Teaching and the Teaching Excellence Framework

Its a humid low to mid twenties at the moment and my infant son is struggling to feed from the breast. He is hungry, pursing his little lips and reaching up to his mother, but something stops him. He sucks once or twice and then draws back. And tries again. And again. He gets frustrated, little arms waving and skin turning redder and redder as he shakes with emotion. His mother, needless to say, finds it hard. The midwives and breast-feeding experts fret. She's doing everything right. Position, flow, comfort - all are carefully and correctly positioned. He is healthy, alert, and not in any pain. But he won't take up the milk. He has to have the bottle. He struggles with the new sensation required in breastfeeding.

Watching him, watching them both, I worry too.

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This last week, in between these feeding issues, I've been thinking about the Government's proposed Teaching Excellence Framework. How it would work. How it might come together. I don't hate the idea, per se, but I do have some issues that I'd like to give an airing.

I'm a great teacher. That might sound arrogant to say, but it has been, over the four years of PhD and one year in Post-Doctoral Limbo, the one thing that I have been sure of. I struggle with writing, with research, with networking, with, really, pretty much every aspect of academic life. But teaching is where I feel comfortable. I wasn't always like that, of course, and at the start I was a quivering wreck of nerves. I put it down to experience. A rough calculation puts me, by my reckoning, at over 500 contact hours of seminar teaching. Students enjoy my classes. I coax quieter students to talk, louder students to calm down, and somehow we always manage to muddle through to an end point where students have a better mark, and a better understanding of how they got there, than they did before. On the way, I sincerely hope, we have some fun, and I gain experience and confidence in my abilities. It is this experience that makes me worry about the TEF.

My concern here is that in reaching out to student worries about teaching in Universities, both the Government and the external assessment body it sees assessing TEF will miss the point. One of the most widely acknowledged problems within the Humanities teaching - that a large proportion of teaching is undertaken by doctoral and post-doctoral students with little or no official connection to the University, at least in any sense that could be covered by TEF's spiritual inspiration REF.

There are, in my experience, three key problems that exist under the current system that would complicate any meaningful attempt to gauge student satisfaction and value for money through TEF.

1. Students are unreliable reviewers of modules.

I'll fight for students until my dying breath but, lets face it, we with teaching experience in Higher Education know that they are not always the most reliable sources of information when it comes to reflective criticism of courses and modules. At York students are asked to grade different aspects of each module Over the years at York I have taught a number of first and second year historiography and skills modules. There are, common I think across many Departments, problems with such modules. Skills are often taught in abstract, devoid of historical content or appreciation of a field, and under such circumstances one can sympathise with students asked to sit through a two hour seminar on footnoting.

Over the years I've got better at teaching these, able to navigate the quagmires of glazed expressions and keep the balance of skills and primary sources alive. But it remains difficult, and would continue to feed into any TEF assessment in a profoundly negative way. Over the past two years there have been a number of studies revealing that students still cling to an image of the middle-aged, white, male, Professor, and that female academics tend to come off worse in feedback regardless of content or performance in the actual lectures.At York this year we had to take disciplinary action over abuse posted online, on Twitter and other social media outlets, over the "boring" content of some medieval lectures.  PhD students have little direct disciplinary support in this regard. They are in a similar position - often semi-invisible in institutions from a teaching perspective. They are liked by students but, often, not necessarily respected in the way senior colleagues are. This disparity of review feeds into my second concern:

2. Some topics will suffer more than others.

At Sheffield I shared my office hour with Liz Goodwin this year. She's finishing off her PhD and is definitely someone to watch. She works on the early modern period but, that semester, was teaching early medieval history. I enjoyed having my lunch and hearing about the Arab Conquests and the collapse of Visigothic Spain. Some of her students? Not so much. I always say in interviews that modern British history is, from a teaching perspective, a battle against "been there, done that" syndrome. You're constantly battling against half-remembered A-Level or GCSE boredom. For my medieval and early modern colleagues, the opposite is true. PhD students tend to be roped into the large first year survey courses. Pre-1700 usually starts strong. After being largely sidelined by the history curriculum at schools before A-Level options, students are eager to dip their toes in unfamiliar waters. The problem is, they don't always like the temperature.

