Examining the Influence of Multiple-Choice Test Formats on Student Performance

Innovative Higher Education - Learning gains associated with multiple-choice testing formats that provide immediate feedback (e.g., IFAT®) are often greater than those for typical...     

Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

Engaging the Campus Community Through New Roles and New Relationships: The McMaster University Library Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Recent reports identify a problem concerning university libraries—that of trending toward the disintermediation from the research process. Many experts have called for libraries to begin leading scholarship and to keep themselves relevant to faculty and students in light of recent work illustrating that within the hierarchy of answering questions regarding information evaluation and searching, librarians fall below Internet search engines, instructors, and even friends. In order to be successful and stay relevant, libraries must be reestablished as leaders within the university community. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has taken the approach of “library as lab” by matching the needs of the library with the interests of an emerging scholar. This has led to the creation of three library-funded postdoctoral fellowships in a program sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources. The new positions have been successful in facilitating a greater number of university partnerships in both teaching and research through such initiatives as the creation of the Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and the Resistance and the opening of the Lyons New Media Center. The ongoing success of the postdoctoral initiative is insured with the creation of the McMaster Centre for Digital Scholarship.