I’ve been busy talking to myself lately as I nut out a presentation for an education come technology conference I’m presenting at in November. As a featured presenter I’m allowed to be speculative, and hey, I’m anything if not speculative. (Oh, and yes, I really do talk to myself sometimes to let ideas lead me, if you don’t talk to them how on earth are they going to answer?) In general I want to think about some recent ideas about content and process, but translated into the language of quantity and quality, though really it is thinking out loud joining the dots between being an educator and providing thick description of my own processes about why it matters and why things should change.
I got to be an academic because my teachers recognised that I was smart. It was my teachers at university who got me my first sessional teaching, and they recommended me because I was smart. Except smart here means something quite specific. It means smart like them. Smart in their image. Not literally, but I was smart in the way that academics, the academy, could and did recognise. I enjoyed teaching, I’ll admit partly because I got to show others that I was smart too, and one of the characteristics of my particular sort of intelligence is my associative thinking, which as a teacher means I’m good at explaining stuff by using examples from anywhere and everywhere. (But note, this lets me be good at ‘explaining’, see what’s already happening, teaching = explaining.) So, I ended up an academic. Not because I trained to be one, and I certainly have not trained to teach since, but because I was smart in a way that other academics in my discipline recognised. It is this that confered membership.
This is normal, all professions (and trades) socialise members in their own image. It is one of the ways in which you learn to become that job. I self selected the university because I like ideas, arguments, my own opinions. I like to write, and I enjoyed performing these things as a teacher. Everyone, more or less, who teaches at a university has a similar story. We were all excellent students, we pretty much already (in most cases) identified with the values of the university, which as students we expressed in writing really complicated essays, but also in those other badges of hope – we would have done the set readings, found more, always have questions because we really did want to know, and were probably in the minority of students who used foot or end notes and some sort of referencing system, real or imagined. Just the sort of student that, as an academic, you like to think are your best students (which you also humbly like to imagine is your doing). So, like other professions, we self identify to the imagined norms of the habitus, and are acculturated and socialised to a set of beliefs and practices that are part of the very identity of the profession. We choose to belong, even when we critique it (we could after all just leave), and before you know it we end up with a world view where we make assumptions that these academic values, the values of the academy as the academy, are what the experience of being at university is really about. I chose to be an academic, and to participate in these values. Just like everyone else here.
Well, not quite everyone else. In fact most of the people at university are not there because they have self selected to be ‘academic’. These are our students. Very few of my students, and I’m going to assume this is the same for most others who teach undergraduate courses (the bread and butter of universities in this country) actually intend, identify with, or what to be academics. They are at university for quite different reasons. They are there to become socialised (to keep that language happening) into a profession, perhaps a discipline, but certainly not to become academics. This even includes some who go on to to do PhD’s. Yet so much of what is taught, how it is taught, what comes to be valued, is, at the end of the day not about what counts in what will be the future professional life world of the student, but is what matters to the academy, to us as academics.
For example, this is one of the reasons why essays matter. In my own broad area of media studies essays are, by far, the dominant assessment form. Most of my students, once they graduate, will never write an essay again. They may write scripts, business proposals, funding applications, reports, press releases, blogs, social media streams for a variety of professional reasons, but not essays. They may write reviews, speeches, pitches, and corporate presentations, but not essays. Why do we insist that essays are the canonical form (when so many other possibilities are available)? Because it is the form that matters to me, as an academic. It is my form. Not the professions we align ourselves to (even though my institution’s self defined marketing language claims we are ‘real world engaged’ and have ‘industry relevance’) – don’t even get me started on the artificiality of the research PhD.
My students do not come to learn how to write better essays. I like essays. Though I prefer to write them as hypertext. I like reading them, writing them. But I’m an academic, one reason I’m here is because I like doing such things and this pays me a salary to do it, but it is a circular and foolishly tautological claim to assume that my students are here for these reasons too. So much of what is presented to me as ‘good teaching’ is in fact making the mistake that training our students as petite academics, mini-me’s, constitutes a good university experience. Rubbish. There are so many ways to encourage, model, teach and assess critical thinking, creative thought, and an engaged making that falls outside of a form that privileges very narrow assumptions about literacy, argument, causality and authority. But, you know, dinosaurs are slow.
Tags:
pedagogy,
research practice
