Chronicle Editor
Simbarashe Murima
TEACHING and learning remains principally didactic, meaning that the influence of education in society is rooted in the transmission of information that integrates diversity of students and academic developments.
This occurs in the external environment of education, which involves the need for high-level skills in the workplace, the digitalisation of daily life and the advent of innovative technologies for teaching.
Qualified lecturers are prized instruments for achieving effective teaching in higher education with a majority of them being experts in their fields.
It is, however, concerning to discover that quite a number of lecturers in tertiary institutions lack the fundamental pedagogical skills required to effectively teach students, thus qualifying some of these lecturers unfit for this purpose.
Having a mastery of specialist knowledge does not imply that a lecturer knows the techniques needed to effectively transfer that knowledge to students. Even PhD holders in certain fields of knowledge are not necessarily experts at teaching.
Nevertheless, professional development is understood as signifying the growth of educators in their teaching profession. There is a need for a teaching qualification, which should be mandatory to equip lecturers with pedagogical expertise and acquaintance.
Becoming a lecturer is a calling, and not child’s play. However, lecturing skills can be developed and improved by acquiring appropriate and progressive skills and knowledge on how to disseminate and deliver curriculum content to learners professionally.
Pedagogical skills are essential in teaching as they elevate the quality of the teaching-learning process.
Pedagogy in education exemplifies the convoluted relationship between the theory and practice of teaching, thus impelling the culture and approaches of learning.
Furthermore, instructional skills provide students with a deep and surface learning of the subject matter, which will ultimately improve all the skills, learning and development outcomes.
Pedagogical skills function as the linchpin for producing and refining learning techniques, talents and attitudes among students.
However, the primary goal of pedagogy comprehension by instructors is to help empower students with a profound understanding of training students to apply their knowledge in real-life situations beyond the precincts of the classroom environment.
As a result, higher education lecturers need suitable training to be able to teach well since some lack the competence to deliver quality teaching to their students.
In contrast, unlike teachers in primary and secondary schools, lecturers at tertiary institutions are not commanded to have a teaching qualification.
It is disconcerting to note that some lecturers in many tertiary institutions lack key pedagogical skills and abilities to convey and improve their teaching and continuous assessment.
A significant number of these lecturers possess an appalling and distorted attitude towards learners and spontaneously feel that students should simply work hard despite the difficulties they may be facing.
Some of these lecturers do not even attempt to make the courses they teach interesting or engaging, thus contravening the purpose of stimulating learning.
Such lecturers may realise that their teaching is awful, but create their summative assessments as easy as possible to make sure the students easily pass their exams, but then it makes it statistically appear as though they are better lecturers than they actually are.
Fascinatingly, some of these untrained lecturers cannot thoroughly understand their teaching content especially when using PowerPoint slides, they read slides word by word, with no further elaboration or support of lucid examples and some just read straight from the text-book and prepared notes.
These inexpert lecturers completely lack patience, understanding, knowledge and empathy, coupled by being blatantly mean and nasty to their students.
Therefore, these type of lecturers are a “hazard” to students’ declarative, procedural, conceptual and metacognitive knowledge acquisition.
I, therefore, uphold the notion that anyone who wants to be in the teaching profession pre or during university lecturing, is required to have teaching credentials to demonstrate that they have developed an indulgent pedagogical concentration surrounding their subject area.
This is to instil awareness that there is more to being able to teach a subject than just knowing it.
It should be a prerequisite for all aspiring and serving lecturers who do not have any teaching certificate to acquire one.
Higher and tertiary education stakeholders should provide training to help mitigate some of the aforementioned challenges faced by stakeholders as a result of inept lecturers in those respective academic institutions.
The impact of unqualified lecturers is subtly underrated by higher and tertiary institutions.
It is imperative for untaught lecturers to attain a teaching qualification to help expand their confidence and to extend expertise in teaching/learning capacities of different students, creativity and professional teaching propriety.
ν Simbarashe Murima (PhDc) writes in his own capacity as an education, tourism and hospitality expert in Namibia and Zimbabwe. He can be reached via email [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> or 0781480742/ +264814571709 (WhatsApp)
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