Excellence in teaching

Dr Philippa Maddern is Head of Department of History and a senior lecturer. Philippa joined UWA as a lecturer in history in 1989 (her first experience of supervising postgraduate students), and was granted an Excellence in Postgraduate Supervision award in 1995.

The duty of supervisors to help students produce the best theses they can within reasonable time, is essential to, but only the start of, good postgraduate supervision. Future scholars must come from present postgraduates (today my student, tomorrow my colleague); hence we should look upon our supervision as a process of inducting students into the whole gamut of academic activity. A postgraduate good enough to get a job in today's academic market will find her/himself faced with challenges for which writing a thesis alone is insufficient preparation. How does he/she simultaneously shape new courses, establish a network among academic colleagues, balance teaching with research, supervise other students, contribute productively to departmental meetings, edit books and journals, and convince publishers and funding bodies that their research project is irresistible?

Sharing hard-won experience in these areas requires carefully thought-out programs of supervision, at both individual and institutional levels. The trick is to provide students with appropriate practice, responsibilities and opportunities to develop initiatives, without overloading them. No doubt teaching experience is good (not least because one must thoroughly understand the problematics of a subject to teach it.) But teaching a course compiled by someone else, involving time-consuming repetitive work, can act more to the student's detriment than their benefit. I see value in proper apprentice teaching schemes (on the model of the program set up by my colleagues in History) to allow postgraduates practice at teaching a variety of levels, lecturing with proper feedback, and structuring a class session, all at the proper stage of their research.

On a broader scale, honest induction into academic life may involve tasks ranging from simply introducing students to experts in their field, to allowing them input into departmental decision-making through representation on departmental meetings and committees. Similarly, giving postgraduates the opportunity to bid for research or publication funding within departments may help to encourage skills of writing applications and reports. Supporting students not only to attend conferences and give papers, but to arrange their own conference sessions may enable them to initiate and develop their own academic networks.

Overall our aim should be, I believe, to provide for each student an integrated supervision program geared to their needs, which (we hope) will produce a new generation of academics-more confident, more skilled, more creative, more open-minded. I can't claim to live up to my own ideals in supervising, which have only gradually developed over the past seven years; but I like to think that I try.