Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with George MacDonald Ross
Author: George MacDonald Ross
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L: 1741-4164
Volume: 9
Number: 1
Start page: 17
End page: 32
Return to vol. 9 no. 1 index page
Continuing our series of interviews with academics with a special interest in teaching issues, David Mossley talked to George MacDonald Ross, retiring Director of the Subject Centre for PRS, about his lengthy philosophical career, the establishment of the Subject Centre network, and his many successes in the teaching of philosophy. The interview was conducted in Leeds on October 29th, 2009.
Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by Discourse this morning George. You've recently retired as director of the Subject Centre, and your work has had a great influence on us, and impact on learning and teaching across our disciplines. I'd like to begin by asking you first about your background in philosophy, how you came into philosophy and your early career.
I think I was brought up to think philosophically, because my father was an amateur theologian and very interested in philosophy. We often had philosophical discussions at home, and I got used to thinking philosophically. In fact I did Classics at school, for A-level, and got a place to study Classics at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. During the long vacation before going to Cambridge, I thought I had better brush up on my Ancient Greek, and started looking at a Greek text and trying to understand it, and thought really Greek is not for me. As it happened, I picked up a second hand copy of Mill's Logic, and thought that sounded really interesting, so I decided to change my subject to Philosophy.
Induction by elimination?
Yes. Not knowing about academic procedures at the time, I didn't bother to tell the college that this was my intention until I arrived and had an interview with the senior tutor. He got very angry when I said I wanted to change my subject, because there wasn't actually a philosophy don in the college at the time, so I'd have to be farmed out for supervision purposes. However, they did let me change, and I have had no regrets. Nor for that matter do I regret having studied Classics, because one of the things that I've done quite a lot of, in my career, is translating historical texts from languages such as Latin into English in a way that is intelligible to undergraduates.
Thanks. Could you tell us a little about your early career?
The first job I had after I graduated was that I spent a year in Crete teaching English as a foreign language. I had no formal tuition in how to teach so I was just learning on the job, but it did teach me a number of things. One in particular was the importance of speaking very intelligibly and distinctly to people and I think I've carried that on as a lifetime habit. There is one particular incident that stuck in my mind that had considerable influence on me. I had painstakingly written comments on a piece of work that one of the students had done, and then allocated the mark for the piece of work, which was not a very high one. When I returned the work to him he turned the paper over to look at the mark, scrumpled the paper up and threw it into the waste paper basket! The lesson I learnt from that was never, ever to return a piece of work with comments and a mark, because students will read the mark and not the comments. It's a complete waste of time, so one of the things I've done as a teacher is to make sure that I return essays with useful and helpful comments which explain why I have given the mark I have, without telling them what the mark is. The students then have to read the comments in order to guess what the mark is, and come and tell me what mark they think I've given them and why. As a result, my students became very adept at assessing their own work and coming to almost exactly the same mark as I actually gave.
So after Greece, how did your career progress?
The first job in teaching philosophy I got was in Birmingham, as a temporary assistant lecturer. I had that job for three years. When I was appointed the appointing committee were a bit iffy about my research credentials, but said, we'll give you the temporary post, because we think you'll be a very good teacher, and I hope they were correct in that prophecy.
Then after those three years, I got another temporary job, very briefly, in Leeds, in the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, as a Research Fellow, and then that got converted into a straight lectureship in philosophy, so I've spent the last 37 years as a lecturer in philosophy at Leeds.
And during that period, how would you describe your research interests?
My research has mainly been in the history of philosophy, which I find particularly interesting, though in those days it was a bit of an uphill struggle being a historian of philosophy, because history of philosophy was very much out of fashion. I remember when I first came to Leeds, somebody took me aside and told me that the only reason why we teach the history of philosophy at Leeds is so that undergraduates will learn the dreadful mistakes that people make through not having read Frege, so I felt that I was teaching philosophy very much on sufferance. It was a long time before I acquired other colleagues who were also interested in the history of philosophy.
That situation has changed somewhat, hasn't it?
It has. I was one of the founding members of the British Society of the History of Philosophy, in fact I was its first secretary, and I think that the organisation has done a lot to raise the status of history within the discipline. Things are very much different now from how they were when I started out.
Could you say a little bit about the development of your subject specific learning and teaching interests?
