyze increasingly effective teaching and learning in and through the arts.
In this era of accountability (called for by the same administration that desperately opposes being held accountable for almost anything itself), one of the terms that is clearly in need of some disambiguation is “assessment”. We hear more and more calls for “assessing” arts learning, but little clarity about what aspects of arts learning we are supposed to be measuring.
Technical skills? Creative thinking? Social-emotional skills? Collaborative skills? Historical content knowledge? Critical thinking and analytical skills? Art appreciation skills?
And once we get clear about what we are measuring, it might also be useful to know why are we measuring it? To show our bosses we done good? To generate new knowledge for teachers? For artists? For students? To help students self-monitor their own growth?
When does knowing how well you’ve done help you do better? Under what conditions?
Recently, a study by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research found a negative correlation between increased “teaching to the test” for high stakes ACT tests and how the students actually did on the tests themselves. Assessment and test prep are, of course, very different animals, but the Consorium finding does suggest a question about assessment: when does assessment help, and when does assessment hinder learning, and how?
We need to know a lot more about arts learning - about when, why, where, for whom and between whom arts learning happens - before we can even begin to ask “how well” with any real confidence, clarity, or purpose. It will take some good hard thinking, but it is well worth doing. It will take some disambiguation.
Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org
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