And a Happy New Year to all of you ardent followers; prosperous too, hopefully!! If the Academics Union does its job, of course....
And because he has had reason to wonder along similar lines in a UCT context recently, the Retroidal Komponent of the VftN noted this news snippet from the Tuesday Monday Paper of the 14th December with great interest:
"UK universities stand accused of hypocrisy over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy. Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester's "Genie" Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities. In the research-intensive Russell Group and 1994 Group universities, only 58% and 35% cent, respectively, feature criteria on teaching and learning in their policies."
...and do we have any reason to consider that UCT is any better?? Aside from Retroid's particular bugbear, the "research-led teaching" concept, the Kollektiv is unaware of any concrete examples enshrined in writing in UCT policy documents that allows for teaching excellence to be weighted equally with research excellence in the assessment of the promotional prospects of any given academic.
Not, Retroid hastens to add, that he believes that he has been unfairly treated in any way, and would in fact rather that the retroidal u/g teaching component be reduced to zero because of research commitments...but this is another argument.
Really and truly, in this day and age in The New SA where we need so badly to help the badly-educated young escape from their academic straitjackets, should we not lead the way in establishing genuinely parallel teaching- and research-track career streams for academics?
My Leicester connection - an excellent virological researcher who decided to become a "teacher track" academic - may have an opinion here; however, I think it is high time UCT got off the fence, and embraced teaching excellence - even in the absence of high-level research activity - as a legitimate criterion for promotion.
Long live, committed teachers, long live...!
11/01/2010, 15:44
Like yourself, I couldn't claim to have been unfairly treated (yet), but focussing on teaching in a "research-led" (sic) institution is an uncomfortable process. More and more UK universities are giving up this pretense and starting to build a cohort of professional teaching staff who do not resent being dragged away from their research to teach. However, the GENIE study conducted by my colleagues here at Leicester was designed to illuminate the discrepancies between stated policies and actually institutional policies. Sadly, these are rife :-(
11/01/2010, 17:07
Oh-oh - 2010 seems to have started then? (I'm still on leave so not that conscious).I understand that UCT is on the way to recognizing (with many, many and, ifs and buts) a teaching track option. But as long as the university makes money out of research (the real motivator for pushing publications?)and makes no direct money out of teaching, teaching will remain a poor relative. And of course it's harder to measure (reduction of teaching to student perception scores on Likert scale items - often badly conceptualised - cannot be said to provide a sound indicator). But, it would be interesting to see some real engagement by the university (as an institution as well as a community of scholars) with teaching (and its distant relative, learning).
11/01/2010, 18:36
How cynical is that, T_Ed: "...teaching (and its distant relative, learning)."
Absolutely true, notwithstanding.... Would that we could bring them closer!! But I am about to spend a sabbatical finding out just how to do that, so let us see.
11/01/2010, 19:11
How odd - I am about to do the same (well, to start the process of understanding what may influence learning, especially at doctoral level). Cynical? Moi? Yes. But only because a tendency abounds that collapses teaching and learning as if they were in a direct causal relation ("I teach - they learn").
16/01/2010, 22:21
...so we shall have to meet won't we...? Have you made an acquainance with Chelyabinsk tractors yet?