Saville Kushner: “Measurement has become the monster that lives in the body of evaluation”

Specialist in topics related to curriculum and evaluation. He had the opportunity to work with the renowned educator Lawrence Stenhouse, with whom he shared these interests. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of the West of England. He has written books in different areas, the last of which is called “School: an exposé”. In it he addresses the challenges of education from a humanistic perspective. We had the opportunity to talk to him about education, evaluation and humanism.
What is a humanistic education like or what would it look like?
Humanism is an “umbrella” of values, concepts, political principles and interactions. In addition, it is contextual and so should be a humanistic education. I have been able to know some examples of attempts to develop a humanistic education, which I wrote in my last book, in fact. One is the Summerhill school, another is the Reggio Emilia system in Italy and the other is the International Baccalaureate, specifically its primary programme. They are all based on different approaches, but they share some elements. One of the most important is that they give a lot of weight to the intellectual autonomy of the young person, that is, not only the expression of the child, the voice of the child or the young person, but especially his judgment. The emergence of knowledge by research processes emerges from the judgments and choices of the young person, so that the adult [el o la docente] it has to support the development of these judgments, facilitating the construction of a path of knowledge generation.
In the field of humanism there is a lot of talk about individual agency, but that concept is too abstract, it must be concretized as an idea in pedagogical terms. For this it is important to consider the contributions that come from neuroscience, related to consciousness and perception. Using experience and judgment, the brain makes certain predictions, making it easier for the body to move around the world. For example, the baby does not perceive a cup, it is that he perceives something that he touches, that he uses, etc., and little by little, his predictions about what it is, with which I am interacting in the world, act. This implies that in the field of education we must support our brains to make good interpretations of reality. This theory of the perception of knowledge changes the meaning of pedagogy and this is the educational transformation, which we are trying to talk about.
Based on this background, we must feed back the pedagogy. This must become practical, considering how it is that the teacher theorizes in the moment about the world that the child or young person (rather the youngest) are perceiving and making judgments. Any teacher, being in a class of 30 students, is faced with 30 judgment machines that are already in place by the time they enter the classroom.
This is a profound change in the science of knowledge, which makes it urgent to think about a radical transformation in the field of pedagogy and education. Summerhill School provides learnings to understand these changes. For example, it is a democratic school, where classes are voluntary and managed by students. The school has about 350 rules or norms, but all made by the students.
Considering that humanism has been around for centuries, why is it difficult at present to link humanism with pedagogy?
My “curriculum guru” is Lawrence Stenhouse. He talked about humanism, but he was a humanist. He wrote a very important book that said that we shape schooling and education assuming that both are integrated with each other, but that this is not necessarily true. Stenhouse said that one factor that affects that problem is that education depends a lot on the theories of economics, psychology, sociology, et cetera, all these disciplines that are looking at education. He was of the opinion that we do not need strange theories of education, but educational theories of education, specifically theories of educational practice. It is not necessary to impose a sociological or psychological theoretical framework, but within each context, each classroom, each school, a theory must be developed, that is, a narrative that speaks of the educational coherence that is needed to favor the fluidity of the interactions between students and teachers. And that’s why he provided the action research methodology in his 1975 book “Act.”ion Research”, with a way of theorizing within the context of the classroom. Classrooms are a laboratory for the generation of knowledge related to student learning, but they also help theorize about how to organize teaching. That for me is pure humanism, because the teacher has to make interpretations, adaptations and accommodations of this theory to each context. Thus, the integration between humanism and pedagogy occurs when the theorization about class takes into account what it means to be human and what the demands are for a human being in society.
That is why it is so important to understand the advances in the sciences of consciousness, since they speak of the bases of what it means to be human and this is that we experience the world subjectively. The coronavirus does not experience the world is subjective, dogs do not either, but we do and what does that mean about being human?
The answer to that question is very difficult, but we can make progress in investigating it and we can also guide education by the nature of that problem. If we also know that our brain is a predictive machine, all knowledge, whether biology, chemistry, English, etc., is part of the basis that the brain uses to make predictions about the world, being able to move more effectively in it. All this speaks of an intense constructivist look at seeing the world and is a fundamental basis for a humanistic education.
—You are very critical of the logics and structures that are assumed in the school curriculum. In fact he has said “the curriculum does not make sense” Why?
“I am now writing a book about the curriculum and with each sheet I lose my sense about it. I have written before that methodology is not about frameworks, it is not about preparation to do something in the field of research, it is not about techniques. The methodology is a reflection on what you did and what worked. It’s retrospective.

More and more I have the same feeling when I think of the curriculum, which is something that does not exist until an educational process has occurred. It is not a design, it is something that one reflects on, it is an explanation. That’s very controversial, because I imagine it’s hard to think about starting an education process without a concept of a resume in mind. But that’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter what we do on Monday at 9:30 in the morning, it doesn’t really matter, because you’re starting out in the middle of a forest where students have already entered. It’s not like we’re outside the forest and on Monday at 9:30 we enter the forest and we get trails, patterns, and so on. No, the student is already there. Stenhouse opened up this field of thinking about what resume means and he said that resume is nothing there is a can take in a box to a classroom and put it on the table. The curriculum is the total experience of the student in a school and, by extension, of the community. It is an ecology of knowledge and this is the exact opposite of the vision of a curriculum that exists before teaching.
—Evaluation is always closely related to the curriculum. What is your vision on evaluation, measurement and education in the present?
—Lee Cronbach wrote a manifesto of evaluation and in its first clause points out that evaluation is the means by which society understands or learns about itself. This means that each assessment is a case study of the society in which we learn about it. Each program that is evaluated has authority, resources or theories that can be generalized to society, or we can see society in the program we are evaluating. Evaluation is always used in situations of change and we hope it will help us to value it. Cronbach would say that evaluation is a process in which we can understand ourselves in a context of change, of how we interact with change. Evaluation is a process in which we theorize about innovation and change, but that doesn’t have much to do with measurement. This has become the monster that lives in the body of the evaluation and that ends up eating it. People who do curricular evaluation are more interested in understanding the nature of change, with which education can be fed back: where is the resistance to change, what difficulties occur to generate it, what we have to understand about people in order to understand the resistances and get excited about change, etc.
All this is related to the development of a humanistic vision of education. If the evaluator needs to understand, we need to know how the evaluated program relates to the people, because they are the witnesses, they are the ones who are within the process of change.. The relationships between the people who make the program, the evaluators and who read the evaluation reports is central to the whole process and therefore it is very important to define who has the right to know about the data that is produced in the process. Evaluation is a democratic process, where each person has rights over their own data. The evaluator cannot own the data, it can be that a teacher, that a manager lends data to the evaluator. The same goes for the evaluator’s reports, which contain the data of individuals and groups of institutions.
Today’s assessment works a long way from those ideas. Evaluation within a context of accountability Hard has little to do with rights and has little to do with understanding as well. It has much more to do with results, but it is almost impossible to analyze the quality of a program through its results, that is, going back from the results back. It does not necessarily happen that with good results there is a good program. “Chaos classrooms” can produce good educational outcomes. For example, summerhill school looks like chaos, there is no order, but it produces young people with high-level education. So, the relationship between an outcome and the quality of an educational program is almost non-existent.

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Original source in Spanish