significant amount of the teaching delivered in higher education departments in Britain. This increased responsibility has made it more and more relevant for institutions, departments and the tutors themselves to think about the provision and relevance of training for part-time tutors and the forms that it might take.
The English Subject Centre’s broader project on part-time teaching will be completed with the publication of a ‘Good Practice Guide’ in the autumn. In a related initiative, the Subject Centre has also been involved in developing a training module for new part-time tutors at the University of Birmingham.
As a result of discussions in the meetings of a focus group on part-time teaching co-ordinated by the LTSN Generic Centre and the Higher Education Staff Development Association (HESDA), a project is being developed which is investigating the form that training for part-time tutors might take. Its remit is in part to consider the relevance of, and responsibility for, training, and — more specifically — the nature of such training in terms of its generic or discipline-specific focus. The project is also taking into account the provision being made for the recognition of part-time tutors’ teaching expertise now that the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT) offers an Associate pathway to membership which is available to that constituency.
In order to engage with these issues in context, the project team is focusing on developing a module, leading to Associate ILT membership, which will meet some of the training needs of postgraduate tutors in the English Department of the University of Birmingham. The project team consists of Ros McCulloch from the Staff Development Unit at the University of Birmingham who was a co-ordinator of the DOPLA (Development of Postgraduate and Language Assistants) project which developed an inter-university training course for language tutors, Dr Siobhán Holland of the English Subject Centre who is responsible for managing the Centre’s ‘Part-Time Teaching’ project and Dr Betty Haglund, a lecturer on a 0.5 temporary contract in the English Department at Birmingham who has had part-time teaching experience there as well as at the University of Central England.
The project team are working together to design a module which incorporates materials and approaches which are drawn from subject-specific debates and teaching concerns as well as from those generic debates about teaching and learning issues and strategies which conventionally provide the framework for training courses for tutors. The project team has had to consider the particular needs of part-time teachers, and specifically the needs of postgraduate tutors who would be teaching for the first time, in addition to thinking through issues about the relationship between the discipline-specific and the generic in contemporary higher education teaching.
The module will equip tutors to:
• Provide constructive feedback in written and oral form.
• Plan and implement courses.
• Teach confidently texts, genres, historical/literary periods and theoretical issues connected and unconnected to their research specialism.
• Select activities which will help students to work at a level appropriate to the session and to the module as a whole.
• Develop opportunities for students to practise skills they need for assessment purposes (e.g. questioning, close reading, the use of secondary materials)
• Foster discussions that encourage participation and support the development and articulation of students’ critical voices.
• Cultivate an atmosphere in which risk-taking and attempts to construct arguments, successfully or unsuccessfully, can be conducted confidently, and are supported.
• Assess confidently in full cognisance of appropriate module, level and benchmarking criteria.
• Provide constructive feedback in written and oral form.
Our work has been based in the first instance on a needs analysis conducted with postgraduate tutors and full-time lecturers in the English Department at Birmingham. This needs analysis helped us to plot a training course for these new tutors. It has also helped us to think through the different ways in which generic and subject-specific materials can be deployed in tandem to develop tutors’ skills. We have also considered the role that departments play in developing and supporting new lecturers in the profession.
The project, which will be completed in the near future, has demonstrated that there is a clear role for departments in the provision of information about administration procedures and practical issues, mentoring processes and information about pastoral and ethical matters. There are also responsibilities which are likely to lie with the module tutor. The responsibilities of departmental staff and module tutors can be carried out most effectively if basic information is included in a handbook for tutors, and we have drafted a version of such a handbook along with other resources which will be made available via the English Subject Centre website shortly.
The English Subject Centre is collecting examples of similar handbooks from other departments and hopes to make these available via this website in the near future. Thanks to those who have already provided us with examples.
Newsletter Issue 4 - September 2002
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