What is good teaching?
TODAY’S column considers two connected topical matters: good teaching, and new threats to it.
Alan Horsman
First, October 24 was the 100th birthday of Alan Horsman, for many years the Donald Collie Professor of English at Otago University. He taught me much, as his colleague from 1971 onwards, just as he did his students, and then the Dunedin U3A. My fuller tribute can be read at <U3A Dunedin Home>
Sydney, SysED and AIEd
Secondly, continuing last week’s column about Sydney, one paper at the conference I was attending stood out, the one by Liam Semmler. It proclaimed a twofold threat to the role of the teacher — at all levels, primary to tertiary. The threat comes from systematic overregulation by officialdom, and an attendant counterthreat from reliance on computerised regulation and learningpackages. He calls them ‘‘SysEd’’, to stress that System comes in many senses before the Education; and ‘‘AIEd’’, corporations selling packages to the education sector.
Australia
Liam reports a widespread unease, in NSW and Australia generally. A huge survey of teachers has just voiced this concern. One teacher resigned from teaching in dismay. ‘‘In her poignant memoir, Teacher (2018), Gabbie Stroud describes intimately how the over systematised Australian education sector remorselessly wore down her ability to continue working as a primary school teacher. Despite all her obvious talent, commitment and professionalism, and all the joy and fulfilment she found and gave in the primary classroom, she left the profession to save her sanity and selfesteem. The absurdities of SysEd crushed her enthusiasm for teaching and buried her working day in an avalanche of administrative duties. She says that such managerial overload shows that there is no respect or support for teachers’’.
Furthermore
Liam notes that computers support the trend, in that teachers (like the rest of us) must fill up computerised forms in which the questions and categories are thought up by unknown people, who impose alien wording and thoughtforms. Computer learningpackages reinforce the trend to restriction, conformity, and (perhaps unintended) dependency.
NZ
Could anything like this happen here? We hear plenty about the need for ‘‘compliance’’ with central regulatory authority. You can take a qualification in compliance! ‘‘Compliance studies’’ is a standard phrase worldwide. Now, of course, there must be system and regulation. But centralised systems by nature put themselves first, the cart before the horse. How many of the central regulators teach a class for a week, to remember what it’s about?
Good teaching
As for me, I learn best from example and encouragement. I had great good fortune in some of my teachers. For example, in my teachertraining I was sent for a stint of teaching practice to HoughtonleSpring, County Durham, where my deputed mentor was Mr Crawford. It is, or was, a coalmining town: many of the class of 40plus 9yearolds were children of miners. For three weeks they, or rather we (since coal had not figured much in my own life till then) learnt about coal. How it was made (geology). Draw a coalwagon (art), draw it again using protractors and such (geometry). Calculate the load (arithmetic). And so on. I revelled in this thematic approach, unlike the three Rs of my own primary days.
Otago days
Teaching and learning went together here too, thanks to Alan Horsman, and the need to lecture on new authors, periods and genres of literature. By contrast, officiously regulated compliance will make teachers play safe, minimise risk. wordwaysdunedin@hotmail.com