Do we need teachers in Higher Education?

Interesting article by Paul Ramsden on the THE website about how "Producing graduates who are critical thinkers requires teachers who can bring scholarship and leadership to the academy."

As with many others, I have long thought that teaching is unbelievably undervalued and often poorly done in higher education. He argues in that although Student Satisfaction is now all the rage in the UK, universities are often barking up the wrong tree. How much marketing literature shows happy, smiling students studying on the beach and then walking off into the sunset with a good degree and a dream graduate job? The pressure to produce more happy students with a 2:1 misses what I think is fundamental about higher education. We could make students happy by handing out free beer at lectures, putting soft porn on the VLE and ensuring all students get a 2:1 but I'm not sure that would fulfill the mission of a University. We can often get dangerously close to thinking of students as customers to be serviced. However, when I go to a restaurant I'm not asked to think about the meal I'm about to eat. I don't have to go away and research the ingredients. I don't have to read about the great chefs who have cooked this meal in the past. I don't have to explore the cultural significance of the meal. I don't have to understand how to cook the meal and I'm not then asked to cook it myself, perhaps with my own individual take on the recipe. In a restaurant you are a customer, as student you are not a customer, more a partner in you own (and ideally the university's) development. As Ramsden argues, “Teaching in higher education should never fool students into thinking there is an easy path to success. Rather, it should make the hardest road enjoyable to follow by communicating complex ideas clearly and succinctly” and also that "Accomplished teaching is the single most important method of producing graduates who can reason and act for themselves, and can apply theory to practical problems - precisely the skills that any employer wants to see."

He also discusses the emphasis that is put on research to the detriment of teaching and argues that when interviewing successful researchers about their teaching he discovered that, “the researchers who were good at teaching - who went about it by focusing on students and their learning (rather than their own teaching performance or transmitting information) - were not those who necessarily produced the most research. They were the ones who focused on the underlying structure of their investigations, on the broad conceptual framework of their subject, rather than isolated individual problems within it - the ones who were scholars in their discipline.”

He concludes that, "The rationale for university teaching is not satisfying students, distributing information to them nor changing them, as some condescendingly say. Rather, it is enabling students to change for themselves." And that way to do that is through excellent teaching.