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Oh, I’m so with this story… one of the greatest gifts we can give students – a responsibility for their own learning… be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage!

On his finding that one in three first-year undergraduates struggle to learn independently, he said: “They are not taking control of their learning in the way we would want them to because they still want to be trained like they were at school.”

Dr Ovens added that the current generation of students had been assessed “more than any other”, and that the problem of dealing with students unused to independent learning was not unique to the UK: “When we talk to colleagues worldwide, they have very similar problems, and they agree that the problems are getting progressively worse year on year.”

Current UK reforms focusing on the student experience carried the risk of a “knee-jerk” response that would lead to even greater spoon-feeding of students, Dr Ovens said.

He argued that academics had to respond to these issues by treating students as independent scholars: “Their autonomy is the single biggest value that can be developed; academics should not view students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge.”

Read full story.

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It’s very easy to ‘decide’ whether students look like they’re worth the extra effort or not, but as Tansy Jessop has always said (notably in the PGCLTHE teaching), all students can learn, so I was really interested to see this article:

That evening at the Queen’s Hall I realised something about my own profession with great clarity. We who teach in further or higher education often look at the students who aren’t applying themselves and dismiss them as useless ne’er-do-wells. Our contempt is really no more than a reflection of theirs: they seem to insult us by their total lack of interest in the subjects to which we have devoted our adult lives. It irritates us. These kids shouldn’t be in a college or university, we mutter to ourselves. They’re a waste of space, time and funding.

And yet, I see now, we actually have no idea who we might be dealing with or what’s going on with any of our students. Ralph and I must have seemed annoyingly hopeless at the age of 16 or 17, but in fact some kind of mental activity must have been stirring in us. We found our separate ways to what we were destined for, and society did eventually begin to get something back from us. It’s just that society had no idea in advance what it would get, or from whom. And we had no idea either.

Read full story.

As officialdom’s demands for meaningless Transparency and Information multiply, Thomas Docherty asks: has clandestine scholarship become the only way to carry out real research and teaching?For a number of years, the university, in common with much of public life in general, has become obsessed with the need to present itself to the world through the twin pillars of Transparency and Information. It is taken for granted that we will piously revere, and robustly comply with, the demands of these iconic towers. Ostensibly, demands for Transparency and Information are positively good: after all, who would want important decisions to be based on a lack of information; and who would want procedures to be covert, operated according to unspoken laws or whimsy, and governed by secretive cabals?

But Information and Transparency are not as innocuous as they seem, especially in the university. When unquestioning respect for them is simply taken for granted as an axiomatic good, they start to assume the power of the obsessive fetish, and the price of fealty exacted is high. Transparency and Information become the means of securing the university’s official conformity with the prevailing social or governmental orthodoxy and dogma. When they assume a primary importance, they govern the official identity of the university, and they thereby deprive the institution of the capacity to make any serious claim for a cultural function beyond the society’s or the government’s official views of the academy.

This brings serious consequential dangers for the university and its proper priorities of teaching, learning, research and scholarly study. These things are all grounded in two axioms of intellectual life: first, that truth should nowhere be taken to be transparently self-evidencing; and second, that information must be subjected to critique if it is to help us seek or form knowledge.

Read full post.

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Interesting, having recently completed my PGCLTHE (which I found helpful)… the general gist of the story is that there is support for the idea that all who teach in HE should be appropriately qualified, but there’s a debate as to how this should be done, and whether this should aim for ‘one size fits all’…

It said at the time that it “strongly recommended” that all new academic staff “be required” to complete an HEA-accredited teaching programme, such as the postgraduate certificate in higher education.

It also said that all postgraduates who teach should undertake training, that existing staff should be “offered opportunities” to do a PGCHE or the equivalent, and that classroom observation should become part of any teaching qualification.

But the HEA’s report on the consultation, published this week, reveals that more than 70 per cent of respondents oppose compulsory discipline-based teaching qualifications.

Read full story.

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Fascinating insight into teaching practice from Dr Jennifer Hill, a lecturer who had a six-month tour of Iraq with the Royal Engineers as a Territorial Army officer:

But Dr Hill’s time in Iraq was not just about serving Queen and country. Working with a completely different set of students made her a better teacher, she believes.

“We were there doing post-war reconstruction and helping to get their infrastructure back on track,” she said. “I was in charge of a group educating and training local artisans, who were learning under a system with no formal framework of qualifications.

“These electricians and carpenters had a certain level of technical knowledge, but they could not apply it beyond their basic training.”

Saddam’s regime, she said, “had completely squashed their ability to think for themselves and problem-solve.

“We encouraged them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses – to make their own decisions and think more creatively.

“It made me think about how I taught my students in Bristol, and consider whether I spent too much time thinking about the cognitive and academic demands of a course, rather than how students were interacting with each other or approaching materials.”

Also a great advocate for PGCLTHE:

Dr Hill is an unapologetic advocate for compulsory teacher training for young academics. She took a postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning at her own university seven years ago and highly recommends the experience.

“The course validated many of my teaching activities, clarified the theoretical foundations on which they were based and prompted me to consider how I could improve my practice, especially how to engage students more actively in their learning.”

