The Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching and Learning: some further reflections.

In my statement of Teaching Philosophy developed for the course I muse that I became a journalist and then a teacher, “by accident” – or through a series of synchronous opportunities.

Where we start and where we finish, what we set out to achieve and what we actually find don’t always mesh easily. I strongly believe in the pedagogy of the accidental. Both teachers and students learn from mistakes, accidents and surprising turns as teaching and learning projects evolve.

I had no real pedagogical imperatives when I began the GCHETL, to be perfectly honest my main motivation – as a casual academic who wanted to progress into a fulltime position – was to gain a qualification that might in some small way give me an edge in a very competitive market for academic positions. Part of this ambition was to learn to “talk the talk” of academe.

What surprised me as I engaged with the course is that gradually my aims moved from just learning to talk the talk, I began to hesitantly walk the walk. Which is to say I began to think of myself more coherently as an academic rather than merely as a part-time journalism teacher.

This evolution could be described as a classic movement from a surface to deep learning mode. My evolving sense of value in the GCHEL came from:

• Engagement with other participants: I found it most interesting to hear the stories of other academics’ engagement with academic life rather than the specifics of classroom practice, much of the detailed pedagogical needs/traditions of other differed significantly from mine;
• Engagement with the literature: my interest in the educational literature was sparked as much by disagreements as it was by agreements;
• The course became a framework for me to think about aspects of my evolving teaching practice in a more formal manner and to document that evolution;

It is the focus on building a coherent academic identity – rather than merely on a set of core academic skills, techniques or frameworks – that led me to the idea of the web site as a dynamic vehicle for integrated reflection. While the idea of a web-based teaching portfolio is not new or unusual I wanted to take this beyond the usual parameters into what I have called a “hypertextual self-presentation”:

My belief in the value of hypertext as both a method and mode of presentation is implicit in the nature of this website which is concieved as a hypertextual self presentation. It acknowledges the social and personal aspect of the archive in that it is designed to be:

    * a site for personal reflection, investigation and aggregation

    * a way of sharing that knowledge

    * a point of contact and node in a series of feedback loops

George Landow argues that the intertextuality of hypermedia opens traditional notions of author/work/tradition into a broader space of text/discourse/culture. This opening-up helps us avoid narrowly conceived technological and historic or textual determinism.

My problem with a lot of the teaching and learning literature is its rigid empiricism. That is why in the evolution of this web project I have tried to produce a different more fluid model of reflective practice, course development and evaluation.

While I can see great value in a rigorous focus on student learning and a grounded approach to learning outcomes I see little value in the current obsession with end of semester course and teaching evaluation surveys.

They are at best a marker of student satisfaction (as distinct from a measure of course effectiveness as learning environments) and they are at worse a popularity vote on a teacher’s personality and style. Survey results from my own subjects indicate strong levels of student satisfaction and a stamp of approval for my personality! However I take little real comfort in such mechanistic measures because my focus is always on further improvements.

Survey results can flag areas which need to be looked at and sometimes can provide feedback to fine tune teaching practice. In the evaluation of Journalism Studies my teaching survey results showed generally highly favourable results but a poor result for a question which asked students to agree or disagree with the statement: “The tutor used a wide and varied range of teaching techniques”.

This led to discussion and reflection with the course co-ordinator about the structure of the course, which was highly condensed and for half of the semester focused on tutorials using a formal debating structure. We agreed that the response was probably largely a result of course structure rather than any specific issues with my own teaching delivery. However this, together with other more informal discussions with students, led to a fruitful evaluation of the course structure and a move away from the debate structure.

However I have seen other instances (as a member of school meetings and sub-committees) where positive survey results have been used to justify a resistance to course changes or improvements. This is in a case where it was apparent to a number of experienced educators that for a variety of reasons changes were definitely needed. Some of these reasons were clear, including the need for better articulation into other subjects and the need to focus on new areas of industry practice but there was also a much harder to articulate feeling amongst some faculty that we could simply do better. However the course co-ordinator’s resistance to change was hard to counter because they held the empirical cards – excellent survey results.

While I understand the bureaucratic need for contemporary evaluation practices that seek to provide across the university measures for best practice it is my experience that these have very little impact on, and can in fact hinder, the development of innovative teaching models.

In developing the web project I have attempted to create an evolving, fluid, hyperlinked narrative structure in which specific evaluation and reflective processes are embedded.

As such I am less interested in the individual evaluations of specific subject structures, class tasks or specific outcomes than I am in the development of a narrative of teaching practice. Such a narrative of teaching practice provides a context for the evaluation of sepcific interventions.

I have outlined my general approach to evaluation and I have detailed the evaluation cycle that led to the adjustment of specific teaching practices in the development of two interrelated subjects, Professional Culture and Practice and Journalism Studies.

What I would note about this approach is that it is not subject specific. In the case of PPC and JS instance the close similarities involved in the subjects allowed for some specific cross-fertilisation and fine-tuning but it also fed into the planning for unrelated subjects like the News and Current Affairs subject. Here for example, I took what I had learned from working with discussion boards in JS and PPC, together with my theoretical work on blogging and was able to design the blogging element of NACAF.

The survey results for NACAF indicated very high levels of satisfaction for course delivery, organization and teaching. However what was more instructive was the class discussion of the specific aspects of the course in the final session.

This discussion reiterated a high level of satisfaction with the course but some of the specific comments allowed me to go beyond a  binary happy/unhappy student satisfaction evaluative framework.

My approach to blogging as a teaching device had been influenced by constructionism and a sense that the physical building of a knowledge artifact can engender a sense of ownership over the process and thus assist a stronger learning experience. This is particularly important for journalism students who need to develop a sense of producing work for a public and the sense of designing/editing a body of work for publication.

In the NACAF discussion one student noted about her blog: “I found myself going back all the time and looking at it, tweeking it. It sounds really dumb but I became really proud of it.”

Another student noted that at first blogging was confronting because she was a “perfectionist” and she was unsure about making her thoughts public, but gradually she began to feel more comfortable with the process.

While such individual comments are just as fraught an evaluative instrument as the quantitative surveys these and similar comments give me confidence that my initial instincts and theorising is on the right track. Further it leads me to suggest that although students may ultimately find blogging an engaging learning experience there are some initial hurdles, which require some careful scaffolding.

If we approach evaluation in higher education and learning as a series of processes that contribute to an integrated narrative of teaching practice then what emerges is a portfolio of teaching strategies that are used across a range of subjects and teaching situations. Teaching strategies are then seen as a series of adaptable approaches that can constantly be adjusted and improved. This helps us to move away from static notions of successful and unsuccessful courses based primarily on measures of student satisfaction to a whole of teaching approach.

Some of the adaptable strategies that I have begun to develop as part of an ongoing teaching practice are:

Blogging as a collaborative and reflective learning practice that combines the development of research, writing and cyberliteracy skills

The production of online teaching resources as a scaffolding technique and a classroom workspace.

The development of assignment/assessment tasks as staged learning experiences that focus on process rather than all or nothing outcomes.

These have all been the subject of formal and informal evaluative processes but more importantly they are part of an evolving theory and practice of teaching which emphasises collaboration, process, the materiality of learning and the importance of cyberliteracies.