The School of English Studies is delighted to announce that Dr Gordon Ramsay is one of 55 academics to have been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship, worth £10,000, by the Higher Education Academy. Dr Ramsay's award recognises his innovative and student led approach to teaching drama and performance in the School.
The National Teaching Fellowships recognise excellence in higher education teaching and support for learning and are awarded to academic staff across higher education institutions across England, Northern Ireland and Wales.
Dr Ramsay is described in his citation as “…one of the School’s most outstanding and inventive teachers… his achievements are well known across the University because his students enthuse about his lectures to friends and family… he has a tremendous and life-long impact on the students he teaches. His methods are the result of his determination to put the student experience of learning at the heart of what he does, which makes learning an exciting and rewarding endeavour… The University values Dr Ramsay’s achievements in the classroom very highly.”
PROFILE — Dr Gordon Ramsay
Lecturer in Drama and Performance, School of English Studies
Dr Gordon Ramsay wants students to be as excited as he is about his subject area. His teaching is based on creating environments which develop students’ confidence and trust in their own voice, along with a capacity to engage with, reflect on and learn from the work of their peers. The best teaching should be unforgettable and Gordon sees his brief is to enhance students’ capacity to challenge and question theoretical as well as peer assumptions. This involves disruption of the conventional lecture format and disruption of the teaching space itself.
Gordon works with a high degree of energy and enthusiasm and this rubs off on students. If he has a maxim or touchstone, or even the beginning of a manifesto, he supposes it is to imagine that each session is the last session he will ever teach, the last session the students will ever attend.
He believes that together, teachers and learners owe it to themselves to be as intellectually adventurous as they are rigorous; to think and say what they may not have previously thought or said; and to listen to, observe and assess each other’s thoughts and actions with equal measures of acuteness and generosity. And while they should be at ease with each other, the teaching environment should not be too comfortable. If it is, nothing is happening; we are simply going through the motions.
Gordon is deeply committed to widening participation and particularly to the development of collaborative relationships with the wider community. This latter blurs the boundary between university and the wider world, and serves to enrich student knowledge, experience and understanding.
More information about the National Teaching Fellowships
Posted on Monday 15th August 2011