Approach to teaching

 When I reflect on why I am teacher and what motivated this life path, I can't help but return to my 10 year old self, who, when asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, stated with conviction 'I want to be a teacher'. I was inspired in my youth by a dedicated and caring set of teachers who sparked a love of learning. While teaching is a passion that started from a young age it is only later in my life, after years of experience that I am coming to fully appreciate what being a teacher involves. It is a challenging and constantly evolving process; it is richly rewarding but requires consistent engagement with students’ needs and reflection on the process and on outcomes. 

During my undergraduate university degree I mentored several first-year students in the Political Studies department from disadvantaged backgrounds. Here I relished the opportunity to share insights and knowledge, and even to help develop English writing skills. I learnt from this experience that teaching was an often intense process and required a high level of commitment and time. However, at this early stage in my teaching and learning process I saw teaching as about giving knowledge rather than facilitating a joint learning process. I returned to teaching while doing my PhD, as a contract lecturer at Goldsmith College, University of London. Here I started to grapple more thoughtfully with students’ needs and how to best engage them on a learning process. However, it was only later in my career that I more fully embraced the idea of co-constructing knowledge and learning processes with students, instead of simply sharing information. In 2010 I was appointed by an international non-governmental organisation (Freedom House) as a designer and facilitator for courses on accountable governance and ethical leadership for cohorts of 20 young high potential leaders from Southern Africa between the ages of 23 and 35.  I soon realised that one could not ‘teach’ learners who have already a wealth of real-world experience around ethics and accountability. Teaching needed to be about facilitating a shared learning experience. Indeed, each time I ran the 10-day course the participants and I would go a learning journey; we would learn about theories, concepts and case studies, but more importantly we would learn about ourselves and each other’s experience and frames of reference. How did we understand the world? What were our implicit biases? How did we approach learning about new ideas and perspectives, and how could we break down our acquired prejudices and reformulate critical and thoughtful views on governance, politics and ethics? How do we translate concepts to apply to our particular and unique contexts?

Several years later I am employed on a permanent basis as a lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. Here I teach a range of undergraduate and post-graduate courses. The setting is different to that of small group facilitation; but, as far as possible, I am still striving to apply a reflective and thoughtful teaching philosophy that will take students on a journey to acquiring critical thinking skills and helping them apply concepts to the ‘real world’, as well as helping them understand new theoretical frameworks and to discover new information.

Learning Theories

Any teaching philosophy approach has at its centre a clear set of aims, values, beliefs and convictions that provide an organizing vision of a teacher’s direction and a rationale towards which his or her efforts are geared (Schönwetter 2002). To a large extent my current approach is I feel inductive, arising out of everyday teaching experiences, rather than being structured around a clear learning theory. That being said, and while there are many approaches to teaching and learning (and I am still engaging in a learning process to understand these), I think that much of the teaching I do aligns closely with the learning theory of constructivism, and specifically social constructivism. This approach to teaching is based on the idea that knowledge is constructed in the moment of learning (Rowe 2015). The individual discovers and retains knowledge and understanding through their own journey and through their own lens of interpretation. It is also suited to a pedagogical focus which is task-orientated, and emphasises self-directed activities orientated towards design and discovery (Conole et al 2004). Drawing from Hung (2001:283) there are several key themes in this approach, two of which I often focus on:

 (1) Learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge  

(2) The interpretation of knowledge is dependent on (a) prior knowledge and beliefs, and (b) the cultural and social context within which the knowledge was constructed.

 These practices resonate strongly with my approach to teaching and to the way in which I think students learn. This learning theory is also, in my view, particularly relevant to the discipline of political studies. In the first lecture I give in any course I always ask the students what they think being a ‘political scientist’ or ‘political analyst’ means. Invariably there are a range of answers, but I try to guide students to the understanding that most of what they will read and learn in the field of political studies is subjective. Being a ‘political analyst’ is being someone who critically evaluates what they read, see or experience. Their evaluation should be based on a) growing body of knowledge of other people’s (generally experts in their field) evidence-based views and b) an understanding of why they react to information in a certain way. This approach to learning is one reason I am supportive of the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Political studies is, in my view, the study of theory, seldom fact, and how theories can be applied (for a discussion of the disciple of Political Science see Schram et al 2014). In this regard a teaching approach focusing on the ongoing construction of knowledge in the moment of learning, may be appropriate, as students are encouraged to constantly construct their own thoughts and views on a topic. 

Attaining Graduate Attributes

In my view social constructivism (buttressed by an attempt to decolonise curriculum), is a teaching and learning theory that is well suited to meeting UWCs graduate attributes. Graduate attributes are generic abilities that allow graduates to learn ‘for an unknown future’ (Bozalek and Watters 2014:1070). UWC has two tiers of attributes, focusing in tier one on generic attributes and in tier two on skills that are necessary to attain tier one attributes. The first tier one attribute focuses on students having a critical attitude towards knowledge. Students should engage in inquiry, critique and synthesis to generate innovative and relevant knowledge which they can then apply to solve diverse problems. 

This is an attribute I strongly support in my approach to teaching and learning. Students construct their own knowledge when they think critically about a topic; that is they reflect on different points of view and how it is they have come to form their own views. In my post-graduate course on South African Politics, for example, I facilitate discussions on the topic of race and transformation in South Africa. In particular I ask students to reflect on what ‘non-racialism’ as a concept, means to them. I do this by providing readings on the theory of non-racialism and then put them into debate teams where they have to argue for or against different points of view. After the debate we have a debriefing discussion where each student can reflect on their own lived experiences of race/racism and how, through reading and debating with their peers, their views have (or have not) shifted. 

UWC’s second graduate attribute is that of critical citizenship and the social good, based on a relationship and interaction with global communities and the environment. Here students must focus on being agents of social good, aspiring to contribute to social justice (Bozalek and Watters 2014:1071). This attribute raises the issue of what ‘social justice’ means and the role of a lecturer in supporting this value. As politics teachers I think we hold responsibility for how and what we teach our students. Politics is not a hard science; it is value laden and subjective.  It is thus our responsibility to assist our students to think critically about what a ‘socially good’ citizen is, and how to contribute to social justice. I do not think however, it is our role to tell them what values we think they should have. 

 For example, when I have taught political ideology courses to third years I have exposed them to the ideologies of liberalism, socialism, nationalism, feminism and ecologism. I may, hypothetically be a socialist feminist, but it is not my role to convert students to those ideologies. I see my role as helping them think reflexively and critically about what they believe. I will provide readings, slides and discussion forums (through tutorial and in lectures) and then, often through assessment, provide them with a space to reflect on why they may or may not subscribe to a certain ideology. In 2013 as a co-teacher of this course we used CDA to guide students with a method through which they could identify and assess an ideology. We then presented them with several controversial readings (racist or sexist for example) and asked them to keep a reflective journal detailing their responses to the readings. In the exam there was also a section that required a reflective narrative on their response to ideological positions. In 2014 I set an exam question asking students which ideology, of the five listed above, they most identified with and why. For the large part this question generated interesting and reflective answers that simultaneously demonstrated an academic understanding of an ideology. 

Continue to: Teaching Experience: Undergraduate and Postgraduate