Excellence in teaching

Gail Jones is a lecturer in the Department of English. She received the Excellence in Postgraduate Research Supervision award in 1998. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

It is often assumed by colleagues outside my discipline that the teaching of literature is solely and fastidiously concerned with discrete textual analysis. This is not the case: literary studies now involves aspects of critical theory, cultural studies and interdisciplinary negotiations, and like many areas in the human and social sciences it has undergone an intellectual reconstruction that broadens both its conceptual range and its pedagogical obligations.

My own teaching practice ranges from first year to honours level and includes textual studies (both written and filmic) and cultural theory. I particularly enjoy teaching at first year level and always begin by spending time talking to students about their expectations of and difficulties with university level courses. Throughout first semester I request frank feedback about curriculum items and the cogency and efficacy of course delivery since it is my belief that students like to be consulted about their experience of learning, and that teachers can benefit a great deal by instituting the understanding that tutorials and lectures are flexible and responsive mechanisms. I encourage students to share resources, and to regard first year as an induction into the collegiality, not the competitiveness, of scholarly life.

My department has a commitment to flexible delivery and inclusive curriculum, and this means that we have in recent years extended our courses both in topics and methods of teaching. Students often find that literature is a field in which they rehearse imaginatively issues which arise in other areas of learning - issues bearing, for example, on race, identity, sexuality, ethics - and for this reason I also include in my teaching an insistence on tolerance, sensitivity and intellectual precision in tutorial discussions. I have found that it is possible to built a kind of ethical reflexivity into the processes of learning by establishing from the outset an assumption that dialogic and interrogative styles are about intellectual generosity and openness. Student centred learning requires the development of self-criticism and discipline; this is easier if students are formally granted the opportunity to articulate their own procedures, problems, pleasures and complaints. My own pedagogical style follows Ralph Waldo Emerson's maxim that it is "not instruction, but provocation" that is the basis of creative teaching.

My second major area of work is postgraduate supervision. This is very gratifying and important work, and I believe that editorial honesty and professional diplomacy are fundamental to successful supervision. At some stage every postgraduate finds thesis work arduous and perhaps demoralising, and thus moral support is also, in my opinion, not to be underestimated.