For me, there’s an indignity in realising I probably now qualify as an “experienced educator.” I have been teaching, in various forms, for over fifteen years. I can’t believe it! Initially this was alongside my industry practice, and now it’s my primary role, layered with leadership, management, and the aspirational “research time.”
The PGCert has forced me to acknowledge this longevity, despite my resistance and personal complex towards ageing.
My early teaching followed the learning experience of being thrown in the deep-end, making mistakes, almost drowning, reflecting, and adjusting. I quickly absorbed the formalities of Higher Education, then inevitably questioned them, and now sit somewhere between compliance and critique. Even in the chaos, I thought I believed I understood what effective teaching required but the PGCert has complicated that certainty.
Much of the theory we’re covering is not entirely new but I feel some comfort in knowing that the practices I have arrived at instinctively now have given names and frameworks to explore. However, engaging critically with pedagogy and institutional contexts, has unsettled me. The depth of analysis has amplified questions I previously held at bay.
The literature and much of what we discuss weekly reflects this unease. We all know there is a culture of overwork and stress in UK HE (Kinman and Wray, 2001), and there’s arguably increasingly toxic organisational conditions shaped by managerialism, financial pressure, and unrealistic policy demands (Erickson, Hanna and Walker, 2020). Institutional visions shift; ineffective leadership rotates; change proliferates, yet coherence, and real meaning and purpose often feel elusive.
The result feels less like strategic evolution and more like managed instability.
The PGCert encourages us to situate our teaching within these broader structures. In doing so, it has intensified my questioning. If the sector is in crisis, and creative industries are similarly unstable, like so much of the world, what exactly are we preparing students for and what are we doing here? Are we fostering critical resilience, or just farming degrees? Is the PGCert itself enabling transformation of practice, or refining our capacity to operate within existing constraints and mediocrity?
Rather than cynicism, this feels closer to what I’ve discovered Barnett calls the “supercomplexity” (Barnett, 2000) of the modern university, where uncertainty is structural rather than incidental. My confusion may therefore be appropriate: a sign of critical engagement rather than incompetence.
Importantly, yes, the programme has helped me reflect on my practice, making me more intentional and attentive to inclusive teaching, and aware of feedback as dialogue rather than transmission (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). I feel I can now better articulate my pedagogic values, not just enact them. However, challenges remain, especially in balancing inclusivity with students who exhibit entitled attitudes toward learning and academics, expecting more from their academic experience than they invest, believing rules should be bent for them, and feeling they should not have to work as hard as others. Academic entitlement correlates with disengagement and incivility, making it difficult to set firm boundaries and deliver an inclusive programme.
Perhaps the purpose of the PGCert is not to resolve doubt but to legitimise it? To move from instinctive teaching to critically informed practice. If so, then my current state, questioning yet committed, may represent development.
I guess I remain productively confused.
In a supercomplex university, that may be the most intellectually honest position available, but it’s all still feels royally messed up!
References
Anderson, K.J., 2021. Power, privilege, and entitlement. In: Power, Privilege, and Entitlement. Oxford University Press. pp. 17–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197578438.003.0002
Barnett, R., 2000. Realising the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.
Erickson, M., Hanna, P. and Walker, C., 2020. ‘The UK higher education senior management survey: A stato-dynamic analysis of managerialism and its discontents’, Higher Education Quarterly, 74(1), pp. 5–22.
Kinman, G. and Wray, S., 2001. Work-related stress in UK academic staff. London: Association of University Teachers.
Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D., 2006. ‘Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 199–218.
Leave a Reply