2 posts tagged “design and technology”
Last week Friday I had an interview for a job teaching Design Technology at a “technology college” in England. It lasted for an hour and a half. The agency who arranged the interview said it was much longer than normal and predicted a favourable outcome. On Monday I was offered the post - which I accepted.
When I told Nancy about it she laughed and asked me how I am going to manage it. “You might as well have accepted a job teaching Maths or Science”. I was quite upset by her response to be honest. I had been expecting her to say, “Well done you!”, and gush a bit. Still, Nancy knows me better than anyone and I wonder if she is right about me biting of more than I can chew with this job.
It is an all-boys school of nearly a thousand students, each one of them taking Design technology. This year I found the 20-odd students I had for art class enough, so how I will manage with 50 times that amount is something I cannot even imagine yet. I will have to deal with it when I am there.
So why did I accept the post? Well to begin with I don’t mind the challenge (albeit it a masochistic one). I will be learning new skills, like how to handle a variety of machines well enough to instruct others how to do so and how to use different CAD programs. I’ll also gain the confidence I currently lack to present myself to a large group of young people and maintain my ground. I’ll learn to be more organised and more efficient.
From a career point of view, Design technology is a good subject to be able to teach because it is a core subject in the UK with many available posts. So once I am okay with teaching it I will be able to cast a far wider net than I can with only Art and Design when looking for a job. In fact, it will probably stand me in good stead when looking for posts in international schools as well. Teaching in international schools is an excellent way to earn good money as a teacher, see the world and experience different cultures, and it is something I would like to do in the future once I have a solid base in the England. Accepting this post is a tactical step towards that goal.
Nonetheless, I am aware that the job might get the better of me after all. Despite all that I stand to gain the fact remains that I prefer teaching Art and Design, I prefer small classes and I prefer teaching girls. But if it really does turn out terribly I will simply leave it at the end of the semester in June when my probation period ends. Even so I will have gained valuable experience and by then I would have found my feet in England, saved some money and be in a better position to go after jobs without the need of an agency.
Time will tell how things turn out.
For the past few days I have been quite busy with projects for my PGCE course. One of them involved presenting a class on the subject we will be teaching. I did mine on the influence of design in different aspects of our lives, recognising good design and showing how design can be distinguished from art. I then gave my first piece of homework, which was a brief to design a T-shirt for the PGCE group.
The lesson was filmed for critical review afterwards, but surprisingly I was not too put out by that. Once I got started I forgot about the camera entirely and before I knew it time was up.
It really makes the world of difference to teach something you are interested in yourself. There is so much I would love to talk about in a Design class and so many challenging projects to initiate. The possibilities are endless… Our lecturer in the Design method is Keith van Winkel. He teaches Design and Technology at St. Andrews school, and is highly acclaimed there and beyond for his stimulating interactive classes. As a teacher trainer he is just as good. I truly feel privileged to be in his class and to learn from him.
This week he gave us an example of the kind of homework he gives his students, which we were to do ourselves. It was to design a cutlery set, a chair and logo for one person from a list of notorious, historical and noteworthy people. The finished project then goes into a portfolio, which will become a teaching manual of sorts by the end of the year because it will be filled with projects that could be used in our future classes. Along the way we can also add projects of our own to the portfolio and build on it further once we are teaching. Keith argues that as teachers we should always do projects we wish to assign first, because in doing so we can test them out.
All our classes are actually held in the D&T building at St. Andrews. It is an amazing location. The building has three layered floors and huge glass windows that allow natural light to stream in from all directions. The arrangement of the desks and work areas is carefully thought out so that the students are quiet tightly grouped together without feeling cramped. As for the creative process, all the equipment you could possibly need is there: from woodwork benches with saws, files and vices to PC’s linked to the Internet and large interactive white boards. It’s amazing really.
I observed Keith teaching a Grade 10 class today for a while. Their project was to depict an object in a way that emphasises its defining characteristic. While they were busy doing so Keith had his stereo system playing music and was busy on his own work at his desk. Every so often he would have a look at their work and give suggestions. Students also came to him whenever they needed to get advice. All in all the class was highly energised, hard at work and very quiet.
In the future I want my classes to run just like that. It must be wonderful to work in such a creative environment everyday and to have students who are for the most part happy to be in your class and interested in what you are teaching. Of course, St. Andrews is renowned for having ridiculously polite and studious kids, but I want to instil that that kind of environment no matter where I end up. I firmly believe that the teacher to a large extent sets the tone of the class.
Earlier on today a British recruitment agency, called Capita, set up a stall outside the education department with information booklets on teaching in the UK. I inquired about teaching Design in the UK, but was told that without Technology to go with it, it would probably be quite difficult to find a post. It didn’t come as much of a surprise really. Design and Technology basically forms single subject with two branches, which is precisely why I wanted to take both of them. Unfortunately for me however, the lecturer who teaches the Technology method at Rhodes is in America on a sabbatical for half this year, so I opted to take Visual Arts as a second course method.
Anyway, after chatting to the Capita lady I decided to speak to the Head of the Education department about taking just Technology next year to be able to get the teaching certificate in Design & Technology rather than Design & Visual Arts. She thought about it for a while, made a few phone calls and told me she might be able to arrange that I have private one on one classes with Keith at St. Andrews until the other lecturer gets back from the US in July.
Keith was understandably not too happy about having the added responsibility of teaching a whole other course method on top of the Design course method, which in turn is on top of a full day teaching D&T at his school. Nonetheless, my eagerness to do whatever it takes to get the Technology component must have won him over because by the end of the day he had already given me some 75 pages of reading on the structure of the subject and a tentative schedule. I also heard him saying to one of the other teachers in the department that he might make me a teaching assistant to speed up the learning process.
So I am thrilled. Everything is working out nicely in Grahamstown. It is a beautiful place, the university is just fantastic, every one of the lecturers I have had so far has been exceptional and now that I can take exactly the course method I want, with private tuition, by Keith of all people, my world couldn’t get much better.
