During our second cross-program session, we were presented with a case study extracted from Bruce Macfarlane’s book Teaching with integrity (Macfarlane, 2004).

Here, apart from discussing how the teacher in question could improve on certain approaches to her teaching, what struck me the most was the conversation our group had when we were asked to discuss what we thought the most interesting questions this case study had risen.

After some brainstorming, we settled on the relationship between research and teaching and how the two can co-exist.

Some people in the group, with experience in both (either personally or through having worked with researchers who teach) pointed out that this is a particularly difficult balance to strike: the two practices require very different skills, aptitudes and traits. Someone pointed out that often researchers don’t have any motivation to teach, that in fact are often not good teachers and that the two (researchers and teachers) often have negative opinions of one another.

But shouldn’t the two feed off each other? Shouldn’t researchers want to share their research and indeed inform, complement, enrich their teaching with it? Likewise, shouldn’t teachers want to inspire their teaching with new material?

I suppose teachers could be happy to teach other people’s research and still be great teachers, but researchers surely would want to research to contribute to new knowledge somehow and what better way to do it than through teaching.

Universities could perhaps encourage researchers to teach by supporting their teaching practices more and celebrating their importance. Although we are lucky to be on the PGCERT Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication here, I don’t know that there is much effort from UAL to celebrate how important it is to teach. It would be great to see regular workshops and seminars or observation opportunities, that encourage teachers to improve their skills, learn and try out new ones, explore different approaches to how their subject is taught by possibly observing others and generally creating more of a community where a teaching discourse can happen.

Bibliography

Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with Integrity. the ethics of higher education practice London: Routledge