For
Whom do we Teach?
The
paradox of ‘excellence’
Dr Richard
Howitt[1]
Department of
Human Geography
Macquarie
University, NSW, 2109
AUSTRALIA
Published in
the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (2000) 24(3): 317-323.
richard.howitt@mq.edu.au
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of this paper
Universities in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern
Teaching; We teach for … our students; employers; the university; the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
In
December 1999, I was awarded the Australian Award for University Teaching
(Social Science). In the wake of that award I have reflected on my approach to
teaching in the context of rapid change in Australian universities.
This brief paper
considers a fundamental question underpinning many of our daily practices as
teachers - ‘for whom do we teach’? It also ponders some of the paradoxical
implications of some answers.
University
teachers are under considerable pressure. Concerns about changing patterns of
government funding, increased class sizes, deteriorating teaching facilities in
many institutions, market intrusions into curriculum process, industrial
organization of the labour process of teaching, reduced academic autonomy and
increased administrative demands on teachers are repeated in many higher
education systems. The social prestige once attached automatically to a
university position is a faded memory in many communities.
In
the context of such pressures, it would be easy to retreat from the demands of
impassioned pedagogy in tertiary geography. It is easy to forget that a
university teacher is the nexus of many nourishing communities. Teaching is a
collective and cooperative activity. Despite the celebration of
‘teaching-as-spectacle’ through competitive awards, teaching is not a solo
performance. It is not just about the person out on the pedestal talking behind
the lectern as a solo act. Teaching is very much a community activity and we
forget this at our peril.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
One
of the characteristics of the current crisis in higher education is that
nourishing communities supporting teaching face many direct and indirect
threats. Because both geography and good teaching matters, those of us teaching
geography in universities have an important role in protecting, nurturing,
rebuilding and even extending those communities.
My
own teaching focuses on the overlapping fields of geography, indigenous
studies, and resource and environmental management. My formal teaching
responsibilities at the university include teaching in an interdisciplinary
resource and environmental management, contributing to the interdisciplinary
Aboriginal Studies program, teaching a specialist resource management course to
Aboriginal students, and providing supervision to a large group of honours and
postgraduate students. Beyond the institutional setting, my field-based
research at the interface of the mining industry and indigenous communities has
produced diverse teaching opportunities that have extended my understanding of
my work as a teacher considerably.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
My
concern with the geopolitics of resources and power, with the social relevance
of social theory, and with the ethics of research and knowledge leads many of
my colleagues to see me as ‘post-modernist’. In many discourses, this category
is seen as a path to disengaging from politics and retreating from the
conventional field-based focus of much geographical research. For me, it has
been a path towards a deeper engagement with processes of empowerment and
disempowerment at several scales, and has confronted me with the need to
articulate the relevance of post-modern insights into the nature of power in
unusual settings. And this has led to an extension of my teaching role well
beyond the classroom.
For
example, during recent discussions as a consultant to the Aboriginal Legal
Rights Movement in South Australia I was required to comment on a proposal to
commence native title negotiations with a set of definitions what is ‘Native
Title’? What is ‘co-existence’? I was given ten minutes to critique this
position. Effectively, I was given an opportunity to do some deconstruction, to
do a bit of post-modern social theory and to demonstrate its relevance to a
group of lawyers and professionals who wanted a problem resolved as quickly as
possible. In that situation, I had to explain why it was impractical to start
with a set of fixed definitions. It would not matter what definitions were
accepted and written down as a formal starting point if a farmer out the back
of Port Pirie couldn’t say what he meant because what he said didn’t fit a
lawyers’ definition. The requirement of the setting meant that we had to be
able to hear what he meant. And if an Aboriginal woman in Oodnadatta couldn’t
say what she thought Native Title meant to her, there was no point in sitting
around the table to discuss a lawyers’ definition of what they thought she
should mean.
In
another case, this time during community consultations for the social impact
study for the Alice Springs to Darwin Railway, I was required to discuss the
safety implications of a high-speed freight train running through a 400 metre
corridor through Aboriginal land north of Alice Springs. Sitting with a group
of Aboriginal women, and relying on interpreters, it became clear that there
was no clear understanding of the idea of a railway. Using materials to hand I
constructed a ‘scale model’ of the rail bed, the line and the cleared corridor
from sand and sticks. Upscaling to the landscape around us, many of the women
began to see the nature of the problem clearly, perhaps for the first time.[2]
Teaching
in such settings is obviously quite different to more conventional classroom
settings. I teach social theory, I teach applied environmental and human rights
research. I find it difficult to draw a boundary around my teaching, to
separate it from my research and community service. I teach a number of courses
that appear in the university calendar but I also teach in other settings. To
think that our role as public intellectuals stops at the classroom door, is to
misunderstand our nourishing communities, the ways in which research and
teaching are intertwined, and where good teaching fits into wider social
processes.
