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Listen if a student says the teacher’s a dud: Vanstone
Students should be the ultimate drivers of quality at universities, and have a right to demand better standards, former Liberal education minister Amanda Vanstone told the National Tertiary Education Union conference in Sydney last week.
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Yes there is an element of truth about the student being the ultimate judge of whether a teacher is a dud or not. But it is not that simple. I have been involved in teaching core numeracy units for over 17 years. You know the so called “hard” units. Based on the teaching scores you could say I am a “dud” teacher.
For a start 95 per cent of my students don’t want to do my core units. I get good scores from good students and Dud scores from Dud students.
I love my disicipline and as hard as I try day in day out I am lucky to get a 3.6 out of 5 for good teaching.
The good students grade me highly but it is the dud students who condem me with comments like “too obessed with detail”. No wonder there is a shortage of maths and physics teachers, it’s a pretty thankless task trying to teach the enabling disciplines and get graded by students as being a dud teacher.
As I said I agree up to a point, but the reality is more complex than the simple statement that Amanda Vanstone made
Since when is a student a competent judge of educative experiences? Look at what happened to Socrates and Christ when the masses/students were not ‘satisfied customers’ and didn’t ‘like’ what they said. Does that eliminate the importance of what they taught? Obviously not and so I totally agree with the previous comment regarding “dud students” as the criteria by which they use to make judgements of our teaching are allowed to remain invisible and yet those of us who are closest to the students know where they are coming from and consequently have little respect for the criteria they use for student evaluation surveys. This perspective which promotes the view that teachers of higher education ought to meet or satisfy student expectations is projected from an economic discourse which seeks to gratify and pander to customer demands. Education on the other hand seeks to challenge student expectations and to cultivate them, NOT to simply meet them. This is the ontological aspect of educational work which is often marginalised in commentaries which continue to assume that the market should continue to be free to determine what is ‘good’ teaching. I continue to aim to ‘dissatisfy’ my students in a Socratic and Nietschean fashion because I considered that there is much greater educative value to be attained through such an approach than simply pandering to student expectations as if there were ‘customers.