Excellence in teaching

Bryan Howieson, senior lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Finance, has thirteen years of teaching experience and won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

Bryan teaches undergraduate financial accounting, ethics, and hours/postgraduate financial accounting. His subject specialism is financial reporting and regulation, and ethics.

In teaching accounting, generally the focus is on technical matters, such as bookkeeping and numerical calculations. This creates a tendency for students to concentrate on rote learning rather than understanding why they are performing various procedures. This is unsatisfactory because it leaves the student with a 'toolkit' of techniques which rapidly become outdated.

My approach to the teaching of financial accounting seeks to down play technical rules and concentrate on developing student's skills in the identification, analysis and solving of problems. I want students to find that their discipline has a long intellectual tradition (they say accounting is the second oldest profession; someone had to monitor the takings of the first!) and that bookkeeping and other procedural matters will form only a small part of their future careers.

Recent national reviews of accounting education have indicated that the profession is dissatisfied with technically based courses and prefers that accounting graduates have broader education and skills in problem solving and communication. With this in mind, I ask students to apply their technical knowledge to a range of practical accounting problem. In the highly innovative business world, accounting practitioners have to be flexible and creative in their thinking to cope with rapid change. Further, they have to be able to present their views and justify their decisions before their peers and the community (accounting decisions can have broad social consequences).

By the end of the course students have greater insight into the forces that shape accounting practice. They have also read more widely than might other wise have been the case. Although I believe that the number of technical rules needs to be limited, students are required to justify their arguments by extensive reference to accounting standards and other authoritative pronouncements. Tutorial-based presentations help develop students' presentation skills.

I do not believe in 'spoon-feeding'; it is most important that students discover the relevant information themselves. However, when trying to communicate complex issues, it is vital that the material be presented in a structured manner. Students should have a clear map of where they are going in a course and how each component links with others. This must occur right at the start, with the first handout specifying unambiguous objectives and a detailed course outline. For each topic I provide a handout indicating the principal issues and some introductory readings.

When I first started lecturing, I thought I had to communicate everything about a topic to the students. This is not possible, nor is it desirable. Lectures provide the structure for a topic, but tutorials provide the important opportunity to explore subtleties. I believe that learning is more fun (and more valued) when students make 'discoveries' for themselves. My role is to foster the learning process.