A bit of background

An admission first of all. Apart from three months in 1995, I have either been a student or worked in higher education since I was 18. I don’t know how common that career path is nowadays, but it is mine.

I have been very lucky, in some ways. In my final year of my undergraduate course I got a note in my pigeon-hole from my dissertation supervisor which said ‘If you get this before 12:30, come and see me. If not, don’t bother!’. I did get it in time, went to see her and learnt that she thought I ought to put an application in for a DFES (as it was at the time) Librarianship PhD studentship based on my dissertation. The bad news was that the deadline for submissions was the following day! We spent the afternoon together, knocking up an application. It was 1995, and my dissertation was looking at the role of the public library in supporting unemployed people. I had stood outside my local job centre and done questionnaires with about 30 people, as well as investigating the local libraries’ provision for the unemployed. Anyway, we managed to knock something together which seemed to make sense, my supervisor sent it off (along with two other applications from other students) and I forgot about it.

Then, just before graduation, I was contacted by my supervisor to say that, whilst I had not got a grant in the first round, the panel liked my application and wanted me to do some more work on it and re-submit. I did some more work – with a bit more time now to think about it properly – and re-submitted. In August, I learnt that I had been successful and had secured one of one three DFES studentship for librarianship in England and Wales for that year.

I started my PhD that October, and began teaching almost immediately. The department at Brighton at that time had a specialism in media librarianship, we had done photography and radio and video production as part of our course, as well as studying the media in options. The department was also developing a new course in Information and Media Studies, intended to be a mix of practical media and information work. I started teaching video production. I was dreadful! I tell colleagues on my courses now about my first experience of teaching. I received no training, or really any guidance. I was given half a module – six weeks – in the first year of the undergraduate course. Half the class were with me doing video, the other half were with a full-time colleague doing ‘multimedia’. After reading week they swapped. I knew that what I was doing was bad, and I did my best to evaluate and revise what I was doing. In reading week, I met with the lecturer running the module and told him about what had gone wrong and how I wanted to alter things his response?

‘You can’t do that! The second lot have to have the same experience as the first, or the first lot could appeal if they fail!’

I think it was at that moment that I realised that I wanted to do better than that, that students deserved better than that.

Ever since then, the students and their experience of teaching and learning has been central to my work. I wanted students to learn, to enjoy learning and to want to learn. I taught as much as I could whilst I was doing my PhD. I taught anything and everything I was asked to teach (although I didn’t realise that this was storing up problems for the future). I evaluated what I was doing as best I could (I still had no training). I hated it if I thought the students were bored. The wonderful Arthur Marshall said that he would have stood on his head when teaching if it helped the students pay attention. I don’t think I would have gone to quite those lengths, but I certainly did all sorts of mad things.

Six months before I was due to finish my PhD, I got a lectureship. It didn’t change much, except I now had to go on a course to learn how to teach, and I was part of the department proper. Sadly, the course was pretty dreadful! It was full of navel-gazing and very low academic standards (I passed one element of the course when my ‘Action Learning Set’ agreed that my proposal for the research section ‘looked about right’. I am still not convinced that anyone had really read it, and I received no more feedback, apart from a pass mark!).

I loved teaching, and I also got stuck into administration and organisation. However, this was a mistake. By the time I left Brighton in 2003 I was Programme Leader for the undergraduate courses, and teaching 13 modules in a year. It was too much!

Since 2003, I have been working at Queen Mary, University of London, first as Teaching Quality Adviser, and now as Education Adviser. I am still passionate about improving student learning and improving the standard of teaching. I am now lucky enough to work with medics, dentists, mathematicians, engineers, scientists of all kinds, historians, linguists and lawyers amongst others.

You may well be wondering why I’ve written all this and what this blog is about. Well, this blog will not be representing anything other than my views, for a start, and I thought it useful for readers (should there be any) to know where I am coming from. Secondly, this is not intended to be anything other than my thoughts and reflections, as someone who works with academics and students, on issues which face higher education and which are raised by my colleagues and others. I’m not setting myself up as an authority, but I hope to be able to contribute to and inform debate on the roles and functions of higher education. Above all, I hope to be interesting – as far as I am concerned, one can aim no higher.