Today was our first tutorial session with Rahul. Participants gave a short presentation on their teaching context and shared an article they’d found in the Spark journal.
The piece I found was written by Clare Sams How do art and design technicians conceive of their role in higher education?
I chose it because I felt it reflects my experience. I spend most of my time working as a designer and sometimes find it difficult to switch into a teaching role as it’s so different to my daily work environment. This article made me reflect on how these two roles actually feed into each other and are constantly helping me to improve.
It also mentions the support role that technicians play and how this works best in a face to face context. This is something I’ve found quite difficult to translate to an online environment.
Rahul also asked us to find a quote about meritocracy. I found this one by Michael Young:
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.
After teaching a class this week, I was thinking about this quote and how difficult it is to succeed purely on merit ordinarily, but especially in the current pandemic situation.
Online learning is not a level playing field, there is digital inequality – one needs a decent computer to run Adobe software, to be able to buy the software (as digital labs onsite are closed) and if you don’t have decent wifi it is a struggle to get the most out of online classes.
If this situation carries on for much longer, this may need to be a provision that universities or even the government will need to think seriously about.