Photo Courtesy of Christine Fourie
“…it’s a huge privilege [working as an academic], I feel so lucky and people who work at institutions like ours are lucky, lucky. Yes, I complain but I don’t like it when I hear people moaning and complaining and feeling hard done by. I want to say ‘Then go and find another job. Where basically you can do what you love to do; come and go just as you please; be exposed to young people all the time; have technology just provided for you! Find another job like that!”
In this brief, Professor Leslie Swartz of the Department of Psychology is interviewed by Dr Catherine Kell, a researcher commissioned by the CTL. Download the full interview with Professor Swartz here.
This is the fourth brief in the Centre for Teaching and Learning or CTL’s ‘Making a life’ series, where we explore the experiences and attitudes of academics at SU, with regard to their roles in teaching, research and what is generally called ‘community involvement’. The series was approached as a set of interviews with individual academics which took the form of reflective conversations between a CTL researcher and the individual academic. Academics approached for the interviews were not sampled, but drawn from different departments and different disciplines, and tended to be those who had had some involvement with CTL. At times we have incorporated other texts into the brief, to enrich the sense of the activities academics engage in, in ‘making a life’.
