Over the summer, I was (more by luck than skill, I suspect) appointed as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. This is the first of two posts contrasting the OU with the more conventional university at which I have taught part-time for several years. This post gives my impressions of the OU as an institution; the second will look at the differences between OU and conventional students.

I have long felt that the Open University does things differently. When I was younger, I remember our kitchen table continually covered with papers, and colourful textbooks; DVDs and software CDs would randomly drop through the letterbox; and, in the middle of the night, the video player would suddenly start whirring, recording some OU broadcast. This was because my dad took an OU course every year, finally earning his second BSc after twelve years hard slog.

Today, I stand on the other side of the OU fence. I recently got a post as an Associate Lecturer on one of the OU's English Literature courses. Having seen the way the OU worms its way into the home life and domestic environments of students sitting courses, suddenly the OU has infiltrated my own kitchen table and scattered its papers on the floor of my bedroom, as I grapple with the demands of teaching a new course, and integrating myself into the rules and procedures of this organisation.

Whilst I always knew the OU was unique among universities, I never realised until now quite how remarkable an institution it is. Over 200 000 students enrol to study with the OU each year. Of these, around 20 000 students are studying an OU course outside the UK; many are ex-pats, or members of the armed forces, but many too are foreign students who welcome the opportunity to make contact with a world-recognised institution. Over two thirds of students will be working whilst studying. 15% of students come from disadvantaged communities.

Even for those not studying formally, the OU makes itself felt. Each week, there are around 50 000 downloads of OU podcasts from iTunes. Two million people access the freely available teaching and learning materials from the Open Learn website. Millions more watch OU supported television programmes, such as the BBC's Coast.

The sheer scale of the organisation is mind-boggling, and utterly unlike any other, mainstream Higher Education institution. And yet what strikes me most as an Associate Lecturer is that at its heart lies an intimate relationship between teachers and students. The idea of an OU course is that the actual teaching is done through the carefully-prepared study materials, such as course books and audio-visual materials. The tutor is not a lecturer in the conventional sense, delivering information and setting tests. The role of a tutor is simply to be on hand to offer some pointers and clarification when a student becomes stuck, to deliver tutorials which again help to draw out some of the issues on the course, and to mark assignments with detailed feedback.

With this theoretically proscribed remit, it would be easy for the OU to offer tutor support for courses en masse. In the digital age, students could post queries on message boards, and a central team of tutors could moderate and respond to them. Largely, the student community could be self-supporting, with students offering each other advice. This does happen to a degree, with students setting up lively Facebook groups, for example. However, although the OU might be run as a purely distance learning organisation, with staff too kept at arm's length, core to student support in the OU remains the allocation of a single tutor, to one small group of students (around 20 in my case).

Students may never get to see me in person (since my students are based in Europe), but they will always know that I am at the end of an email or phone line. In that respect, the student-teacher relationship encouraged by the OU is even more intimate than in a traditional university, where a tutor might lecture to 200 students, or have dozens of small tutorial groups to supervise. Already this year I have had more "contact" with my OU students than with my students at my other, conventional university.

It is quite clear that the OU is a student-centred organisation. It has to be. Its whole raison d'etre when founded forty years ago was to widen the availability of Higher Education to students. At the same time, though, the OU has had continually to attract students in order to sustain itself. Albeit often with generous financial support available for those who could not otherwise afford it, students have always paid fees and the OU is conscious that without students, it would cease to exist. It was, in this sense, forty years ahead of the game of tuition fees, which turned students into consumers.

As I have been complaining recently on this blog, conventional universities have no room to provide more contact hours or support for students who are now paying fees, because it is still the research which brings in most money. As an OU lecturer, though, I am told that I am expected to support my students based on their needs. If a student needs additional help, there is a mechanism to reimburse me, as I can request overtime payments. By contrast at my mainstream university, if any student needs more than the basic tuition, or additional pastoral care, I have to support them at my own time and expense.

On the flip side, the OU also seems genuinely to care about its Associate Lecturers, all of whom teach purely on a part time basis, often alongside other jobs. It would be easy to pass the buck of professional development on to other organisations, or expect lecturers (who may already be established academics) to fend for themselves. Instead, from the moment I received my training pack it was clear that the OU will invest and support me, in a way that sets a good example for my own relationship with students.

For example, the OU offers a course fee waiver for Associate Lecturers, and runs a range of courses that might be relevant to teaching within and beyond the OU. Part of my salary is stipulated as professional development time, and although it is left on trust whether I will actually do any, the fact that it is highlighted as a separate payment speaks volumes. I am allocated a mentor who I can approach with the picky concerns that are not worth raising with a line manager. A sample of my essays will be double marked, and I will get to see the moderator's comments; in my other university job, by contrast, I have never been told about external examiners' reports, despite me marking half the year group for one module last year, and have had specifically to ask whether my marks had to be pushed up, down, or were just right.

But. I would not be an academic if I did not judiciously balance the positives with negatives. And although my view of the OU has been very positive thus far, and I am proud to be associated with an organisation that does so much to support those who would otherwise be disenfranchised from Higher Educations, already there are some things that gripe.

There is - what else? - that old issue of pay. The OU at least has the decency to state that I should be working for 6 hours a week, which puts to shame my other university which assumes that it takes 1 hour to prepare for a 1 hour tutorial. Joke. Even so, the 6 hours very easily vanishes. I am probably working twice that each week at the moment, because I have to learn the course for the first time, as well as to teach it. Given that students on my course should be studying for 15 hours a week...well, you do the maths. Having said that, I expect that next year, with more experience behind me, the 6 hours should become a fairer representation.

The issue which has surprised and frustrated me most, though, is the awful and incoherent IT infrastructure behind the OU enterprise. There are several different websites all doing comparable things within interfaces that all look different and un-integrated (Open Learn, Student Home, Tutor Home, Platform First Class, Intranet Home). The email and forum software belongs in a museum of early 1990s bulletin boards: there is no threading, 100 MB of storage, no search function, poor attachment support, an awful address book, no mobile or push email support. A project is underway to replace this old system with something that may live up to the vain name First Class. But we have had richly interactive websites and communication tools for the last decade, and given that part of the OU's remit is to drive forward educational technologies, it is shockingly behind the times with its own virtual learning environment (VLE).

Similarly, the way my tutorials work is ridiculously quirky. Because my students are scattered across Europe, we hold tutorials via a telephone conferencing system. This involves an operator phoning round each participant in turn, which occupies 5 to 10 minutes of a 45 minute tutorial; we then hold a conversation across a time-delayed, echoing line. I must not overrun my tutorials, since the international operator-assisted calling charges are significant. Neither must the calls go through to students' mobiles.

