In the midst of lockdown, having started a Masters Degree in Photography as a tentative step towards a different way of spending my life, I floated the idea that maybe one day, when it was done, I could lecture.

I know nothing about working in Higher Education other than what I’ve observed as the consumer of an HND thirty years ago and, over the last two years, an online Masters.

When the MA was finally done I swore I was done with study. For a short while I wanted to retire to reading purely for pleasure, and the piles of books that covered my sofas gradually got put away. With post-its notes bursting from their pages like the errant hairs on Mr Twit’s unkempt beard, the books were placed in a nearly orderly fashion onto some new Ikea bookshelves bought specifically to deal with the fallout from my MA induced book addiction.

It didn’t take long though for the need to learn to return. The idea of lecturing being part of my post-Covid, post-redundancy, newly widowed, lone-parenting life that I was now trying to build, seemed to offer an exciting way to move forward. And so it is that I find myself at the beginning of a Post-Graduate Certificate In Higher Education. A training course designed to “Develop the expertise to support you within your role in both digital and face-to-face teaching and learning contexts.” (Falmouth)

Looking back at my recent career I had enjoyed mentoring the teams I worked with, I liked communicating, I developed small training programmes for new Product Managers, and ran a course on Design Thinking, so the idea of getting enjoyment from teaching formally isn’t a huge leap from the parts of my ‘old work’ I liked the most.

Unlike my MA, where I started thinking I knew more than I did, I am starting this course clear in my mind that I know nothing and am starting from scratch. Over the next nine months I need to learn a lot through reading, but also through working. It is clear that practical work experience is as important as the theoretical study.

This blog is a record of that journey. The readings, thinkings, discoveries and disasters, partly for my own record, and partly because some of what I write here may turn into assessed work.

It’s week 1 and a new journey has begun.