After scooping a Distinguished Lecturer award, Dr Taryn Bernard from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences says she sees the award as recognition for the effort she has put into the design of her curricula.

Launched in 2017, the Stellenbosch University Teaching Excellence Awards acknowledge lecturers in two categories, “Distinguished Teacher" and “Developing Teacher", based on their experience and leadership in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Applicants had to submit a portfolio that demonstrated their reflection on and evidence of four main components: context, students, knowledge and professional growth. They also had to indicate the lessons they had learnt on their journey to becoming excellent teachers.

With eleven years in the teaching profession under her belt, Bernard highlights the importance for lecturers to pay attention to the difficulties students face when entering university and the mechanisms that can be used to support students.

Why did you choose teaching as a career?

“Probably like many academics, I chose research as a career and the teaching part was something that I needed to do in order to engage in the research I wanted to do. I was not a good teacher at first; I was shy and intimidated by big classrooms. But as I started to feel more comfortable and developed my own teaching style, which involved a lot of moving around and questions and writing on the blackboard, I started to see teaching as a very important aspect of my job."

What have been some of your career highlights?

“I love travelling and teaching in other countries. A big highlight for me this year was travelling to Kenya to present a course in critical discourse analysis at the University of Nairobi. Teaching critical methods of language analysis to a class of second-language speakers of English is a tall order, but the course was well received and in the end we all learnt something about culture and communication from each other."

What have been some of the biggest career challenges?

“Working on an extended programme has always been a significant challenge for me. Unfortunately, these programmes mostly remain an undesirable part of the South African Higher Education (HE) system, which means I often have to motivate people to see the relevance and importance of these programmes and the key role they play in transforming the South African HE sector."

 Why did you enter into this award?

“I knew that as a young academic it was important for me to have a teaching portfolio. The opportunity to win an award was just an added bonus."

 What does it mean to win the Distinguished Teacher/Developing Teacher award?

I see winning the Distinguished Teacher award for 2019 as an enormous accomplishment, especially because I am still an early career researcher. I see the award as recognition for the effort I put into the design of my curricula, the way I teach, but also recognition for my knowledge of the scholarship of teaching and learning. I think it is important for lecturers to pay attention to the difficulties students face when entering university and the mechanisms we can use to support them in this process. I see the award system as a way of recognising all the hard work and time that goes into being a good educator."

What impact will this award have on your teaching career going forward?

Starting a teaching portfolio from scratch was a mammoth task but it is now something that I need to keep updated, a “living document". In order to do this properly, I need to always be aware of my teaching philosophy, how it changes over time and how I implement it in the classroom. This is bound to have a massive impact on my teaching career going forward."

When you are not busy teaching, what are some of your favourites hobbies and why?

“I have a lot of hobbies, too many to mention. I listen to a lot of music. When I'm in need of a break, I walk around our beautiful campus to get a coffee. I always feel so grateful to work in such a beautiful environment."

 What do you hope to impart to students that you teach?

“I find it very rewarding to teach students about the complexities of language – how we use it to construct our own identities and the identities of others in ways that can be both empowering and disempowering. The term for this is critical language awareness, and I think it's a skill everyone should have."

Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

This year, I went on a journey into coding and exploring quantitative data – a journey which ended with me regaining my love and appreciation of qualitative data. In five years' time I would like to have completed a longitudinal ethnographic study that documents the movement of a particular group of multilingual and multicultural students through the higher education system. There is still so much to learn about diversity and resilience, and so much of this can only be found in the stories students tell about themselves and their worlds.

*The above-mentioned candidates will receive her award during a ceremony at the end of the fourth quarter.

For more information about the Teaching Excellence Awards, contact Dr Karin Cattell-Holden at [email protected] or 021 808 3074.