But there is another way of running conferencing cheaply and easily, with me in full control. You may have heard of it. It is called VoIP. It would be easy for me to install software on my own PC that would allow me to conference call students, either to their phones or computers or mobiles, for nothing more than the cost of a local rate phone call. Like all large institutions, I guess the OU must be slow to turn on to new technological opportunities. But as the one at the sharp end of a rubbish and costly phone line, who could run a VoIP conference with the click of a mouse, the rigidity of the old system is frustrating and, again, surprising given the OU's remit to promote virtual and distance learning.

To be fair to the OU, it is not alone in being a Higher Education institution that struggles with the internet age. My other university uses the god-awful, snail-slow, user-unfriendly Blackboard. However, whilst in mainstream universities such VLEs are an addendum to conventional teaching methods (lectures and tutorials), the VLE is increasingly the main face of the OU for students and, for that matter, for Associate Lecturers.

Even so, a gripe about technology should be set in the context of the fact that the OU works, and works brilliantly for a large and diverse body of students who would otherwise not have access to study. In my second blog post, I will look at how these students seem to differ from "conventional" ones who have slipped directly from college into university.

Labels: Open University, teaching, University Life, virtual learning

One of the pleasures of university life is the three months in summer when students depart, and rather than having to swim against a tide of preparation and marking, one actually gets to tread water, reflecting on what has gone before, and planning new strategies. For module conveners and heads of department, such planning usually means revising reading lists, syllabi, lectures, and exam papers in the wake of a burden of student feedback forms and external examiners' reports. But not being elevated to the position of a full-time academic, in my humble role as a part-time tutor, I get to reflect more modestly on my own teaching experience, and plan subtle but perhaps more exciting changes to my own teaching methods.

Over the summer, then, one plan I have implemented has been to build myself a personal website to showcase my research and CV and, rather less vainly, to support my teaching through technologies that are not offered by the university's central virtual learning environment. For example, having moved to an online calendar, I post my free/busy information so students can check when they can meet me if they need an appointment. I also offer anonymous teaching feedback questionnaires. However, the most exciting element of the website is my new Twitter account.

Long one of the Twitterati under the not-so-pseudonymic alibrown18, this coming academic year, I will be using another Twitter account purely in support of teaching (I will not give it out here, precisely because it is designed for my students, not the use of you, Joe Public). In this blog post, I explain my rationale behind using Twitter, and anticipate some of the problems and potential benefits as a technological aid to traditional teaching and email contact methods.

Rationale

One thing that surprises me as a teacher is how few emails I get asking intellectual-type questions, where a student is struggling to comprehend material and wants some help, or where a student is carrying out their own research for essays and would like some pointers. There are far fewer than one might have expect given that they have so little contact time with me over the year. Of course, just about once a minute I receive an email along the lines of "my printer has broken, can I have another month to write my essay?" but it is rare for a student to ask me something less practical, and more discursive. Whilst this might suggest that I am unapproachable, or that I give off the whiff of "I'm too busy doing research, now leave me alone," I would prefer to think that I give the impression to students that they are welcome to ask me any questions they would like, to discuss essays or other concerns. Why, then, do so few approach me with questions that indicate fresh engagement or problems with their course content?

One clue might lie in the style of the relatively few discursive emails that I do receive. We live in a culture in which, so we are told, students would write essays via text speak and emoticons if they could get away with it. Given this, I am always surprised that when I receive a email from a student, they are most often carefully-crafted, literate, and considered. Students are usually apologetic for having "bothered" me, even if the question being asked was worthy and interesting. Coupling this with the fact that I receive fewer dialectical emails than might be expected, my suspicion is that students are put off from asking intellectual questions for fear of sounding stupid. They do not want to seem to be asking that question that might be deemed too simple, and hence too much of a bother to a busy tutor. Thus students may get so bogged down in worrying about how they can express their question, that few of them actually do so, not being prepared to write through a careful email expressing their thoughts.

As a very different form of electronic exchange, with a 140 character limit the very nature of Twitter defies extended talk. It is, however, potentially very useful for precisely the reason that intrinsically no question or comment a student poses there can be a deep one, though it may nevertheless point towards hidden complexities and undercurrents of thought in the student's mind. The additional level of informality might encourage more hesitant, or less articulate, students to use this medium instead of email. I can at this stage imagine messages like, "Help. I really want 2 write about science in Conrad's Secret Agent. What should I read?" or "Is the passage in Pride and Prejudice on p.49 free indirect discourse?"

Naturally, such questions would require an extended, probably emailed, reply. But the important issue here is about opening a channel of communication between student and tutor, encouraging the student that the tutor is approachable and open to an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and recommendations.

A second motivation for using Twitter lies in the efficient way it can be used to share contemporary media stories, web links, or one's current reading. My thoughts on this benefit were sparked when in the middle of the last academic year I read Elaine Showalter's article in The Guardian review, showcasing her new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. At the time, I was teaching an American fiction course, and it struck me as apt that Showalter had touched a nerve about the masculine bias in American literature. Almost certainly, some of my students will have picked up on the article, or on one of her radio and web features around the time. Yet most may not have done.

Using a quick, informal tweet to direct students to the article would have made clear that this was neither essential reading, nor necessarily my view on the state of American literature, but that it might be of interest nonetheless. Based on my serendipitous research experiences of happening upon books in Oxfam or articles in the London Review of Books that sent my writing off into new and fertile fields, I firmly believe that research in the arts is as much about luck and the unexpected discovery than the predictable approach through the established reading list. Because of its brevity, tweets containing links or recommendations have the sense of happenstance about them. For example, I could only have posted: "Article by Showalter on which women writers are important in American Lit. http://bit.ly/H9fC4" It is then up to the student to read and decide for themselves what their opinion on this new criticism is.

On that note, a more ephemeral epistemological possibility might be raised through the use of microblogging teaching aids. Literature departments have come a long way since Arnold, Leavis, Eliot and their like populated their "great tradition" with dead, white, European males. Whilst many bemoan the postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist relativism that was - and still is - the reaction to this tradition, there is no doubt that today, English studies is in perpetual flux. The "canon," such as it is, shifts with the cultural climate and the intellectual tide. Just as Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing shook up the notion of the male tradition by perceiving a female line of literary inheritance, a new work by a major critic like Showalter will get noticed, will shift the boundaries of the discipline, will break the silo of "American Literature."

