Mr Chong Ching Liang (School of Health Sciences)

(1) How do you see your role as a lecturer?

I see myself not as a teacher but as a guide. The world is structured via the internet for the learners to be their own teachers. My role is to help put up signposts to help learners navigate and construct their own learning. The notion of teaching in this day and age is difficult, with the pervasiveness of information from the web supplanting the teacher. So the challenge is for us to see ourselves as “former-teachers”, learning how to grow into the role of the guide who can help facilitate the learning of our students. I never ever considered this role of guide as a job. It has always been a vocation.

(2) What keeps you going as a lecturer?

The belief and the hope that through what I do, my efforts will add on to the efforts of others to collectively construct a better world for the future. Embedded in this calling is a deeper desire that a teacher can help transform society. It is not just the “Heads” that we need to engage, but our students’ Hearts, Knowledge, Empathy and Self-learning. We guide our learners’ direction and equip them with the necessary critical thinking skills to enable them to make sense of the bewildering amount of choices of information they have before them.

(3) What are the important traits of excellence as a lecturer?

To paraphrase the Serenity Prayer…. The courage to push the students’ learning no matter how difficult it may seem. The honesty of being able to see when we are wrong and be able to adapt and learn ourselves. Finally the wisdom to “step back” if we recognise that students are not yet ready for the changes we hope they will embrace. I believe the true measure of a teacher learning-guide’s ability is not based on his or her ability to encourage students with low cut off points to learn but to motivate students who have lower academic self-esteem to achieve.

(4) How do you keep yourself relevant as an educator and as a professional?

By constantly assuming that I do not know anything. By respecting the fact that I will learn from my students as much as they will learn from me. Finally, that students are my peers and not my subordinate.

(5) If you were to write a short paragraph to introduce you as a lecturer, what would you write?

My life as a teacher has alternated between exhilaration at seeing students grow and transform, to sheer paranoia and feelings of deep-inadequacy as to whether have I taught well, appropriately and impacted my students’ learning process fully. The schizophrenic swing of emotions is simply an indication of the great responsibilities that comes naturally with teaching. (I wrote this for my first NPTA, still believe in this after all these years…)