Newsletter No. 204

4 No. 204 4th June 2002 CUHK Newsletter Put on Yours Thinking Caps Please! Prof. Gordon Mathews, Faculty of Social Science He rips up money, wears masks, speaks to his audience with the lights off, makes them ask questions by refusing to say anything except in response to questions... . No, he is not a magician. Prof. Gordon Mathews, a winner of the Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award, is simply an anthropology professor who comes up with whacky ideas for subverting his students' assumptions about the social world they live in. T he objective of anthropology as a discipline is to understand human societies in a holistic way. As an anthropology teacher, my role is to make students question everything from money to love to education itself in order to understand the processes which have moulded us as human beings and to see beyond that moulding and its illusions. My students should not unthinkingly believe anything that anyone tells them, including what I tell them. If I can succeed in getting them to question their lives, and think independently, then I am good anthropology teacher,' said Prof. Mathews. And the highest praise he has ever received from a student was That class really made me think!' Having said that, he added what makes a good teacher differs from discipline to discipline: a good teacher of accounting or engineering would probably be one who can get students to most effectively learn the subject matter. Prof. Mathews feels 'very lucky' to be an anthropologist as he believes he would probably be 'a terrible teacher of accounting or engineering'. While it is not possible to prove the truth of that statement, it is clear that Prof. Mathews enjoys teaching students to acquire perspective more than subject matter. It is often believed that wisdom, unlike knowledge, cannot be learnt. And exams as we know them may be able to test knowledge but not wisdom. For this reason, students receiving bad grades in Prof. Mathews's class do not have to worry about getting accusatory remarks from him. Grades, he says, are ways that society sorts its members into prospective future social classes; they may have little to do with intelligence, let alone wisdom. However students who do not pay attention in Prof. Mathew's class are in danger of being shouted at because it means they are not thinking, or at least not thinking hard. But fortunately, he says, that does not happen very often. Speaking of challenging preconceived ideas, Prof. Mathews's associations with his students show that not accepting what you are told can bring pleasant surprises. Youngsters in Hong Kong have sometimes been described by Westerners as childish, from the way they socialize to their dependence on family. Prof. Mathews finds that, among his CUHK students at least, this is a matter of social performance rather than of actual thinking. It is said CUHK students are passive in class, but he succeeds in drawing them out of inertia by posing questions directly to them in class — which they answer. Hong Kong students have also been criticized for their utilitarian approach to learning. However every year when Prof. Mathews poses this question to his students: 'Which would you choose: to graduate with high honours and learn nothing in university or to learn a lot and get no honours?', the majority say they would choose the latter. Is there anything in Prof. Mathews's experiences and personality that contribute to his being a good teacher? ‘I helped run an English conversation school in Sapporo, Japan during the 1980s. If students didn't come, I couldn't pay the rent. That certainly taught me the importance of trying to be a good teacher. I ' d starve if I wasn't!' he said. On a more serious note, he said that if he is a good teacher, it is because he really believes in what he teaches. Besides, he cares about his students a great deal, and because most realize he cares about them, they study more diligently. Perhaps that explains why he believes the Exemplary Teaching Award would make more sense and have more credibility if it were run by students. 'If we allowed a committee of students across disciplines and faculties to select the winners of the exemplary teaching award, we would be treating CUHK students as adults, as they deserve to be treated, rather than as children. It's their education, after all. Shouldn't they be doing the selecting?' Prof. Mathews sometimes worries that if students' command of English drops below a certain point, it will become impossible to teach sophisticated ideas in English. Fortunately, he says, this has not happened. Since he joined the Anthropology Department seven years ago, it has become a more international place, with postgraduate students from Norway, Japan, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, among other places, which has made teaching more interesting for him. However he points out that certain university policies, such as the external examiner system, make him a less effective teacher. 'After I grade students' final papers, they may never have the chance to see them, since the papers have to be rushed off to the Registration and Examination Section. I do hope this policy can be changed,' said Prof. Mathews. Despite a few complaints, Prof. Mathews would probably not be happier if he were in a different station in life. 'If I wasn't an anthropologist, and especially an anthropologist living overseas (he is from the US), I ' d probably be a very unhappy person, because I would be in the middle of society instead of being able to stand outside it. I ' m very, very lucky, I believe, to be doing what I do. But who knows? Maybe in a different life, I ' d have become a jazz musician!' said Prof. Mathews. From Swimming Pool to Classroom Prof. Allan Walker, Faculty of Education Prof. Allan Walker of the Department of Educational Adm i n i s t r a t i on and Policy is not particularly comfortable i f you call him an exemplary teacher to his face. While he enjoys getting recognition for his work, he thinks good teachers need to be humble i f they are to keep learning and to gain students' respect. Good teachers, he says, are those that use all the methods, strategies or techniques at their disposal to help students understand, think, and then articulate their own position. They also have a solid understanding of what they are teaching, which involves being active in research and staying in close touch w i t h developments in the field. Prof. Walker also strongly believes that good teachers are able to make students 'feel good' about themselves while maintaining high standards and expectations. Measured against this yardstick, Prof. Walker believes many teachers across the University deserve the award as much as he does because 'at times... everybody is a good teacher, and, at other times, they're terrible teachers.' However he also thinks that everyone can become a better teacher by conducting and/or keeping up to date on research both in his/her area of specialization and on effective teaching itself, and by developing a willingness to experiment and even fail, in order to learn something new. Prof. Walker, who describes himself as 'a determined, open-minded person, who, in general, likes people and doesn't have an ego problem', has taught in many different places and to different target groups. His first formal experience as a teacher was teaching young children how to swim every summer in Australia. After that he taught primary school students while a principal of an all-Aboriginal school in Australia. His first tertiary teaching experience was as a graduate student in the US. Since then, he has taught as a full-time faculty member at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and at universities in Australia. He has also done part-time teaching in Vietnam and the Philippines. Speaking of people and experiences that have helped shape him as a teacher, he mentions Prof. Joseph Murphy, a young academic who taught him while he was studying in the US. 'He was an outstanding role model, both as a researcher and a teacher, for a budding academic. As a teacher, the way he structured his classes, organized and varied the learning experiences, set high expectations and took an interest in his students really made an impact on me. Even now I often think of him when teaching,' said Prof. Walker. His learning has continued at CUHK, and he clearly recalls a 'rather humbling but very worthwhile experience' when he first started teaching at CUHK: 'I remember standing in front of my first classes, trying to crack jokes and teach pretty much as I had for the last two years in Australia. A l l I got in return were polite smiles 一 nobody laughed, but they did smile instead of answering my questions. I soon learnt I had to get into what they thought and where they came from if I was going to make a difference.' Prof. Walker says he continues to learn not only from his colleagues but also from observing teachers in Hong Kong secondary school classrooms, a requirement in the Faculty of Education, an experience he describes as 'a great source of inspiration and learning'. While he finds it hard to accurately describe how his teaching style, from pool to university classrooms, has changed over the years, he believes he is constantly shifting how and what lie teaches in response to student needs and external contexts. Coming to CUHK, for example, has meant for him a battle between 'shifting my style to suit the students, and shifting the students to suit my style', a battle that has left him 'somewhere in the middle'. Prof. Walker, who teaches a wide range of courses, from undergraduate students who have never taught before to school principals with 30 years' experience, has a high regard for all his students, especially those who trudge up the hill to attend classes after a full day's work. What does he like or dislike most about his students? He admires their pragmatism, their perseverance and willingness to learn and is sometimes critical of their punctuality (or lack of it) and, somewhat ironically, the same pragmatism he admires. The Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award 2001