Using myself as an example

Earlier on today, and in the context of discussing the recent strike action, Jo Wolf tweeted something that caught my eye and made me think. To quote the relevant-to-this-post bit: "What mattered to me as a student was whether teachers were clear, insightful, enthusiastic and engaged. Even if we had keep coats on because rooms so cold." What’s under discussion here is the extent to which University management may have tried to spend their way to better NSS scores. The Article Jo is commenting on is this one.

Jo’s remark brought me up short, because my immediate response was to think about students generally. If you didn’t already know, I should say that Jo’s a Professor of Philosophy. To the extent that he enjoyed his degree, and pursued a further degree , and made his career out of the subject, and now in fact teaches and researches it, I think it’s fair to say that Jo would be the exception, rather than the rule! (If he’s not, the that was one hell of an UG student cohort.)

As I say, what brought me up short was the fact that, at least dialectically, Jo appealed here to his own experience of being a student to seemingly draw a general conclusion. “He’s clearly atypical!”, I thought.

Problematically, so I am (though less exceptional than Jo!—more’s the pity…), but I also use my experiences of being student to work out what I think ought to happen.

I think I should stop. I think that most (all?) of us should. A few salient points. When I was an UG student (1998-2001), we didn’t really use the internet. Not much, anyway. There weren’t powerpoint slides. There frequently weren’t handouts. I had to use hard-copies of anything I wanted to read. None of these things are true for most of our UG students.

More, School has changed. I lack the data to assess ‘for the better’ or ‘for the worse, but given the pervasiveness of the internet and social media, it’s clearly different. So, the students coming in have different skills and different expectations to the ones I had.

As soon as I stop and think about it, it’s clear that I need to be more cautious than I have been in thinking through those differences and where those differences might be telling. I really need to stop appealing to my own experiences of being a student.

A much better contrast would be my experiences of being an academic. And am I so different from my students? In some ways, no. Like many of them, I prefer to use electronic resources, rather than go to the library. Like at least some of them, I’ll leave work closer to a deadline than I should. Like at least some of them, I’m sometimes prone to irritation if I have to read through pages and pages of guidance before I can do something (For essay writing guides & module sign-up, see REF or TEF policy; I can recognise the import and value of such things, whilst still wishing they were otherwise).

In closing I should be clear that I’m not meaning to have a pop at Jo here. His tweet had a particular context that means that I don’t think we can be at all confident in reading in to it that he would disagree with me on any of this. The framing is simply autobiographical; his tweet was what made me reflect on my own practices, which I then found wanting.