Teaching the first class of the academic year can be like learning a new dance: the moves are tricky; you don’t know what steps your partner is going to take; and whether you will complement each other.
Film Studies professor emeritus Allan Gedalof offers an animated speech on the importance of teaching during the Fall Perspectives on Teaching conference.
University of Western Ontario faculty and graduate students learned teaching cues from one of its best, Department of Film Studies professor emeritus Allan Gedalof, during the Fall Perspectives on Teaching conference Sept. 2.
Gedalof taught for 35 years at Western and received numerous teaching awards. He provided insight into his own tricks of the trade, but reiterated there isn’t one right way to teach.
“When I started teaching I wrote scripts because I felt I didn’t know enough and I couldn’t control the lecture,” he says.
Feeling he was losing his student audience, he decided to switch up his tactics and adopted the mantra, “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Gedalof cautioned professors against structuring the class so it doesn’t leave room for spontaneous ideas. You have to be willing to let your dance partner take the lead sometimes, he says.
“What mattered most was … the way I managed the engagement between the students and the discipline I represented,” he says.
Universities are in the business of changing people’s lives; filling students’ minds with bodies of knowledge occurs incidentally, he adds.
Gedalof challenged the audience to develop a teaching persona and think about how they could best serve their students.
“It is not a job that you can ever do perfectly or a job where you can say the job is done,” he says. “Whatever we do, we just hope to fail better next time.”
Western might have ‘research-intensive’ in its slogan, but President Amit Chakma promises to be the principle cheerleader of teaching on campus.
Chakma offered the welcoming remarks at the conference.
As he looks back on all of his contributions during his career, “inevitably it boils down to my interaction with students, the lives I have been able to touch” that was most memorable.
“It is important for those of us, senior faculty, to inspire our younger colleagues with the value of teaching because at the end of the day, it is really not a matter of how many books you have published, how many papers you have written, citations that can be attributed to you, but how many lives we have touched.”