DALVision 2020: Nick Mount on why everyone’s talking teaching

If there’s a teaching crisis in undergraduate education, Nick Mount doesn’t believe that it’s necessarily in the classroom.

“I’m not convinced that teaching itself is in a state of crisis in the academy,” says Dr. Mount, who is associate chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto and a 3M National Teaching Fellow (Canada’s highest teaching award). “The crisis is a numbers crisis.”

And it’s a collision of those numbers, he says — rising enrolments matched with fewer teachers and declining teaching loads among existing faculty — that’s sparking the discussion about teaching in the 21st century taking place in newspaper columns, government chambers and the hallways of universities themselves.

Dr. Mount is bringing those discussions to campus on Tuesday, Nov. 13 as one of the keynote speakers at the DALVision 2020 Senate Forum on Undergraduate Education. With lectures, panel discussions and World Café, it’s an opportunity for Dal’s academic community — faculty, staff and students — to take charge of a conversation that, according to Dr. Mount, is dominated by outside voices.

“We need more teachers participating in the conversation. Right now, it’s miniscule. And that’s not surprising when we know that it’s research, by and large, that establishes pecking order among academics. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, just that you can’t tell academics you’re going to reward this behaviour more than that behaviour, then be surprised when they care more about the first behaviour.”

Sparking a dialogue

Dr. Mount, a two-time Dal grad (MA’94, PhD’01), is an accomplished author and scholar with teaching accolades to spare. In addition to his 3M Fellowship, he’s a two-time finalist in TVO’s Best Lecturer Competition, has won both the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Outstanding Teaching Award and the President’s Teaching Award at the University of Toronto, and has a National Magazine Silver Award to his name as well.

He’s worried that too much of the dialogue around undergraduate teaching is being left to those on the periphery of the classroom, hence his keynote’s title: “The Talk About Teachers Today: Why scholarship thinks we're ignorant, Margaret Wente hates us, and the world still needs us.”

He says that in the current economic climate, and with more challenging job prospects for grads with an undergraduate degree, the world outside the academy is taking an interest in university teaching in a way it never has before.

“The attention itself is absolutely deserved. I think the conversation is a great thing to have happening, and when it comes to the criticisms I think we often deserve many of them. I just get very worried when people who know nothing about the academy start coming up with solutions, and I don’t think that a lot of the solutions being kicked around are necessarily the right way to go.”

Want to hear more from Dr. Mount about the sources of the rising interest in university teaching? Attend the DALVision 2020 Senate Forum on Tuesday, November 13 — with sessions in both Halifax and Truro — or watch the webcast live online.