First term reflections

Now that I’m inarguably back in the saddle–in week four of a five week term (universally agreed to be a *stupid* length)–I’ve been thinking a lot about how the way in which I think about myself as a teacher has changed a great deal in the last year.

A year ago I was beginning the long write-up of my diploma research, and in many ways it has been the entry to, and exit from, that research that’s altered me.

Studying for the diploma was my first exposure to research methodologies outside literary and cultural studies (or textual analysis more generally), and, for a time, I was quite taken with the idea of pursuing more qualitative research once my diploma work was finished. It seemed a useful way to reconcile the different threads of my job: classroom work, negotiating relationships with colleagues and my own literary critical interests.

Things didn’t quite turn out that way. I ended my project feeling ambivalent about my relationship, as researcher, with some of my research participants. The hindsight that it would have been better not to have initiated a project with colleagues as participants descended rapidly. It seemed, in my write-up, that you couldn’t after all take literary critical approaches out of the girl, and there was an ill fit between parts of my work and the analytical framework of my external marker.

In the midst of this process my confidence in literary critical inquiry as a legitimate field of research was renewed, since it was in trying something else that I realised where my skills and experience lay. At the same time, the internal workplace dynamics which I hoped to address and clarify in my research were only further muddied by my presentation of the research to its intended audience. In a sense, what I was arguing was proved true: that aspects of my colleagues’ pedagogical worldviews are mutually incomprehensible, or at least in ideological tension with each other. But if so, so what?

So the last six months have seen the a recession of the workplace dynamics that used to trouble me so (even a cursory browse through my archives will throw something up on this theme), at the same time as my orientation as a scholar has been strengthened. New writing commissions outside of work have helped this immensely.

As my relationships with my colleagues have come to seem less important and therefore less problematic, so my relationship, as a teacher, with my students has assumed a more central role. Teaching material that students are interested in learning (which I don’t get the luxury of doing all of the time) strikes me as a particularly charmed situation. It’s a private/public sphere, with much of the emotional weight of a familial relationship yet streamlined of relational difficulties by its constructedness, its artifice. A pairing between a motivated teacher and student, or teacher and class, can be one of the most unsullied settings in public life, in which best selves come out to play, albeit temporarily.

My classroom presence is a persona, and one which intrigues me as if it belonged to someone else, since I don’t think of myself as a person who is particularly confident, clear-spoken or adept at anticipating and solving problems. And yet, in the lecture theatre or classroom, there it is. I’m not sure where it comes from.

To see my former students take confident part in university study is a particular delight, as it is to be greeted, emailed or otherwise fondly remembered as they go successfully on. It’s a reward I didn’t really have as a tutor, where my influence was smaller and my activities more localised, or as a music teacher, where even my longest-apprenticed student quit just as she was hitting proficiency. It’s the students that occupy my mind almost completely now, to my greater satisfaction than in the past, but for that to happen, my confidence in my own disciplinary training needed to be consolidated. And that took a while.