Yet in spite of the undermining of the tradition, even the best lecture courses can be slow to turn with the tide, perhaps introducing one or two different books a year, and certainly not rewriting material to reflect issues currently in the news, blogosphere, or literary media. The lecture course, doing its job of teaching efficiently and reliably week by week, has its place. Indeed, arguably the key merit of literary studies is its comparative stability. By discussing a common body of the best texts of a culture or time, a literature course sends a community of readers, who become workers, thinkers, and leaders, out into the world with a common humanistic framework derived from those books. But the lecture course that is the bedrock of such an idealistic (perhaps, today, slightly naive) ambition does not necessarily impart to students the sense of their subject today as dynamic, with long-cherished authors up for critical grabs, with new authors just waiting to be explored.

Now I would not suggest that Twitter, for all of its powerful Streisand effects on the media, is by itself capable of carrying a new culture into English studies. Nor indeed would such a revolution be a good thing. The whole beauty of posting subject news to Twitter is that its informal nature means that any links or reading suggested there will not fundamentally contradict central reading lists carefully constructed by module conveners. It will be clear that these reading lists and lectures are the core of course content. Yet any contemporary tweets may also inspire students' independent learning, encourage them to explore the less well-known books on course lists, and invest in them the sense of literary studies as a discursive game, rather than a one-way process where they suck well worn information out of eminent academics. What I would hope using Twitter will do as a teaching aid is to convey in students the sense of their subject as being alive in wider critical and lay society, so that individually students feel free to imagine new ways of approaching established texts. Additionally, if I use it to post my own reading as I prepare for teaching, this might convey the excitement of independent research in a way that could enthuse students.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is, of course, just one of many web tools that might help to support learning. Why, then, is it potentially better than any alternative platform or content sharing facility?

As I have already said, Twitter's 140 character limit is ideal for encouraging students to open communication spontaneously, rather than worrying about contacting a tutor to ask a potentially (to them) silly question. It also makes it easy for me to share links to articles or books, without feeling that I have to write a long email or blog post justifying my suggestion, and without implying that my suggestions are certainly better than those on reading lists.

Besides brevity, another benefit of Twitter is its simplicity. I can easily use a browser plugin (such as Echofon) or my mobile phone to post links or responses to students, without having to log-in to any university email or content management system.

Further, students can also follow my Twitter feed passively. I have in the past considered using Facebook as a teaching support, because it is ubiquitous among the student community and has straightforward facilities for discussions, such as the wall and message boards; it also has an events system which could be used to remind students of deadlines or meetings. However, feedback from my students on their tutorial questionnaires strongly suggested that students would see my use of Facebook as a breach of private walls. Firstly, students use Facebook to escape work, not to do it. Secondly, in order to create a teaching group, I would first need to befriend students and vice versa, meaning that we might be tempted to snoop on each other's profiles.

Twitter, however, requires no such exchange of personal details in order to allow a feed to be followed. Indeed, anxious students can actually "block" me from following them, whilst still being able to see me. I can also use Twitter's API to post tweets to my static teaching website (and one would hope that existing virtual learning platforms, such as the dreaded Blackboard, will make use of this architecture in future) so students can check there even if they are not signed-up members of Twitter. Tweets can also be followed as individual RSS feeds corresponding to a hash tag. So, for example, I can assign #drama to one module, #modernism to another, and students can follow only those feeds relevant to their subject. That Twitter is by nature a public medium also means that other students not directly taught by me can pick up on my feeds, helping to offer "parity of provision" between students taught by different tutors.

Finally, the use of the "retweet" convention would allow students to use my Twitter feed to share their own discoveries with their peers, without those students having to log on to a discussion board or compose a justificatory email. Such retweets could also be anonymised, if students fear being tagged as the class "geek," whilst they can be moderated more easily than a discussion board, if I feel the content is unsuitable or irrelevant. Indeed, such moderation, which would require me to contact the student explaining why I have not passed their suggestion on, might also draw out that the student is not engaged with the course reading in the best possible way.

The Test

Of course, all the above are hypotheses conceived in the dreamy days of the summer vacation. It may well be that students do not use Twitter to contact me with sparks of doubt or questions. It may be that few make use of my feeds on current subject news. It may also be that my university comes down on me for daring to use a technology that does not come under its official virtual learning environment, and for doing something that goes beyond the normal expectation of a tutor.

But I feel that, being early in my career, and not having the burden of a full-time academic job and associated admin and research, if I do not try these things now, I may never; or, rather, if it does work, I will be able (quite selfishly) to promote my technological innovation as an aspect to my CV, rather than something expected of a university tutor as will increasingly be the case over the next decade. At the moment, Twitter is surfing the wave of the Web 2.0 era, the hottest new technology since, well, Facebook last year. It would seem a real missed opportunity not to test how microblogging can work as a teaching tool.

The final question, though, because it is so cutting edge, is what the test of its success can be. Despite the mass of publicity, not everyone is familiar with Twitter, and despite being tech-savvy, students might think my use of the medium is a bit alien and strange. Perhaps they will not use it just because it is not yet prominent in their consciousnesses, the way Facebook is, and I would be wrong to be deflated if uptake is slow. A key problem of testing how my Twitter posts are used is that, whilst being open so that students can follow feeds in a number of ways without having to "befriend" me, this makes it impossible to apply metrics. How do I know whether my students are following me, or just random strangers? How do I know how many students without Twitter accounts are visiting my static website and actually reading the feeds there? How do I know how many have subscribed to the RSS feeds with a reader?

Further, if students do not use it to contact me with their questions, or to share their reading with their peers, does this suggest something intrinsic to many students (that they do not really want to actively engage with their learning and the intellectual potential of their subject, but simply want to pass the course), or does it suggest that this technology too has failed to unlock their discursive sides? If a few students do actively use it to chase up my reading suggestions or to ask questions, will my efforts taken to reach these few have been worthwhile, or are those the same students who would have excelled as learners anyway?

There is, at this stage, only one thing to do. In a couple of days, I have my first meetings with my students, when I will introduce my new website, and direct them to my Twitter stream. I will, quite shamelessly, get their feedback and thoughts. And hope that I will also, in a year's time, be posting here that it has been a resounding success. Wtch this spc. x.

Labels: Literature, teaching, twitter, University Life

Last week, the UK's postgraduate support body, Vitae, published a survey of distance learning and part-time doctorates. The next day in the UK, universities and the higher education press were pouring over the results from the annual National Student Survey, extrapolating a general rule about the state of universities from every dropped percentage point. Meanwhile, as an ongoing feature of this time of the academic year, many postgraduates will be busy filling in questionnaires for their graduate schools.

