Be there or be square: the strange art of lecturing | Teaching and learning - Times Higher Education

A PowerPoint marathon or a ‘captured’ lecture will always be a pale i mitation of a live experience, in which an expert practitioner taps into ‘the dangerous energy of all those watching eyes’, says Richard Sugg, has lectured in English and cultural history at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.

 Photo: Getty Images

Nine o’clock on a cold, dark, winter’s morning. You are trapped. Two hundred pairs of eyes are staring down intently at you from a height. Deep in the ancient reptile stem of the brain, angry voices shout at you: “Why are 200 people all staring at you from a height? Because they are going to kill you and eat you. Why else?”

In almost 20 years of lecturing – at the universities of Southampton, Cardiff and Durham – they never did. And yet a nagging edge of this fear always remains for many lecturers, even when something alarmingly extraordinary becomes more ordinary over time. The sense that eyes are more of a problem than bodies was pinpointed nicely by a colleague of mine at Southampton. Her solution to lecturing nerves was simple: she took off the glasses she wore for distance vision.

In the early days and weeks of mastering this art, the theory of the carefully written lecture can easily melt under the fierce heat of all those curious eyes. For those who find this a problem, it is a problem of pressure, of too much presence, too much energy, compressed into one space for a brief time.

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The furthest extreme of the PowerPoint lecture is an obsessively tech-dominated 50 minutes of images and text in a dark room. At one level, with so much textual content and quotation projected up in cinematic fashion, we already find a reframing of that basic question: are you there? Is the audience listening to you or are they reading a summarised book chapter? After all, if some students find that there is too little of you to bother getting up for a 9am slot, then why shouldn’t they just plead sick and call up the PowerPoint version at a later date?

But the real point is that the students can barely see the lecturer, even if they want to. And if they cannot see your eyes, they are not just losing you. They are losing the excitement of real knowledge, there in your eyes: something really shown, not merely said; something very hard to fake.

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Source: Times Higher Education