I started thinking about this in my own context after coming across this post from Stephen Downes.
The role of the teacher is expanding into more diverse fields than ever before. Not only must the teacher have a strong foundation in their professional discipline but they are increasingly expected to take on new roles on a fairly regular basis. What does this look like?
Roles of the teacher
- They must become expert teachers. In addition to disciplinary expertise, teachers must also become experts at being teachers. Which means that they must become experts in learning.
- They must learn to use, and adapt with, the increasing array of technology used in the learning environment.
- They’re often expected to provide technical support (because even though it’s not their actual responsibility, who does the student email the day before the assignment is due?)
- They must become content creators, editing video, audio, and multimedia presentations to provide excellent learning experiences for their students.
- They must curate the best resources from an exponentially expanding pool of freely available content.
- They must develop an online identity to complement their classroom identity.
- They must develop a professional brand so that they can market themselves (and their institutions) on social media.
- They must publish, not only in their professional discipline, but on the topic of pedagogy as well.
- They must be writers.
- They must be, at the very least, familiar with concepts in social justice, racial justice, and critical consciousness.
- They must provide social, psychological, and emotional support for students.
- They must build online and physical communities of learning i.e. they must be organisers.
- They must be excellent administrators. Manage budgets. Prepare reports. Chair faculty committees.
Unbundling the role of the teacher
I came up with this list without thinking about it very carefully, or for very long. I’m sure there are other roles not included here. At some point we should probably ask if it’s reasonable to expect a single person to fill all of these roles. At the current scale of teaching (let’s say, 1 teacher for about 50-60 students in higher education), it doesn’t make any sense to have more people in these other roles because it would be too expensive. But if you grow the size of the cohort – something that MOOCs, for example, aim to facilitate – you get better economies of scale. At some point it becomes viable, or perhaps desirable, to unbundle the the role of the teacher and have different people providing different services to students at different times.
If you had to choose only one of these roles to occupy for the rest of your career, which one would it be?
Note: For the sake of argument, I’ve avoided the idea that some of these roles will be taken over by narrow artificial intelligence. It just complicates things and isn’t necessary to make the point. But of course, that’s the more likely scenario.