It sometimes seems as if higher education is fuelled by two things: money, and survey results. But whilst entire university administration departments are dedicated to designing questionnaires, or to dissecting their results, should individual academics or postgraduate teaching assistants seek feedback on their own teaching? In this blog post, I want to share my own experience (or initial lack of it) in designing surveys to direct my own teaching. But before thinking about the methods of questionnaire design, it is worth stressing why feedback is such a vital tool for teaching, even at the early stage of an academic career in which I find myself.

If UK academics want to apply to the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the national centre for teaching excellence, to receive accreditation - often, for early-career researchers, at the Associate level - all they need to do is to fill in a form describing their teaching activities in two "areas of activity" from a list of five. These include assessing students, planning a lesson, or providing a supportive environment in which students can learn.

Area 1, for instance, asks the applicant to:

Identify the ways in which you contribute to the design and planning of learning activities. These might include involvement in the design or redesign of curricula, courses and programmes of study and/or identifying and planning different kinds of interaction with learners in various contexts for single sessions or larger programmes.

Perhaps you have held a tutorial with a group of students, planned a seminar or even given a lecture. Surely all you need to do, then, is to state what you have taught - books you have used, for example - just as you would on a CV?

The catch comes with the subsequent sentence, a mantra that is repeated beneath all of the other areas of activity:

Please give reasons for your choice of learning content, activities and techniques and how they relate to developing the learners' understanding of the subject. Please explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it.

These repeated sentences represent the tip of the huge, foundational move that has taken place in universities over the last two decades. This is the shift towards "student-centred learning."

At first, this might seem like one of those clever-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrases so beloved of technocrats. Surely universities have always had students at their centre? But consider the case of the professor who stands in front of the blackboard in a stuffy lecture theatre, droning on for an hour about some scrawl behind him, to which he occasionally gestures with an absent hand. I am sure you have encountered this stereotype at some point in your education. In response to a lecturer like this, you might well have buried your head in your hands and your eyes in your textbooks, believing that the reason you cannot understand the material or find it so dull is not that the lecturer is bad, but rather than he is so brilliant and the material he is teaching so difficult that you will never understand it. You may even have fallen for that fallacy that the worse the teacher, the better the student you must become, because you are being forced to study independently in order to understand.

Student-centred learning attempts to send such lecturers up in a (metaphorical) puff of smoke, turning attention instead to students. Lecturers should not plan lessons in ways that they find easiest to teach; and although teaching is often most exciting when at the cutting-edge of research, they should not simply talk about their current career-defining, ultra-complex project because that interests them more than teaching the basics. Rather, lecturers should instead consider what hard knowledge and soft skills they want students to learn by the end of their degree, and think about how students might best go about learning it.

This is what lies behind the HEA's application for Associate Practitioners, with that repeated requirement that you "give reasons for your choice of learning content" and that you "explain how you know that your work is effective and how you try to improve it."

How, though, can one provide this sort of evidence? The clue lies in compulsory Area 5 of the HEA's application form:

This area is about how you use research, scholarly activity and/or professional activities to support learning. Please use this section to give examples of ways in which you draw upon discipline based and pedagogic research, scholarly activity and/or other professional activities in the support of teaching and learning.

No PhD researcher should ever uncritically accept the findings of the latest journal article. Instead, research requires one to evaluate the previous reliability of an author, or to look out for any cunning argumentative tricks or methodological errors that may compromise a paper's findings. Area 5 asks that researchers bring the same evaluative techniques to bear on teaching. How do we know our teaching is effective for students? How do we evaluate whether they are learning in ways that best suit them?

This is where the questionnaire or survey starts to become of value to individual academics, not just to institutions focused on the latest league tables. Whilst good teachers will always be able to pick up on the vibes of a classroom, and sense whether students are engaged with the material they are teaching, there is no substitute for hard evidence of teaching effectiveness, just as in research one would never reject a paper's findings purely on a hunch.

And so onto my own experience. When I started teaching tutorials in English Literature four years ago, I thought I was doing a great job. Not only did I give students preliminary reading to do, I also got them to download podcasts and audio books. Rather than sticking with dusty books, I asked them to do exercises with hypertext editions.

But whilst I may have enjoyed implementing these twenty-first-century practices, when I set about applying to the HEA in 2006, how could I know that these were actually what students wanted? How could I measure whether my teaching techniques were benefiting their learning? In large part, answering this meant designing a survey. And here, I as a literary academic found myself somewhat in the dark - and, by sharing my experiences here, I hope to enlighten others in the same position as I was three years ago.

The first thing I found is that in order to be useful, questions need to be specific. Asking students whether they enjoyed tutorials (or not) might (or might not) do something for my ego, but reveals little about how they are using tutorials for learning. Perhaps they enjoyed tutorials, for example, because I never scheduled them first thing in the morning. Perhaps they were with their friends in my group, and their memories of tutorials are conditioned more by the chatter before and after, than by what actually went on in the classroom.

Even when I later modified this question to ask whether my tutorials were useful in "developing your understanding of course material," I found this did not really help much. At my university, students receive just four one-hour tutorials per year, the rest of teaching taking the form of lectures. Therefore, in preparing for a one-off tutorial, a student will usually read their primary and secondary material carefully, thereby improving their understanding of the course material automatically. Although they may not have perceived it that way when they responded to my question, the exact form of the tutorial may have mattered less than the mere fact of its existence as a key punctuation point in the academic year. Additionally, whilst I try to allow students to do most of the talking and debate in tutorials, with me taking the role of chairperson, I know that other tutors prefer to take a more active role, disseminating ideas and information rather than merely facilitating a debate. Neither approach may be better at ensuring that the preparation for the tutorial, and the contact time itself, become sound platforms for subsequent study. If a student acknowledged that my tutorials had helped their understanding, this did not necessarily mean my way of running tutorials was the best or only way of achieving the same result.

The first recommendation with surveys, then, is to try avoid generalised questions, or to ask them as part of a suite of more detailed ones. Asking whether a student enjoyed or benefited from my tutorials told me little about my teaching. Neither did asking whether it helped their understanding, because a different approach might have been similarly beneficial. In the most recent version of the survey I issued last academic year, I still asked these questions, as they provide an opportunity for students to complain if they really have not enjoyed the tutorials, and for me to get a general sense of student perceptions of me generally (it is not necessarily the case that just because a student may offer lots of valid pointers for improvement, this means your teaching overall is poor). However, I also ask more detailed, follow-up questions. Did students feel they got more out of set tasks (mini-exercises I get them to do in pairs), or when discussing a text as a whole group? Did students use any handouts given in tutorials as a way of pursuing themes developed in the space of the hour's discussion?

