being a teacher again

Next week I will once again become a teacher. I'm returning to the HE classroom after a five year absence. As I've been trying to work on my preparation for this move back into a role and identity I was most proud and happy to have, the complexities of how to embrace this old and familiar identity within the context of my current position in my department has been brought into sharp focus. Before I had almost complete autonomy over all aspect of the subject curricula I taught. I was the only person teaching the subject, it was my domain and I was indeed the queen of that castle. I could approach the subject content and its underlying philosophies and pedagogy in the way I saw fit. This year it's all very different. I'm one of three people assigned to teach the subject and it's not been easy negotiating for the opening up or creation of a space where issues related to the curriculum and pedagogy can be discussed. And I'm not happy with what I've seen. There are glaring omissions and misalignment in relation to issues related to choice of content, pedagogy, and assessment strategies and importantly to me, the lack of responsiveness to students and their needs and what they bring to the learning context. It hard for me to turn a blind-eye: in respect of my teaching I usually don't do half-measures, I don't easily settle for mediocre or anything other than active learning. I'm ruffling feathers because I'm asking questions about the nature of assessments, the lack of time devoted to orientation and induction into the subject content, the department, the institutional ways of being, the type of classrooms I'm required to conduct my lectures and practicals in, the validity of the promotion of a decontextual skills orientated philosophy to the course content. But next week I meet my students and I'm excited about that - I'm keen to see how my PhD experience will impact on my pedagogic practice and how the learner role I've occupied over the past five years will act to sensitize the teacher role I now have to step into again.

staff or student

On Friday I had to do this big'ish formal presentation to the staff in my department about my portfolio of responsibility in the department - i.e. my academic staff development function. This is the primary role I 'sort of' play in my department. I also have a big'ish administrative function associated with quality assurance activities linked to an institutionally driven curriculum development project. Then in between these two big'ish tasks I'm also expected to teach, and I want to do research (by no means a core requisite for academic staff in our institution). In this academic staff development role my energies are focused on helping staff to find ways of improving their teaching practices and to nurture an awareness and interest in the general scholarship of teaching and learning.

Later that afternoon in conversation with a colleague about a possible research project to explore engineering students' experiences and perceptions of learning mathematics, I realised that I'm still too interested in students and their experiences to shift my research agenda. I may work in academic staff development, but I don't want to research that aspect of my work. I'm still not ready to let go of the student as my central focus. This same ideal ensured that my PhD research was firmly grounded in the academic literacies tradition - to allow me to place the student in core position of my research design and to ensure that their perceptions and experiences directed everything else I did in my research and analysis. This strong leaning towards the student is a very common feeling shared by many of the academics I know and respect. We are constantly pulled towards all sorts of other enticing or not so enticing activities associated with our work in higher education, but the student is always king/queen - the alpha and the omega - the core element that defines our identities and usually gives us a reason to get up in the morning. I might have suggested that staff and their concerns somehow can share the same platform as students. But that's misleading because for now my interest, and especially my research interest, are firmly locked-in on the student.

maybe it's not all in my head?

A friend sent me this link from THE about the complexities of being an academic in current times. I read it and breathed a sigh of relief - it's clearly not all in my head, these feelings of disconnection, dislocation, uneasy I feel about my place in the academic machine and in particular the department where I work. And as the weekend arrives, after a very disheartening engagement with my boss, where the realities of departmental priorities that so clearly seek to sideline and marginalise the positive contribution I was hoping to make, become abundantly clear to me, I'm relieved because of the perspective and possibilities my PhD experience has allowed me to see.

that gap between the past and the present

Because of the PhD studies I was effectively away from the institution where I work for five years. I'm realising that, the gap between 'the past' and 'the present' is where insincerity, insecurity and cowardice play. I've lost a history, an understanding of how things work and how they have developed and progressed in that five year gap. I'm not sure I can make it up. I'm trying - and I've decided to bring the PhD into service to help me overcome the problems presented by that gap - especially my own insecurities related to having lost my footing in the status and other hierarchies in the department. But equally interesting and sometimes difficult for me to handle are the insecurities and insincerity I encounter from colleagues, which I feel ill equipped to deal with because of the 'gap' burden. Often when I'm unable to 'deal' with what is thrown at me I interpret my response as cowardice - because I fail to act even when I know I should, and I appear, to myself anyway, to take the easy route and slip out of view.

I've been told that my position as Senior Lecturer (one I earned through the newly introduced Ad Hominen promotion system at my institution just before I left) means that I should take on an 'academic leadership' role with a portfolio of responsibility - just like the other Senior Lecturers in the department - all of whom were appointed to a specific administrative post like to this title. While this phrase 'academic leadership' is being used to position this role - especially for my benefit - I can't help feeling a hollowness, bordering on insincerity in how it is translated in practice. My reading of the sub-text implies that I'm not or haven't taken on and acted rightfully in my assigned position within the department (so I haven't shown academic leadership). However, nothing in how the department is currently structured has created the possibility for me to act or be seen to act in this position. I still haven't been asked to join the extended management meetings - so one of the technicians in our department has a permanent 'spot' on this forum, but not me. Of course my response - which has been not to explicitly highlight this omission to the powers is underpinned by a willingness to sit under the radar and smile almost cunningly knowing that I'm therefore not required to attend boring 3-4 hours meetings and thus allowed to write instead or get on with other more important academic 'stuff'. I'm complicit in my own invisibility while realising that just like I carry the burden of the gap in my history, the institution/department still operates very much in the past where leadership and seniority is also constructive in administrative terms - just like the technikon environment which is the ghost of our present institutional self. So they want to play the 'academic' game and seemingly talk the 'academic' language that might suggest they are in 'the game' but really do they really have any sense of what it is?

new focus

Seems it didn't take too long to come up with an idea of how to take my blog forward. How to make it accommodate the new (old) things and activities I'm engaging in and the identities that are becoming part of me in the post-PhD phase of my life. Post-PhD being the operative phrase that is all important. I'm going to blog about what it means to be in this post-PhD phase, how the PhD is shaping, influencing, directing, contorting how I see myself and my work within the specific vocational higher education institution where I work and the broader local and international higher education context that I am also part of. So I'll be rambling on about my new teaching role (in the disturbingly titled 'Academic and Professional Literacies' arena) and all the other activities and tasks wonderfully assigned to the very non-descript 'Academic Support' job title I currently have. A taster of the open-endedness of this title, today the first day of the academic year I had two random (and I mean random) students find their way into my office (I've decided that for the next two week my door will remain closed at all times) and ask me for advice about their continued studies in my department or how they might get into the course even though their application had already been rejected. Now of course I realise these students probably come into my office because mine was the only door open in the corridor and they needed their questions answered, but maybe, just maybe they saw the name tag and underlying title on my door and thought - 'I have a concern that needs some academic support, and the person inside this office should be able to answer it'.

And so the post-PhD phase of my life and this blog begins and to celebrate I've given the blog a bit of a face-lift. I quite like it!

what now?

The corrections are with the Research School and I guess it's practically over - the PhD that is. So I've been wondering what to do with this blog. I'm not sure  - I started the blog as a way of reflecting on my PhD journey and now that I've reached my final destination I'm not what function the blog might fulfill. I don't want to stop blogging but I'm not 100% sure how to make the blog-transition from the PhD to my next journey. At this point I'm not exactly sure what they next journey will be or rather what story I want to tell about my life post-PhD. I'm gonna have to think about this a little bit more and possibility use the blog as a canvas for my explorations. The blog, my blog, I think is robust, it can deal with some eclectic meanderings - a little bit of this, a tiny bit of that and viola! Hopefully something new, yet familiar.