The Queens’ Prizes for Outstanding Contribution to College Education are designed to recognise excellent teaching of students of Queens’ College. Nominations for this prize, which can come from students or supervisors, are reviewed by a panel chaired by the Senior Tutor and including student members.
How do you see your role as a supervisor? What is your contribution to your students’ education?
To begin with, I am very focussed on essay structure. Students come from such a variety of different backgrounds, so at the beginning I want to help them figure out how to write essays here at Cambridge that will do well and get a good response.
I am also very focussed on quality of argument, probably more so than pure engagement with the text. I want to make sure that my students produce good arguments that are well structured and that meet the demands. If they do that, then I’m happy.
Thirdly, I give my students the opportunity to choose topics that they are most interested in, because then they have more fun with it and that puts them in a better frame of mind when they go into their exams. So I let them pick their topics from the sixteen options and pair them on that basis to get as much topic overlap as possible.
Why is learning to construct and critique an argument so important to you?
I think in Politics the number one skill we give people, especially those who don’t continue into postgraduate study, is the ability to evaluate a set of claims: whether they fit together, whether they are valid, whether the premises on which they are based are true. So we try to get people to be more precise in the way they engage arguments and to engage steel-man versions of arguments – the best, most persuasive version of arguments – rather than quickly deciding that they don’t like where the argument is going and simply dismissing it.
If I can get my students to move away from attacking straw men and get them to go after steel men, when they do engage with an argument they don’t like, they will engage in a more precise and interesting way.
So, how do you build or encourage those ways of thinking, reasoning and engaging through supervisions and set work?
I will often ask questions that invite students to express their own view. Then if I see a student being very quick to dismiss an argument, I put on the hat of the person that they have been reading and, in the comments, give the counter-arguments that I imagine that person would give.
My students often think that I support the person that they have been reading and I have to explain that I don’t! My point is that you have to fully understand the argument before you can pick on it in the most precise and persuasive way. Otherwise if you run into someone who does agree with that argument, you won’t stand any chance of changing their mind. So, I frame this as a device for helping students to win arguments in their lives.
What influenced this approach to supervising that you have developed?
I thought back to when I was an undergraduate: I would have wanted more focus on whether my argument was good and less focus on how many things I cited. And, I would have wanted a more authentic style of engagement: I talk to my students like adults, like fully formed people who are entitled to pick the topics they want and have the opinions they want. I try to speak to them in an informal way; I dispense with the hierarchy between myself and them to make them feel that it’s a more even-handed engagement.
I think, or at least based on the feedback, that that has been something the students have really responded to. So then when I am critical, it doesn’t feel like some faceless critique: it’s framed in a way that is friendly and all about helping them. I always try to put that first: how is this about helping you?
When did you start to supervise, and do you think that there are particular qualities postgraduate students can bring to supervising?
This is now my third year supervising, so the award is for my second year of teaching. At least in my experience, postgraduate students tend to spend more time on essays and leave more thorough comments. We are closer in age and lived experience to the students, so it is easier for us to develop a rapport, because we don’t feel like their secondary school teacher, or their father, or a distant or intimidating authority figure. That makes it easier for me to do the things that I would try to do anyway if I were older, but I might find that there were more barriers in the way.
What does it mean to you to be nominated and selected for this award?
In this line of work we often hear nice things and get good feedback from individual people, but to have it from the institution and from the whole cohort makes those compliments that I have received in the past much more meaningful and substantive. It is very significant and has given me a lot of confidence, both in teaching here and going forward in life. It means a lot to me and I would like to thank the students and the committee for running these awards and for picking me.
Do you have any idea what ‘going forward’ might look like for you? Where would you like to be in a year or so’s time?
There are a lot of things I might consider doing but at the moment I’m not sure what people will let me do! I try not to be overly committal in my engagement with the future because I want to stay open to a variety of things that people might offer me. I would be very happy to stay in academia, perhaps in Cambridge, if the opportunity arises. If not, there are other things I could imagine doing, such as going back home to Indiana for instance. I try to stay open to possibility without over-committing myself to anything because then if I don’t get exactly what I want I would be disappointed.
Nominations for the 2018/2019 Queens' Prizes for Outstanding Contribution to College Education will open in September and nominations can be made through the Queens' website. Anyone with any questions about this prize and scheme should contact Dr Meg Tait.
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