I also now ask very specific questions looking ahead to teaching in subsequent years, whilst reflecting on the one just gone. For example, I ask whether students benefited from any online resources or podcasts, and if so whether they think the next generation of students would appreciate more of them. This year, I even asked whether my current students thought future ones would be happy for me to use Facebook in teaching. Their responses to these questions were clear enough to guide my teaching next year decisively. Broadly put, yes to more online resources and podcasts, but no way can I use Facebook for teaching, breaking the boundary between academic teacher and student socialite.

Another trick I have discovered with surveys is to introduce them at the start of the year rather than towards the end. This might seem counter-intuitive, and against the way surveys usually run at universities. How can students comment on a course when they have not yet completed it? However, I realised that presenting the questionnaire at the start of the year would have two benefits.

Firstly, when I hand out the questionnaires at our first meeting, it forms a sort of contract between student and teacher. By indicating that I value their pedagogic feedback and will try act upon it, this implies that I will also value any literary comments they might make in tutorials. I may be the "teacher," but that does not make me God, and giving them the opportunity to criticise my teaching also illustrates the point that my ideas about a text should not be viewed as the "right" answers. This is critical in English literature, which is a discursive rather than fact-based subject.

Secondly, one of the well-recognised problems with questionnaires is that they tend to represent polarised opinions. Either students who have hated a course use them to sound off all their grumbles, even if they do not originate with you, or students who have loved the course praise the teacher, even if it is really the selection of books or material that they have liked. In previous years, I have experienced both sides of the equation in my survey results. What can be missing is the intermediate students who have liked some aspects but not others. It is hard to make concrete changes in response either to total demolition or praise, whereas students with balanced views can be more specific about what was good or bad about your teaching.

Therefore, issuing a questionnaire at the start of the year helps to encourage comments on individual aspects of teaching that can be enhanced as the year progresses, rather than coming to light only retrospectively, in a sweeping appraisal at the end. Last year, for example, after one tutorial a student commented that the questions about a novel which I asked in preparation for that tutorial did not really align with the essay questions asked in the exam at the end of the year. A fair point, and one I could rectify straight away in later teaching.

A final move I made this year, to hone the process I had started when applying to the HEA three years ago, was to place the questionnaires online. Though the paper versions never asked a student to put their names on the top, the online environment ensures greater anonymity for students, which is crucial if they are going to offer free judgements. Additionally, I noticed with the paper versions that many respondents simply offered numerical answers (that is, rating for specific questions from 1, good, to 5, bad) rather than giving more useful, written feedback. I guess this is because they felt that they had to answer every question on the written sheet, and so simply dashed through it. In contrast, the online questionnaires often received detailed comments about just one or two aspects - perhaps in response to a particular issue with one tutorial - rather than purely quantitative ratings across the full spread of questions.

I cannot stress enough how beneficial surveys have been for my teaching. Whether it is doing the specific, simple things (such as using more podcasts or keeping well away from Facebook), confirming my intuitions about how much a group is getting from my teaching, assuaging my ego with positive comments or keeping me on my toes with negative ones, questionnaires force me continually into that position desired by the HEA, where teaching is never statically delivered from the front of a lecture hall, but part of a reciprocal process which sees the student as the key figure in learning.

Given this, I do find it odd that although my own department have been supportive in allowing me to produce my own surveys, I know other postgraduates have had different experiences, because of fears of negative criticism which might lead students, who are after all fee paying clients, to complain formally to their universities, once they realise enough of them feel the same way about poor teaching at their institution. I am also aware that, over four years, my questionnaires have evolved tortuously out of my earlier naivete. I have eventually, I hope, found a good way to ask that all-important, daring question of a student: how effective is my teaching?

[This is a slightly modified cross-post from the Graduate Junction blog.]

Labels: Higher Education Academy, questionnaire, surveys, teaching, University Life

Settling into life after my PhD, and finding it now only mildly frantic, it is scary to contemplate re-entering the full pace of academic life. But that is precisely what I have been doing over the last month or so, applying for every plausible academic job that comes up in the hopes of hitting that all important first post. If nothing comes through I may be able to stay teaching part-time at my current university next year, and I have several other temporary jobs that keep the economic wolf from the door, but these are nothing compared to the long-term security an academic post would bring.

So far I have sent off six applications, and been invited for three interviews, which is not a bad success rate (though despite having a generally free summer, one interview was unfortunately scheduled on a rare day I could not do, so I had to drop out). However, interestingly, all the jobs I have been shortlisted for have been for teaching-only roles. It seems clear that the old adage about publish or perish still stands. I may have a few journal articles to my name, but it is only having a book publication that opens the door to a full academic role. And revisiting my PhD to prepare it for publication is something for which I don't quite have the stomach yet.

So what have been my experiences of the two interviews for teaching-only posts that I have just been through? As ever, my thoughts and advice to you, dear reader, are most relevant to someone interviewing in English literature, but can probably be extrapolated across subjects.

Firstly, there was an odd difference in the duration of each interview. One was an hour and a half marathon, in which the interviewers went through my CV step by step, challenging gaps in my experience, whilst also encouraging me to show how other facets might compensate for my weaknesses. The other interview, by contrast, was short, just thirty minutes. The questions were more directed, asking me to give examples of certain points where I could show I met the person specification. Additionally, the first ten minutes were occupied by a presentation I had been asked to prepare, on "The Challenges of Teaching Contemporary Fiction."

From these two experiences, I can draw the following conclusions. In the case of the longer interview, I tended to waffle, because the interview was so broad and lengthy. I may have ended up speaking a great deal, but I'm not sure I put myself across in the best possible light. I am convinced myself that I met the needs of the post, but I gave the interviewers a hard task in trying to extract the relevant pieces from my long responses, so they could connect them to the person specification. In the latter, by contrast, I knew - because I was told how short it would be from the outset - that I had to be more succinct and to the point. I spoke less, but in the thirty minutes my voice really had to work, if I was to distinguish myself from any of the other applicants.

On the other hand, I am not sure how my presentation was perceived in the second. Not knowing who would be on the interviewing panel, I decided to pitch it at a fairly colloquial level rather than with the detail of a conference paper. I tried to deliver it from memory and ad libbed at times, though in actuality I'd written a 2000 word essay to work from. I also tried to give examples of "The Challenge of Teaching the Contemporary" with reference to texts and modules on the course at that university. However, I fear I may not have been innovative enough. Candidates were asked to present "in any manner deemed appropriate." Speaking a presentation that originated on paper, to a panel who unnervingly gave little feedback other than an occasional nod, may not have portrayed a sense of my enthusiasm for teaching, or my ability to talk about texts in the spontaneous, largely unprepared way required in the classroom. But maybe there is no right way to give a presentation of this kind, and maybe, given that a successful interview depends a great deal on confidence, it is better to be over-prepared and to do a safe presentation, rather than to risk showing off and using unusual approaches on the day.

