Responding to a misconception about my own teaching

Keith S. Taber

There are many postings here about things that learners said, and so presumably thought, about curriculum topics that would likely surprise, if not shock, the teachers who had taught them those topics. I am certainly not immune from being misunderstood. Today, I reflect on how someone seems to have understood some of my own teaching, and indeed seriously objected to it.

When I have called-out academic malpractice in this blog the targets have usually been conference organisers or journal administrators using misleading (or downright dishonest) techniques, or publishers mistreating authors. I feel somewhat uneasy about publicly contradicting a junior scholar. However, I also do not appreciate being publicly described as deliberately misleading a student, as has happened here, and my direct challenge to the blog author was rejected.

The accusation

A while back some Faculty colleagues referred me to a blog that included the following comments:

In the Faculty of Education students pursuing the MPhil or PhD take a research ethics lecture that presents the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as ethically sound, but only up to the year 1947 when penicillin was actively being used to treat syphilis. According to the Cambridge lecturer, that's the point when the study became unethical.

When I interrupted his lecture to object to his presentation, I was told by that lecturer that he'd never received any objections in his many, many years of teaching the same slides on the same course. That was not true. He knew and the Faculty knows and yet that false information continues to be disseminated to students, many of whom will go on to complete research in developing countries where their only reference for their ethical or unethical behavior is this lecture.

I am not named, but virtually anyone in my Faculty, or having taken graduate studies there in the last few years, would surely know who was being discussed. As is pointed out in our Educational Research course, and the Research Methods strand of other graduate courses, if you want to avoid someone being identified in your writing, it is not enough to not name them. I can be fairly confident the author of the comments above should have known that: it is a point made in the very lecture being criticised.

This blog posting seems to have received quite a lot of attention among students at the University Faculty where I worked. Yet the two claims here are simply not correct. The teaching is seriously misrepresented, and I certainly did not lie to this student.

The blog invited me to 'Leave a Reply', so I did. My comments were subject to moderation – and the next morning I found a response in my email in-box. My comments would not be posted, and the claims would not be amended: I was welcome to post my reply elsewhere, but not at the site where I was being criticised. So, here goes:

The (rejected) reply

I hope you are well.

I was directed to your blog by a group of scholars in the Faculty (Of Education at Cambridge). It is an impressive blog. However, I was rather surprised by some of what you have posted. I was the lecturer you refer to in your posting who taught the lecture on research ethics. I do indeed remember you interrupting me when I was presenting the Tuskagee syphilis study as an example of unethical research. I always encouraged students to participate in class, and would have welcomed your input at the end of my treatment of that example.

However, having read your comments here, I do need to challenge your account. I do not consider that the Tuskegee syphilis study was initially ethically sound, and I do not (and did not) teach that. I certainly did make the point that even if the study had been ethical until antibiotics were widely available, continuing it beyond that point would have been completely unjustifiable. But that was certainly not the only reason the study was unethical. Perhaps this would have been clearer if you had let me finish my own comments before interjecting – but even so I really do not understand how you could have interpreted the teaching that way.

I may well have commented that no one had ever raised any objections to the presentation when I had given the lecture on previous occasions over a number of years – because that is true. No one had previously raised any concerns with me regarding my teaching of this example (or any aspect of the lecture as far as I can recall). I am not sure why you seem to so confidently assume otherwise: regarding this, you are simply wrong.

Usually in that lecture I would present a brief account of the Milgram 'learning' experiment, which would often lead to extended discussion about the ethical problems of that research in relation to its motivation and what was usefully learnt from it. Then, later in the session, I would talk about the Tuskegee study, which normally passed without comment. I had always assumed that was because the study is so obviously and seriously problematic that no one would see any reason to disagree with my critique. Then I would go on to discuss other issues and studies. I can assure you that no one had previously, before you, raised any concerns about my teaching of this example with me. If anyone in earlier cohorts had any concerns about this example they would have been welcome to talk to me about them – either in class, or privately afterwards. No one ever did.

