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Lois - teaching
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Name: Lois
PhD discipline: Archeology
Area(s) of work: University teaching
Year of graduation: 1997
Date of Interview: 08/06/2008

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Lois outlines her teaching experience and explains how she felt about teaching during her PhD.
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Can you tell me a bit more about your teaching experience and why you didn't take up the opportunities and do more teaching? And how you felt about teaching when you were doing your PhD? 

At the beginning of my PhD I wasn't very keen on doing any teaching. I just wanted to get on with my project and I was very worried about it actually.  Probably my only experience of doing any teaching was doing student presentations and I think I only ever did one of them in my life, and it was awful. I look back on it now and it was so bad, it was so badly done and I just felt so bad about it. So I wasn't very interested in doing that again but through doing my PhD, because it was quite technical because it was computers, I built up a lot of expertise and l kind of learnt through just doing things generally about using computers. So in the department where I was based they used that quite naturally and they got me to do demonstrations for other students coming in, whether they were undergraduate students or whether they were new PhD students, and I think I developed a bit of confidence doing that, because it wasn't like standing on the front of the class. It was in a small computer room and you're sitting down, you're not standing up and it was just showing people things on the screen. But I think I built up a bit of confidence doing that so that was crucial actually. I now realise that that was really crucial. A) to building my confidence and B) to getting me to think about what do these people need to know, what order do I need to tell them things in, just really basic things about teaching. So I think that was very good, so I at least had that amount of experience.

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