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.
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