That ambiguity aside, to anyone preparing for an academic interview, the following specific advice is worth passing on. To make the interviews relevant, ensure you have the person specification at the top of your mind, so that you know precisely what the interviewers are looking for. Discoursing on the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, as I did in my first interview, may have been interesting to me as it was based on my research, but did not really demonstrate my knowledge of textual adaptations as the role required, since the film was never a book to begin with. By contrast, when one of the panel in my second interview asked how I had got a flagging tutorial re-energised, I had the example of a tutorial on Toni Morrison's Beloved at the top of my mind, which given the racial subject matter allowed me to show not only my teaching methods, but also the way in which in that tutorial I had integrated opinions of students from diverse backgrounds, which was another element of the person specification.

One factor that was common to both interviews was that although these posts were teaching-only, both nevertheless asked how my research might integrate with my teaching. Go in with a quick and easy synopsis of your research at the tip of your tongue, and do not be afraid to simplify, as if for a lay audience. It is probably not good, as I found in my first interview, to talk about obscure postmodern theories that are irrelevant to the post, and outside of the specialisms of the interviewers.

In order to show this synergy, it is important to be thoroughly acquainted with the modules you may be required to teach, so that you can point precisely to how you can match research and teaching. There may, for example, be particular texts that you have already written on, even if you have not taught them. Because an early-career academic like myself is unlikely to have taught all the books on a reading list, it is important to show how one's research has given one a confident, broad coverage of a field or period, even if not the specific works. But, even if you think that you are knowledgeable about a work that is on one of the modules, ensure that this confidence is justified. Asked about Jane Eyre, a novel I must have read tens of times and taught just six months ago, it probably did not show me in the best light that I could not remember the name of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic.

On a positive note, though, I got the impression from both interviews that the interviewers were quite open-minded about the demands of teaching at university level. At this level, in discursive subjects in the arts and humanities, teaching in tutorials and seminars is definitely not about conveying information. It is, rather, about effectively stimulating, guiding, and summarising a debate amongst students, so that they are then enthused to explore the nitty gritty detail for themselves. In this context, it is not your own knowledge that matters so much as your soft skills: the ability to communicate succinctly, to be sensitive to students' differing abilities and the validity of their different opinions, to convey passion for a subject. It is not essential that you know the works to be taught intimately. In fact, this can sometimes be a negative thing, leading you to lecture to, rather than respond to, a student discussion. And, of course, if selected to teach a particular course, you have as a PhD graduate presumably got the ability to research a new topic efficiently - with courses not starting until September, both interviews made clear that there would be ample time for preparation of new texts before the start of term. Consequently, the interviews were not, as I had feared, tests of my current knowledge - In what year was Wide Sargasso Sea first published? Who won the Booker Prize in 2003? - but tests of my underlying ability to teach anything that happens to be required by a syllabus.

Responding to these perceptions would not, of course, guarantee a successful interview. It is easy to forget, when one is focused on preparing, that there may be many other candidates shortlisted for a role. However, even if unsuccessful it is always better to reflect on the outcome as being due to the fact that the panel pro-actively chose a candidate with more and better experience, rather than that they simply dropped you because your interview was so poor. On that note, I must confess: just this morning I've received a letter confirming I've not been accepted for the second post. For the first, I have to wait until the university knows its student numbers, but I'm not hopeful here, either. What I do know is that the two interviews were quite productive experiences because quite different, and next year, with more teaching and a few more articles (maybe even that first book) behind me, things could be looking up.

Labels: job interviews, teaching, University Life

Now I do not consider myself a vain person - he says, vainly - but indulge me just for a while in this post. After all, personal blogs are inherently narcissistic, so if I cannot talk about myself here, where can I?

The occasion for my smugness was my final day of teaching this year. Rather than running a tutorial on a single topic, I was holding an open office morning just before the exams, for students from any of my modules to drop in and to air their concerns.

I had begun by talking with one student about his view of post-Renaissance literature, and his argument that Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the collapse of metaphysics. I suggested that this was something of an over-simplification, and that a better view would be that during the Enlightenment science and religion coexisted, albeit somewhat uneasily, and in fact that the rise of capitalism, scientific method and mass literature in the seventeenth century perhaps took on a sort of metaphysical character, a belief in the power of rational thought to pull man up the ladder of faith.

Next up, I talked with another student about Puritanism in Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. We chatted about the way in which, in this novel of the 1850s which looks back to the 1650s, Hawthorne tried to expose the historical fact that the old, singular, strident morality of Puritanism on which the New World was originally founded had been shown to be problematic as America become more multicultural. Recalling my MA dissertation, I suggested that he go an read one or two of Hawthorne's other, moralising short stories, such as "Egotism, or, The Bosom Serpent."

My third student was concerned about Literary Theory, and was wondering whether Ian McEwan might be a good author to approach from a feminist angle. We chatted about the Thatcherite figure in The Child in Time, and the emasculated male characters in later works like Saturday or On Chesil Beach. We then puzzled on how gender issues might inform McEwan's next "climate change" novel.

As the student left, and I drew breath, it was at this point that the whiff of my satisfaction hung in the office. In the space of an hour, I had gone from the seventeenth century to a novel (McEwan's next) that has not yet been published; I had discussed the history of science, then the history of feminism; from the putative Great American Novel of Fitzgerald, to the desert islands of Daniel Defoe. Even though, as these students evidenced, I would have been covering a similar range as an undergraduate, suddenly, and for the first time in my educational history, I felt at ease and confident in my subject. Like a well-fitted suit, literature and literary criticism seems to have slipped on me so that here I was, taking my mind for a wander, not noticing all the different areas of learning I was carrying with me.

