Through my experiences as an “older student”, facilitator, instructor, teaching assistant, lecturer, moderator, examiner and peer reviewer in the disciplines of strategic management, human capital, performance management and industrial psychology, I have had ample opportunity to reflect on my own learning and subsequent approaches towards teaching and learning. In developing my philosophy of education, I also did self-reflection through, inter alia, completing a self-inventory psychometric assessment to get insight and a better understanding of my own views related to progressivism, perennialism, romanticism and essentialism. Here, I share my underlying beliefs about teaching and philosophical approaches that I can bring to the workplace as part of a teaching team.
I believe that there is more than one way to learn. Most of my own learning came through experience, believing in my own individuality, progress and change (progressivism). However, I also believe in the teaching of everlasting ideas and universal truths (perennialism), as well as the teaching of moral values and virtues such as respect, authority and perseverance with consideration for others, practicality and intellectual knowledge (essentialism). I am a pragmatist. I hope to achieve a balance between experience and academic knowledge in my teaching. Thus, as a teacher, I always aim towards explaining complex, theoretical / abstract concepts, ideas or models by applying it to practical situations and experiences, reflecting my pragmatic approach as a teacher.
My approach towards improving my teaching is to focus my lecturing on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (i.e., concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation), and through actively paying attention to students’ different approaches towards learning. Thus, I focus my teaching around providing authentic and concrete experiences. Taking a long-term perspective towards experiential learning, I view assignments in relation to each other; with learning goals for students to develop skills that build on each step, reinforced by the next task, leading up to examination, assessment and competence.
Some of the most difficult challenges currently faced by the “world of work” is the exponential rate of change (e.g., Artificial Intelligence [AI], 4IR, hybrid working, virtual reality, augmented reality, meta-verse, etc.), fast tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondly, from an industrial psychology lecturing perspective in academia, few lectures have practiced in an independent practice, registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), and thus lack recent experiences in the “world of work”. Thus, teaching students from only an academic premise, is a “real world” challenge. My extensive experiences, related to nearly two decades in government, a decade in private sector and a decade as consultant, lecturer, and practicing industrial psychologist has enabled me to take abstract concepts, such as emotional intelligence (EQ), and turn it into an active, concrete experience for students. Thus, I include reflective observation into course design. I also strive to get students involved with “real world” problems to solve or tasks to complete. For example, when students’ complete assignments, not only do they have to engage with a “real place of work” and create feedback, but they also engage with abstract conceptualisation of what EQ, for example, should be and actively experiment with its content and creation of feedback.