Well, I've always been a great believer in killing two birds with one stone, and one thing that I've tried to do is to relate the teaching of philosophy to my interests in the history of philosophy. I have written a lot about this, particularly about Kant's views on the teaching of philosophy, which I find extremely modern and up to date. I think that many people would improve as philosophy teachers if they followed the advice that Kant gave about teaching philosophy.
Ok, and how did the SC come about?
During the 1990s, I moved very much into administration. I was head of department, and I was chair of what was known as the taught courses committee of the faculties of Arts, Social Sciences and Law, at a time when the university went over to modularisation, so I had a lot of controversial work to do in order to bring about the modularisation of something like half the programmes of study in the university. After that came to an end, I went off to what was then University College Scarborough, as academic dean and deputy principal, with a brief to turn it round from being an ex primary teacher education college to being a bonsai university with university values. That was a very interesting and enjoyable experience, so when I came back to leeds in the later 1990s, I suppose I was suffering a bit from the very common syndrome of people not wanting to go back to doing exactly what they were doing before. I was looking for a more responsible role. So when, in 1999, I read the advertisements for people to set up the Subject Centres I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to continue a leadership role, while at the same time fulfilling my own overriding interests in high quality teaching.
The SCs were, in many respects, a response to some of the recommendations of the Dearing report. How effective do you think the SCs were as a response?
I think the SCs were mainly set up under the influence of the treasury, who thought it was outrageous that about the only profession which didn't involve professional training was university teaching. Just about every other profession did, being a doctor or a lawyer for example, and they didn't see why there should be this exception for university teachers, particularly because there was a lot of anecdotal evidence of not very competent teaching going on in universities. A lot of money was spent during the 1980s and 1990s on setting up educational development units in universities, employing a lot of members of staff who had the brief to improve the quality of learning and teaching in universities, and they hadn't been terribly effective. The main reason that they were not effective is because busy members of staff were very reluctant to go on courses and be trained by people who did not know anything about their own discipline. This meant that the training tended to be heavily theoretical, or on highly practical issues like how to use an OHP which people didn't find very edifying.
Also philosophers in particular, I think, have been very sceptical about what is done in educational theory because they object to the language, and also the research methods which are used in education. In particular the idea that anything has to be supported by endless references to the literature looks to philosophers, and I have sympathy with this, rather like the fallacy of the argument from authority. Philosophers are much more interested in rational arguments for doing things this way rather than that, or straight empirical evidence on the basis of what has worked in practice. The trouble is, educational specialists tend not to be teachers in higher education and don't actually have the practical experience which philosophy lecturers would respect. So I think that the SCs were set up in a way to call the bluff of academics who said we're not interested in what we get as training, because it's not relevant to our particular discipline. Ok, here's some money to set up these subject centres which are discipline specific.
Ok, so would you like to expand a little bit further on your philosophy of education, and your views on education more generally, not just in regards to the philosophy of higher education, but education as an overall activity or process?
I am a great believer in the traditional distinction between education and training, and I believe that I'm in the business of education. I don't want to disparage training, and even within the sorts of things we teach in university, there is a role for developing physical skills and rote learning. For example, if you want to learn a language, there's the hard slog of memorising vocabulary and grammar which you have to go through, and which is in a sense a part of education, even though it looks more like training. But what distinguishes a university language degree from a crash course at a language school are higher-order activities such as placing the language in a social and historical context, very delicate issues of how you translate from one language to another, literary criticism, and so on. Or again, mathematics won't get you very far unless you've learnt your times tables, even though there's far more to mathematics than that. I think philosophy is rather different from other disciplines, in that the amount of rote learning that is appropriate is at a minimum compared to other disciplines. The higher order skills are of much greater importance.
