Michael Okyere Asante, University of Ghana
Through a narrative inquiry of four student-lecturers consisting of three females and one male, this paper explores the strategies employed by university student teachers and the challenges they face in their role of widening access to the Classics at the University of Ghana. Studies have reported both challenges and positive results in widening access and introducing new and innovative pedagogies to Classics in schools and communities (Holmes-Henderson et al. 2018, Taylor et al. 2022), and part of the success of the initiatives at widening access to Classics has been due to the role of student-lecturers (Bracke 2016). Scholarship highlighting these initiatives in teaching Classics in the 21st century, however, tend to focus largely on British and American institutions (Okyere Asante 2022; cf. Bracke and Bradshaw 2017; Ancona 2012; Dugdale 2012). There is the need to consider what widening participation means for, and what strategies and challenges apply to, Classics programmes in political and developmental contexts where teaching is carried out in translation and the discipline is seen as Eurocentric and ‘non-developmental’ (Okyere Asante 2022).
All the four student-lecturers in this study perform some care-giving role and combine teaching of at least one course per semester with full-time PhD studies. The strategic plan of the University of Ghana where they teach and study mandates departments to (1) achieve at least 75% of teaching targets, (2) have at least 85% of faculty obtain their PhDs by 2018, and (3) have an enabling environment for equal opportunity in gender and diversity. However, the constraints faced by themselves and their department make it highly difficult to contribute towards these targets: the student-lecturers report understaffing, increased administrative responsibilities, large class sizes at lower levels, limited budget, lack of access to materials, work/life balance issues, financial challenges, and mental health issues. Despite these difficulties, enrolment in the Classics BA programme increased over the past decade from 5 students in 400 level in the 2009/2010 academic year to 44 students in the 2020/2021 academic year, when teaching moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, in the 2022/2023 academic year, enrolment stands at 159 at 400 level.
What accounts for this growth in numbers? What teaching strategies have helped retain students in the Classics programme? What impact has the increase in enrolment had on the teaching and research of these student-lecturers, relative to other factors? The paper shows that both in-classroom teaching and extracurricular strategies that embed employability (cf. Barrow et al. 2010) and relevance to help students find meaning in the Classics have a positive impact on retaining students. However, the paper notes that continued increases in enrolment and the current structure of the BA programme (will) have a negative impact on the quality of teaching. Employing more staff and revising the current BA programme will help meet students’ demand for the Classics as well as the university’s strategic foci listed above, but other institutional policies such as non-employment of staff without PhDs hinder the very need to meet these strategic foci.