Getting to Grips With: LECTURING


I’ve been doing some bits of graduate teaching since I started my PhD at Liverpool, mostly small group seminar teaching, with a smattering of advanced Latin language teaching thrown in at the end of the Spring term last year.  I’ve enjoyed putting the principles of my graduate teaching training into practice while exploring a variety of subject areas outside of my main PhD research, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Roman expansion, and the afterlife of the Trojan war in later literature.  It’s been great to revisit materials I had worked on in the past, and, as cliché as it sounds, it has been inspiring and humbling to encourage students in their exploration of these topics and enhance their critical analysis skills with each class. 

Every academic year brings new challenges, and this year, I was offered the incredible opportunity to do some lecturing! Not only would I be able to further develop my teaching skills, but I would be lecturing on Lucan (for a very short intro, click here: www.ancient.eu/Marcus_Annaeus_Lucanus/ ), and dabbling in some all-important ‘research-led teaching’ as I touched upon some key areas and themes of my own work. We decided that I would take two lectures, the first on Book 6 of Lucan’s epic (with particular focus on the necromancy!), and the second on a broader thematic topic (violence in Lucan), and, needless to say, I scurried away from that supervision meeting eager to start planning.
As I sat down to plan out my lectures and gather suitable passages of text for my slides, I paused to think about some of the key differences between seminar teaching and lecturing, and how I would (theoretically) overcome any difficulties in presenting material in this way. Some key points came to mind…

Seminars:
-As the tutor, you are responsible for guiding discussions and offering suggestions in relation to pre-prepared (in theory) primary and secondary reading material.
-You are not (always) expected to be delivering the content itself, but encouraging students to think critically about material in a variety of ways.
-These are fundamentally interactive classes.

Lectures:
-You are expected to deliver content (lots of content) to a larger audience. And people expect you to know what you are talking about.
-(Generally) Less interaction between students and lecturer than in a seminar setting.
-People sometimes fall asleep in lectures.

Based on these points, I decided to try and make the content and slides of both my lectures as engaging and aesthetically pleasing as possible.  After all, even if people are drifting in and out of concentration, they might just remember a fun picture (or meme) which jogs their memory further down the line.  Fortunately, I had several long train journeys around the country prior to each of my lectures, so I used this time to put together the visual aspects of my lectures (lack of decent wifi on trains and my lack of foresight when it came to packing novels meant that this became a very engaging activity), and create a rough outline and script of what I intended to say.   

When the time actually came for me to deliver each of my lectures, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my nerves and misgivings were, for the most part, gone.  I’d gone over the lectures a couple of times by myself, so I knew that they ran to time and that all of the slides I’d prepared were functioning properly.  I knew that there would be friendly and encouraging faces in the audience (some students I’d taught during the previous academic year, plus my ever-supportive supervisor), so I wouldn’t be facing a room of stony expressions.  

As the first lecture got underway, I was glad that I had opted to create a brief outline of my lecture content rather than a formal script.  This strategy meant that I could talk to rather than at the class, and not appear as though I was choosing to ignore my audience in favour of a piece of paper.  This also gave me the flexibility to play around with the amount of time spent on certain areas of the lecture or specific individual examples as and when I thought the class could benefit from closer scrutiny of some of the text. 


Title slides!


I found the whole process of preparing and actually delivering my lectures incredibly useful, as it helped me break down some of my ideas into brief, accessible, bitesize points.  It’s always important to think about how you can make your research engaging and exciting for a non-specialist audience, without losing any key ideas and thoughts in the process.  All of the students were studying Classics (or some variation of Classics), but were encountering Lucan for the first time through this module.  When I first started planning the lectures, I found myself often getting carried away with the tiny details of my own research, which, while fascinating to me (and maybe 5 other people), are not absolutely crucial for someone looking to approach Lucan’s text for the very first time.  This process gave me plenty of food for thought for future public engagement projects, and for how I go about writing conference papers for interdisciplinary audiences who may not be intimately familiar with the ancient texts I refer to. 

All in all, I had a great experience doing my first little bit of lecturing! I feel as though I learnt as much as the students (hopefully they learnt something!), and I look forward to doing more lecture-based teaching in future, as well as creating more Lucan-themed memes…



Small smattering of Lucan memes ;)



Elaine Over & Out
Classics and Ancient History PhD student at the University of Liverpool, working on Lucan, Necromancy, and Civil War. Generously funded by the AHRC NWCDTP. Also enjoys music, polo, and gin. For more information, head here: www.nwcdtp.ac.uk/current-students/student-profiles/elaine-sanderson/

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