34 Years

A semi-biographical article by Bea Groves

Transcript

1. /home/bea/Documents/Personal/34 Years - Bea Groves 25-4-14.odt 34 Years by Beatrix E. Groves I think my mother is still waiting for me to get a proper job. She really doesn't understand what being a 'part-time tutor' is. She exists in a far-off era where the contract culture was a rarity, and teaching was a respected profession. Where teachers were people who could countersign your passport application, akin in status to doctors and solicitors. I never intended to end up teaching in further education. In truth, I ended up in the profession by accident. I was one of Thatcher's millions. Unemployed and with no hope of a job. When you're out of hope in such a profound way, you think of yourself as prematurely retired... at the age of twenty-four. It's better than using the term 'unemployed', which reeks of the media's howl of skiving and dependency. Better than being dehumanised. Some things never change. In order to pass the time productively I went to a music appreciation course organised by the Workers' Educational Association. This was quite a revolution for me, as I literally hated my schooling. I had a bad time of it with bullying and the pressure of being academic. So going back to any sort of school-type environment was the last thing I wanted. But I liked classical music, and ended up loving the WEA. The tutor listened to me and valued my opinion. I was treated with respect, which was a huge antidote to the horrors of the dole queue. But in the post-Easter period there were no courses. As per usual, there had been government funding cuts, and the WEA was running a two-term year. In desperation, I offered to organise the little student group over the summer. We would meet in each others houses and continue to listen and talk about music on our own. So it started. I enjoyed being 'the leader'. I loved that I was still listened to. But better still: I realised very quickly how much I had to share with others. It wasn't so much that I knew a lot about music, but that I had a knack for communicating it. Purely instinctive, crude and poorly organised, but a knack nevertheless. Having continued this voluntary 'teaching' for a year or two, I finally decided to ask if I could do it on a paid basis for the WEA. But I was told (wrongly, as it happens!) that the Association only employed qualified tutors. This threw me into despair for while, but then one day I saw an ad' in the local newspaper which said “Teach anything to anyone...”. It was for something called the City & Guilds 730 at my local college. I took this as a sign of destiny, and signed up! Quite brave of me really, as I was still somewhat education-phobic, even then. The 730 proved to be the hardest work I've ever done in my life. I was literally absorbed in it every Bea Groves 25/04/2014 Page 1 of 4
2. /home/bea/Documents/Personal/34 Years - Bea Groves 25-4-14.odt single day, and if it hadn't been for my growing skill and enthusiasm, and the support of some excellent tutors (including the legendary Margaret Bell), I would never have managed it. Similarly, I owe a lot to WEA District Secretary Michael Standen, who gave me paid teaching practice hours with the WEA around the area. He somehow saw something in me that others did not, and I will always be grateful for his kindness. He also managed to include me as the only male tutor on a Women's Education program course! This was to prove ironic, to say the least. Within two years of the 730 I had studied a second teachers' certificate (in computing). Teaching music history and appreciation was fun, but it didn't bring in much of an income, even by late 1980's standards. So diversification into a subject area in demand seemed sensible. Before long I was teaching for the WEA, local college, local Peoples Centre, and various other large and small bodies. The contracts came in, and I was 'hooked'. I loved education. Not in a saintly 'I'm doing this for my students' way, but in a more egotistical search for stolen identity and self-respect. The fact that my students often were in search of the same thing was a serendipitous, and led me to be a very popular tutor. But where was the permanency? I had done my duty, trained as hard as I could, expanded my skills and updated them (all of this before CPD became a religion, and all off my own bat), but still I was on repeating contracts. I consoled myself with the 'gun-slinger' myth: I was a hired gun who worked for the highest bidder, and had no truck with allying myself with a cause! But I knew this was just romantic aversion to a growing truth. I was exploited. By businesses that wanted hands for the wheel when they had money, but ignored me the rest of the time. No matter how good I got, not matter how expert I was, or how perfect my acclimatisation to policy changes... I was always going to be expendable. Even a first class honours degree in FE, and an LCGI from the City & Guilds made no great appreciable difference to my working stability or income. It was even difficult to get into a Union. Though the WEA's history meant it had close ties with unions, I found that when I asked about joining I wasn't made too welcome. The attitude was – unions were for the full-time staff, not the come-and-go plebs like me. I started to realise I was part of a new class of people that Thatcherism had created. A new working class, if you will: part-time workers who sold their time, but had no clear tie to anyone or any anything. We were the 'real' workers, hidden behind an older proletariat that had been suckered into buying their own council houses and investing in de-nationalised utilities. They had moved on (or thought they had). But we filled the economic gap, cheaper than they had ever been. So one day I was at work. I had just finished teaching, and bumped into a fellow tutor just as we were going to a meeting. She said to me in passing, 'Y'know I wish we had a support group, or something. I never get to meet anyone else like me, who teaches'. I took her remark to heart, and decided to call a small meeting of the dozen or so tutor (trainers, lecturers...) that I personally knew. We sat down one afternoon in 1995 in a room at Wallsend Peoples Centre, and debated the possibility of some network or other that would help promote and support part-time issues. Out of Bea Groves 25/04/2014 Page 2 of 4