I have no reason to believe that colleagues at Cambridge are deliberately disseminating false information to students, but then I do not audit other teaching officers' lectures, and I cannot speak for them. However, I can speak for myself, just as you rightly speak up for yourself. I have certainly always taken care to do my best not to teach things that are not the case. Of course, as a school and college science teacher I was often teaching models and simplifications, and not the 'whole' truth, but that is the nature of pedagogy, and is something we should make clear to learners (i.e., that they are being taught models and simplifications that can later in their studies be developed through more sophisticated treatments).

In a similar way, I used simplifications and models in my research methods lectures at Cambridge – for example, in terms of the 'shape' of a research project, or contrasting paradigms, or types of qualitative analysis, and so on, but would make explicit to the class that this is what they were: 'teaching models'. I entered the teaching profession to make a positive difference; to help learners develop, and to acquire new understandings and perspectives and skills; not to misinform people. I very much suspect that on occasions I must have got some things wrong, but, if so, such errors would always have been honest mistakes. I have never knowingly taught something that I thought was untrue.

So, whilst I admire your courage in standing up for what you believe, and I certainly wish you well, what you have written is not correct, and I trust my response will be posted so that your inaccurate remarks will not go unchallenged. I suspect that you are not being deliberately untruthful (you accuse me of telling you something I knew was not true: I try to be charitable and give people the benefit of doubt, so I would like to think that you were writing your comments in good faith), but I do not understand how you managed to come to the interpretation of my teaching that you did, and wish that you would have at least heard me out before interrupting the class, as that may have clarified my position for you. The Tuskegee syphilis study was a racist, unethical study that misled and abused some of those people with the lowest levels of economic and political power in society: people (not just the men subjected to the study, but also their families) who were betrayed by those employed by the public health service that they trusted (and should have been able to trust) to look after their interests. I do not see how anyone could consider it an ethically sound study, and I struggle to see why you would think anyone could.

Your claim that I lied about not having previously received complaints about my teaching of this topic before is simply untrue – it is a falsehood that I hope you will be prepared to correct.

What should a 'constructivist' teacher make of this?

I should be careful about criticising a student for thinking I was teaching something quite different from what I thought I was teaching. I have spent much of my career telling other teachers that learners will make sense of our teaching in terms of the interpretive resources they have available, and so they may interpret our teaching in unexpected ways. Learners will always be biased to understand in terms of their expectations and past experiences. We see it all the time in science teaching, as many of the posts here demonstrate.

I have described learning as being an incremental, interpretive, and so iterative, process and not a simple transfer of understanding (Taber, 2014). Teaching (indeed communication) is always a representation of thinking in a publicly accessible form (speech, gesture, text, diagrams {what sense does the figure above make out of the context of the lecture?}, models, etc.) – and whatever meaning may have informed the production of the representation, the representation itself does not have or contain meaning: the person accessing that presentation has to impose their own interpretation to form a meaning (Taber, 2013b). After teaching and writing about these ideas, I would be a hypocrite to claim that a learner could not misinterpret my own teaching as I can communicate perfectly to a room full of students from all around the world with different life experiences and varied disciplinary backgrounds!

Even so, I am still struggling to understand the interpretation put on my teaching in this case, despite going back to revisit the teaching materials a number of times. Most of the points I was making must have been completed disregarded to think I did not consider the study, which ran from 1932 to 1972 (Jones, 1993) unethical until 1947. So, even for someone who claims to be a constructivist teacher and knows there is always a risk of learners misconceiving teaching, this example seems an extreme case.

The confident claim that it was not true that I had not received previous complaints about my teaching of this example is even harder to understand. It is at least a good reminder for me not to assume I know what students are thinking or that they know what I am thinking, or can readily access the intended meaning in my teaching. I've made those points to others enough times, so I will try to see this incident as a useful reminder to follow my own advice.

Sources cited:

• Jones, J. H. (1993). Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New and expanded ed.). New York: The Free Press.
• Taber, K. S. (2013a). Classroom-based Research and Evidence-based Practice: An introduction (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
• Taber, K. S. (2013b). Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Taber, K. S. (2014). Student Thinking and Learning in Science: Perspectives on the nature and development of learners' ideas. New York: Routledge.