An Ontario Superior Court has directed the Ontario College of Teachers to find an alternate method to evaluate an Iranian refugee teacher’s qualifications without “official” documentation.
To teach in Ontario’s publicly funded schools, a teacher must have a Certificate of Qualification from the college, which was created in 1996. Officials there deemed her few documents insufficient to judge her abilities to teach and refused her requests for a personal interview or to develop alternate means to evaluate her abilities.
Will this first crack open the floodgates of competency-based testing for professionals? Too many professional associations have used the premise that only official documentation from a recognised and accredited institution is acceptable to show competence in a field. This is a load of hogwash, but it has helped to create entire industries around training, certification and accreditation. Some of these industries have transformed into oligopolies and monopolies, such as for the healthcare professions.
The Court has recognised that there is more than one way to exhibit competence in a field. I would go farther and say that a formal training or education program has less correlation to actual competence in a field than a well-designed performance based evaluation. How you become competent in a field should not matter. What matters is actual performance. However, such an approach would put many training and education programs out of business.
Perhaps this decision is an indication of changes to come. Formal training already accounts for very little in the IT or Web media sectors. Most employers want to see actual products or code, and don’t really care what credentials the worker has, as long as he or she can produce the goods.
I can appreciate this woman’s frustration, and applaud the court’s decision.
It took me over two years to find an institution that would enrol me onto its postgraduate programme without a B Hons degree to my name. I have a few diplomas, some prior learning at postgrad level and 20 years of related experience (during which time I have been an avid independent, informal learner), which my current university (Oxford Brookes, to give them a plug) was happy to accept as equivalency. By contrast, the Open University initially said I had to do a 6 month bridging course and then moved the goalposts to say that I had to do a fast track (2 year) B degree first. In theory all universities offer the opportunity for applicants to prove aptitude/ability/whatever by means of a panel interview. However, since I would imagine that making that decision is something very few of the faculty want to have to to do, and my experience was that none of the institutions I approached was actually prepared to go this route. I guess I could have stamped my feet and insisted that they follow protocol, but I lost the stomach for the fight and then caught a break when Brookes offered me a place unconditionally.
I guess the gist of this rather rambling account is that many institutions are addicted to pieces of paper.
Sadly, the institutions are not unique. Among employers (my own included) – informal learning is often stongly encourageed as an alternative to accredited courses and programmes. However, when it comes to recruitment, they tend to want to see the right bits of paper, which strikes me as being somewhat hypocritical.