Lecturing with positivity in mind

I am a retired professor from a local university. Like all professors, we are experts in obscure areas of scholarship, and in my case, it is the neurophysiology of learning.

We have come into the limelight lately with the focus on our lecturing methods. It is interesting to note that while lecturing means “to give a formal talk on a serious subject”, the Cambridge Dictionary also says it is “an angry or serious talk given to someone in order to criticise their behaviour”, the very antithesis of what I think a good lecturer should be.

Yet, apparently on social media, there are those who think that being angry, abusive and highly critical is the best way to teach and learn. They talk of “tough love” and how their success was attributed to this.

Like the word “lecture”, tough love also has two different meanings. Proponents of negativity say tough love involves enforcing constraints and forcing others to take responsibility for their actions via restrictive actions, I don’t doubt that one bit at all.

Negativity and this form of tough love can lead to a measure of success, I suppose if you can call it that. You can be the best at anything if you are under the threat of failure.

A student with no opportunity to put forward different ideas or opinions of their own is a docile student, easily moulded by negativity to give good but uninspiring solutions to problems, always staying safe within their mediocrity. Never going out of the box. Never questioning the tough love that borders on becoming psychologically abusive.

Why choose negativity?

But why the negativity when you can achieve so much more through positivity? Positive lecturers believe in tough love too, but here it means an unconditional recognition of faults, overcoming them together and growing stronger through honest open communication.

I used to teach basic sciences in a faculty where every student is itching to find the cure for cancer or to resuscitate a seemingly hopeless case in the Intensive Care Unit. Although they cannot wait to get to the clinical years, they first have to endure what they think is the fundamentally boring study of normal structure (anatomy) and function (physiology).

How do I make physiology come alive? A highly challenging question for all lecturers. Do we choose positivity over negativity?

Lecturers need to be more than talking heads, spouting exactly word for word what is already in the text. Why would a student come to a lecture, if that stuff is already in the books? Why would they even pay attention, when the dreaded PowerPoint slides mirror what is already in the book?

It’s always a nice day to be out by the beach than it is to be lectured. Besides, the exam questions always came from those slides anyway. There has to be more.

A good lecturer inspires. A good lecturer philosophises. A good lecturer makes everything simple without being simplistic. Physiology is boring you say? It’s about balance, equilibrium, and function over form. It’s about the beauty and grandeur of God’s creation. Yes, students can do just as well if you teach by threats, or you teach with thought.

But good teacher searches for what is not in the texts and links them to the mundane and becomes inspirational in the process. There are as many ways to skin a cat as there are ways to learn. A good lecturer will allow you to learn by reading the text or listening to the audio, or by going online with your computer.

Not having a computer does not matter. Not being from a higher income group does not matter. It’s not about privilege or affordability. Anyone can learn the same thing in different ways. It just needs the guidance of a lecturer with a positive outlook, to point the student in the right direction in the best possible way. Learning is a two-way process.

I think that in all those long years I have been lecturing, I have learned more from my students than they have from me. A truly humbling experience. Thank you, my dear students, for having taught this old professor a thing or two about empathy, sympathy and positivity.

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DR ZALINA ISMAIL is former professor in Neurophysiology at the School of Health Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia and Fellow of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research. - Mkini