{"id":19,"date":"2019-06-13T13:27:03","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T13:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/english\/?page_id=19"},"modified":"2026-02-19T20:34:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T20:34:32","slug":"learning-goals","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/english\/learning-goals\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Goals"},"content":{"rendered":"

STATEMENT ON LEARNING GOALS AND ASSESSMENT<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

That an academic department should have \u201clearning goals\u201d seems obvious. That a department should also have some mechanisms in place to assess whether these goals are being met would also seem to be self-evident. As educators, we consider with care what and how we teach our students, and we would like to know whether our educational program is working. So would our students, their parents, and the college\u2019s accreditors.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But here is the issue. Our, or anyone\u2019s, ability to know whether it\u2019s working depends a great deal on what it<\/i> is.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many common learning goals are easy to assess, as they emphasize the acquisition of knowledge and skills: \u201cdemonstrate disciplinary knowledge,\u201d \u201cdevelop clarity in writing,\u201d and the like. But other learning goals are not as readily evaluated. For example, our lives are defined by our capacity to make moral and ethical judgements. Students grapple every day with questions of academic integrity and honesty, fairness and respect. Their educational experiences confront them with multiple and diverse cultural constructions, and they develop reasoned responses to complex questions and debates. This development of ethical awareness, key to living an engaged and examined life, is central to our mission, and yet we cannot properly <\/span>assess<\/span><\/i> it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To our minds this is the real problem: it is the nature of assessment to privilege those learning goals that can most easily be assessed. And a society that overvalues assessment, in its focus on incessant testing and measuring, tends only to produce better test-takers, while severely hobbling students in other respects.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What is more, a culture of assessment contributes to a broader misunderstanding of the humanities and their importance. As the French philosopher Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard explains, an emphasis on what he terms the \u201cperformativity criterion\u201d\u2014the choice to frame one\u2019s approach to learning simply in terms of efficiency, utility, and outcomes\u2014excludes from the outset some basic aspects of humanistic inquiry.*<\/span>\u00a0While fields with a more quantitative focus may embrace this ethos, the core humanities (English, History, Philosophy, Religion), which deal centrally with ambiguity and nuance \u2013 in short, the unquantifiable \u2013 may well ask: what possibilities get stifled when we simply accept the logic of performativity of which assessment is a part?<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Degrees in the humanities are certainly marketable: English majors do as well as, or better than, other graduating seniors in pursuing careers. But we must resist the urge to articulate the values of the English major simply in terms of a narrowly defined utility. The pursuit of intellectual interests not obviously practical will actually render our students more fit to navigate the complexities of human experience in the world. These truths \u2013 that the expansion of mind made possible by the college experience helps fit our students for living, and that, in this sense, the college experience is deeply productive \u2013 are by no means new. They are foundational to liberal arts institutions like Trinity. The pedagogical practices that emerge from these beliefs, the core pedagogical practices of humanities departments like English, are <\/span>least<\/span><\/i> susceptible to assessment, and thus at the greatest risk.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A Taxonomy of Learning Goals<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

In place of the brief list of learning goals that we have been asked to provide, therefore, we would instead offer a taxonomy that better articulates our priorities and identifies exactly how we address the expectations of assessment.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Priorities for which the Language of \u201cLearning Goals\u201d is Inadequate<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

The very language of learning \u201cgoals\u201d forecloses on the notion of an activity \u2014 like thinking \u2014 being an end in itself. For this reason, the thoughtfulness we uniformly encourage in our students properly has no place in this taxonomy.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning Goals that are Not Open to Assessment<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

To be clear: these learning goals are our highest priorities<\/strong>; to the extent that worrying about, and devoting extra time and energy to, other, more assessable ends prevents us from pursuing these goals, we are diminished. Like the college\u2019s expectation that students will develop some sort of ethical capacity before graduating, these goals cannot be assessed without being fundamentally changed.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, one of our goals might well resemble the common expectation that students \u201cbecome critical readers of complex texts.\u201d But the language of mastery is of limited value. Literature and film are, among many other things, attempts to grapple with, without ever solving, the problem of being human \u2013 a problem with moral, ontological, political (in both the narrow and broad senses), ethnic, erotic, and epistemic dimensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

