Independent Thinking on Teaching in Higher Education

From theory to practice

Erik Blair

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781781353714
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A refreshing and invigorating exploration of what really matters and what really works in higher education teaching.
Dr Erik Blair's Independent Thinking on Teaching in Higher Education: From theory to practice is a refreshing and invigorating exploration of what really matters and what really works in higher education teaching.
This book offers an insight into an area of higher education that has become more significant of late: the art of teaching. It focuses on the actual work of teaching and gives thought-provoking and perceptive guidance on how to teach in a meaningful and engaging manner. Independent Thinking on Teaching in Higher Education doesn't bamboozle with abstract terminology. Instead, Erik guides readers through topic-driven chapters that offer practical answers supported by rationales drawn from everyday experience. Alongside the core themes, he also provides bite-sized 'nuggets of wisdom' that prompt readers to implement flexible and effective strategies as part of their daily practice.
The book offers a deeper understanding of the roles and responsibilities of those who teach in higher education, and also covers the three areas measured in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF): teaching quality, the learning environment, and the educational and professional outcomes achieved by students. Furthermore, Erik goes beyond the lecture theatre and seminar room by including a section dedicated to teaching online - that is, how to get the best out of delivering content to students remotely via the virtual learning environment.
Ideal for those new to teaching in higher education as well as more experienced practitioners who want to continue honing their craft, Independent Thinking on Teaching in Higher Education embraces teaching and learning as a personal and human activity - and encourages educators to reflect on how the suggested approaches can be applied in their particular teaching environment.
Suitable for all educators working in higher education.

5

CHAPTER 1

OPENING THE BEETLE BOX

Before we examine teaching in higher education, we need to think about who it is that does the teaching. By and large, this person is employed as a lecturer, but lecturers are not the only people who teach in higher education – there are also tutors, graduate teaching assistants, fellows, readers and professors, as well as other colleagues who work with students to develop specific skills (both techni­cal and academic). Becoming someone who teaches in higher education (whatever your role or job title might be) ‘is not a simple matter, with almost a decade required to prepare an individual for even an entry-level role’.1 With so much effort involved, it might be worthwhile to find out just what is expected of those who teach in higher educa­tion. A quick internet search using terms such as ‘lecturer’, ‘reader’ or ‘academic support tutor’ will provide a surface definition, but this description is likely to be limited in scope – focusing on the duties and responsibilities of someone working in higher education.

In this chapter, I will dig below surface definitions and start to explore the interaction of various personal and profes­sional demarcations. In doing so, I hope to move the conversation beyond a discussion of what someone who teaches in higher education is employed to do and focus on what they actually do.

6

DISCIPLINARY ROOTS

Say the word ‘learning’ and you might get a mental pic­ture. Most people can come up with their own definition of learning, although this is often narrow and prejudiced by personal experience. However, language can change its meaning according to context, therefore the meaning of the word ‘learning’ is likely to depend on who is using it and the specific conditions in which they find themselves. In his analysis of private and public language, Wittgenstein tells a story of two boys, each with a matchbox containing what he calls a ‘beetle’.2 They agree never to look inside each other’s matchbox and also agree that they both con­tain a beetle. In this analogy, we see that the thing that is ‘beetle’ is private to each boy and that the term only has meaning on account of its public use. It does not actually matter what is in the box – the word ‘beetle’ now means ‘the thing inside the box’. In a similar way, individuals (lec­turers, students and the public at large) discuss the thing inside their head that they call ‘teaching’.

Language is also context-bound: the setting for Wittgenstein’s example was a game played by two boys, but two zoologists working in the tropical rainforests of Trinidad and Tobago would have a different understanding of ‘beetle’. Likewise, the word ‘teaching’ also has a private meaning, but we can only communicate with others when they share a similar understanding of the word. In this way, language is private-shared – no one person can decide on the ‘true’ meaning of any term. However, while we might all have our own meanings, in practice they are often not so different and can overlap with the meanings of others. This vast Venn diagram of meaning holds a 7practical truth about what ‘teaching’ actually is (even if this agreed definition is hard to conceptualise or verbalise).

Teaching in higher education is a personally negotiated experience. Individuals will have taken different journeys to arrive at their present situation and will be uniquely shaped by those experiences. However, working within a shared institutional system tends to have a normative effect. Foucault suggests that ‘we live inside a set of rela­tions’,3 so any discussion of meaning or interpretation also needs to consider communicated norms within the con­text of higher education. These norms are the result of, among other things, governmental and institutional directives, student expectations, graduate outcomes, departmental and disciplinary cultures and the assorted needs of various stakeholders. Teaching in the ‘supercom­plexity’ of modern higher education is therefore about much more than simply being an expert within a certain field.4

Understanding what it means to teach in this environ­ment involves problematising how we conceptualise learning, examining what we think education is for, ques­tioning our own identity as conduits to knowledge and reflecting on our individual biases. In so doing, we allow the significance of everyday academic roles and regular teaching/learning activities to be examined afresh. Everyone who teaches in higher education has their own approach to teaching, and because everyone who teaches in higher education has had a personal experience of being taught, almost everyone has their own understand­ing of what it means to teach in this environment (and almost everyone has something to say about teaching).

