God and Nature 2025 #1
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Just Starting Out
By Mike Clifford
For the last three years, in my role as Faculty Adviser, I’ve had the privilege of observing over 50 new lecturers deliver teaching sessions to students across the University. These observations are part of the Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, a course designed to prepare colleagues new to teaching for the joys and delights of lecturing to classes ranging from five to over 300 students. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen, and even more so by the dedication and commitment these fledgling lecturers showed to improve their teaching practice in the conversations we’ve had before and after the sessions. Of course, not everything has been perfect, but in 98% of cases, I’ve been able to provide encouragement rather than rebuke. To parody George Orwell’s Animal Farm: all our staff are excellent, but some are more excellent than others.
When giving feedback, it’s all too tempting to say, “Well, if I were giving that class, I’d do it like this.” But I’ve tried my hardest to listen more than to advise and to ask open questions like “How do you think it went?” and “What would you do differently next time around?” before sharing a little of my rather unorthodox teaching pedagogy. The observant may have already noted that on the poster right outside my office door which lists my teaching duties is the tagline “starting the revolution one lecture at a time”.
I can’t remember having much in the way of peer observation when I started out, apart from my mentor commenting that one session she witnessed was more like a sermon than a lecture. To this day, I’m not entirely sure whether that was a compliment, as I’m sure that the churchgoers among us have heard good sermons, bad sermons, challenging sermons, and sermons that weren’t exciting, whatever that means. In those distant days, there was very little preparation for teaching, so mostly I copied the good lecturers that I’d observed during my undergraduate degree and hoped for the best. Two examples stuck in my mind: a thermodynamics prof who only scribbled occasionally on the blackboard but had a knack for explaining concepts like entropy without them seeming esoteric, and a law lecturer, who was quirky, to say the least.
Teaching engineering students the intricacies of contract law doesn’t sound like a very tempting prospect, but the prof in question made the lectures memorable, interesting, and exciting. Our introduction to Professor JC (I won’t name him in full for fear of getting into trouble, although I suspect that he’s long dead) was unpromising. The class sat patiently while an elderly man leaning on a walking stick limped his way to the front of the lecture hall. He wound down the focus arm of the overhead projector (cutting-edge technology for the 1980s) and hung his walking stick on the projector. Prof JC turned his head rather theatrically to read the “NO SMOKING” sign on the wall, pulled a cigarette out of a packet from inside his jacket pocket, and proceeded to chain-smoke his way through the next ten weeks of lectures. Thirty-five years later, I can still remember his opening words to the class: “You think I’m here to teach you about contract law, but I’m here to tell you stories about Bartók, church mice, and red-haired Irish nurses.” I was hooked—I’ve always loved hearing a good story.
Storytelling forms the basis for most of my teaching. Sometimes these stories are presented as case studies, something that most engineers are familiar with—the ship that sank, the aircraft that crashed, the factory that improved productivity, the design that changed everything, and so on. But often I tell stories that have less clear-cut meanings.
I started using drama and storytelling early on in my career as a lecturer after reviewing some existing practice and literature on the use of performance techniques in the post-compulsory education sector and creative approaches to teaching and learning. My approach sets out to reclaim the lecture as a dynamic teaching tool and to engage students by arousing curiosity, generating suspense and wonder, making the lecture a sense of occasion, and raising expectation that the teaching session would be worth attending. I see storytelling as an entry point to introduce complex topics such as sustainability, as well as a means of supporting the needs of visual learners and those with shorter attention spans. It’s not simply about entertainment—there needs to be careful consideration to the link between the costume/story/drama and the module learning outcomes. Despite my pedagogical grounding, I suspect that not all my colleagues are convinced of my approach.
Jesus’ disciples were also a bit puzzled why Jesus didn’t just tell it straight. In Matthew 13, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you tell stories?”
Jesus replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it. (Matt 13:11-15, The Message)*
I love that phrase: “to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening.” Sometimes giving a lecture can feel a bit like trying to wake the dead, but I hope that through stories we can create readiness to learn truths about engineering as well as truths eternal.
*Peterson, Eugene H. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. NavPress, 2002.
Mike Clifford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are in combustion, biomass briquetting, cookstove design, and other appropriate technologies. He has published over 80 refereed conference and journal publications and has contributed chapters to books on composites processing and on appropriate and sustainable technologies.