Even
in more conventional classroom settings, the boundaries are often blurred. In
my major course on Resource Management, I open with a powerful song about the
English Revolution[3] which leads
to an invitation for students to engage in a process of turning upside down
their taken for granted worlds. This opening ‘performance’ in the course is
linked to a tutorial discussion of polyphony in pedagogic practice in geography[4]
in which students are encouraged to question the role they expect a ‘teacher’
to play in their learning, and in which the whole question of performance as a
social relationship between performer, audience and culture is discussed.[5]
This seeks to unsettle the passive role of students as learners, and to
emphasize the face-to-face relationship between teachers and students as
polyphonic. Levinas[6] also
emphasizes the importance of the face-to-face relationship as a crucial ethical
moment, and it is this that leads me to consider the range of ethical
relationships that are framed by our teaching.
With
a widespread shift away from an older style of collegiality to a more
industrialized set of labour relations, increasingly legal relations that
reflect our place as education workers in large and complex industrial entities
govern our workplace relations. Yet, some of the work that we do is hard to fit
into those sorts of workplace relations. So although at one level its quite
clear who we work for, for whom do we teach - we teach for our universities
at other levels we are accountable to a range of other communities from our
student to our disciplines and ourselves.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
What
does it mean to say that we teach for our students? Conventionally we glibly
emphasise ‘student-centred’ teaching, but how many of us consider what that
really involves? To what extent do we get to know our students, let alone
centre our teaching on them? I’m constantly flabbergasted by the number of
students who tell me that I am their first university teacher to remember their
names. I don’t think I learn people's names because I used to be a primary
school teacher, although in that work it is always obvious that students’ names
are really important. But a relationship with one’s students remains important
in higher education, and, despite all the problems and pressures, I committed
to a mentoring model of education. I benefited immensely as a student from
having mentors[7], who knew
what I was on about and cared enough to facilitate that, not to teach me what
they knew, but to allow me to learn what I needed. I think that being able to
reflect on those relationships that shaped our own intellectual trajectories is
absolutely critical to the work that we do. Despite the rhetoric of
student-centredness, it is very easy to slip into an information-centred or
skills-focused curriculum process where students are told what they have to
learn rather than challenged to look at ideas, values and the ethical
implications of certain skills and knowledges. In increasingly crowded teaching
schedules, we have to find a balance between getting through substantial
amounts of information, and nurturing students as learners and researchers.[8]
In
large classes (for example my third year course typically has 75-100 students),
to be student centred is to be fragmented. It means to never have time, it
means to find time in the gaps, to make time in the gaps, to always be able to
find a way of communicating and listening. If we are unable to find this time,
one must ask just what we are teaching, and why! What is it that we think that
we’re doing if we’re unable to engage with the students as co-learners in new
fields and in this way, if we’re simply pushing out people who “fit the mould'.
I
have had some memorable disputes with colleagues about the very notion of a
‘mould’ that our students should fit. Part of the wider social role, for
example, of honours and graduate students is to break down the notion that
there can be a mould. Indeed, one of the imperatives for young researchers is
the imperative of innovation the need to break rules, constantly reinvent,
constantly push the boundaries, while always building on a critical discourse
around existing understandings and knowledge. As teachers I think that we need
to recognize that at all levels. But it is not for the students alone that we
teach.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
Without
reducing my focus on students, I also allow the market place to intrude into
the classroom because I also think we teach for employment outcomes. I think we
owe it to our students to offer help and guidance for them to become employable
to think of themselves as employable.
One
of the things I spent a lot of time talking to students about is how to relate
their University-based skills and learning to employment opportunities. When
they look at job advertisements that say applicants need five years experience,
what experience do they actually have? Both students and employers often feel
that recent graduates don’t have any relevant experience. When one looks at
typical job descriptions, many of the core criteria reflect the daily demands
on students throughout their studies: they work to deadline, balance complex
tasks, demonstrate written and oral communication skills, balance, complete and
meet deadlines. Such selection criteria sound like exactly what students do as
students. If their teachers confirm employers’ prejudices that the university
is disconnected from the rest of society as an ivory tower, we are serving
society poorly. We know that many employers think that’s true, so in part, its
up to us to demonstrate why that’s not the case. Why are we relevant? What we
offer students, what we help students to achieve, is relevant to their next
step into the workforce.
