Voice file name: Sam Ellis
Key:
s.l.
sounds like
I’m Sam Ellis, I’m a lecturer in Music at Bangor University; I have a PhD in Historical Musicology
and I work across the subjects of Music, History and the other Humanities. I’ve also done some work
in Geography and Rural Studies and at the Higher Education Academy I work on grant funded
programs.
I think the biggest challenge I faced as a new lecturer was also one of my greatest opportunities for
personal development, which was learning from my mistakes. There wasn’t a huge amount of support
to begin with; I was on a PG Cert Program for Teaching in Higher Education which was useful in the
first instance but actually just getting out there and doing it, doing the teaching was the most useful
thing. So for example I remember the first time I went into a large lecture theatre, to deliver a lecture,
that’s literally what I did – I delivered a lecture, fifty minutes of pretty much non stop talking to a
room full of students, who by the end were worn out, a sea of fairly blank faces and I realized through
my rather crestfallen state that this wasn’t going to be a very positive way of teaching in the long
term. So I decided I needed really to bring in techniques that I had already learnt in small group
teaching, into the lecture theatre; so more interaction, more discussion and more group work if
possible. So learning from my mistakes was a really big key thing for me.
What really excites me about my role as a teacher in Higher Education is the opportunity I have to use
my research as a means of teaching students, of breaking down some really quite difficult concepts
and offer them some really new research and introducing it to students in a way that they can use it,
consume it, and develop a really broad range of skills through that research. That’s tremendously
exciting.
A real break through moment for me as a teacher, was feeling that I could discuss my teaching
experiences outside of the classroom. At Bangor I was really lucky in having a good mentor within
my department, who I could discuss things that I had done well with, things that maybe I could
improve next. Also my parents had been classroom teachers and had some really interesting ideas
about Teaching and Learning Practice, many of which I could apply to my own practice. Also on the
PG Cert course that I followed for a while at Bangor, I was exposed to people from different
disciplines and even though some of them were working in very different disciplines like Engineering
or Maths for example, I could definitely learn from their experiences and apply those to my work too.
A really important thing for me was understanding that you had to make things relevant and current
for students; it was no good just keeping things in the 17th or 18th Centuries when actually students
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lives were lived in the 20th or 21st Centuries. So for example a really good way I found of talking
about historical issues, social issues of say race, gender, class, national identity, was looking at
something like the music of Elvis, which a lot of my students were very keen on. It was a fantastic
way of really picking back a lot of interesting historical and social aspects and do something that was
actually quite current to them. Using popular music in music theory is a way of making it instantly
relevant to your 21st Century students, and that’s something that I continue to do in my own practice
today.
If I could give some advice to somebody starting out in teaching I’d say if you can avoid lecturing do;
you may be a lecturer, you may be in a lecture theatre, you may be giving a lecture but you don’t
actually need to be lecturing. There are many ways of involving students, even in a large lecture
theatre, through small group work, through better interaction, through discussion and I would really
encourage people to think about trying to employ those techniques in lectures.
Also think about the things that you do outside of work, do these have any relevance to Teaching and
Learning? For example I’m an athletics coach and I know that the same pedagogical principles do
apply with Teaching and Learning Higher Education and athletics coaching. Things like
demonstrating, explaining things, checking for understanding, there is definitely some cross over
there. Likewise, for a student, they might be a runner for example, they might be a musician, they
might do Teaching and Learning in a different context outside of your lectures. Can they bring those
techniques in to their learning? If you can encourage them to do that I think you are on to a winner.
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