The quest for becoming a better teacher

What I should be doing is the final assignment for the course in the basics of university pedagogy. What I am doing is this. I hope writing this blog will clarify my thoughts enough to be able to finish the actual assignment.

I have been teaching undergraduates now and then for more than ten years. Mostly I have had one or two course in an academic year, often a parallel course to a university one in the open university. I think my first courses were pretty straightforward - I did it as I had seen it being done, and did not come to think that there might be something more to teaching. However, then I had the luck of having some really good teachers in Leicester, and ever since I have been attempting to get better at what I am doing. So I was delighted when I, after two previous attempts, finally got accepted to a five-credit course in university pedagogy.

It turned out that the course would require quite a lot of work, and since my autumn was going to be busy, I wondered if I should drop the whole thing. However, expecting to be parted with my beloved Alma Mater next year, I decided to tackle it. Should have known better. Between my "part-time" research job, teaching and other things I had to take up to manage to keep my nose above the surface financially (not to mention family responsibilities), I really did not have the time I should have devoted to the course to do it well. 

Neither was the course quite what I expected. It turned out that rather than giving us skills in teaching it was aimed as an introduction to the field of research called university pedagogy. From the viewpoint of academic achievement the course has not been a huge success for me. Most of the time I have felt a little lost with the assignments, which is probably reflected in the quality of my output. From the viewpoint of personal development I think I am doing a little better. I might not be able to write a theoretical treatise on  teaching in higher education, but that was not my goal, anyway. I did not want to become a researcher in university pedagogy, I just wanted to become a better teacher, and towards that end I think I have gained some useful tools, which I intend to apply as soon as I start teaching again - in a couple of weeks. It is a course I have always thought I would love to teach, so it will be interesting to see if I can impart some of my enthusiasm to the students.

Hindsight into the future

I just finished making a summary of the student feedback from the general archaeology course last autumn. Finally that course is wrapped up. I bet the average student never realizes how much behind-the-scenes work is involved in teaching. The feedback was nice to read, though, we - meaning the other lecturer and myself - got good marks from the students.

I got this link from a friend. Hope you will find these as amusing as I did.

What I did in May

Good news have been cropping up lately:
- my article will be published, after all (my first ever publication in an international refereed journal)
- my paper was accepted for next year's ICAANE in London
- I got a four-month grant for writing my dissertation which means it might eventually be completed

The course in archaeological survey is almost over, the students just need to hand in the final assignments on post-fieldwork. As always, the course was an educational experience for myself in how not to do things. The course could have been better; I suppose it could have been worse. I have learned my lessons and will no doubt do different mistakes next year.

It was also an interesting glimpse into the undergraduate psyche and the pressures today's students are under. Back in the good old days when I was a student you had a certain number of months we were entitled to study grants, and how you used that time was your own business. If you used up the money before graduating, well, that was just too bad. Since then the Study Grants Board has become interested in the progress of your studies. You have to prove that you have been studying diligently, and the only way of proving that is, of course, getting enough credits. The close supervision of credits earned seems to have created a situation where the credits themselves are the end, and not the means to an end. The students do not study to learn anything, they study to get the credits.

The same system that works on the level of an individual student, works also between the Minitry of Education and the universities. The Ministry, which hands out the money for the universities, requires universities to produce a certain number of degrees yearly to get the funds to run their teaching and research. Of course the requirements rise every year without similar input into resources. The universities are effectively treated as if they were factories producing rubber boots for the left foot only. Every year the factories are required to produce more boots out of the same amount of rubber. And they say hey, you can do that if you cut the amount of raw material per boot. The boots won't last any wear, but who cares, as long as the statistics look nice - the end product is useless without the right foot boot anyway.

Virtual teaching

or: If a tree falls in a forest but there is no-one to hear it, will it still make a sound falling?

