Jane Austen, school uniforms, London with all it has to offer, even the packed sandwiches you can buy at Tesco’s, but most definitely and more than anything, the language itself… all of this has held an incredible fascination for me ever since I visited London for a school trip when I was 14 years old.
Having been intrigued by everything English the better part of my life, it was with a lot of enthusiasm that I moved countries and academic systems alike, having been through most of education in Germany and Spain. Still, I came with very few expectations and ideas what it would be like to be ‘on the other side’, being a language teacher in the English higher education system.
So, you get to university as a student. You get to follow your dreams and passions in a new place with new peers, new challenges and in a much freer system. But what does it feel like when you join the university as an employee? Turns out, remarkably similar, as I found out when I started teaching as a Language Assistant for German in 2013 at the University of Nottingham, and a year later moved on to a five-year post as a language tutor in German at the University of Liverpool.
Well, there were a few differences. Being on a first name basis with your professor, something that would never happen in Germany. When I tried that with my very first seminar group, I ran into the name Siobhan. This made it a rather entertaining first class for my students. I would like to say it was because of my well- prepared structure and creative way of approaching the topic of military hierarchies in Nazi Germany. But it had more to do with my inability to pronounce the poor student’s name correctly.
So, I stumbled into a system that I knew very little about and that, despite the introduction talks and workshops that every new starter in a job at the university is obligated to sit through, still only really got to know through the ‘learning by doing’ approach.
With this in mind, let the following take you through my encounters of the past years. It is important to point out, that this is obviously mainly based on my personal experiences in Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester. But they don’t exist in a vacuum. There have also been plenty of chats with colleagues from other disciplines in higher education which do indeed speak of similar impressions and situations.
Let’s take the system of evaluation used within Higher Education in England. This is something I had to learn while manoeuvring in Nottingham, and it was the start to my journey of reflecting upon the differences between the systems I had known. There were obviously the different types of marks in the first place, but then there also seemed to be a certain desirable distribution of marks that a cohort should overall reach which, as it is more of an unwritten rule, took me a while to understand, and also came as a bit of a shock to me. Another thing I learnt the hard way was the tendency of avoiding failing those people who made far too many mistakes for their language level. Of course, one can be a harsher or a more generous marker in general. In all fairness, I seem to be leaning towards the harsher side. This isn’t to say everybody passes, but a lot of undesirable consequences, for example re-sits that then won’t be attended but still need to be prepared and scheduled, come with failing students. So one is encouraged to find another point here and there.
Another interesting aspect is the way in which teaching in higher education has been turned into a customer-based rather than intellectual industry given the introduction of fees in 1998, and their increase to £9000 per year since the academic year of 2012-13. As somebody who studied in Germany, where the student fees, and subsequent debts, are nowhere near these obscene amounts of money, this was a real key difference for me. As a consequence of this understanding, students are seen, and view themselves, as clients – a trend which has become visible in the way fresher’s week has become more like an event over the years, in the way the student experience gets treated when it comes to choosing a place to study, in the students’ attitude in emails and interaction with staff. All a big contrast to what I am used to, coming from a German university where there was a big and successful student movement and demonstration against introducing 500 euro fees.
Taking all this into account, I sometimes wonder why I am still working in this field, why I am still supporting a system that often fails everybody involved. And then I remember. Of course, there is the fact that I do what I do because it isn’t just a job but a vocation for me. I can’t see anybody working in education for more than afew years if that’s not the case. And then I also want to acknowledge that not everything is bad. There are excellent students who are a joy to teach, who are really interested in their subject and who can deal with the system. But these students would have been excellent in any system; it is about the students we lose along the way, the ones who struggle in this system, the ones who could really strive in a different educational environment. And in the end, the means to improve this system lie within it, not outside.
There is a clear trend of marketisation of education which contradicts very much what universities should be – safe spaces of learning and intellectual development where students can and should face challenges independently of marks. This has meant a pressure on academic staff to be excellent at research, teaching and administration. A system that doubles and triples administrative tasks. Where small numbers in a class result in a constant worry over whether it is still ‘lucrative’ enough for the university to continue the programme.
So, what are the main points to take away from this piece of reflection. What did I want to say, what did I want to point out. I guess it was really important to stress that the success of learning should not be measured by the test scores a student gets; but unfortunately, it very often ends up being precisely that.