Jane Simpson held a lunch-time forum on linguistics teaching on Saturday, 4th July, from 12.45 to 1.30 at Riverview.
ALS has been involved and interested in the education of linguistics students for a long time - holding the Australian Linguistics Institute is just one example of this. However, the move by DEETYA to quantify "Quality teaching" and to fund universities accordingly, will affect all departments of linguistics, and means that all university teachers of linguistics could benefit by ALS taking a more public role in expressing our interest in the quality of linguistics teaching.
If we do not as a profession have simple mechansims in place to improve the teaching of linguistics, then the running will be left to the university teaching professionals who may well introduce teaching indicators that do not reflect our views, or that would be burdensome to carry out. Sample indicators that have been suggested by the University of Sydney teaching professionals include: attendance at courses in university teaching, getting Teaching Initiative Grants and scholarly publications on teaching. The resemblance to DEETYA research points will no doubt be horribly apparent.
I propose that we discuss ways of coping with this. Possible strategies include:
- holding a yearly "teaching forum" at the ALS, attendance at which could arguably be said to be attendance at a course on teaching
- devoting a couple of pages of the journal to refereed reports on teaching (which then count as "scholarly publications on teaching")
- offering a "Teaching initiative grant" -- maybe $1,000 a year for some teaching project that would help the rest of us --e.g. putting up course notes on the web for all of us to use