"Too many Constantines and Goths and Monks" my students grumbled one morning when I asked them about the other module they were taking. My wife, the only person to have taught on both pre and post 1650 survey courses at York, had students who agreed. Sources were too obtuse, the reading too hard, the focus too broad. By assessment time at the end of term, they have clustered around the warm familiarity of the twentieth-century dictators and, in contrast, dread the cold realms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. Some of this is the challenge of teaching at a University level, exciting and surprising as well as teeth-gnashingly frustrating, but this would be chaos in an externally assessed system. PhD and Post-Doc tutors rarely have much control over what they teach but would, I fear, be tarred with the reviewing brush for concerns beyond their control.

3. PhD and Post-Doc Tutors get nothing.

I enjoyed, this week, reading Rachel Moss' piece on trigger warnings in History Today. Particularly the part about the box of tissues in the office. This year, one office hour, Liz and I were confronted by one of our shared students. She had not been doing as well as she could have been, we had both prior to that day, discussed her work and our concerns. However that lunchtime she came in, sat down in the swivel chair, and burst into tears. And suddenly everything came out. Her problems with her housemates. Her homesickness. Her confusion over her consistently stuck grades. Her housemate's suicide attempt the night before the essay deadline. Liz and I ended up shuttling other students who turned up with more banal concerns out of the office and tag-teaming her until we could finally sit down, the three of us, and properly talk through her issues. She ate up the whole office hour for both of us. But it was worth it. In the following weeks she was a whole new person. Feeling more supported she became more vocal in seminars, more confident in her written work, and generally more upbeat about the whole University experience. In the last week of semester she stopped by the office to thank us both. When she left Liz turned to me and said that she thought we'd helped her turn a corner. I was inclined to agree, and it is one of the teaching moments that, whilst not in the seminar room, will stay with me forever.

How this would fit into an assessment I'm not sure. Is it a contact hour? Skills support?

Jo Johnson, Universities and Science Minister behind the proposed TEF, has said:

Students are telling us in surveys that they know they would do better by investing more time in their studies.

 True, but how can such interactions be judged? For better or worse PhD and Post-Doc tutors are the workhorses of Humanities teaching, concentrated in that critical first year when students are prone to homesickness, course fatigue, or culture shock amongst others. I cannot even begin to imagine the complexity that a fair assessment criteria would need to judge their contribution to teaching in Departments across the county. And neither, sadly, can I imagine the Government coming to grips with such a criteria. In the end, PhD and Post-Doc tutors will always be the poor relations in such a system.

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My little boy is doing alright. He's healthy. Just struggling with something new. My wife, I think like all new mothers, is worried about being labelled a "bad mother" for her failure to breast-feed. But, looking at him try again and again to settle with her, I can't believe that. Of course, I'm a partial observer. I have skin in the game, quite literally. But the situation is so complex, so charged with human emotion, and necessitating such careful arrangements and rearrangements of skills, that I fail to see how any outside assessor would be able to get a clearer picture.

London, Chatham and Dover, Travellers and Letters to the Editor c.1900

The Graphic, 1893

 

To say that the London, Chatham and Dover Railway had a poor reputation would be a little of an understatement. Despite having an enviable record for passenger safety, although not a perfect one as some railway historians have claimed, due to its adoption of Westinghouse Brakes and new signalling techniques, it was not a commuter favourite.

 

The London, Chatham and Dover Railway (henceforth LCDR) ran a series of lines, perhaps unsuprisingly given their name, down from London to the Kent coast. They also branched out across the eastern and central parts of South London, around Crystal Palace and Nunhead, and by the late 1860s had reached the Thames at Blackfriars and crossed to build Ludgate Hill station.

 

This positioned the LCDR as a primary provider for the growing commuter population south of the river but also put them in a prime position for capturing the continental traffic both to and from the port of Dover.

 

Given that this post is an early working piece the historigraphy of travelling is not complete here. Looking to my right reveals an enormous pile of books to climb. Instead, I want to address one significant voice on the topic - that of Wolfgang Schievelbusch.

 

I've long admired Schivelbusch's work, which takes a socio-cultural angle on various aspects of modern life. He's been most influential in the past when his work on night-time, the 1983 Disenchanted Light, is placed alongside Joachim Schlor's 1998 Nights in the Big City. But recently I've been dipping back into his The Railway Journey. Its a fantastic exploration of how the coming of the railways reshaped modern society, yet I do have some reflections on his discussion of the railway carriage and its effects that I want to discuss.

