A Reflection on Valuing Teacher Training and Pedagogy as Scholarship in Higher Education

An undergraduate student said to me after one class session, “I feel like you’d rather be working with younger kids.” [She was quite perceptive, as I used to do just that.]

What is it that gave her this impression? Is it the way I approach a class period? Is it the fact that I call it a class period? Is it the way I frame lessons and activities? Does it have something to do with the overall “feeling” of the class?

Her assumption was not altogether surprising. This type of feedback and criticism has been a continual undercurrent of many student evaluations for me, since I started teaching at the collegiate level. My first year as a full-time faculty member I received multiple comments along the lines of “You teach us like we are in high school” or “I don’t feel like I’m in college.” Although I did develop more of an elephant skin in graduate school, critiques from students can still cut me deeper than those of colleagues in a blind review. The students’ critical words initially hurt, but I confess that in an odd way I am now proud of their characterization of my teaching style. Despite what students might have perceived, there is nothing negative about a K-12 approach to teaching. In fact, might those educators be better trained in pedagogy, theory, and classroom management than many university professors?

Most of my pedagogical beliefs and techniques have come from my training and experience as an elementary educator, and for a majority of my time in higher education I have felt the need to defend this, rather than celebrate it. Within 20 minutes of my very first class as a graduate student, I was publicly outed as “the elementary school teacher,” and it is a mantle I have carried ever since. Even when Dr. David Birch told me before teaching my first Personal Health course at the University of Alabama that “good teaching is good teaching is good teaching,” I had a hard time embracing this notion that effective pedagogy can cross grade levels, ages, and perhaps even disciplines. In retrospect, I seem to have wasted a lot of energy suffering from imposter syndrome, feeling like I needed to prove to everyone around me that a BA in English and a master’s of teaching in elementary education had helped me develop skills worthy of being both a doctoral student and a Certified Health Education Specialist.

When I read the Message from the Editor in Volume 4, Issue 3, of this journal questioning why so little is done formally to teach doctoral students how to teach (Gambescia, 2018), it struck a chord with me. Someone did teach me how to teach, and yet, I spent years feeling as though it was a handicap. If academia, in general, does not seem to place equal value on teaching as it does on research—and graduate training does the same (De Cesare, 2003)—then it is no wonder that a doctoral student who finds her strength in the classroom rather than in research feels somehow inadequate as a graduate student. Does this have something to do with the conventional belief that we must think of ourselves as researchers first and educators second (despite the “education” in health education)?

While I may have initially been quite perplexed by the critique from students that I “should lecture more;” I realize that in the minds of many—faculty, students, and those distant from the professorate, like the media—that is what college teaching is, and should be. However, I want to call into question why this should remain the expectation. It seems that we, as trained educators, tend to put much more thought into how we teach in elementary and high school, and I believe our college and university students deserve to have the same care and attention put into how they are taught.

Why do we not make pedagogy a standard part of our doctoral programs alongside research methods and evaluation? It may be because, even though “universities were founded to teach students” and “students provide compensation for our service” (Gambescia, 2018, p. 171), so much of our perceived worth and subsequent rewards as faculty members come from what we research and publish. Moving the profession forward connotes implementation and evaluation of programs and studies, not strong lesson plans and students who truly learn and grow as individuals in the classroom. This is true of many disciplines, not just health education. Scholars from various disciplines recognize this inequity. I borrow the words of Mariolina Salvatori, an associate professor emerita in English at the University of Pittsburgh, who writes,

Institutions should encourage young faculty to acknowledge and remedy the fact that what the culture at large sees as “scholarship” does not necessarily include what we mean by the scholarship of teaching and learning. Institutions should make it possible for young faculty to learn to do in the classroom what they have learned and have been expected to do in the “scholarly” publications that earn them tenure. And young faculty need to . . . disabuse skeptical or misinformed administrators of assuming that teaching is an off-the-cuff improvisational activity that can provide a refuge from “real scholarship.” This view of teaching devalues teachers, students, scholarship, and institutions. (Salvatori, 2011, pp. 91-92)

In full disclosure, I am a young faculty member who is hoping to do just what Professor Salvatori recommends.

Let me be clear that my background was valued by many of my mentors and colleagues, and it may be that my imposter syndrome helped me work harder in research to make up for what I thought I lacked. I also work now in a department where my strengths in teaching are not only celebrated but shared: My colleagues are dedicated to being true mentors to their students, and we spend a substantial amount of time discussing better ways to teach and support our students. Yet, there is an underlying awareness that the time spent addressing our teaching might not be valued in the larger scope of academia if it is not peer-reviewed and published (Atkinson, 2001).

These days, I no longer try to shy away from my background with my students—they see photos of me with my old fifth grade classes (dressed up like a leprechaun, no less) the very first day of the course. I reference my experiences in the classroom quite often, and many students have now come to know the joy to be found in what I call my “craft box.” The students do not all take to my style. I am not so self-important to believe I reach them all, nor to believe I am a perfect teacher, without any room to grow. My class meetings do resemble traditional lecture-discussion more often than I would like, and I would love to have a month where I actually accomplish all I have planned for class and do not have to rearrange the schedule yet again. I am not always sure that I am grading appropriately or giving effective feedback; and I certainly know the feeling of finding myself “standing at the front of the room, posing a question whose response is a sea of blank faces” (Larson, Young, & Leibham, 2011, p. 29). However, I, as so many of us do, believe I am a teacher first, and a researcher second. I spend the majority of my time reworking my lessons, developing new methods, updating content, reaching out and connecting with my students, evaluating and assessing their work, and focusing on trying to be the most effective educator that I can be—knowing all the while that, similar to a tree falling in the forest, if it does not get published, it might not “matter.”

This reflection is not meant to tell everyone’s story, only mine. It is also not meant to suggest that those who are not trained cannot teach. I have learned that regardless of background and training, all professors have the potential to make an impact in the classroom. I write, rather, to assert my hope that we, as a profession, can recognize the value of formal training in curriculum and instruction, developing classroom management techniques, and utilizing learning theory. We should celebrate the education in health education by implementing pedagogical training in our programs if it is not there already and guiding future health educators in the research and development of their own pedagogy. It may never become the norm across academia—scholars of sociology have been addressing graduate student teacher training for more than 20 years, and still, only three quarters of programs had any formal training for their graduate instructors, and there remains a lack of standardization of quality and content (Blouin & Moss, 2015; Smollin & Arluke, 2014)—but I think it worthwhile to consider perpetuating a new norm for health education, whereby professors and community leaders alike are able to apply to their practice the theory and research of both health behavior and education, and that they are valued not just for their research capabilities but also for the strength they bring to teaching.