Dr Stuart Middleton speaking at the Inaugural Symposium

 

Dr Stuart Middleton

Director External Relations

Manukau Institute of Technology

 

I want to start with some anecdotes about my own teaching.

 

First, I knew that my reputation as an excellent secondary school teacher of English was in tatters the morning of the School Certificate examination n 1977. One of my students, let’s call her Marion, came to the staff room door and asked to see me.

 

“Mr Middleton, is A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Witi Ihimaera a novel or a short story?” My advice to her was to try and enjoy the examination. Shortly after that I moved into tertiary teaching.

 

Second. On another occasion in 2002, a fellow I would place as being in his mid-forties rushed into my office at the Auckland College of Education and said:

 

“In a hurry, can’t stop to talk but I wanted you to know that those classes with you in 1983 absolutely changed my life. They were the turning point for me and I just wanted you to know that. See ya.”

 

With that he was gone and to this day I have no idea who he was.

 

Third. Finally, just early this year a student I had taught in 1981 made an appointment to see me. Her life’s journey in the past 27 years had been a painful one. Her departure at the end of her year’s course had been characterised by anger and incident the details of which are unimportant.

 

She wanted to have a conversation about the course she had taken which I had taught all those years ago but circumstances had denied her the opportunity at the time.  She wanted to say much she had enjoyed it. She felt bad about having left without telling me all this and especially at not telling me that I had taught her more by the way the classes were conducted than ever any of the understandings the course content could deliver. It took two hours for her to say all this before she left in a taxi and in all probability I shall never see her again.

 

These three simple anecdotes tell me a lot about teaching.

 

The success of our work as teachers relies almost completely on the success of others. I have long asked the question, can teaching be said to have occurred where learning has not? Or put more crudely, am I able to pursue the proposition that I taught well but they learnt badly? Are we sufficiently accountable for the real results of our actions as teachers. If we are not accountable for failure then who is?

 

I do not want to get into a discussion of research versus teaching –  I reject simple binary distinctions as the truth is usually in the middle. The best research also teaches and teaching is research. And in passing I must say that that Boyer’s (1997) definition of scholarship in the academy – discovery, integration, application and teaching – has not received enough attention.

 

But unlike research which is peer reviewed, teaching is reviewed by students. Not in those subtle and gentle student satisfaction activities or in course evaluations but in the brutal story told by the academic outcomes of our work as teachers. Successful teaching would see students meet the standards required particularly in situations where the entry to courses is controlled.

 

Throughout the tertiary sectors of the English-speaking world there is one statistic that has remained relatively constant for over 50 years. That is the interesting fact that about half of those who start a tertiary qualification do not complete it.

 

Is this a comment on our teaching? Would you get into an aircraft or onto a hospital operating theatre trolley if those activities had the same success? And why isn’t the commerce commission interested in an activity that charges customers from the price of a cheap imported car each year but delivers the product to only half of them?

 

A colleague in Bulgaria cannot understand some of this argument. “It is not problem for us,” she says. “In Bulgaria we get half our funding when a student enrols and the other half when they graduate!”

 

By way of contrast the peer review of research is a much more benign and soft measure. So Marion and her confusion is a comment on me as a teacher.

 

Now the fellow who knew me but who I didn’t recognise.

 

Much of our work as teachers has serendipitous impacts on learners. Some beneficial and important effects of teaching might not be apparent at the time or even for some time or even intended. That is because the best teachers bring a degree of intuitive expertise to their work and the explicit curriculum that the lessons focus on is underpinned by other attributes that the teacher brings to the pedagogic equation that develop students as people and in terms of the discipline. There is a difference between knowing a lot about botany and being a botanist, between having an encyclopaedic grasp of the trivia of history and being an historian and between both of these things and actually practising the craft of the botanist and the historian.

 

Finally, the woman who had reflected over many years on her experience in a course. What she really was saying was that the way we teach is what we teach. Again a binary distinction is destroyed – there is no difference between content and method – and that is what marks excellence in teaching.

 

Over the years I have read the excellence in teaching award booklets (having been involved in the selection of the first crop) and seen a clear pattern that underlines the importance of the way that you work rather than the actual material you are working with. Many of you have been identified as excellent teachers who, I would argue, would be excellent teachers in many disciplines.

 

I guess that what I am saying is that gathering you together offers opportunities to affect the quality of tertiary education right across the country. This brings me to some comments about the academy.

 

What sort of academy might this be? Something in the style of a Military Academy? Led perhaps by Colonel Graeme Fraser?  This kind of academy would be characterised by a certain “gung hoism”, competitiveness and strict hierarchies.

 

Or it might develop the style of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We are still far from the red carpets and glitz that this academy promotes – but I must say that the teaching awards in the UK receive a pretty glamorous reception. But this link raises two interesting ideas.

 

The first is that the academy would elect the winners rather than a selection panel which would simply manage the nominations. This would in essence be the recognition of excellence in teaching through peer review.

 

The other is that the awards could be called “Brians”.

 

Is this academy to have the role of the Academie Francaise – that of the guardian of the standards, the arbiter and the ultimate authority on tertiary teaching excellence?

 

Putting frivolity aside, of course the academy that is the Academy of Excellence in Tertiary Teaching is the one established in the academic use of the word. This is the society of learned individuals organized to advance art, science, literature, music, or some other cultural or intellectual area of endeavour. (Academy as a word comes from the name of an olive grove outside ancient Athens. Is there a local equivalent – The Pigeon Park of Academic Excellence? ) The purpose generally of the academy in the traditional sense was to provide training and, when applicable, to create exhibiting or performance opportunities for their members or students and this is exactly what you are set up to do.

 

This academy could well provide training through brokering best practice and making available in a widespread manner the skills, the expertise and the flair that is in this group.

Now what would be the equivalent of the mission of the academy “to create exhibiting or performance opportunities for [members of the academy] or students”?

 

Well clearly this is to organise yourselves in ways that promote “exhibitions” of excellent tertiary teaching to your students, in this case, other teachers in tertiary institutions. I envisage regular road-shows of teaching excellence, an academic circus tent of talent. But be careful. Remember the human cannonball who was fired because his act was over the heads of the audience. (They had to hire him back because they couldn’t get a replacement of the same calibre!) This sounds like a restructuring in a tertiary institution!

 

DVD’s of best practice, demonstration lessons (even lectures if you want to call them that) publications that give more practical detail than the awards publication. It is your job to spread the word about excellent teaching, what it is, why some teaching is excellent and some isn’t. We certainly do not need any more research about all this. The issue is not a lack of research but the willingness of teachers in tertiary institutions to ignore research about excellent teaching.

 

And please can you do this without using the work “andragogy.” Otherwise Marion will be back to ask ne who wrote “Andragogy and the Lion.”

 

You could do all this. Or you could become an exclusive club, the academic equivalent of the Northern Club where the successful retreat into their own company at the end of the day, and in their ivy covered building (I kid you not) to chat among themselves.

 

The choice is yours.

 

But you certainly have a task to do as an academy in the tertiary sector. Jacques Barzun reminded us of the terrifying characteristic of our modern age – “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” We need to set about re-establishing that tradition.

 

Why? Well because teachers matter. Allan Curnow summed it up in that wonderful defining poem Landfall in Unknown Seas when he asked:

 

……    Who reaches

The answer to that is you. Good luck for your work with that.

 

I congratulate Ako Aotearoa on establishing this academy, I congratulate all the members of the academy on your achievements that have brought you here as foundation members.

 

Ina te mahi he rangatira

 

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena kotou katoa