 

Much of my early research on this topic came from one of my favourite, and to my mind criminally underused sources, letters to the Editor of The Times. Now digitised and fully searchable, late nineteenth-century newspapers offer more and more titbits for the historian willing to comb them. I've used these multiple times (they are a great teaching resource too) but I was shocked by the extent of letters touching on the LCDR. Between 1870 and 1899 (when the line shifted to a joint working relationship with South Eastern Railway) no fewer than 79 entries in "letters to the Editor" touched on the subject. As a historian you are lucky if you get a dozen on any topic that isn't either enormously broad or a major national issue.

 

Almost all of these 79 entires, some of which contain multiple letters grouped due to similar content, were negative. 

'Why am I, and scores of others, to be constantly subjected to the annoyance and loss of time occasioned by the wretched unpunctuality, irregularity, and not infrequently, as was the case this morning, the failure of the train to put in an appearence at all?'

complained one letter, whose author chose to identify himself only as A Victim. (The Times,

4^th October 1871) 

 

Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey, has some interesting points to make about the experience of the railway carriage. His main observation is that they disjointed older forms of familiarity whilst traveling, spelling the death of conversation in transit, and also representing 'the total optical and acoustical isolation' of the passenger from the form of transport in comparison to older horse-drawn carriages or riding (Shivelbusch, 1986, 75-79). To some extent these are present in the complaints. Delayed at Rainham a Mr Abraham sent his son out of the carriage to investigate the cause of the delay - it was only by breaching the isolation of the carriage that they were able to discover the nature of the stoppage ahead. (The Times, 7th September 1878).

 

Yet other passengers seemed to expect a connection to the outside world. Schivelbusch speaks of the fear, particularly with the emergence of railway murders in the middle of the century, that isolation provoked. The comments of travellers on the LCDR speak of anxiety only when the established lines of connection failed and isolation became an unwelcome, and unexpected, reality. One Indignant Traveller had a distressing journey when his wife was taken ill in the carriage in 1898.

'Between Chatham and Hearne Hill her condition grew so alarming that, as we lived at a town which has a station on the main line, I decided to stop the train there by means of the communicator fixed up in the carriage. This I pulled according to the printed instructions...but the train did not even slacken'

Upon confronting the driver and guard at the terminus the angry passenger was shocked to discover that the cable had simply not alerted the apologetic operators at all.

 

Scattered throughout the letters pages across this thirty year period are complaints about inabilities to contact guards, about poorly enforced ticket distinctions, about the lack of warmer foot covers and blankets at LCDR stations for ongoing passengers, about the intrusion of rowdy Bank-Holidayers into carriages where quiet conversations were happening, and, chiefly, about the rattling discomfort provoked by the unwillingness of the LCDR to invest in bogies to provide proper suspension for their carriages.

 

It is, I think, important to given credence to these sources but also to read them against the grain. Schivelbusch sees the move towards carriages with compartments offset from a corridor that ran the length of the vehicle as inevitable. A consequence of the 'quiet and isolation, experienced as both pleasurable and frightening'. (Schivelbusch, 1986, 88). Yet whilst these letters support a mixed view of isolation, that could be both enjoyed and feared, they also point to an appreciation amongst passengers that they were never truly isolated from the outside world. The regular rhythm of station stops, the coming and going of fellow passengers, and the interactions with staff that could (or at least should in LCDR's case) have taken place at stations and en route, suggest a much more subtle experience than Schivelbusch suggests, one which only provoked reactions when it was punctuated by error or failure. As the only positive commenter in the selection of letters pointed out, it was not that bad most of the time. Even if the condition of carriages left a little to be desired, he wrote,

 

'I must bear testimony to the uniform civility and courtesy which is meted out to travellers on the London and Chatham line...while the line is deficient in many things, on no other system is more civility extended to the passengers than on this'. (The Times, 24th September 1895)

 

Experiences on the LCDR, it seems, were for passengers a balancing of missed connections and personal ones.

 







Fresh Beginnings

Hello and welcome!

This blog is going to stand as a record of my time as Research Fellow at the National Railway Museum, York, which should run 2015-2018.

Here I'll be discussing the wider interplay between transport history and social, cultural, and other forms of history, reflecting on how these impact my own work and on how these play out in wider academic and public history events.

My main research project, whilst here, is a history of South London 1870-1940. This project, which I have no doubt will bore readers to the core in the course of this blogging adventure, uses the railways as a way of understanding the changing landscape of the southern half of the world's biggest (at the time) city.

Other blogs about historical research, being an academic in a museum, and wider issues will undoubtedly follow.

My final plea is that this is an open space - if people have suggestions, research ideas, or just comments please feel free to contribute and comment below!

Oli Betts