Yesterday I participated in the OU academic literacies forum. Basically a discussion group for students and their supervisors who are working in the general area of academic literacies research. We were discussing the Lea and Street(1998, 2006) models of writing in higher education. A lot of the time we were discussing its implications for pedagogy and its incorporation into teaching and learning practices. Then later in the evening I was chatting online to a really old student of mine. His promotional video for Cape Town is a finalist in The My Cape Town competition. He was sort of crediting me for developing his script writing ability, way back in 2001 when I first starting teaching on the Multimedia technology course. My only reaction was embarrassment, because honestly I really didn't know what the hell I was doing then. Through the years I have seen my ex-student excel in their professional lives and really become experts in their field. Of course this makes me very proud, but I do wonder if this was through any help from me.
I don't remember being a very humanist lecturer and teacher - yes I professed to be this kind of teacher, and took my teaching very seriously. I was committed to being accountable, professional, always seeking new ways to enhance the learning experience, always challenging my student to do more, be more, think me and never accept second best for their work. But I was hard, really hard - in my critique of their work, in the expectations I set for them, and not tolerating anything but their best effort in everything they submitted for assessment. My main motivation for such behaviour was my own interpretation of how I could challenge deficit discourses about students, especially 'disadvantaged' students in higher education. I always saw all my students, anyone who gained entry into the course, as being able to succeed in the course and succeed in industry. I was my responsibly to help them succeed. But my drive was also to ensure that they were tough and could withstand any assault from anyone who looked down at them because they chose to come to Pentech or couldn't get into a 'proper' university or simply because they were black. I wanted them to feel self assure, confident that they were worthy and could match anyone out there - that their background would not determine their future. So I was hard and expected nothing but excellent work from them.
My reflections on my own teaching practice yesterday made me think how I could have done it better - how I would never want to do what I did over those 8 years at Multimedia (and especially those first 3 years) AGAIN. I mentioned at the meeting yesterday a point which I firmly believe - any golden ideals about being a teacher that encourages students to learn are thrown out the window, when you make that same teacher assess that learning against criteria that can never really accurately capture the complexity of learning. And here I am talking about all the things that have almost nothing to do with a person's cognitive ability to learn something new. I'm talking about issues of epistemology; i.e. notions of what counts as knowledge within the discipline, within the profession, within the department, within a particular subject area, for the lecturer, for the student, for the student's family etc... - all the social, power and ideological processes that impact, shape and contort what is meant by knowledge and how it is meant to be demonstrated. I think my heart was in the right place - I saw in each of my students the possibly to learn something new and for that learning to act as a catalyst for new, positive things, as they determined it. But...somehow I wish, now, I could have been more mindful of all the obstacles they would need to overcome in order to make such an ideal a reality and I wish I could have fulfilled a more supportive role - rather than being so driven by my own ambitions to prove society wrong.
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