TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Eric Christiansen’s
superb portrait of Raymond Carr on the
occasion of his ninetieth birthday provides an
inspiring role model. But would Professor Carr’s
pedagogical methods receive a five star rating today?
Christensen’s first paragraph is particularly acute on
a delicate issue raised by the use of student
evaluations as an indicator of teaching quality:
‘Dons don't usually appear to much advantage in fiction.
Sillery, Samgrass, Cottard, Lucky Jim's professor, the
History Man, all Snow's Masters: these spring to mind at
once. Why are they so disgusting?
Perhaps some are false fathers to young people expecting
more attention, like the pompous young Gibbon at Magdalen.
Perhaps because they are obvious targets to would-be
writers at a time of life when the urge to debag and
deflate is strong: they seem self-satisfied in ways which
cry louder for satire than the ways of more, or less
insignificant subjects. The clever students don't need
dons. The dons don't need the stupid ones. Theirs is a
marriage of inconvenience, bound to end in tears.’
It appears from Eric Christiansen’s article that Professor
Carr’s teaching philosophy was to know a lot about his
subject and to make that knowledge available to anyone who
wanted to engage with him. On his terms. It goes without
saying that knowledge such as Professor Carr’s could never
compensate for failure to complete a course such as
this. As Eric rightly noted Professor
Carr’s techniques were developed in a tertiary
education environment as different from ours “as the
moon”. Perhaps a better role model is someone who has
exceeded every key performance indicator in
contemporary education and as part of her ongoing
service to “ the industry” makes herself available as
a consultant to devise new ones.
Professor Denise Bradley, author of the
Bradley report on Higher Education in Australia.
Because the report is rather long and packed with
challenging insights it is difficult to extract a
single pithy mission statement but I urge you to
read it just so we are on the same page
via a vis the challenges and opportunities created by
the contemporary post secondary marketplace for online
content delivery .
Fortunately Tim Parks, reflecting on his experience as a
teacher at the university of Milan, has neatly encapsulated
the values of modern educational practice embodied in the
Bradley report. His words are especially salient given the
anticipated shift to post graduate students enrolments as a
basis for sustaining university income .
‘For if it is true that our civilisation is going through a
vast and arduous process of unlearning, of exclusion,
forgetting even, what we get in return is the exhilaration
of efficiency, the gratifying impression of getting things
done. Theses for example.’
from Magic by Tim Parks