So,
if we are working and producing students who add value to society - students
who will be capable of creating the next generation of 'best practice' in their
chosen fields - surely we need to be interested in their prospective
workplaces. If we are confident in the quality of our graduates (as one can be
when student-centred learning and clear relationships and performance criteria
are established), we have to be confident that it is better for our students to
be in the workplace than for somebody else to be there. Finding ways to open
employers’ eyes to that perspective is, therefore, an important part of our
teaching role
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
The
discursive spaces of the university are amongst our most important nourishing
communities. The university does have a social role and we need to recognise
that is part of what we represent when we walk out in front of our students,
when we set up a lab, when we’re out in the field with our students or when
we’re involved in community work that arises from research or extension roles.
We need to nurture spaces for tertiary teachers to be recognised as important
and valuable contributors to the community. In many institutions, we also need
to advocate teaching in university structures regarding promotions and other
maters.
One
of the reasons I was nominated for teaching awards in 1999 arose from a failed
application for promotion in 1998. At that time the university's promotions
committee found me to be just short of being an ‘excellent’ teacher. In the
absence of a positive judgement as an ‘excellent’ researcher, I was deemed to
be ineligible for promotion at that time. I was very, very good good enough
to be offered accelerated salary progression but not quite good enough for
academic progression. While I accepted that judgement as insufficient to
dislodge me from the various activities[9]
I was involved in, enough of my students and colleagues were sufficiently angered
by this judgement of my work to nominate me for ‘excellent’ teaching awards in
the following year. That of course raises the question of why is there are
teaching criteria in promotion if its possible for someone who walks out from a
rejection from a university process to walk into a national teaching process?
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
We
also teach for our disciplines, but I think that this role is often overlooked
under pressure from other critical audiences. At some levels, of course, we are the discipline. Whatever we’re
teaching in, we are part of that historical tradition and to be a disciple
isn’t to be a slavish follower in that context, it is to be the producer of
knowledge, the nurturer of new possibilities and the source of guidance on how
to hang onto what is of value and how to transcend what is negative.[10]
In
the context of current debates about indigenous rights, dispossession and
reconciliation in Australia, I am very conscious of this. Working as a
geographer like, anthropology, we share an ambiguous ethical legacy and working
in indigenous studies in these disciplines makes you extraordinarily conscious
of the worst part of disciplinary education. Geographers were amongst the
groups of people who helped to dispossess Aboriginal people in this country. We
did the planning, we did the boundary thing, we provided the theoretical
framework for dispossession as much as lawyers did. But why doesn’t someone
like me just throw out disciplinary traditions in pursuing social change? I
remain enough of a Marxist to think that our ability to transcend current
circumstances is to be found in where we are. But we don’t need to reject or
reinvent our disciplinary foundations. Rather we need to reconstruct and move
on from where they have placed us.
Once
upon a time, academics were paid to think. In the increasingly productive,
outcomes-oriented university, however, thinking seems to have become a luxury
or even an indulgence. I we walk past an office and see a colleague leaning
back with their feet up on the desk and staring out into space, do we see that
as productive time?! In an all-too-hectic schedule, it is a rare occasion that
I can sit down with colleagues talking about ideas and approaches. We nee to
maintain and nurture the ability of the next generation to produce disciplinary
classics that overturn the world as we knew it! Without that, our disciplines
become quaint and beloved relics rather than useful frameworks for reaching out
to communities and situations as they arise.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
Ultimately,
for many of us who are dedicated to our craft as teachers, our personal
identities are deeply implicated in our teaching. In constructing our courses,
texts and students, we construct ourselves and to overlook this is to devalue
the work that produces good teachers, and good teaching communities. My son
taught me this a few years ago when I apologized for yet another absence at a
weekend on-campus teaching time. 'Don’t be silly, Dad', said my seven-year-old
at the time. 'You know you love it!' Indeed, I do, and I should not forget that
in even the hardest of times when the marking has piled up and too many hours
past midnight find me at the keyboard.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
In
periods of social change, it is often students who lead social responses to
situations. In Australian universities there has been a long period of student
conservatism, punctuated recently by some disturbances on proposals for
imposition of student fees and tax reform, and some environmental issues. Many
fields of human endeavour have been repositioned as ‘expert’ fields, in which
accredited boffins are authorized to speak, and others are silenced. Working in
indigenous affairs, the impact of such short-sighted expertise is all too obvious
in the lives of many indigenous peoples. My own opportunity to learn the
limitations of expert-centredness arose early in my studies, when an bush
worker that I worked with in university holidays spoke to me about a very
clever ‘university feller’ who was coming to his property to study emus,
Australia’s large flightless bird. With a glint in his eye, my friend said,
“Gee he was clever, you know. What he knew about emus could fill up a whole
book and what he didn’t know would fill a bloody library!” Non-technical
experts in our communities are also important knowledge producers and so are
our students.