3. /home/bea/Documents/Personal/34 Years - Bea Groves 25-4-14.odt this, APTT was born: the Association of Part-Time Tutors, a support, campaigning and training group for anyone working as a part-timer in the post-compulsory education sector. Within a year or two we were a constituted voluntary body, and had 300 members from around Tyneside (and also further afield). We developed and ran our own accredited training courses (via Open College), put on training days, gave advice, and worked very closely with the regional officers of the NATFHE and AUT unions. We weren't a union, but we had a small amount of power for the first time, and we were listened to. APTT flourished throughout the nineties and early noughties. Only to meet its nemesis with the invention of the Institute for Learning (IfL). Because it was compulsory to join IfL under the then regulations, many of APTT's members found themselves in a far better funded and organised body than we could ever offer in our own 'part-time' way. Slowly numbers declined, and interest in the Association died. I don't regret this happening. In many ways it was the issue of casualised part-timing that mattered, not the vehicle for its discussion and analysis. Hence, as long as contractual tutors held a degree of influence within IfL it was an organisation worth supporting. I joined. But my life changed in other ways at the same time. I came out as a transgender woman in 2008. After years of searching for identity, I was finally brave enough to do something serious about it. It was a chaotic, damaging, stressful and traumatic year. I was uncertain that I would even have a career. Would adult students take to Bea Groves the same way as they had taken to her caterpillar-like male predecessor? As it happened, they did, much to my utter astonishment! And to make matters even more astonishing, I stood in the IfL elections for national President in 2010 and was successful. I have to admit, my ambition was based on the investigation of how far I could take being a transperson in the public eye. The gamble was a success I wonder about to this day. To add to this, I was re-elected in 2011. The first President to have that honour, and a vindication of the fact that my first election had not just been a fluke. I am still a part-time tutor, thirty-four years on. I'm now fifty-eight years of age, a woman, and still involved with IfL, my trade union (UCU), and a variety of other bodies. APTT is no more, but I have plans for a successor body, tentatively called FE Watch. But I long for stability. I long for a job that lasts longer than one term, that lets me develop my talents and to add to a project which I can call my own. Like most part-timers, I want to stay part-time. I want to be able to choose what I do, keep on teaching, and not have to withdraw to a management post in order to have secure living. I want to do what I do best; engage with students and lead them where they want to go. But exploitation still reigns, and so does its consequential stupidities. By taking the short-sighted road to financial flexibility through a casual workforce, educational bodies have failed to see the cynicism they are breeding. Tutors increasingly do not believe anything their managers tell them, and are rightly self-preservational in their work practices. Bea Groves 25/04/2014 Page 3 of 4
4. /home/bea/Documents/Personal/34 Years - Bea Groves 25-4-14.odt Casualisation has meant that imaginative teaching is rare, due to the need to hold onto work by not taking risks that might end in conspicuous failure. Radical questions about what makes good learning, or even what learning is are never asked. In fact, talking about teaching and learning (other than in the charade of management organised events) is very rare indeed. We, as teachers, still hold to our principles, but in the darkness of our hearts rather than the light of day. What we want to say, cannot be said. But it is indicated in the work we do, and our growing resentment of the micromanagement it entails. Ofsted's thought-police tactics have blunted our willingness to step out of orthodoxy. Fear has meant that overt organisation against bad terms and conditions of work is uncommon within the contract culture. Without the growing efforts of unions around raising the profile of such issues I have doubts whether anyone would realise there is a 'problem' at all. Am I pessimistic? On the contrary, I always live in hope. I believe we can learn our way out of this, but that it's up to us to patiently teach those in government and management exactly what teaching and learning is, and how to support those who implement it. It's a hard lesson to teach, but then that was ever the case. Bea Groves (1933 words) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Bea Groves 25/04/2014 Page 4 of 4