Excellence in teaching

Judith Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department. She was a joint recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award for best unit in 1999. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

In 1999, with my colleagues Kieran Dolin and Stephanie Green, I won the 'Excellence in Teaching Award - Best Unit' for our revised course Victorian Ideologies. We agreed that the one thing we always hope to achieve above all else is a passion for the subject we teach and promote. We are enthusiastically committed to our area of interest, Victorian Studies, and we work very hard at trying to pass on our personal enthusiasm and interest and knowledge to our students. Since Victorian writers were among the first to engage with the problems of living in an urban industrial society, an understanding of their ideas about such issues as identity, gender and race can assist students to understand dominant and alternative ideologies of the present.

Teaching and eliciting responses to particular texts and ideas can provide new insights and excitingly different ways of thinking about our topic area. We can think of no more satisfactory moment in a tutorial than to be able to say to a student, 'I never thought of it in that way before'. We try our best to foster an environment of reciprocity in which students can feel sufficiently confident to express their opinions and ideas and to know that these will be received with thoughtful interest. If the tutor nevertheless feels an idea should be reshaped then we try to do that in as positive a way as possible.

Part of our philosophy consists in the belief that students would on the whole prefer to be challenged by the material they study and so there are, on the course, two long novels, Villette by Charlotte Brontë and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, as well as other complex texts such as John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. To support students in this challenge we assembled relevant theoretical and literary texts into a specially devised Course Reader which could be referred to for comparison and explication. Although some at first found the reading demanded of them a struggle, all agreed at the end of the course that it had been worthwhile. Indeed some students became quite passionate about particular novels and their authors, and when questioned about whether certain titles might be dropped from the course, because they could be perceived as too long or too difficult, they became quite vehement in defence of them. When a student writes on a SPOT survey 'The texts have been superb although sometimes daunting to begin: rich, complex and interesting' then for that individual at least our philosophy has been effective.