Some reflections on teaching.
Mike Horne FGS
Holistic learning/teaching.
Nothing in life exists in isolation. We are all dependent on others and our planet for our lives.
The same is true of learning and teaching. It is not possible to separate bits of it into little compartments that are totally independent of each other. They are dependent on previous learning. They are linked to other learning. They lead to whatever the future might bring.
That is what is so exciting about teaching adults. They bring a diversity of learning and life experiences that enriches the course for fellow students and the tutor.
I have found that I need to be holistic and specialist in my approach at the same time. Yes, I have to ensure that I am delivering accurate information in an honest way, but that I can also relate it to the whole learning experience. Each item is part of a bigger whole and the are relationships between the parts that are often difficult to separate.
Interestingly Zen Buddhism explains that the source of human unhappiness is caused by separateness of the individual. Along with Taoism, it encourages the student to see the interdependence of all things.
So I am always looking for connections or "hooks" - the things that will help the student relate something new to what they already know.
Though some students may be looking for an expert who passes down knowledge I see myself as a catalyst - the factor that enables them to learn for themselves. I remember when I was involved in politics I got the greatest thrill on the doorstep not when someone said they would vote for me but when I could see that the person I was canvassing started thinking for themselves about the issues.
At the end of my first essay for this course I wrote down some future aims, including "to keep improving courses and course content". The assessor has underlined "improving" and written "How? Be more specific." Well, for me, improving is an on going process. And it may be a vague process and I don't know where it will lead me. If I could have been specific then I would have carried out the improvement. Once the improving has stopped then will I have become the perfect teacher or a teacher who has stopped learning?
There is a complex and disturbing Buddhist Scripture known as the Diamond Sutra (anon. 1984) the essence of which is to point out that when someone says to themselves 'that's it, I have achieved enlightenment' they are further away from it than when they started their search!
In my research I find few answers but a lot of new questions. In my teaching I find new things that work and discard others that don't. I find that there is a thrill in both research and teaching, when I gain an insight or the student gains an insight. The process leading to the insight cannot be separated from the insight. Without the process there would be no insight. Stop the process when you get an insight and all you have is a preserved (dare I say "fossilised") insight. What is the value of that?
"Learning" is a process and for a sentient being is thus "life long". Once it stops it becomes "learnt"!
"The unexpected is an opportunity to learn" (Keep & Rainbird 2002).
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Teaching and conformity.
What is the purpose of teaching? Is it to promote learning or to assess the learning ability of the student?
The former leads to a true sharing of knowledge and skills for their own sake.
The latter is constrained by its aim. For it to succeed a standard amount of knowledge is dispensed and the ability of the student to memorise it is tested against a norm. It gives little scope for diversity and consequently discriminates against those who do not conform to expectations.
It can lead to the dumbing down of the subject, because the aim is to test the student rather than encourage the student to investigate the topic beyond the bounds of the syllabus or the teacher's knowledge. It has to ignore alternatives because too much variety is difficult to assess by examinations or essays.
The classic example is the multiple-choice question - the student can answer A, B, C or D. It is very easy to mark! But the student cannot answer E. Nor "a bit of A and some B".
But then what is the role of the teacher? Most schoolteachers have never done or published any original research. They work to an external syllabus using popular textbooks. Are they accused of plagiarism?
I try to present my students with an original approach to geology, and include as much of my personal research and experience as possible. The course that I like teaching least is the one that relies heavily on other material, and includes earth science topics that I have never experienced myself (such as black smokers and Pre-Cambrian rocks) or the big concepts such as Plate Tectonics.
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Mixed ability teaching :-
I have found that there has to be a pragmatic approach to the classes, dictated largely by recruitment. In an ideal world there would be an ideal number of students who sign up and continue through my geology modules in a logical order.
This unfortunately does not happen. Some people only want to study certain aspects of the subject. Some come with previous background knowledge and want to get specific knowledge about local geology.
Another problem is the length of the course. Several students at the end of a 10-credit (20 contact hours) course say they wished it could be longer. One of the teaching observations recommends this also. But would a twenty-credit course costing twice as much in fees recruit sufficient students to be viable?
So I have developed a rolling programme of nine ten-credit UFA courses that roll over three years and allow students to start at any point in that programme.
Each module caters for complete beginners and more experienced students, and I plan to increase the amount of group work pairing up beginners with experience students, a method that I observed being successfully used in an archaeology course.
There are still a few students that want a more traditional form of teaching - with the tutor handing out facts and marking their work with a red pen! There is a difference (and perhaps a conflict) between skills-based and knowledge-based teaching and learning.
Students doing a course for a second time would get more out of it and would work to a higher level from the same content, but I have noticed that since the introduction of the U.F.A. into the University's part-time adult education people no longer repeat courses. Presumably this is because they have a certificate to say they have 'passed' and thus cannot attend again regardless of how much they enjoyed it.