One of my corollaries of believing that it is education rather than training that is of importance is that it puts the emphasis not on what the teacher tells the student (so it's not a question of the passive absorption of knowledge that the teacher has, or practising the simple skills the teacher has) but on developing the autonomy of the learner. I'm unashamedly student-centred, to use the jargon, in my approach to education. This has certain consequences. For example, I tend to disparage lecturing as a form of teaching. It had its place in its time—in a medieval university the lecture consisted in the reading out of a book, and this was an essential function, because students couldn't afford books themselves. They were very valuable objects, and even paper was expensive, so they couldn't take copious notes, and they were expected to memorise the text, which they could then discuss. So the twin source and methods of education available in universities were the lecture, where you got the text inside your head, and then discussion, which was very good. They had debates and disputations in which students would be allocated quite paradoxical positions, and had to use imaginative reason in order to defend them, arguing against each other, using lots of independent thinking, which was an excellent method of teaching. I think one of the tragedies of more recent university education is that the lecture became redundant after the invention of printing, and it has taken over half a millennium for us to catch up with the importance of the Gutenberg revolution. People talk about a post- Gutenberg university, in which we recognise that lecturing is no longer the most appropriate method of teaching. But we have preserved the lecture and unfortunately dropped the disputation, which is actually the most interesting and important part of the university education. So I'd like to restore the balance, and I've avoided lecturing myself. The last time I gave a lecture was in 1993. I keep to small group teaching in which I encourage the students to contribute, to think, to debate, to argue, discuss and to be autonomous, independent learners.
Do you think that that position is sustainable given the very large numbers of students there are now, compared to when you first started teaching?
It is more difficult, and certainly in my own institution when I arrived for many years the staff student ratio was stable at about 8.6, whereas now it's in the upper 20s, so we've got many more students to teach. Nevertheless, I do think that we are teaching students much more efficiently than we were when I first came. It's much more of a professional operation and there are ways of organising things so that you can minimise the large lecture and spend more time on one-to-one work or small group work. A lot depends on how things are arranged. One thing that has not changed, though, is that I remember doing a survey when I was head of department trying to calculate the amount of attention students got in different years. I used a very simple, crude measure, which was to take the hours that students had of contact with teachers and divide it by the number of fellow students who were present at the same time, so one hour one-to-one counts as one hour, and one hour in a lecture theatre with 60 students counts as one minute. On the basis of that measure, it turned out that final year students had around 10 times as much attention as first year students. Now I think most academics would agree that one of the things that happens during a student's time at university is that they become more autonomous, less dependent on their teachers, than when they arrived. Sometimes a crude dichotomy is drawn between school teaching where it's all didactic, teaching to the text, and students are quite passive, then suddenly you come to university where you've got much more freedom, you're expected to spend much more time working independently out of formal hours, you should be handling your own reading, and things like that. The focus is on a much greater autonomy. I think it's a paradox that although we all believe this, the way we teach is exactly the opposite, from what we believe about what will happen, so we give students less help and attention when they arrive, and much more at the very point when they will be leaving university as autonomous learners. So I think a lot could be done to rebalance the way that we teach so that we teach more heavily in the first year, and then gradually leave the students more to their own resources as they approach graduation.
So ideally, what sort of skills or abilities do you think a student needs to be successful in a philosophy programme when they're starting out? And how effective is the current education system in delivering those skills to students?
I would say independent thinking, being able to see alternatives, and not thinking of learning as going along a predetermined path where there's only one way you can go. The openness about philosophy is more distinctive than it is in other disciplines. Of course you also get it in other disciplines, for example in literature where you interpret a text differently, in history where there are different theories about what happened or even what history is about, and so on. Sociology and politics are also disciplines where there are different possibilities of interpretation, and approach, but it's particularly marked in philosophy, and I think it's particularly difficult to come from being taught at school, at A-level, to what we expect of them in the first year. I think we need to pay more attention than we do to this transition from school to university. I'm sorry to say that even in the case of the people who've done philosophy at A-level, the way that A-level is taught in order to bring it into line with other A-level syllabuses means that there is far too much teaching to the test, assessment all the time, and not enough freedom for students to think for themselves. So it is possibly more difficult to bring people round to the way we teach at university if they've done philosophy A-level than if they haven't, because they think they've done it already. You tend to teach much the same material, like Descartes, for instance, is taught in the first year and also at A-level, and often the students say, well I've done Descartes already. They get rather bored and don't appreciate the different expectations of university.
So how do you think philosophy changes people?
I think it makes them much more self-aware and self-reflective, in a way, sometimes, they don't always like. This is why I'm very much against talking in terms of student satisfaction, as if it's our task to satisfy desires or expectations that the students have when they arrive. I think it's very important that they've probably wasted their time at university if they haven't got a wholly changed expectation about what education's about, so often the process of becoming more philosophically sophisticated makes students less satisfied than they were before, because they see the complexity of things, issues are not as simple as they thought they were, they're seeing other dimensions, they might find it more difficult to decide about things and so on. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be disturbing.