By
pursuing teaching that encourages dissent, questioning and challenge, we might
make things harder because we need to respond to student thinking, rather than
just their answers, but we need to prepared be uncomfortable around their new
proposals for responses to problems being left to them.
We
need to be open to knowledge, skills and values in our teaching; we need
to address information, methods and ethics.
Universities
in Crisis; Nourishing Communities; Post-modern Teaching; We teach for … our
students; employers; the university;
the discipline; ourselves; Unsettling Expert-Centred Models; The
paradox of excellence;
This
leaves us with many paradoxes to come to terms with. Perhaps the most troubling
is the extent to which excellent students rely on excellent teaching. In a
period when technology drives many teaching innovations, it is easy to be
seduced into superficial slickness, rather than a relationship of substance
between learner and mentor. When HTML presentations are becoming smoother and
more impressive, it gets harder to nurture relationships of real community
between teachers and students.
The
relatively recent emergence of awards to recognise excellent teaching are
welcome, but they also disguise important issues and paradoxes. Teaching is not
a competitive endeavour for which one can win prizes. Rather it is a cooperative
endeavour in which one works as part of a community or communities that are
justified in seeking support from one’s efforts.
Certainly
individual excellence is fine, but in the end, structural excellence, in terms
of access, equity, justice and diversity are addressed, is more important.
Teacher-centred teaching is no improvement on knowledge centre curriculum
processes. But as Friere identified three decades ago, education offers a
window on processes of cultural identify education is the practice of
freedom [11], and
ultimately, we teach for the future.
[1] I would like
to acknowledge the support of Iain Hay and the other JGIE editors, and my own
nourishing community of students and colleagues at Macquarie University.
[2] For methodological discussion of this study, see Howitt, Richard and Jackson, Sue (2000).Social Impact Assessment and Linear Projects. In: Social Impact Analysis: An Applied Anthropology manual (Ed: Laurence R Goldman), Berg, Oxford: 257-294.
[3] Leon Rossleson, The World Turned Upside Down. See the text at the following website: http://www.web.net/~smorton/Billy_Bragg/The_World_Turned_Upside_Down.html. See also Leon Rossleson’s home page at http://www.fishdesign.com/rosselson/leon.html.
[4] McDowell, Linda (1994), Polyphony and pedagogic authority. Area 26.3: 241-248.
[5] For a powerful perspective on issues of audience and performance in the construction of identity see Malouf,David (1998): A spirit of play: the making of Australian consciousness. ABC Books, Sydney.
[6] For example, see Levinas,Emmanuel (1969): Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh. (translated by Alphonso Lingis); Levinas,Emmanuel (1985): Ethics and Infinity: conversations with Philippe Nemo. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh. (translator: RA Cohen).
[7] In particular I would like to acknowledge my debts to David Lea at University of New England, Mary Hall and Bill Jonas at Newcastle University, Frank Williamson at University of NSW, and Bob Fagan at Macquarie University.
[8] For a discussion of the relevance of this approach in graduate supervision see Macquarie Human Geography Group (in press) Nourishing Conversations: dialogues with co-conspirators in the construction of knowledge. In Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)elations, (Eds: Bartlett, A and Mercer, G) Peter Lang, New York.
[9] As one of my colleagues put it succinctly some time ago, I was already doing what I wanted to do when I grew up!
[10] For discussion of Australian geography in this context, see Howitt, Richard and Jackson, Sue (1998): Some things do change: indigenous rights, geographers and geography in Australia. Australian Geographer 29(2), 155-173.
[11] Freire,Paulo (1972): Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin, Harmondsworth; Freire,Paulo (1976): Education: the Practice of Freedom. Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London.