As I commented on this blog, towards the start of my PhD four years ago I felt highly self-conscious, even nervous, at conferences and seminars, because other academics' questions always seemed much more informed and well-formed than my own. Following a seminar, my supervisor, for instance, who ostensibly works in postmodern theory and contemporary literature, would happily drop in references to Jonathan Swift, or James Boswell, or Plato. I had always wondered where that sort of breadth of knowledge could possibly come from. In my tutorial room, though, I realised that it is teaching that plays no small part in it. As I wrote earlier this year, teaching across multiple modules gives you a range and allows you to perceive interconnections between material that you can rarely perceive when doing a prosaic research project. And students like those I saw for the final time this year, who are engaged and interested and who bring their own ideas, demands and questions, force tutors to be light of their step through literary history. If I opened this post in a self-indulgent manner, I have to close by acknowledging that if I feel myself to have learnt a lot this year, and to have acquired a new confidence in my subject, it is only because my students have forced me to do so by their own abilities and searching questions. My students this year have, oddly, been among my best teachers in the whole of my university career.

Labels: students, teaching, University Life

My previous post about the problems of the historical novel has another dimension to it. In that post, I posed two questions, working with C.J. Sansom's popular Tudor detective novel, Dissolution: whether a good historical novel is harder to write in a period of poor general education, and whether the historical novel works less effectively when narrated in the first person. Both problems arise because the novel appears more didactic than fictional. Now whatever the answer to these questions, my point is that they were not raised out of my engagement with some great work of literature. Indeed, I suggested that the best historical literary fictions, such as John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, actively bring such questions to the fore through devices such as metafiction, by which they reflect on the processes by which the story is being crafted. So, in a sense, my two simple questions hardly seem worth asking about this book, because the novel has pre-empted them and is interested in deeper, more complex issues, such as the degree to which we can ever transparently and accurately represent anything through language. It is perhaps only in less carefully constructed literature that basic questions come to the fore, at least for literary critics, because the problems with the fiction stand out so clearly.

And this brings to mind something I said to my students at the start of the academic year. We were looking at Robinson Crusoe, and in my initial questions I ascertained that the majority of them had not enjoyed it. Some of them were even bold enough to call it a "bad" novel. Ever the optimist, I tried to put a positive spin on things by saying that this was a pretty unique work on their course. Most of the novels, poems and plays they study over the three years are there because they have some intrinsic aesthetic merit, at least according to the lecturers who include them on syllabi. Robinson Crusoe, however, is there by virtue of its historical significance, as one of the earliest English novels. And so it is a unique book for them to study, because it is one of those rare works that has some quite obvious deficiencies in style and structure, even if it is contextually an important work of literature. In the tutorial, we were able quite easily to discuss issues of realism, because of how sharply this is breached when Crusoe swims naked to the shipwreck and returns with biscuits in his pockets. We also pinpointed that one primary objection to the novel is that its allegorical and didactic religious intentions bubble like froth on the surface of the plot, and so we almost automatically put up barriers against its moralising. The development of the novel over the three centuries since Crusoe can be read as the development of increasingly clever ways to conceal social and political issues beneath the text, in ways which are more effective because they sneak in by the back door of the book's potential readings. As with Dissolution, this problem of didacticism in Robinson Crusoecame out because of, rather than in spite of, the developmental weaknesses of Defoe's embryonic novel.

I wonder, therefore, whether literature courses are perhaps too much built around the canon of good literature. Should courses be bolder and also look at works of questionable literary quality? This of course feeds into broader debates about the role of literature departments: should literature departments exist to maintain taste and inculcate generations of students about what a good work of art looks like (a Harold Bloom kind of view), or should departments reflect the literary predilictions of culture as a whole, studying those books that happen to be popular even if not considered good fiction by trained literary critics? My own opinions would sway towards the latter, since my research looks at popular science fiction (arguably the most academically overlooked genre of significance), including film and computer games. Over the years, I have drifted away from being a pure literature student into a cultural studies researcher.

But regardless of my personal convictions and this broader debate, I am sure that even the conservative, Bloomian school ought to acknowledge that the teaching of literature loses something if it only ever focuses on the good, without providing a counter-image of the "bad" against which fine writing defines itself. Not only would such an "anti-canon" (as one might tentatively call it) help to guide questions of taste, it also might point to significant theoretical issues, such as those to which my attention was drawn in my previous post. The risk of only ever looking at "good" literature is that we focus intently on the intricate stylistic complexities that combine to make it excellent. We talk about Austen's free indirect discourse as a way of creating psychological intimacy, or George Eliot's omniscient narrator in Middlemarch, or John Fowles' historiographic argument in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And we overlook the very basic fact that a novel (and in a different way, a poem) tells a story, and that novels that have few stylistic innovations or have significant stylistic problems can nevertheless tell "good" stories. Just look at the longevity of the Crusoe myth in popular culture, or the fact that, in spite of my critical objections, I am absorbed in Dissolution's murder mystery, turning the pages as my light burns late into the night.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, canon, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature, teaching

I have a proviso to add to my previous post, in which I wrote about the largely positive nature of having a substantial teaching load. This is - what else could it be? - a gripe about pay. Now during the previous years when I have taught just a couple of groups, the pay was largely irrelevant. The demands on my time, over the course of the year, were minimal, and though that £60 or so each month was welcome, I would probably have done it for free because the experience was so positive.

Now, though, I find myself in the unenviable but by no means uncommon of being an hourly-paid university teacher. The University and College Union have been campaigning about this for years, but I have always passed over the mutters and grumbles in my UCU magazine. I now realise what they were on about - indeed, you can consider this post my virtual placard.

I am paid at the rate of £30 per contact hour with each group, plus £30 for one hour's preparation per group. Not a bad wage, on the face of it. Until I worked out how many hours I actually have done, compared to how many I have been officially paid for. Totting up the hours I have spent in preparation for each tutorial, sitting in front of a computer making groovy handouts and thinking up exciting activities, I have done around 60 hours to teach six different modules. Though it's a bit hard to calculate, because my monthly salary is divided into twelve equal installments whereas the teaching is erratic depending on the times we arrange to meet over the year, I guess I'm probably being paid for only about one quarter of the time I actually put in. And, I should note, that this 60 hour estimate is just formal time when I have switched on the computer for the sole purpose of preparing a tutorial. It does not include all those accumulated minutes snatched on the bus or before bed at night when I have done the primary reading of the various novels and poems I am teaching. It does not include the incidental minutes when I have had to field email questions, or upload resources onto our online learning system. It does not include all the admin of printing, photocopying, and filling in absentee reports.

Finally, for those who haven't switched off after this petty rant, I want to add a note about employment rights in my "casual" teaching role. When I also started work in the university library, I had to churn through whole wads of paper relating to my pension contributions, health and safety, employment rights, mentoring, staff development opportunities and so on. Which is all very laughable, given that I spend twice as much time teaching as I do in my library job. For what passes for my teaching "contract," by contrast, I am technically not employed by the university. I can be dismissed without notice at any point in the year. I have no automatic right to a pension. I am not eligible to undertake any process of personal development, and receive no money to support my training. Worst of all, my library rights and computing access will in principle be withdrawn once I submit my thesis (although through a combination of luck and planning, my library role will still allow me these privileges, so I personally should not notice any difference).

