Tag: @timeshighered

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Academic

Teaching Overseas: A Cultural Challenge

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/659902

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.”

Categories
Academic

‘Work is Exhausting’ @timeshighered

Gender seemed to have most impact on the way burnout revealed itself, the study suggests. Male lecturers typically had higher depersonalisation scores, for example, while their female peers tended to suffer more emotional exhaustion.

This probably reflected, the authors suggest, the draining effect on women who were having to “juggle multiple roles at work and at home”, on the one hand, and their reluctance to adopt “a distant, indifferent professional persona” on the other.

The researchers also report that “staff exposure to high numbers of students, especially tuition of postgraduates, strongly predicts the experience of burnout”.

However, they suggest that lecturers with qualities that might make them particularly suited to the job suffered more than their less engaged colleagues. The quality of “openness” may “make (academics) appealing tutors, encouraging greater interaction with students”, but it also appeared to “predispose teachers to burnout”, the paper says.

Full story.

 

Categories
History

Wherefore art thou, Haldane? State plans for humanities research

“I recently wrote a post for the blog “Humanities Matter” drawing attention to what I felt was a new level of government influence over the funding of humanities research, as evidenced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ research allocation for 2011-14. An article by Iain Pears in the London Review of Books came to very similar conclusions, and last week The Observer picked up the story.

In its report, The Observer focused on the conspicuous presence of the government’s “Big Society” agenda in one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s highest-priority “strategic research areas”. In addition to the deepening convergence between BIS priorities and the AHRC’s delivery plan, I cited evidence to The Observer that direct government pressure had been placed on the British Academy to adopt its “national priorities” or lose funding (see my letter to its leader, Sir Adam Roberts, published in Times Higher Education on 10 March and as yet unanswered). But I did not assert that the coalition had directly instructed the AHRC to embrace the Big Society, and the AHRC has firmly denied receiving any such direct instructions.

Fortunately, this confusion has not obscured the bigger issue, which is now being debated widely in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media: to what extent should the government be able to dictate priorities for humanities research?

At one level, of course, the government is responsible. Both of the dual funding streams – quality-related grant distributed via the Higher Education Funding Council for England and other bodies, and postgraduate and project funding through the likes of the AHRC and the British Academy – are supplied with public money, for which the government is accountable. But there is a rich and valuable tradition in this country of public funding for sensitive areas relating to news, the arts, education and the like – where free expression is at stake, and where public expenditure is meant to sustain a diversity of views – being held at arm’s length from the state.”

Full story.

 

Categories
History

Popular Front: Is Niall Ferguson a ‘proper’ historian?

“Anyone seeking an academic with “impact” should look no further than Niall Ferguson. His books and television series about the British Empire, its American successor and the bloody 20th century have been hugely popular. Whether they irritate, inform or entertain, they have certainly got people talking about big historical questions – and their relevance to today’s challenges.

Yet they have also led to a good deal of criticism from other scholars, on the grounds that Ferguson sacrifices depth to breadth and no longer quite counts as a “proper” historian. Much of this no doubt can be attributed to envy, snobbery or lack of sympathy for Ferguson’s robustly expressed political views. But perhaps it also reflects a sense that impact is all very well and good, provided it’s the right sort of impact.”

Love this bit:

“Ferguson’s popular works “have an impact because they reach millions of people”.

“Does that mean I have ceased to be a ‘proper’ historian? Only if you consider it improper to try to explain history to a mass audience. I have no time for people who think that academics should confine themselves to addressing their colleagues and students at elite universities. For the record, I have done and continue to do my share of academic work, publishing on average one article a year in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s possible to address – and have an impact on – both the scholarly community and the wider public.””

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Categories
History

Meet and greet: bridging the academic/cultural divide

Matthew Reisz on an ESRC-funded seminar series aiming for closer links between arts and education

At a time when both cultural institutions and the study of the humanities and social sciences face an uncertain future in the wake of government funding cuts, there is much to be gained from dialogue between academics, artists and curators.

That is the central premise of New Perspectives on Education and Culture, a seminar series funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

The series was launched last week at an event at London’s Whitechapel Gallery that brought together sociologists, philosophers and artists, as well as gallery professionals.

For organiser Jocey Quinn, professor of education at the University of Plymouth, “culture and education are not separate entities but intersect across every area of life. We are all a part of culture and can’t step outside it, even though it enacts multiple exclusions and hierarchies.”

Professor Quinn said she hoped the series would offer “serious pleasures” and an inspiring space during these hard times while forging “an emerging cross-disciplinary field”.

Although cultural studies addressed many diverse areas of life – she cited by way of example research about encounters with pixies on Cornish coastal paths – the discipline needed “to pay much more attention to education and learning”.

Educators, in turn, could learn from cultural studies about “the importance of the symbolic and imagined”, Professor Quinn argued.

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