Hello! This morning saw the first workshop of the first module of the PG Cert in HE titled “Introduction to Teaching and Learning in Higher Education”. We kicked off with a group participation exercise whereby we formed pairs and discussed things we’re looking forward to and things we’re not looking forward to this semester, we then formed groups of four and discussed the commonalities of our anticipations. My group was made of 3 people from my course (MA Fine Art with PG Cert in HE) ie-students, and one woman who i think is a yoga teacher. I got off to a bad start as I couldn’t work out in what capacity the tutor wanted us to think about our anticipations, the task it seemed was directed at those who are already in teaching positions whereas I’m an art student, a teaching student and a receptionist, all of which involve different sets of things that i’m looking forward to and dreading! After a bit of discussion I got the idea though (it was in the capacity of a teaching student-seems obvious now!) Myself and the other students were all looking forward to the challenge and learning new skills and also the chance to motivate others and hopefully see the results…the yoga lady said she was going to do everything the same as always and so had nothing to look forward to. One of my fellow students expressed concern about being subjected to observations, this made me realise that this isn’t something that worries me at all and i’m actually quite looking forward to the one to one contact with the tutor, perhaps this is because I prefer familiarity with my teachers and feel more secure than when I feel they don’t know who I am and I could potentially fade into the background, maybe this will influence my own teaching style. What does concern me however, is the inevitable insecurity and intimidation i’ll feel when meeting the students, they’re not that much younger than me and they’re more used to being in education than me so they scare me!We went on to discuss different roles; firstly we individualy wrote down all the roles we feel we’ll be encompassing over the next few months, again I completely got the wrong end of the stick and wrote down a bunch of roles personal to me such as student, teacher, artist, administrator, treasurer, athlete (riding my bike to uni) and then I got really deep and put friend/girlfriend/sister/daughter (puke!) Obviously as soon I realised we were talking about the roles that teaching encompasses I hid my notebook in utter embarrassment! So we then looked at individual roles and in groups listed the skills and characteristics required and how they would then be developed and which resources and support we could access.
I’m going to have to start a new post now because i’m running out of words!