We both hope and expect of our students that the experience of the major will nurture capacities of empathy and the appreciation of difference<\/strong>; that it will leave them less afraid of ambiguity and of the questions of life that cannot, finally, be answered; that it will make them aware of the extent to which the world around them is a <\/span>human<\/span><\/i> world \u2014 the product of human thought, creativity, and effort \u2014 and thus awaiting their own contributions to it.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This deepening of sensibility and broadening of experience is at the heart of the humanities. Literature and film, in addition, are arts \u2013 and while we would hope that students achieve \u201cartistic literacy,\u201d we would suggest that something still more fundamental is at stake.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In his poem \u201cAsphodel, that greeny flower,\u201d William Carlos Williams writes that \u201cIt is difficult \/ to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack \/ of what is found there.\u201d To be a humanist is to take this claim seriously. Williams is making a point about aesthetics: specifically, that \u201cgetting the news\u201d from art is far more fundamental to a life of purpose and meaning than those who pursue narrow ideas of assessable performance typically realize.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning Goals for which an Additional Assessment Mechanism, though Conceivable, would be Trivial<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

The learning goals that we group under this heading are reflected, primarily, in how we structure our curriculum. We believe, for example, that our majors, in all three concentrations that we offer, should acquire a grasp of literary history.<\/strong> Accordingly, we require that our majors take survey courses that investigate both the complex social circumstances that give rise to literary production and how genres develop over time.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our majors also take a certain number of upper-level courses in literature written before 1800<\/strong>, and a certain number of courses in literature written after that year. In addition to this historical emphasis, we offer courses that introduce students to a broad range of cultural production: American<\/strong> and British<\/strong>, upper class and working class, \u201canglophone\u201d and \u201cethnic\u201d (all in their endless varieties).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These requirements shape students\u2019 experience of the major. But their taking and passing these courses constitutes a more significant, objective, and revealing marker of goal achievement than any secondary mechanism could provide. These goals are ultimately at the service of our deeper priorities (in B), which are not susceptible to any codified rubric of assessment.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Why do we care, that is to say, that our students be exposed to literature from the distant past, and to cultures fundamentally different from their own?<\/strong> Because: if literature is, among many other things, a grappling with the problem of being human, we think it important that students see how people have grappled with this problem in different times and in different cultural contexts. These learning goals (C) matter, in short, because they contribute to the deepening of sensibility and critical thought that constitutes the main purpose of an English department.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning Goals for which We Believe Our Students Should Take Assessment Responsibility<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

Part of a student\u2019s career \u2013 in any major \u2013 should ideally involve a) a growing awareness of the discipline as a discipline (its cardinal discourses, how the areas of study comprised by the discipline relate to each other, etc.), and b) a growing sense of responsibility for \u2014 and ownership of \u2014 her or his own path <\/span>through<\/span><\/i> the discipline.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To address the first of these \u201cmeta\u201d concerns, we require that students take at least one course in critical reflection<\/strong> (for our view about assessing this goal, see C). To address the second goal, we ask that our students, in the first semester of junior year, conduct a self-assessment<\/strong>, in which they articulate their goals for the major and integrate their previous coursework with the courses they still have to take. This self-assessment then forms a basis for conversations with their advisors \u2013 with an effect, potentially, on our own thinking about the curriculum. The work of thinking through their careers as majors, however, belongs fundamentally to the students.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning Goals for which Assessment is Possible<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

There are, finally, a handful of learning goals for which assessment is possible and potentially useful. These are the only learning goals we will list \u2013 but before we do so, we would offer two observations about them. First<\/strong>: these learning goals are, uniformly, <\/span>skills<\/span><\/i>. As such, they are most in accordance with the bias in assessment culture towards quantifiable outcomes. While one cannot square the conceptual goals that we discuss in (B) with a positivistic or practical rubric, it is possible to do so when evaluating writing or research ability.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a national culture deeply suspicious of the humanities, teaching students to become better writers still fortunately retains an obvious \u201cpractical\u201d value, but writing and research are ultimately crucial for the way they allow our students to explore the core questions of the discipline and to claim their own places in key, ongoing conversations. Second<\/strong>: skills assessment is dangerous and misleading to the extent that it is believed to be <\/span>objective<\/span><\/i>. Unlike matters of fact, the province of the more positivistic disciplines, a student\u2019s writing, or the quality of her or his research work, can <\/span>only<\/span><\/i> be judged subjectively. Whatever mechanisms we put in place to evaluate these learning goals, the evaluation will ultimately reflect subjective and idiosyncratic preferences. With these provisos in mind, we expect that our students will:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n