Rogers (2001 p 77 onwards) makes the point that "all groups of learners are of mixed ability to some extent". Even when there is some selection involved, such as class of school children of the same age or University students, there is still a mixture of experience and abilities. The advantage that a UFA class has is that the students are there because they want to be! The students attending compulsory course are not all as motivated and some may be resentful at having to attend something that they think is beneath them. I enjoy teaching the UFA students more than the post-graduates on the safety course, which a fellow tutor recently described as "lecturing to a bag of sand!"
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Some other teaching strategies:-
There were some aspects of teaching I would have liked to investigate further. Some traditional forms of teaching that seem to have been overlooked in recent years.
Repetition or learning by rote. The memorising of lists and texts seems to be out of fashion, but has significant uses in certain situations. As well as the use in early school maths, foreign languages and drama - I am fascinated by its use in religious training, where it is an aid to deep insights and understanding and highly valued, e.g. see chapter 19 of the Lotus Sutra (Kato et al. 1975).
Storytelling. This seems to have been abandoned for several reasons - primarily the dominance of the "sound-bite". It is a common perception that the public has a very short attention span so if you say something it has to be short and impressive. Politicians no longer give long speeches to public meeting but seek our votes though sound-bites on the Television. Political conferences are no longer a chance for the party members to confer and influence policy, but are stage-managed media opportunities.
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Assessing students work
The one bit of teaching that I truly dislike is assessing student's work.
What am I trying to achieve in the assessment? I look at it as a means of reassuring the student that they are making progress and encouraging them to take their studies a little bit further. Given that I have a mixed ability class from beginner to post-doctorate, I am not aiming to compare their knowledge in a UFA course. Yet I do have a responsibility to those who are studying for credit and the institution not to give students false hopes and put them in an embarrassing situation by passing everyone regardless of ability. Academia and the cost of academic publishing does not encourage the writing of long personal anecdotes, but favours concise citation of other people's thoughts as an indicator of learning (Baynham 2002). Are those who just cannot work like that to be branded as failures? . Some people are just not suited to pure academia, but their talents should be encouraged and nurtured.
What do we as educators assess? Should it be the student's progress, knowledge, memory, skills, competence, ability to impress the tutor, .... ? In some cases it is clear AND important - such as a driving test, but when someone is studying for pleasure is it helpful to tell them that they have failed the assessment? Some people still question the usefulness of testing in helping people with life and careers in the real world (Bedell 2002).
I recently heard that lecturers at one University Department did not regard themselves as "teachers":- they are now "self-directed learning facilitators" (at the same University the Library is now a "Learning Centre" and probably staffed by a Learning Resource Directorate Team rather than Librarians). In other words they do not teach the students everything they are expected to learn and are just there to point them in the right direction and assess the results. The students are assessed on the work that they have not been taught and consequently find it very difficult to know if their studies are achieving the correct standard until they receive their exam results!
The whole field of assessment if fraught with difficulties when you look at standardisation. Different subjects are trying to stimulate different attributes in the individual - observation and objectivity in science, creativity in the arts, debate in philosophy and so on (see Fry et al. 1999 for different emphases in teaching and learning).
The situation becomes more complicated when you look at the one-to-one relationship of supervising an individual research project or thesis. Should the supervisor take on the role of mentor, dungeon-master (as in fantasy role-playing games), waiter (Murray 1998 quoted in Marshall 1999), coach (Rogers 2001), motivator (University of Hull Chemistry Department web-site 2002) or counsellor? What is the appropriate level of involvement when/if the supervisor is also an internal examiner? What is being examined the researcher or the teamwork?
Difficulty writing to a different standards:-
Science vs social sciences vs creative arts.
Baynham (2002) describes the difficulties experienced by student nurses because their training includes pure medical science and social science. The written work they are required to produce is to two different academic styles. He also points out that the social science's academic world undervalues personal experience. Admittedly younger students do not have a huge stores of life experiences to draw on, but there must be a place for anecdotal writing in more mature students.
I see Science as the observation of facts and then trying to find links between them. I teach my students to trust their own observations and use facts from literature, but not necessarily to believe other people's opinions (Horne 2002). I do not discriminate in this - I encourage all to do this regardless of their experience and age.
It seems that the Social Sciences are different - I was amazed that in discussion with fellow HETC students that Social Scientists are not expected to use their own experience as evidence until they reach Ph.D. levels.
In the creative arts creativity is most valued - I remember in discussions about UFA assessments some tutors requesting that greater emphasis be given to creativity over other factors and I remarked that science students who were creative would fail! There surely has to be a sliding scale to reflect the variability of academic factors within different subjects.
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I am grateful for the opportunity to attend the course. Whether this work passes the assessment or not, I have learnt a lot of stuff that hope can be included in my teaching for the benefit of my students. They are the people who should be the real beneficiaries of this course. So I thank all the tutors, organisers and fellow HETC students.
Sorry there is no conclusion.
As Christmas Humphreys (1971) put it "Walk on".