Silent Partners: Student Course Evaluations and the Construction of Pedagogical Worlds

Abstract

This pilot study examines the student evaluation of courses as a situated discourse practice. It seeks to understand how the practice informs student and instructor attitudes, practices, and identities by examining a particular case - the course evaluation instrument used in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. Rhetorical genre theory provides a theoretical framework to understand the practice in pragmatic, semiotic, and hegemonic terms. An interdiscursive approach (Bhatia, 2008) was used to examine the practice, including a textual analysis of the instrument itself to reveal the ideological perspectives about teaching and learning that inhere in it, as well as a qualitative study of the genre's users (students, course instructors, department chairs) to ascertain the genre's received meaning and how the genre informs and influences actions as a result of this meaning. Results indicate that the genre projects an institutionally dominant ideology about teaching and learning in the Faculty of Arts which is at odds with emerging practices. Qualitative analysis suggests that the instrument acts a silent partner for students, mediating pedagogical meaning for them, as well as for instructors, seeking to impose institutionally dominant pedagogies and to influence their pedagogical decisions.Key words: course evaluations, rhetorical genre theory, teaching and learning paradigms, institutional pedagogies