Voice file name: Peter DSena
Key:
s.l.sounds like
My name is Peter De Sena; I’m the Discipline Lead for History at the Higher Education Academy and I’ve worked for over thirty-four year both as a teacher in schools and also as a lecturer in a university, more or less an equal amount of time for each; sixteen years in schools and seventeen years in universities.
In that time I have taught at various different levels; I’ve taught in schools children aged between eleven and eighteen, O’Levels, GCSEs, A Levels and also children with special needs at the age of eleven. At universities I have taught Academic History but I’ve also trained history teachers and in my time at universities I’ve also had posts with responsibility as a Course Leader for History, a Course Leader for Primary and Secondary Education and also as a Head of Department.
What’s proved particularly challenging for me as a teacher in HE is that I’ve had three different starts and they’ve been disconnected by a number of years. So I started, aged twenty-seven, in training History teachers and doing some Academic History, but my main post was to teach the PGCE in History and at that time, and I’m talking about the 1980s, there was very little support and guidance; it was a very much DIY sort of experience and being that I was only four or five years detached, if you like, from my own experience of doing a PGCE, some of that was naturally replicated.
My second experience of being a starter though was when I was in my thirties and I was full time as a Head of Department in a school, but I was teaching one evening a week at what was then called Hatfield Polytechnic. I was interested because one of the things I found in teaching in a History Degree, for evening mature students, was that I was the youngest person in the room, and their expectations of what they wanted from the degree was quite different to what I’d seen earlier on in my previous roles. They were people who were sometimes doing a degree after they had finished a career or as part of their own career development, what we now call CPD.
I remember asking one of my colleagues who’d just gone through this himself as a student, as a mature student, what was the one key thing that I should always bear in mind. He said, even then, this was in the 1980s, that I should give them value for money; that they should always be given tasks, directed activities as well as the lecture, that it was a holistic experience and they would want to take something quite tangible away with them. They’d worked really hard to get into the room, it wasn’t something that they were taking for granted, they was a reason for being there.
My third start was as someone who was going in as being full time, because the two earlier roles were both part time. When I started full time I had two hats, almost in equal measure if you like; one was teaching Academic History and the other was training teachers. So there were different sets of rules, if you like, in terms of professional standards and guidance that I had to adhere to and be really very conscious of in one and the other was the QAA requirements and you shouldn’t always assume that the requirements are the same. So people in an institution can be teaching to very, very different sets of standards; so there were different things that I had to learn, if you like, on those three different starts.
One of the things that has really excited me about my role in teaching is about bringing the fruits of research and scholarly activity into the experiences of the learners and I’ve been able to do that both in schools and in universities. I’ll give you an example, in the 1980s when I was teaching very, very near to the Broadwater Farm Estate, in a school, children were asking me why can’t we learn about the history of others; and of course the social and cultural diversity in the school meant that I was going to be therefore teaching Irish History, Black History and so on and so forth. I did this by taking the research of leading historians at the time and taking it at their level into the classroom, and then also did this in university as well, both in Academic History and in History teacher education. This was a way of helping people to understand the way in which Britain was developing and had developed, so it was really quite relevant to them; I felt part of important scholarly debates.
One particular light bulb moment is when I didn’t teach History but I was teaching Maths full time in a school and what that allowed me to do was to look at the processes of the learner. In the early 1980s Maths education was introducing Assessment for Learning; now this was really very far ahead of what was being done in many other disciplines but because I wasn’t looking so closely at the subject matter as I would perhaps in a critical way if I was looking at the teaching of History, I was looking at the processes and I was looking at the ways in which students were engaging with their learning and being able to mentor each other and look at the ways in which they could build, if you like, on their experiences and understand their own learning in order to be able to make progress.
What I was able to do was to look at those, I suppose, in a more objective way than if I was looking at in my own discipline and then take some of those structures, where appropriate, into the ways in which I started to teach History. In this way, by default, and I wouldn’t have called it Assessment for Learning in the 1980s, I don’t think many people would have, I started to introduce something which was really rather important and I think now is well known as being a core element, if you like, of Teaching and Learning.
There is one piece of advice I would give to everybody, no matter what their discipline, if they were going into HE teaching, and that is to become part of the department as far as you can. I know that because I started as a part timer on two occasions and that meant that I was dipping in and out; I would arrive at may be half five and then disappear at nine o’clock in the evening. I didn’t know about the particular events that were going on, I didn’t know anything more than the real formalities and it’s not the same going to the final Exam Board and sitting there in the crowd, when in fact we all know that networking, informal networking, the water cooler conversation can tell you far more about what’s going on in the department.
So I would really, really, really stress this as being important. Do network, do go in and it may well be that it will help with your own research, the structure and quality of your own teaching and also you start to collaborate on research bids and all manner of other things. So I would strongly suggest do more than perhaps the basics and become involved with people in your department in order to be able to help your own teaching but also perhaps your own research and scholarly activity.
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