Increased use of podcasts, video clips and other new-media materials is another way that teaching can be improved, she said.

“I teach a lot of bio-geography about forests and deserts, and it’s often difficult to convey what a place is actually like.

“I film a lot of stuff on location and students love it, but you have to make sure it’s engaging with them in a useful way. When I first did it, students were not coming together or learning from each other.”

She also cautioned against allowing students to think that their lecturers will spoon-feed them with all the materials they need.

“You need to anchor them in the subject and challenge them to find out more. I now set quizzes about the materials and generally help to move them in the right direction.”

She finishes:

“Every university should encourage and support teaching to the same extent that it does research.”

…lecturers must be able to impart what they know. Craig Mahoney, head of the HEA, believes training can make any academic a more effective and inspired teacher

“When I moved to England from Australia, I was excited at the prospect of undertaking the postgraduate certificate in higher education,” writes Francesca Haig, a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Chester, in a 2009 article for the Higher Education Academy’sAcademy Exchange magazine.

“In Australia, such qualifications were not required for academic posts, and I thought that the emphasis England placed on teaching qualifications indicated a regard for teaching, usually so undervalued in academia (although not by students). Colleagues in England laughed ominously at my enthusiasm; such qualifications, I soon learnt, are commonly viewed as yet another hoop through which academics must now jump.”

Read full story, and note that I really enjoyed the PGCLTHE at my University, and am now teaching on it.

The proposals, set out by the Higher Education Academy, are “too detailed and prescriptive” and could be counterproductive, staff in the field have warned.

Plans to revise the UK Professional Standards Framework were published by the HEA in November after the Browne Review called for teaching qualifications to be made compulsory for new academics.

The framework, which was first published in 2006, is used to accredit universities’ teaching-development activities, but the HEA has admitted that many staff do not see it as “relevant” to their career progression.

Under the HEA’s proposals, the updated framework says that in future, all staff on academic probation will have to complete an HEA-accredited teaching programme, such as a postgraduate certificate in higher education. Postgraduates who teach would also have to take an HEA-accredited course.

A “sector-wide profile” on the number of staff who have reached each level of the framework would be published by the HEA annually.

Meanwhile, training courses would have to meet more detailed requirements.

Read full story. An interesting story, as I look to complete my PGCLTHE, which I have found very helpful in enabling me to think about my own teaching practice, and those things that I can do differently, and enabling me to learn from others.

“We hope to achieve greater clarity about our subject,” explained Jon Wardle, director of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University.

“Should media education be about serving the jobs market, reflecting society back to itself or holding power to account? And since the media are now central to our lives, should they be studied in a separate discipline or right across the university syllabus?”

To get the ball rolling, Mr Wardle has co-authored an initial statement noting that the project comes at a time when media education appears to be flourishing.

“Applications to media courses in the UK have never been higher,” it says. “In Southeast Asia, media education is now a legislated aspect of schooling in a number of countries, and in the US various foundations are making millions of pounds available for academics to investigate the nation’s media literacy.”

Read full story, or read the Manifesto.

If so, you are not alone, according to a series of accounts academics have written about their daily lives.

To inform Share, a research project that is investigating the ways in which academics around the world represent, share and change their teaching practices, university teachers are being invited to keep a diary on the 15th day of each month over the course of a year.

The first batch of diary entries – extracts from which have been published in a newsletter to contributors – reveal what was on participants’ minds on 15 September.

For one, the day began at 4am with sleep broken by “worrying about the tsunami that is the new academic year that is going to hit us in two weeks”.

Other diarists blur the boundary between home and work, “checking emails while in my nightie” or “answering emails from my sofa” at 6.45am.

Read full story.

Everyone teaching in a university should want to bring ideas, facts and principles to life in a way that will encourage their students to find out more for themselves. The heart of teaching in higher education is, as Alfred North Whitehead put it in “Universities and Their Function” in 1927, the “imaginative acquisition of knowledge”. A university education is nothing if it does not ignite a burning desire to learn. Imagination illuminates the facts and structures them. It makes the dull and obscure parts of learning a challenge to be overcome rather than a burden to be endured. In that frame of mind, students are ready to understand and will want to share with other people the remarkable feeling that understanding brings.

Effective university teaching matters a great deal – but not because it has much to do with student satisfaction. That’s a by-product. It matters because it gets students to engage with abstract ideas in a way that allows them to make the subject their own.

Accomplished teaching is the single most important method of producing graduates who can reason and act for themselves, and can apply theory to practical problems – precisely the skills that any employer wants to see.

It is not a simple equation of cause and effect. The other important element is the resolve of the students themselves. By their own efforts, they can convert the opportunity into the outcome. Students decide their own destinies, and lecturers only add or subtract value at the margins. Skilful teaching, by teachers who apply their learning with imagination, can inspire students to do more than they ever thought they could.

Teaching in higher education should never fool students into thinking there is an easy path to success. Rather, it should make the hardest road enjoyable to follow by communicating complex ideas clearly and succinctly.

Read full story in the Times Higher Ed, and read also the next story “Credit where it’s overdue“.