Abstract
This paper describes adjustments to teaching practice after migrating from the North American to the Australasian higher education sector. Although the particular experience described is individual and personal, the discoveries and adjustments made can be useful to anyone who faces the experience of academic migration, or even to any teacher. Key adjustments recommended include emphasis on inquiry over information, patient attention to the individuality of learners and teachers, and shared practice of the values of sympathetic understanding, fairness and intellectual humility. These recommendations are not new – in fact the paper takes pains to show how ancient they really are – but they can serve as reminders to teachers facing the insecurity of the global higher education environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Robinson Jeffers, “The Eye” (1948) in Jeffers (1965, p. 85); capitalisation as it appears in Jeffers.
- 2.
- 3.
See Hamlin (1944).
- 4.
See Meckler (2006).
- 5.
The usual gloss on this quaint motto, which the University’s own website translates “the constellation is changed, the disposition is the same” (usyd.edu.au/heraldry/coat_of_arms/motto.shtml) is that it expresses the determination to preserve the English cultural and intellectual orientation in the face of the celestial disorientation experienced by immigrants to the Southern hemisphere, upon finding that all the familiar Northern constellations had vanished from the sky. Crudely put, the motto means, “You can take the professor out of England, but you can’t take England out of the professor.”
- 6.
De Prescriptione Haereticorum vii, in Stevenson (1987, pp. 166–167).
- 7.
I hope the reader will forgive my use of this familiar vulgar expression. My aim in using it is to indicate that those who ignore the past are condemned to being unable to see themselves repeating it. Many Australians would not know that in Clouds, Aristophanes refers to the entire audience as “buggered” (tous euruprôktous, 1098).
- 8.
See Bennett (1993).
- 9.
I took some solace in the tradition, now doubted, that Plato was (and still is) known by his nickname, his given name being Aristocles.
- 10.
This is actually a tag from Aristotle, about practical wisdom. See Nicomachean Ethics VI.10.1138a1-3.
- 11.
See Ashby (1941). I am grateful to Jean Barrett and the archive of the History Room, SDN Children’s Services, Woolloomooloo, for granting me access to this paper.
- 12.
For one version of the deep vs surface learning distinction see Biggs and Tang (2007, pp. 13–18). A more specific version of this distinction can be found in terms of ‘extended abstract’ vs ‘prestructural’ learning, in Biggs’ famous ‘structure of observed learning outcomes’ (SOLO) taxonomy. See Biggs and Collis (1982).
- 13.
See Oenone (1829), ll. 143–4, in Tennyson (1832): “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,/These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”
- 14.
See, for example, the concise description of the classical Athenian education in Plato’s Protagoras 325c–326e (cf. Plato Laws 653a-b and Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics II.3.1104b10-13).
- 15.
That is, if you take any multiple of nine, no matter how large, and add the digits in that number and keep adding them until they resolve into a single digit, that digit will always be nine.
- 16.
Song of Myself 32.10, in Whitman (1885).
- 17.
I have only lately discovered, to my embarrassment, that critical reflection about how you teach and why is an elementary part of teaching development. See Brookfield (1995).
- 18.
See Aristotle, Metaphysics I. 1–2.
- 19.
Cua’s beautiful description was based on his study of Chinese and Aristotelian ethics. He inspired me to a lifelong interest in Chinese philosophy. For more on this view see Cua (1978).
- 20.
Martha Nussbaum uses this imaginative idea to great effect in her book The Therapy of Desire (1994).
- 21.
See Thompson (1997, pp. 24–42).
- 22.
Aristotle says (Nicomachean Ethics II.8.1109a1-4) that the ethical moderation occupies a mean between sensory self-indulgence and being ‘unfeeling’ (anaisthêton, 1108b21).
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Benitez, E. (2014). Teaching Across the Eye: Insecurity, Individuality, and Intellectual Values in Global Higher Education Practice. In: Mason, C., Rawlings-Sanaei, F. (eds) Academic Migration, Discipline Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-88-8_8
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