This event was designed by the English Subject Centre as a means of providing subject-specific training to complement the more generalised training in university teaching methods now routinely provided by many institutions. The programme got under way at tea-time on the Friday, with a general introduction and getting-to-know-each-other session, followed by dinner, a talk by Elisabeth Jay of Oxford Brookes University, and drinks in the bar. On the Saturday, there were four sessions: topics covered in the morning were seminar planning, marking, and e-learning, whilst the afternoon was given over to paired discussions of problems we had each encountered in our teaching experience to date.
I doubt if many of the 2 or so participants who turned up at the University of Birmingham conference centre on a cold Friday afternoon in December did so with an excess of enthusiasm for the task. Many had probably been bullied or cajoled by their Departments into going. Some may have taken comfort in the hope that attendance at the event would look good on their CVs. Most had firm if unspecified views on how they would have preferred to spend their Friday night and Saturday morning. It is greatly to the credit of the organisers that by the end of the event, there was widespread agreement that it had been an important and useful exercise.
‘New lecturers’ had been interpreted broadly. Among the participants were postdocs and temporary teaching fellows, some who had started permanent lectureships the previous September, and others who had been in lectureships for 2–3 years. I was about to start my first permanent teaching position – coincidentally, at the University of Birmingham – in January 2005. Among us were both language and literature specialists, modernists and early modernists – scholars of areas as diverse as Elizabethan prose fiction, recipe books, cyber theory and chick lit.
It was instructive to find out about the experiences of people from different academic backgrounds, and especially about the widely diverse working conditions experienced in different institutions. The need for good practice in inducting new staff – explaining the rules and, more nebulously, the habits of departments – was unanimously agreed on. Most new lecturers know better than to expect an office of their own in today’s overstretched departments, but a desk, email address and telephone number would appear to be essential, in terms both of self-organisation and of maintaining one’s credit with students. Alas, such simple marks of status cannot always be taken for granted. Stories were told of deskless staff, while one especially unfortunate victim of university bureaucracy had had to wait four months for a departmental email address. It can take less time than that for students to decide that you’re not a proper member of staff and don’t count.
One session in which the ‘group therapy’ aspect of the event came to the fore was the marking workshop. We had been supplied in advance with an undergraduate essay on Restoration comedy – an area in which none of us was expert – and a notably rigorous set of marking criteria. It will be news to no one that there is an element of subjectivity in grading literary essays, but I think we were all nonetheless quite surprised by the wide range of marks (47–64%) suggested by members of the group. After arguing the merits of the case among ourselves, we later learnt that the essay, when originally submitted, had earned a mark in the low sixties. The workshop was a useful means of exploring a vitally important issue. Also very valuable was the session on e-learning, which was extremely informative and could usefully have been twice as long.
It is probably a comment on the usual habits both of conferences and of academics that the organisers’ precise time-keeping through both the Friday and Saturday sessions evoked considerable surprise and admiration. Another lesson for us all; it can be done! Overall, then, this was a helpful, reassuring and informative event.
