Excellence in teaching

Christopher Wortham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English. His main teaching area and interests are 16th and 17th century literature. He has edited five books and is the editor of Parergon journal. He received the Excellence in Teaching award for the Faculty of Arts in 1998. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

In the part of Africa where I was born and brought up, a university education was a rare and lucky privilege. For a start you had to be white. Then you had to have rich parents or a scholarship. One of the reasons why I value my career in university education with a deep and undying passion is that in my youth I never expected to have one. But I was one of the lucky ones.

People have asked me about my approach to teaching. I find this an embarrassing question because I don't think I teach. In fact I hope I don't. What I set out to do is to offer pathways towards participation in a common pursuit. Part of that process, of course, involves setting up modes of interaction that are conventionally recognized within the profession, e.g. the presentation of essays in acceptable form. So perhaps to that extent I do teach. For me, however, a lecture is not a process of telling people, but of inviting them to consider a point of view and a number of possibilities. I don't like lectures much precisely because they do seem to teach: one person is talking and a lot of others are listening and writing down. I intend in future years to move more, as other staff members have done, towards interactive seminars. Tutorials, thankfully, are less about teaching and for me they constitute the heart and soul of our educative processes. In advance I prepare a tutorial programme with a number of suggested topics (subject to alteration at students' request) and ask each student in their tutorial group to present a short paper or summary of ideas during the programme. The student's presentation always begins the session and it means (1) that students don't get lumbered with my ideas first up in a way that directs remaining discussion and (2) by corollary that in every tutorial group, even if the chosen topic happens to be the same, the conversation takes a different path. Thus freshness and variety are maintained. And I am surprised. I need to be constantly surprised and to register my surprise. That way I learn and I hope others do too.

In a member of teaching staff there are certain basics for which no amount of genius may compensate. These are reliability, punctuality and promptness (horribly old-fashioned as these may sound). Reliability means never cancelling or rescheduling tutorials except in dire emergency. I hardly ever go away to conferences during term-time because absence disrupts the students' work patterns, which are of paramount importance. Being on time for classes is just part of being well-organized and there is no short-cut to this: one just has to be there and to have one's offering for the lecture or tutorial fully prepared. Promptness involves quick attention to students' concerns. Not least of these is getting assignments back as soon as possible. I try never to allow more than a week to elapse between submission and return of written work.

Touching on the main theme of this edition of ITL, email is an enormously exciting development and is only one of a number of recent enhancements within information technology. Within the University I use email mainly for brief communication with colleagues and students. My email address, as well as my phone number, is on the door of my room. I am now asking all my students to give me their email address (most now seem to have one) so that I can make a 'Nickname', or cluster of addresses, for each tutorial group and then use that nickname to send a message to the whole group. Soon, as email use becomes universal, it may become practicable to send documents like course readers and lecture programmes as email attachments.