Better to be an unhappy man than a happy pig. So do you think that there are any key threshold concepts in philosophy that bring about this change?
I find it very difficult to isolate any particular threshold concepts, because you might say that what makes a concept a philosophical concept is precisely that it is a threshold concept, that is to say, that once you've grasped the concept then there's no going back, you can't sort of ungrasp it again and you see things through different eyes. You've won a number of awards and fellowships. Would you like to say a little bit about what was involved in those? Well there are actually three if you include that I was given an award of merit by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. I suspect that I got that one because they were rather jealous of the fact that there was public money going into the teaching of philosophy through my directorship of the Subject Centre. That was certainly part of it, but it was very nice to have that recognition. Also I must say I do very much value attending regular conferences of the AAPT, which is trying to do the same thing as us, but hasn't got the same sort of resources or support.
The second award I got was the University of Leeds University Teaching Fellowship, and the policy of the University of Leeds was to offer these fellowships as a sort of dry run for the National Teaching Fellowships, so the criteria for awarding them were quite similar. The most distinctive features of the Leeds one and also the National Teaching Fellowship is that they're not really interested in a teacher as a performer, so there's no inspection of what you do. They don't sit in your classes and see if you're a brilliant, charismatic lecturer, and I think this is wholly beneficial, because teaching involves all the things that you set up in order to encourage students to learn, and to help them to learn. Probably about the least helpful thing you can do is to give them charismatic lectures, because then students go away with the impression that they've got all they need. They then think that all they have to do is go away and repeat the sort of stuff that they've absorbed from the lectures, when they're assessed, and that's all, so I like to say that there's only one thing that's worse than a bad lecture and that's a good one, because it leaves the student satisfied. I think that what we need to do is to show that we structure the students' learning experience in such a way that they are under pressure to work hard, to think hard, to work independently, and to produce really good work.
What role do you think inspiration plays, which a charismatic lecturer could inspire?
Yes, well there are many ways that one can inspire, and it doesn't have to be in the context of a formal lecture. Certainly I think demonstrating that you are interested in what you are doing, and above all demonstrating that you are interested in each student as an individual, is of crucial importance in inspiring them. Of course it helps if you are witty or you have a good fund of funny stories and things like that, but it is by no means essential, in being a good teacher. There is too much emphasis on assessing teachers on things like wit and liveliness and so on, and though they do help, they're not what education is about.
So can we say a little bit more about the National Teaching Fellowship, and also the NTF scheme?
The scheme has altered over the years. When it was originally set up it was intended as a way of rewarding people who were outstanding teachers and also who were showing leadership. Part of the criteria was to demonstrate that you have influenced other people for the good, so obviously being director of the Subject Centre was an advantage, in that it was evidence of influencing other people. Nowadays, there are more fellowships. Part of the earlier system was that you had to put forward a project, you were given £40,000 to implement it, and you were partly judged on the nature of the project. The way that is has changed recently is that there are more fellows. There are now 50 a year appointed with lower funding, it's now only £10,000, and the £10,000 is not for a project, it is as a reward, so you can use it how you like, in order to make your life as a teacher, or as a leader in teaching, easier. So for example you can buy computers, use it for foreign travel to conferences, and things like that, so how it's spent is much more open. In addition to that, there's an additional pot of money which national teaching fellows can bid for, for much larger sums, for projects designed to improve the student learning experience in universities.
Thanks. Looking at your work with the SC, what would you pick out as highlights of the 9 years you've spent as director?
For myself, I think what I felt best about was when we had an international conference at Leeds, which was well-attended, and in particular attracted roughly equal numbers of people from the UK, the US and the rest of the world. It was a truly international event, which led to some very interesting papers in the journal Discourse, and I feel that events of this nature are really what it's about. I just regret the difficulty of getting people from the UK to attend such events. I know it's a problem that many institutions are strapped for resources and find it difficult to support people going to conferences on learning and teaching issues. Such funding as there is tends to be reserved for research events rather than teaching events, which is something I regret.
So what would you say is the good of the SC?
