Archimedes’ Point: An Educational Research Body As Interface Of Engagement

The field of Classics is an inherently interdisciplinary one, combining within itself the disciplines of linguistics, history, literature, archaeology, and philosophy. In addition, Classics provision in the UK secondary school system is extremely uneven; while some students will have had eight or more years of instruction in the field prior to attending university, others might have none at all. This combination of disciplinary and educational factors has meant that teaching practice at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics is highly varied and flexible. Instructors must be ready to adapt their practice to a wide array of individual needs, allowing their interactions with students a wide latitude for contingency. In addition, the traditional division of teaching responsibilities between the Faculty and the various colleges serves further to vary practice. Eight months ago, the author – a temporary but extended-term member of the Faculty of Classics – was seconded to the Teaching for Learning Network (TfLN), an educational research network. The author’s research programme was originally narrowly defined. It soon became apparent, however, that the utility of his research would be derived not simply its results, but also from the altered relationship to the Faculty’s teaching structure his status as a researcher conferred upon him. As an instructor in, but not entirely of, a University department, the author was in a unique position to attain a global perspective upon Faculty teaching, with the research network acting as a neutral site for educational co-configuration. In the author's case, this process began with a series of formal and informal meetings with Classics teaching staff. These interactions were then used to inform the application of instruments previously developed by the TfLN – chiefly practice-value questionnaires – to gain an overview of teaching, and student opinion of it. Evaluation of the results of these questionnaires was further enabled by use of the Network’s evolving analytic framework, which allowed a coherent interpretation of their data. The result was a comprehensive picture of teaching at the Faculty, otherwise difficult to achieve, informed by the insights both of its teaching staff and of the TfLN. This picture clearly indicated unsuspected points of common concern shared by teachers and students throughout the Faculty. These areas of concern furthermore pointed to achievable solutions regarding elementary aspects of language learning – solutions which are now being implemented. A tightly-defined programme of research has thus created a secondary – but potentially more important – effect of raising awareness of the obstacles to effective learning and the measures needed to counter these at the Faculty. * Corresponding author: Dr Timothy Hill, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA. E mail [email protected] The Faculty of Classics and the TfLN In February 2007, the author was seconded as a member of teaching staff at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics to the Teaching for Learning Network (TfLN) in order to investigate practice for the development of ‘confident readership’ of the ancient Greek and Latin languages, explicitly stated as the goal of undergraduate language instruction at the Faculty. Both the discipline of Classics and its traditions at the Faculty are distinctive. The history of its study at Cambridge dates back to the foundation of the university c. 1209, and to a large extent the discipline still enshrines many of the values most traditional in university education – in particular, an emphasis on text and language-learning, with the hermeneutics of textual interpretation as the primary focus of study. On the other hand, classicists have long recognised that their methods and objects of study are at risk of appearing old-fashioned or becoming obsolete, and efforts at reforming or restructuring the subject as a whole have occurred sporadically throughout the last century (Schofield, 2003). Teaching at the Faculty of Classics is likewise a mixture of received tradition and rationalising reform. Before the early 1990s, language teaching was still generally orientated towards the small-group, college-based instructional sessions known locally as ‘supervisions’. Since then the Faculty has assumed an increased role in language teaching; nevertheless, teaching is still decentralised to a degree unusual even in Cambridge. Even such language instruction as does occur in the Faculty is flexible in organisation, with no syllabus or textbook being set. As a result, practice at the Faculty is in large part determined by received understandings regarding methods and criteria of instruction. This paper accordingly describes the author’s transition from being a member of teaching staff ‘embedded’ in the Faculty’s existing teaching culture to a researcher engaged by both the Faculty and the TfLN. It furthermore outlines the process whereby this ‘liminal’ status allowed him to gain a systematic overview of teaching practice as a basis for the first stage of ‘brokerage activities’ as described by Burt (Burt, 2005: 61). Teaching Context: