On being a maritime lecturer
Maritime education and training has seen a progressive shift from further education to higher education in recent years, which has brought about changes in how we teach our maritime professionals, and in the skills and abilities required of maritime lecturers.
Previously, our emphasis was on technical proficiency in a prescribed and limited range of skills, and in the curriculum that would foster them.
Detailed syllabuses guided maritime lecturers as to the subjects to teach and how long to spend on each area. The curriculum was content driven; the more subjects cadets covered in their training, the more ‘qualified’ or competent they were thought to be. The requirements of the maritime lecturers tasked to deliver this curriculum emphasised technical proficiency; ex-mariners were sought who were highly skilled professionals that could transmit their considerable knowledge to their class through lectures.
We have since learnt that if we cover too many subjects, it will be at the expense of the understanding and thus the technical proficiency we desire. Cadets will adopt rote learning to pass exams. They may pass, appear to be competent, but their understanding will be superficial at best and their competence will be counterfeit.
We have also learnt that it is necessary to have a deep understanding of your subject. Highly competent professionals do not necessarily make for good maritime lecturers. Students need to be actively engaged in their learning in order to foster the deep understanding and the competence that our industry needs. This requires maritime lecturers to learn from their students as much as their students learn from them, by seeking their feedback on their teaching.
Maritime lecturers need to change their focus to what the cadets are doing and how they learn. Rather than giving the cadets a lecture, they give them a project to do where they have to investigate for themselves and test out ideas by building ships’ models and seeing what happens when they get their calculations wrong.
More recently, there has been pressure to expand the curriculum further to include non-technical competencies such as leadership, management, and cultural awareness. This places even greater emphasis on student-centred teaching. One cannot ‘teach’ these skills through lectures; they are learnt through experi- ence and thus the job of the maritime lecturer is to create these experiences.
In order to enable maritime lecturers to make this switch from teacher-centred to student-centred learning, we need to develop their professional practice in teaching as well as help them to maintain their technical expertise. At Warsash Maritime Academy, we have developed a postgraduate programme for lecturers in maritime education and training designed to achieve this aim.
This one-year programme encourages individuals to be innovative in their teaching by giving them the under- standing of how people learn, the tools to reflect on their teaching practice, and the skills to use technology, such as simulators, to best effect. It also prepares them for postgraduate teaching, where even greater emphasis is placed on fostering students’ independent learning.
This is only achieved if maritime lecturers have the confidence to let go of the responsibility for their students’ learning, which inadvertently fosters dependency, and to replace spoon-feeding in lectures with opportunities for hands on experience of applying knowledge and ideas.
In conclusion, it is my belief that there is no genetic code or innate ability that sets a good maritime lecturer apart from his or her colleagues. It is a dedication to professional teaching practice, which, ironically perhaps, involves the lecturer doing less and their students doing more that will produce the results we desire: competent professionals who have a deep understanding of their craft.
A longer version of this article, complete with bibliography can be downloaded below:
HE01060 - On Being a Maritime Lecturer