8However, teaching in higher education is not just one eas­ily defined activity. Many individuals develop their conception of their role by engaging with pre-formed ideas about how their subject should be taught and learned – an understanding rooted in their experience of disciplinary learning. These discipline-specific thoughts can be both conscious and unconscious but they tend to be limited in their scope – focusing on the story of how one individual became an expert in one particular aspect of one particular discipline. Furthermore, the philosophi­cal underpinnings of our pedagogy are often individual and disciplinary rather than institutional or universal.

As well as engaging with the knowledge base, those teaching in higher education may have learned the meth­ods, modes and practices of their subject in various ways. For some, their pedagogical approach has been carefully constructed through the scrutiny of educational theory, the critical reading of educational literature and reflective practice. Many develop their practice by studying towards formal higher education qualifications. But there are also a great many people in higher education who developed their teaching practice tacitly and built their understand­ing of their role through direct on-the-job experience. No matter which route an individual has taken, it is their des­tination (the higher education institution that employs them) that defines the requirements of their role. These requirements are often outlined in job descriptions, but the tasks actually undertaken when teaching in higher education can also be rather nebulous and difficult to cap­ture. Once we begin to examine the everyday routines of the role, we can begin to capture what it means to be a teacher and from there we can start to scrutinise the rationale behind our activities.

As we have already discussed, an individual’s educational journey and experiences will have coloured how they see 9their teaching role. For some this will mean that they find themselves teaching as they were taught, while others may want to rebel and try new approaches. Those who teach in higher education tend to have studied a particu­lar topic (whether that is physics, economics, film-making or academic writing skills) and their studies are likely to have been embedded in a particular teaching format or ‘signature pedagogy’. (A signature pedagogy is the typical way that a specific discipline is taught.) These stereotypi­cal approaches relate to the pedagogy of the subject and to the resources used. For example, it is customary for law to be taught using rote learning and the Socratic approach (where carefully constructed questions lead to logical answers); it is typical for basketball to be taught on the court rather than in a classroom; and if we were to take up parachute jumping, then we would almost certainly expect to get in an aeroplane at some point. Before we even arrive in a higher education learning environment, we need to think about how we have been conditioned by our previous learning.

TEACHER-LED VS. STUDENT-LED PEDAGOGY

Broadly, there are two things we can do in response to our educational conditioning: we can comply or we can rebel. The first is easy and probably doesn’t take too much think­ing; however, we will simply perpetuate the system. If you were not happy with the way you were taught when you attended higher education, then you need to start rebelling now! Realistically, this might not be the right time to start a revolution, so our rebellion may need to be smaller and more aligned to academic norms. We can begin by being more reflective and more critical – not simply reproducing 10the established ways but questioning their validity and pur­pose. Whenever I meet someone who has memorised a poem by heart I am generally unimpressed – remembering lengthy stanzas of poetry is clearly not easy, but it is the application of this learning that is important to me. So, our first reflective acts of rebellion should involve examining the utility of some of the ways our subjects are taught – whether they are taught in a certain way because that is the only possible way to teach them or because of convention. If you can see alternative ways of teaching your topic, then explore these further.

Imagine we were teaching an introductory class on bas­ketball and the focus of the class is how to get the ball into the hoop. There are two main teaching methods we could apply: a deductive pedagogy or an inductive pedagogy. The deductive approach tends to be teacher-led. It starts with definitions, descriptions and demonstrations. (The way I remember this is that the word ‘deductive’ starts with the letters ‘d’ and ‘e’, as do define, describe and demonstrate.) We would gather the class around and carefully talk them through the various stages of standing, aiming, throwing and scoring a basket. After this struc­tured demonstration, the group would go and practise these skills, and then we would bring them all together in a final plenary during which we would review what they have done and what they have learned.

If we were to adopt an inductive approach, we would start by giving the students two things: (1) the problem we want them to solve and (2) the criteria for success. We would explain that we want them to get the ball in the hoop and that they should find the most consistent method for doing so. We would then send them off to experiment. Our role would be to oversee and take notes, but to be ready to act or to be on hand for any questions that may arise. After experimenting, we would draw the group 11together and review their success/failure. We would then ask the students to relate what the literature (or coaching manual) suggests to what we, as a class, found to be the most successful approach. Where there are discrepancies we would explore these, and where there are consisten­cies we would examine why we think that certain approaches worked best. (I remember what ‘inductive pedagogy’ is because it starts with the word ‘in’ – and this method usually involves students getting stuck in.)

Both deductive and inductive methods have their strengths and weaknesses, and it is more than likely that our teaching will use a blend of the two. The point is that there is usually at least one other way to teach a topic. If we were to apply deductive and inductive pedagogical meth­ods to the teaching of academic writing – something that most of us in higher education have to teach to some degree – then we might decide to show students what to do (deductive) or we might get them to look at instances of good and bad academic writing and work out some key rules for themselves (inductive). In medicine, we might explain the skeletal features of the human body or we might give each student a bone and ask them to work as a team to recreate the entire skeleton. When teaching film-making, we might talk stude...

Table of contents

• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• FIRST THOUGHTS
• CHAPTER 1: OPENING THE BEETLE BOX
• CHAPTER 2: THE STRUCTURE OF TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 3: THE FLOW OF INFORMATION
• CHAPTER 4: OBSERVATION AS A LEARNING PROCESS
• CHAPTER 5: LOOKING BACK, GOING FORWARD
• FINAL THOUGHTS
• REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
• COPYRIGHT
• ADVERTISEMENT