I am not convinced by my experience in virtual teaching so far. For one thing, it is a really dreary monologue for the teacher, who has no means of judging how the audience is responding. If it is as dull for the students, they are probably half-asleep, or else most of them have left and gone home. All potential for interaction is lost by the fact that the students are sitting in a classroom and each group has only one computer for communicating back to me and to the other groups, with no microphone, so the only means of asking questions is by typing them. Finnish students are not famous for being communicative anyway, quite on the contrary, but in comparison with this virtual course the discussion on the other one I have been teaching is lively. Despite all the technology involved, I feel this is going backwards in time, to the good old days when a professor would enter the classroom, give his lecture and leave, without any interruption from the students intent on absorbing his words of wisdom.

However, in the light of recent discussion revolving around Finnish university policies , I fear I am really witnessing the future. The government is also planning to cut down thousands of governmental jobs in the name of a productivity program - as if e.g. social security or educational sector is a company operating by the laws of quartal capitalism*. That is so absurd it would make you laugh if it was not real. So, I can see how alluring the idea must be for the decision-makers: By employing one teacher only you can teach (in a very broad sense of the word, but who cares as long as the statistics look nice?) students anywhere in the country with negligible material costs. Lo and behold, we have invented the next best thing after the duck laying gold eggs.

*And see where that principle has led us... It never fails to confound me how these companies can make more and more money by constantly closing factories and kicking out workers. In the past having to close down factories would have been a sign of impending disaster for the company but now it just causes their share price to soar. I confess my utter and absolute bafflement.

You can't choose your ancestors, or can you?

Besides the virtual lectures, I'm also teaching on another course with live audience. The subject is general archaeology, and the course is basically supposed to include no less than the prehistory of the whole world, although by the dept. of archaeology tradition and by restrictions set by limited time, the view tends to be centered on prehistoric Europe. Yes, you might ask like my dissertation's supervisor, how and why a person supposedly specializing on the Late Classical Near East is doing this. Well, you see, I still need to eat even after I ran out of my research grant, and in fact I rather like teaching (I can hear the teen-age me howling in terror and despair, as one of the reasons I started studying something as useless as ethnology was my firm intention never to end up as a teacher).

Anyway, on last Tuesday I got to start the course by introducing our ancestors to the students. Having to go through more than 20 million years of human evolution in three hours I barely had the time to present the bare bones of the subject (quite literally). I tried to put on a lively show, but by the end of the session the group of students seemed slightly stunned and more than a little glassy-eyed. I honestly think I got more out of the subject myself, while preparing the lecture.

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice these things, but because this was something of an interesting notion to me, I'd like to share it. It is about Lucy, the fossil Australopithecus afarensis. When Lucy was found, she was quickly dubbed our ancestral mother, as it was thought at the time that we are descended from the Australopithecini. However, recently the human family tree has been extensively pruned and grafted, and now it seems that the Australopithecini were a branch separate from us. This heavy-handed gardening stripped Lucy of the status of our esteemed great-grandmother, a change which I think is reflected in these two reconstructions which I happened to find in the Internet when browsing for illustrations for my lecture.


In the first one, which is said to be from a French museum, Lucy is portrayed as remarkably human. The second one I found on BBC's site. It is a recent reconstruction and probably closer to the reality - Australopithecini were quite chimp-like in body, with the one remarkable difference: they walked on two feet. But it would not do to portray our grandmother as an ape, would it now? However, after Lucy lost her post-humously acquired touch of humanity, it is quite acceptable to do so, and by doing, to distance ourselves from these less-successful relatives.

Virtually there

I have become a virtual teacher. I am teaching the rudiments of archaeology on an internet course in the open university. In practice this means that the students follow the lectures at three different locations over the country. What is sort of silly is that the students sit in a classroom and listen. So they don't have their own computers and microphones and the interaction part of the lecture is nearly non-existent. The only way to communicate is using the chat function of Connect Pro, the program we use for broadcasting the lectures.For the students, I am a talking head on a screen. For me they are even more unreal. Because they have no microphones, I'm talking into a complete silence which feels very weird. Luckily I can at least see a few of them in a webcam picture, so I know there is somebody out there, but I can't really see their reactions - whether they seem to be interested or bored out of their minds.

Am I witnessing the future of teaching in universities?