Interview: How do u develop a career as an academic lecturer?

This month I was fortunate enough to interview academic Brendan Prendeville. Brendan is currently a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths and has been in this permanent position since 1994. However he began teaching long before this starting out as a freelance visiting tutor. Brendan’s career started with a degree in Fine Art Painting in 1968 at Central Saint Martins, he then moved on to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art where he gained a masters in History of Art in 1970. As an academic he has had many publications including ‘Realism in 20th Century Painting’ (2000) which has also been published in French, Spanish and Chinese editions. His specialised research today focuses, as he states, ‘on themes and problems concerning painting and phenomenology’.

In this interview Brendan opens the door to the inner workings of being an academic and advises on how one manages to balance research and teaching. Here he promotes his belief that renewal and flexibility is intrinsic to success in this field.

1. What’s your job title?

I am currently the Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

2. How would you describe your job?

There are 3 aspects to our work, teaching, administration and research. I teach on the 1st year Modernities module and I teach a third year subject, Truth in Painting and I also contribute to the MA core course on aspects of modern philosophy. In addition to this, there is dissertation supervision, PHD supervision and examining all of this comes under the heading of teaching. In regard to administration, my chief responsibility for a few years has been programme leader for BA History of Art, and admissions tutor. This includes running open days, answering queries and handling transfers from other universities and holding interviews if needed. I also write the annual programme review each year and attend meetings with the department board and other committees in connection with teaching and research.

Then there is research – we are required to publish so we have to be able to devote some time to sustaining research and publication. I have to read, research, write, send things for publication and get them published. Then there are conferences: going to conferences, giving conference papers and attending other events, which are relevant to my research. Generally speaking, time allowed for research falls during vacations, as the demands of teaching and administration ensure that little time for research is available during term. If you have a particular project to complete, however, such as a book, it is possible to apply for research leave, which I have done in fact, and I will be taking this period of leave next term.

3. What is a typical day for you?

A typical day for me, involves a mixture of teaching, preparing for teaching and responding to it i.e. marking essays, giving tutorials and giving dissertation tutorials. During the week normally on a Thursday, with regard to administration, I have to attend a departmental meeting. Then of course what is unpredictable is what comes in via email, involving queries and giving advice to individual students, which can take up varying amounts of time. However much you do in teaching, there is always more you feel you could do.

Brendan is the Senior lecturer of the Department of Visual cultures at Goldsmiths – Which explores ‘new forms of art theory and history, art practice and visual culture’.

4. What skills/ qualifications do you need to do your job?

You need expertise to teach in higher education, you need a range of broad competence and knowledge in the field that your working in and related areas and you need your own special area of knowledge. In higher education we teach on the basis of our research, our research informs our teaching so we can constantly renew it. The qualifications I gained were a degree in fine art painting at St. Martins first of all. While still a student I had an article published in the British Journal of Aesthetics. This prompted me to pursue postgraduate study, and the only academic M-level programme available to me at the time as a Fine Art graduate was a two year MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, which I applied for successfully.

In terms of skills, you need a quick grasp of ideas because you often have to be able to prepare to teach a new subject or an entire course at short notice. You might have to work long hours and it helps if you can understand and organise your material swiftly. You need to be able to communicate complex ideas clearly. I also feel mental flexibility is a necessary attribute, with the effect that you don’t get too hooked on a particular line or argument, you can see alternatives. So when someone is speaking to you, i.e. a student, you are receptive to what they are saying even when it conflicts with your expectations and prejudices. A non-defensive attitude, although it is not a skill but a personal trait, is definitely something that helps a lot and is worth cultivating. This makes it possible when teaching if someone asks you a question you weren’t expecting, to be able to draw from yourself something you haven’t equally expected, and this helps you in turn in developing your thinking. At the same time, you need specialised skills and knowledge so as to be able to pursue your own research and renew your expertise, constantly keeping it alive and fresh. But this too involves conversation, you can’t simply draw on your inner resources. What we all do to practise this is attend research seminars, listening to what our colleagues are researching and go to conferences, presenting research papers and trying things out and so on. It’s all a big conversation; one must learn by conversation.

Brendan Prendeville, Anne Mallet and Roger Ackling shortly after leaving at St Martins, 1969. Photo: Martin Cook

5. What advice would you give a student looking to get work in your field?

Really nowadays if you want to teach in higher education you will have to get a Masters and then a doctorate, a PhD. In my day a PhD wasn’t an absolute requirement. I personally didn’t do one because I was very ambivalent towards Art History in any case. I wrote about art but one reason why I gave up the full time lecturing post I had for two years after graduating from the MA was because I wanted to keep up my practice of painting and drawing. Now of course because of the change in our practice, the relation between theory and practice is more fluid, so there are people in our department who think of themselves as practitioners as well as scholars and theoreticians. My kind of dilemma is not a kind of problem is less likely to arise now.

In addition to this, prior experience in teaching is fundamental. You must find out if it’s something you enjoy, that satisfies you, where the anxiety it’s bound to induce will not be insuperable. It must bring something back to you and it must be fruitful and rewarding. Doctoral students who have teaching assistant posts gain a teaching qualification in parallel to their teaching practice, and this is a good thing.

6. Who is your creative inspiration and why?

My creative inspiration is French film director Robert Bresson, (1901- 1999).

Robert Bresson

I find his filmmaking very inspiring because of his incredible creative independence, which you can see in the way the films he directed have a consistent thread to them, which is something he formulated in his Notes on Cinematography. What I find in his films that is inspiring is a very rigorous way of working which results in incredible emotional surprises. He takes a lot of risks, his work risks sometimes falling into the absurd and looking almost mechanical. However I feel the risks succeed in bringing off very powerful results. If you want a film to look at I would recommend some of his earlier films, which are in black and white such as, ‘Un condemné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent soufflé où il veut (A Man Escaped), 1956, ‘Pick Pocket’ 1959, ‘Au hasard Balthazar 1966 and Mouchette 1967.

7. Do you have any tips or advice on how you focus on your research outside teaching?

You must sustain your personal research outside of your teaching, as that’s the only way you can actually do it. It should also be a means of renewal – you can’t research just by locking yourself up with books and computer for a length of time. Just as your teaching is renewing you in some kind of way, your research needs to be able to renew itself and, in either case, you benefit from being given a new topic, a different set of people to engage with, whether it be a new class you are teaching or a research seminar. You need something that is going to come in and you can’t produce it of your own accord or out of yourself; here is where you must put yourself in different places, find new interlocutors.

It is much the same for artists, who know that they can’t just lock themselves up in their studios and sustain a creative practice solely in this way because it yields diminishing returns. Just as artists must exhibit and meet at private views and in studio complexes, so as a researcher you need to open up your research to other people and engage in theirs. Research is creative in the sense that you are looking for the unforeseen, and often you may find that you come across something totally by accident that turns out to be extremely relevant This illustrates the point that to be prosperous in research you must avoid becoming so attached to your own ideas that you fail to recognise the occasional unexpected gift that comes your way.

Eleanor x