By Mike Clifford
For the last three years, in my role as Faculty Adviser, I’ve had the privilege of observing over 50 new lecturers deliver teaching sessions to students across the University. These observations are part of the Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, a course designed to prepare colleagues new to teaching for the joys and delights of lecturing to classes ranging from five to over 300 students. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen, and even more so by the dedication and commitment these fledgling lecturers showed to improve their teaching practice in the conversations we’ve had before and after the sessions. Of course, not everything has been perfect, but in 98% of cases, I’ve been able to provide encouragement rather than rebuke. To parody George Orwell’s Animal Farm: all our staff are excellent, but some are more excellent than others.
When giving feedback, it’s all too tempting to say, “Well, if I were giving that class, I’d do it like this.” But I’ve tried my hardest to listen more than to advise and to ask open questions like “How do you think it went?” and “What would you do differently next time around?” before sharing a little of my rather unorthodox teaching pedagogy. The observant may have already noted that on the poster right outside my office door which lists my teaching duties is the tagline “starting the revolution one lecture at a time”.
I can’t remember having much in the way of peer observation when I started out, apart from my mentor commenting that one session she witnessed was more like a sermon than a lecture. To this day, I’m not entirely sure whether that was a compliment, as I’m sure that the churchgoers among us have heard good sermons, bad sermons, challenging sermons, and sermons that weren’t exciting, whatever that means. In those distant days, there was very little preparation for teaching, so mostly I copied the good lecturers that I’d observed during my undergraduate degree and hoped for the best. Two examples stuck in my mind: a thermodynamics prof who only scribbled occasionally on the blackboard but had a knack for explaining concepts like entropy without them seeming esoteric, and a law lecturer, who was quirky, to say the least.
Teaching engineering students the intricacies of contract law doesn’t sound like a very tempting prospect, but the prof in question made the lectures memorable, interesting, and exciting. Our introduction to Professor JC (I won’t name him in full for fear of getting into trouble, although I suspect that he’s long dead) was unpromising. The class sat patiently while an elderly man leaning on a walking stick limped his way to the front of the lecture hall. He wound down the focus arm of the overhead projector (cutting-edge technology for the 1980s) and hung his walking stick on the projector. Prof JC turned his head rather theatrically to read the “NO SMOKING” sign on the wall, pulled a cigarette out of a packet from inside his jacket pocket, and proceeded to chain-smoke his way through the next ten weeks of lectures. Thirty-five years later, I can still remember his opening words to the class: “You think I’m here to teach you about contract law, but I’m here to tell you stories about Bartók, church mice, and red-haired Irish nurses.” I was hooked—I’ve always loved hearing a good story.
Storytelling forms the basis for most of my teaching. Sometimes these stories are presented as case studies, something that most engineers are familiar with—the ship that sank, the aircraft that crashed, the factory that improved productivity, the design that changed everything, and so on. But often I tell stories that have less clear-cut meanings.
I started using drama and storytelling early on in my career as a lecturer after reviewing some existing practice and literature on the use of performance techniques in the post-compulsory education sector and creative approaches to teaching and learning. My approach sets out to reclaim the lecture as a dynamic teaching tool and to engage students by arousing curiosity, generating suspense and wonder, making the lecture a sense of occasion, and raising expectation that the teaching session would be worth attending. I see storytelling as an entry point to introduce complex topics such as sustainability, as well as a means of supporting the needs of visual learners and those with shorter attention spans. It’s not simply about entertainment—there needs to be careful consideration to the link between the costume/story/drama and the module learning outcomes. Despite my pedagogical grounding, I suspect that not all my colleagues are convinced of my approach.
Jesus’ disciples were also a bit puzzled why Jesus didn’t just tell it straight. In Matthew 13, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you tell stories?”
Jesus replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it. (Matt 13:11-15, The Message)*
I love that phrase: “to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening.” Sometimes giving a lecture can feel a bit like trying to wake the dead, but I hope that through stories we can create readiness to learn truths about engineering as well as truths eternal.
*Peterson, Eugene H. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. NavPress, 2002.
Mike Clifford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are in combustion, biomass briquetting, cookstove design, and other appropriate technologies. He has published over 80 refereed conference and journal publications and has contributed chapters to books on composites processing and on appropriate and sustainable technologies.