Assessing the ineffable

From Inside Higher Ed, an interview with editors of a new book from the Teagle Foundation on assessment of the hard-to-assess in the disciplines. Remarkably, this book is available for free download on the Teagle web site.

Humanists are sometimes wary of assessment because they feel that there is something ineffable at the heart of their work in the classroom. We realized that the ineffable itself -- in the form of theories of the sublime -- is a subject that we think about a lot. And we wondered whether we could invite people to talk about ineffability -- about the sublime -- as a way of coming to understand some of our most cherished learning goals for our students, and even assessing them. In a way, we were inviting people to face head-on the thing that no one thinks we can talk about. And the collection developed from there.

And now, for the rest of the story...