Overview Both the division of teaching between Faculty and colleges and its lack of codified learning ‘benchmarks’ or standards have arisen largely for historical reasons. Nevertheless, the devolution of central control and the resulting freedom of instructors to teach according to their own insight and experience have both proven to be invaluable in ancient language teaching. While contingency of teaching to student needs is of course desirable in any learning situation, additional factors specific to the Faculty of Classics demand an unusually high degree of instructor flexibility. First, students enter the Faculty with a wide range of experience and skills. Some students will enter Classics having already received several years of instruction in both ancient Greek and Latin; others will have Latin, but not Greek; while a small number will enter with neither. If practice is allowed to be extremely varied, this is at least in part because student needs are similarly varied, and teaching staff must be extremely sensitive to the requirements of their students if they are to succeed in bringing them through the largely-standardised assessments and exams carried out at the end of the academic year. Second, Classics is an inherently ‘interdisciplinary’ study – an aspect of the discipline that is strongly emphasised at Cambridge. Students at the Faculty must be able to demonstrate an awareness and understanding of all the major genres of ancient writing, of philosophy, of history, and of the visual arts. It is furthermore expected that they will specialise in one or more of these areas over time. Language instructors, then, must be prepared to tailor the material they teach for students with a very wide array of interests and specialisms. Despite concerns regarding the content and standardisation of college-based small group teaching at Oxford and Cambridge generally (Trigwell and Ashwin, 2003; Ashwin, 2005; Cambridge University Students’ Union, 2004), small-group and loosely-structured teaching accordingly also possesses strengths indispensible in ancient language learning – a point borne out by student questionnaires (on which, see below). The Researcher: Situation and Context Prior to secondment to the TfLN the author was involved in both Faculty and college teaching, as is broadly typical – but not universal – of Classics instructors at Cambridge. Faculty-based teaching, in his case, focused upon a class entitled ‘Linguistic Structures’, in which students are taught broad grammatical and syntactic points related to the Latin language. Although the ancient language text from which examples are to be drawn is specified, course planning beyond this is left entirely to the discretion of the instructor. College teaching (‘supervisions’), in the researcher’s case, takes two forms. The first of these, known as ‘unseens preparation’, involves asking students to translate ancient language passage ‘on sight’ – i.e., having never seen them before, with the instructor providing guidance as and when necessary. The second – the literature supervision – is focused upon literary analysis and appreciation rather than language per se. In actual teaching practice, however, the author finds it difficult to draw any firm distinction between the two. The guidelines for this college teaching are even more loosely-defined than they are for the ‘Linguistic Structures’ course; ‘unseens’ teaching in particular is free-form and open-ended. The TfLN as Interface of Engagement The purpose of the author’s secondment to the TfLN was to pursue a research proposal developed by the Faculty to investigate ‘confident readership’, in three stages. 1. Analysis and definition of the behavioural, cognitive and personal characteristics which constitute confident readership, and their interrelationship 2. Evaluation of the contribution of the current teaching practices to the achievement of confident readership and its component parts 3. The implementation of variations in teaching regimes to support the development of confident readership, and analysis of the impact on student progression. Implicit in this proposal is a conceptualisation of language use as a holistic practice, demanding the simultaneous integration of several different activities and engaging the student on a more than purely intellectual level. As such – despite the status of ‘confident readership’ as a defined goal of language teaching at the Faculty – its underlying assumptions contrasted sharply with the researcher’s actual teaching practice prior to involvement with the TfLN, which tended to be focused on the inculcation of particular identifiable language skills, rather than upon language use as a whole. Engagement with the TfLN in terms of the research project, then, can be said to have initiated a cycle of co-configuration with both the researcher and the Faculty as a whole. This cycle might notionally be broken down into three parts: a process of data-gathering; a process of decontextualisation; and a process of recontextualisation, which potentially forms the basis for brokerage activities. Each of these stages, furthermore, can be seen as dependent upon the ‘liminal’ status accorded the researcher as a practitioner of both teaching and educational research.