The good of the SC is that in many ways it provides an opportunity of support for people who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of the student learning experience at a departmental level. We've given a lot of grants for people to be able to work at this and money speaks, so if somebody has got, say, £3,000 to do something, this weighs well in the balance against research activities. The SC also gives an opportunity for people to get together with likeminded people in different departments. I think it's interesting that some of our most successful events have been with people like formal logicians, who feel rather beleaguered because logic doesn't have the same place in the syllabus as it used to 40 years ago, for example, and I think people teaching formal logic feel rather lonely, and are conscious of the difficulty of teaching it and its unpopularity among students, so it gives an opportunity for logicians to get together with a sense of solidarity and mutual support from different departments. The same is true of various other minority groups within our disciplines, such as our successful work with Black theologians.
Generally when philosophers get together at conferences, particularly at research conferences, the attitude tends to be oppositional. You're trying to pick holes in papers that have just been delivered. I think one of the really rewarding things to do with holding events to do with learning and teaching is that when philosophers get together to discuss learning and teaching, there's a much greater spirit of co-operation, of recognition that we all have the same problems and we can learn from each other. I do find this a really rewarding part of the job.
Although you've officially retired, there is still work continuing with your teaching fellowship, and you are also still working as a senior adviser for the SC. Would you like to say a little bit about what you're working on at the moment, and how you see your projects moving into the future?
Well, when people retire they always say that they're busier than ever. I still have a lot of writing projects. I haven't forgotten my research interests in the history of philosophy, and I recently published a book on Hobbes. I also intend to put together my thoughts on teaching into a book which I will call ‘How I teach philosophy', which will be mainly a reflection on how I teach philosophy and the way I do things, but there's quite a lot of unfinished business. I haven't yet completed the project that was funded by my UTF, which is a new idea for using multiple choice questions on a computer as a way of getting people to think about issues where there are no right or wrong answers. What I'm doing is to add it as a bolt on to a translation I've already produced of a large part of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I use multiple choice questions in order to encourage students to think about different ways of interpreting crucial parts of the text, and considering arguments, considering reasons for interpreting one way rather than another, and then considering reasons for regarding the text as so interpreted as being a good or bad piece of philosophy. The idea is that the students would spend some time going through these different possibilities, so I'm not saying this is the right answer to it, but these are the sorts of possibilities and how one could rationally support them. The aim is that students acquire the practice of thinking as an experienced historian of philosophy while they are reading the text, rather than the approach which most students have, which is either to say, I can't understand this, or trying to read it as if it were a newspaper article or a novel or something like that, which of course won't work. It forces them to think about things in an appropriate way.
Ok, so looking more broadly now, what do you think are the most pressing factors driving change in our disciplines in the UK, and internationally? Are they the same in teaching and research, or are they different?
Obviously, I think one of the most pressing issues at the present moment is the question of financing, and there's going to be a lot of pressure on people to teach more economically, which goes against all that I hold dear, that is, trying to establish a personal relationship with each student. Also, I worry that the outcome of recent high profile debates about standards at universities may result in much greater standardisation of what is done, and the more you standardise, the more you get teaching to the test, and you lose what is essential to a liberal education in the university. We've got to find ways of teaching professionally and efficiently but without losing the essential point, that we are educating the students as individuals and not merely passing on factual content and basic skills.
Do you think there are any international pressures, more broadly?
Yes, I think there are international pressures which we have largely ignored in the UK, and I have to say the QAA has been doing some sterling work trying to defend the way we do things in the UK against different approaches that are common in the continent. In particular I think they have been successful in fending off attempts to measure student learning in terms of the hours they spend sitting in seats, rather than in terms of the outcomes of what they've actually learnt. The UK approach has actually been victorious there, and that's a very good thing.
And again, on most of the continent there's much more central control. In countries such as France, there's even a centralised national syllabus, and I think this is incompatible with developing students as autonomous individuals.
Which teacher has had the most influence on you, and why?
I find that a very difficult question to answer. I have to admit that I don't think the teaching I had at Cambridge for example was very good, I always resolved that anyone who went through my hands as a student would have a better education than I got at Cambridge, but I don't want to disparage my own education too much. There were certainly object lessons I learnt from the way people taught so that I learnt a lot about what to avoid in teaching.
Finally, what would you say was your greatest achievement as a philosophy educator?
That again is a very difficult question. It tends to be a lot of different things. I feel I've achieved something worthwhile when I read the comments in the course evaluation questionnaires, where students say nice things about how they've been transformed by doing my course. I get comments such as, it's the most difficult module they've had to do, but the most rewarding. It's not a question of one off big achievements— it's lots of little things.
Thank you, George.
Thank you.
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
