Call in Spanish the Consumers' View

Abstract

In any language-teaching institution the teaching staff can legitimately be seen as consumers of the various teaching aids which are commercially available, ranging from the staple diet of books, set texts, secondary reading, to video material, slides, computer software, etc. Another way of interpreting the principle of consumership is that the students are the ultimate beneficiaries of the materials we use in our teaching. The extent to which our students benefit from our teaching is largely dependent on the materials that we have at our disposal. ‘Bad materials = bad teaching’ is a rather simplistic way of looking at this issue, but one which has a lot to commend itself in my view. Would we change our teaching methods if our students made constructive criticism? In a recent temporary teaching post I held as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, I was struck by the importance given across the board in the USA to official student surveys carried out by the college administration based on the professors' performance, the results of which can be crucial in the securement of tenure. The attitude in the UK (at least in the universities) is totally at odds with this particular sense of consumership, and one can imagine the degree of resistance that a plan to introduce a similar system of student assessment of lecturers might meet in this country, most obviously because students are not consumers in this country in quite the same sense that they are in the USA. Although the student assessment system itself clearly has its pitfalls there are some positive things to be gained from surveys of this kind, in that they can be very informative about student response to courses, teaching methods, etc., and can lead the way to improved teacher-student relations.