The nail in the coffin is the fact that I am helpless in the face of all these contradictions. I realise that the teaching will ultimately pay off in the long run, as the experience will round off my CV so I can apply for proper academic posts next year. But any of the other postdocs (i.e. my friends) in my department no doubt realise this likewise. Were I to refuse to teach in protest, others would be only too happy to step into my shoes. Were I to kick up a fuss to the university big wigs, they would no doubt pressure my department simply to drop me.The only ray of enlightenment and glimmer of gold might be found in a recent report in my UCU magazine. This concerns hourly-paid teaching staff at Aberdeen (including postgraduates), whose concerns and frustrations seem remarkably similar to my own. But, having waved their painted placards at their university administration, they have had some success. In conjunction with the union, the University reached a new agreement with Teaching Assistants:

TAs are paid for 'sufficient hours to carry out their duties', including
marking papers and emailing students, and specifying that TAs are entitled to
pay progression for each year of experience. As this newsletter went to
press, TAs were being issued with contracts. Early indications are that in some
departments, the assessment of hours of work has increased by 40%, the number of
students in tutorials has been reduced to 2005 levels, and TAs will be paid to
participate in course reviews.

Labels: hourly paid, Postgraduate Diary, teaching

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have taken on a lot more teaching this year, having requested it back in those naive days of Summer sun when I assumed I would have submitted my thesis by September. As I said before, the combined load of teaching and research has put me under a lot of strain. However, unexpectedly, some positive things have come out of teaching many different groups across different modules, with a workload which is relatively representative of the normal lecturer's. My experience may well be typical of postgraduates moving from a very restricted teaching role of their PhD years, to more extensive duties post-doctorate. And although I am talking about my experience in an Arts' faculty, I am sure many of the same themes will occur to any new university teacher.

As three of my tutorials are on the introductory modules of the first-year English Literature degree, the main thing I have noticed is that the different modules have ideas and historical contexts which cut across them. So, for example, teaching on the early eighteenth-century novel, Robinson Crusoe, I tried to get my tutorial groups to explore the way in which the fact that Daniel Defoe was a Protestant may have informed his representation of Crusoe's spiritual epiphany on the island. Feeling that God must be punishing him for his youthful arrogance in leaving home, Crusoe reads the signs of a Providential God in the events that happen to him. He also embodies a Protestant work ethic, so that he does not expect to drop to his knees and find his prayers for deliverance being answered; rather, he must work for himself, in the process learning to farm and fabricate the food and tools he needs to survive, discoveries which form much of the novel's plot.

Now as some one who researches postmodern fiction, much of this religious context was comparatively new to me. And I was therefore glad that I gained a mutual insight from my work in teaching the poet, John Donne. Donne was born in 1571 of a Catholic family, in an England where Catholics could expect to be persecuted, totured and arrested. Having seen his brother die in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest, Donne was torn between the religious expectations of his family, and his ambitions to climb the career ladder of the civil service. Eventually, Donne did convert to Protestantism, preaching fierce sermons at St. Paul's Cathedral, and receiving the respect he craved. However, just as Crusoe is repeatedly anxious that God has got it in for him, Donne too is never quite sure of the theological ground he stands on. For Catholics, performing the expected rites is the way to reach closer to God; and what could be a better way to guarantee passage to Heaven than if one has been willing to die for the faith, as Donne's brother did? And what could be less certain than Protestantism, with its salvation through faith alone? How could Donne know how much faith is enough? How could he know that his personal reading of the Bible was done with enough conviction? That there are no guarantees in Protestantism, only questions and doubts, lies at the heart of Donne's poetry, which offers some of the most elegantly tortured verse in the English language.

As you can tell by this brief excursion through the religious detail of English literary history, this postmodernist scholar has got surprisingly engaged with this earlier material, and though it is by no means my usual field, I had the experience over the course of these two authors of conducting what felt like personally original research. Although I have always loved the unpredictable excitement of face-to-face teaching, and the feeling that I am actually doing something productive with my time, I have rarely had that buzz of discovery that I know from my PhD life. That energy, though, did start to flicker in my mind as I researched these general periods and ideas, rather than just particular texts to be taught on a single module.

In a different relationship between teaching and research, my own research into literary theory has, naturally, informed and guided my teaching on the module of that name. For example, whilst lectures on the canon discuss whether Shakespeare could ever be considered "bad" literature in a different culture or period, my own research into cybernetic fiction led me to ask the inverse question of my tutorial groups: can we imagine a time in the future when a computer-generated poem is considered to be "good" literature? And not only has my research helped my teaching here, my research has benefited from some of the esoteric background reading I had to do in order to teach the rest of the syllabus on this module. It is not quite a teach one module, get some research in for free; but the more teaching you do, the more likely it is that you will mutually accrue benefits on both sides of the teaching-research equation.

The other benefit of teaching more groups in more subjects is that I start to see the same faces and to build a relationship with students, rather than having them simply flicker into my life at certain periods, before then fading away again. If I know a student is particularly vocal in one class, but silent in another, I can start to guage where their particular interests and abilities lie. If a student writes one good essay, and one bad one, I can say more usefully specific things about where they need to improve, and where they are already doing well, because I have a relative understanding of how good they are overall.

Finally, and egocentrically, I am better able to evaluate my own teaching. If I have really engaged discussions with five groups for one module, then find the sixth to be comparatively silent and inert, I guess that it is probably not due to the content of the tutorial I have designed, but rather to the idiosyncrasies of the individuals in the sixth group. Conversely, if one group is very vocal in my tutorial for one module, but the same group seems quite quiet in the tutorial for a different module, I figure that either they are not so engaged with the subject matter of the latter, or - more likely - that I need to adapt my teaching style to fit with their predispositions and the ways they are responding to the different material.

So whilst we are all familiar with professorial grumbles about the teaching-research imbalance, it seems to me worth thinking about how more teaching can actually be a bonus, even if it does take up a remarkably disproportionate amount of time. Maybe I am at that naive stage when teaching is still exciting and new enough for me to feel pleasure in it; maybe, after fielding a whole load more emails asking when our next tutorial is or when a certain author died, I will have become a grumpily resentful of the claims on my research time that teaching makes. But hey, at least this arts' teacher can always escape to those desert islands in the mind, like Robinson Crusoe.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, teaching