In 2007, I was awarded the Prime Minister’s award for excellence in tertiary teaching. Yesterday evening, the 2017 award winners join
the select group of NZ tertiary teachers recognised for sustained excellence in
teaching. All awardees automatically become members of the Ako AotearoaAcademy. The Academy is a community of practice for award winners, they have a
mandate to advocate within their own institutions, nationally and internationally, for support of excellent teaching. The Academy also
organises a yearly symposium, always a wonderful, supportive and enervating
professional development opportunity. This year, the symposium - Talking Teaching - will he held at the end of November in Dunedin. The first two days will be an open forum for all tertiary educators to share practice.
In 2007, I was on the cusp of shifting from being a trades
teacher, teaching baking into a ‘staff development’ position. Since 1999, I had
proportional (0.2 or one day a week to 0.4) positions on various ‘elearning’
projects. Mainly supporting tutors in a diverse range of discipline areas, to
shift from being f2f to on-line or blended learning facilitators. In 2008, I shifted full-time into a shared role as a teacher
educator and ‘staff developer’. When the then CPIT Centre for Educational
Development came into being, I was one of 3 other people, horizontally shifted
across to be part of the Centre. Since then several internal organisational changes and a change of institutional name to Ara has seen my role morph and evolve over time. My current role as an educational developer / ‘learning designer’ in the Learning Design section of Academic Services Division at Ara Institute of Canterbury includes about 3/5 of programme design / development, 1/5 of supporting staff
in a range of teaching and learning and 1/5 as a researcher and scholar in
vocational education. The role has its challenges but is always rewarding and
interesting.
When I received my award, I was one of very few
non-university staff to attain the award. For many years, I have been inspired
by the life of Sir Edmund Hillary. He not only was the first, along with
Tenzing Norgay, to climb Mount Everest, but also founded the Himalayan Trust. The trust
raises money to assist the Nepalis to build schools and hospitals and through
its almost 50 years have contributed to the betterment of the lives of many
people in Nepal. Therefore, Hillary made use of his status, to better the lives
of others.
My aspirations are more modest but greatly inspired by a need
to foster better teaching and learning capability within NZ vocational
education. I was lucky with the timing of my award. Ako Aotearoa, the NZ Centre
for Tertiary Teaching excellence, was set up at the same time. The award
provided me with networking opportunities with the new organisation, assisting
me to build sound relationships and to participate in a range of Ako Aotearoa
activities. To date, I have been able to garner funding to undertake two
Nationally funded projects and seven smaller projects, funded through the
Southern regional hub (see Projects page on this blog for list and links to project outputs). My post PhD scholarly journey has therefore been largely
‘learning by doing’ through the completion of externally funded projects which
require results. In line with my goal to build capability within the vocational
education sector to carry out ‘practitioner-led’ inquiry, both the National and four of the smaller projects involved other trades tutors or ITO staff. For most, the projects
were the first time these tutors have had the opportunity to complete an
in-depth study into the efficacy of their teaching innovations.
There has now been a decade of contributing to the
‘evidence-base’ to assist the improvement of vocational learning. There is
still much to do, and my contribution has been small but hopefully a start at
building awareness and capability. The current project on e-assessments brings
together many of my learnings from previous projects. In particular, the project also builds capability with a team of tutors who have a mandate to undertake some research as part of their teaching roles. I am hopeful some of this team will go on to lead other projects as vocational education research is still sparse. Modest beginnings are always better than no work at all :)
In so doing, I hope some of the following quote, attributed to Lao Tzu, has transpired.
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