Once upon a time: Designing a narrative-inspired curriculum for a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education

Once upon a time, there was a group of old teachers (well, maybe not so old, thanks very much) whose job it was to help other people learn to teach. They had high satisfaction with their jobs (as everyone in HE seems to have nowadays) and they liked the new teachers they worked with. Most of the new teachers seemed to find the old teachers useful, and they went out into the world with good ideas about how to teach. But something was troubling the old teachers. Some of the new teachers were finding it difficult to use the reflecting pool to think about their teaching. Some of them were scared to look into the pool afraid of what they might see, while others preferred to copy how teaching was done around them and did not want to use the pool at all. The old teachers scratched their heads, and had meetings where they argued about different ideas, and eventually they had a solution: they would tell the new teachers lots of stories, about themselves and about teaching, and encourage the new teachers in turn to tell stories. They wrote a big book (well a modest Moodle book called the ‘Module Anthology’) about teaching, with a chapter devoted to each of the main aspects of teaching, and in each chapter they encouraged the new teachers to use the reflecting pool and to tell their own stories.

Did they live happily ever after? We don’t know yet, but we’re starting to think that maybe they did...