Becoming an Educator: More Than Being a Lecturer or Tutor

My understanding of education did not begin with any of my university degrees. It started much earlier, as a child moving between classrooms in Europe and Asia. Yet, despite a lifetime of studying and teaching across different continents, I recently found myself losing sight of the very educator I had spent decades becoming.

To understand how I arrived at that point, I have to look at the vast tapestry of my background. I hold several degrees in education covering K–12, college, and university teaching, alongside global qualifications from institutions across different continents. I have lived education from both sides of the desk—first as a student in wildly different cultural systems, and later as a teacher, trainer, lecturer, and tutor.

All of these experiences shaped the educationalist I eventually became. But when I trace the true origin of my philosophy, it always anchors back to my earliest years as a learner: the belief that learning should be enjoyable.

Learning Should Be Enjoyable

As a child, I studied in both Europe and Asia, and what I experienced in Europe stayed with me. There was freedom to learn and explore, and learning was fun. We did not even have exams until Grade 5!

Later, when I studied to become a teacher at an Australian university, I experienced something similar. We did not spend all our time sitting and listening to someone lecture us. Much of our learning happened through what we would now call the flipped classroom approach, activity-based learning, role-plays and case studies. There was a holistic approach to education that allowed us to participate in our own learning rather than simply receive information.

The way I was taught influenced the way I eventually taught others. I had experienced the freedom to explore as a child, and my teacher education helped me understand how that freedom could become part of the learning process.

It became the foundation of who I was as an educator.

From Teaching to Training Adults

Later, I became a trainer and continued to use learner-centred pedagogy. When working with adults, of course, andragogy is a more appropriate term.

Adults bring knowledge, skills, abilities and life experiences into the learning environment. They may also bring professional experience, cultural knowledge and different ways of understanding the world. I have never understood why we would want them to leave all of that outside the classroom.

My role was to recognise what they already brought with them and build on it.

This became an important part of my understanding of what it meant to be an educator. Teaching was not simply about how much knowledge I had or how well I could explain something. It was also about recognising the knowledge in the room, creating opportunities for people to learn and facilitating that learning.

I carried this philosophy with me when I entered Higher Education.

Becoming a Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer

When I entered Higher Education, I was surprised by how traditional the approaches to teaching and assessment could be. This was not limited to one university or even one country. Over the years, I worked in universities across different continents and continued to see similar approaches.

The lecturer lectured and the students listened. There were examinations, assessments and considerable stress amongst students. There was also a level of power distance, with the lecturer positioned as the person who held the knowledge while students were expected to receive it.

This was very different from the educational philosophy I had developed over the years.

I was now a lecturer, but I was also an educationalist.

For me, being a lecturer or tutor described my role, while being an educator meant something more. My responsibility was not simply to deliver the content of a unit or make sure that students knew enough to complete an assessment. I wanted students to question, explore, discuss and apply what they were learning, while also recognising the knowledge, skills and experiences they already brought into the classroom. I always believed in being a facilitator of learning and that my students were not ‘Tabula Rasa’ needing to be filled with knowledge they could access elsewhere.

I advocated for this approach, and senior colleagues generally understood and accepted what I was doing. Some peers colleagues who were more comfortable with traditional approaches were less comfortable with mine, and at times this created resentment and caused problems.

For years, despite those pressures, I continued to teach in the way I believed students learned best.

When I Moved Away from My Approach

More recently, I was pressured to move towards a more traditional approach to make things easier for the teaching team. The colleagues I was working with had been there longer than I had and were accustomed to traditional approaches, not only in their teaching but also in the way assessments were designed.

What I found particularly difficult was that, even as a Senior Lecturer, I increasingly felt that I could not make the educational decisions I wanted to make. I had years of experience as an educator, qualifications in education and a clear understanding of why I used particular approaches, yet I found myself having to adapt my teaching and assessment decisions to fit the established way of doing things. Eventually, I changed my approach to align more closely with the rest of the team.

This was a significant change for me because I was not simply changing a teaching technique. I was moving away from an approach to education that had developed through my own experiences as a learner, my formal education as a teacher, my work as a trainer and my years of practice in Higher Education.

For years, despite the pressures around me, I had remained true to the educator I was. More recently, I had allowed myself to move away from that, and I collapsed. The professional misalignment left me completely burnt out, forcing a deep reflection.

The reflection that followed made me think again about my journey through education and what had shaped me along the way. I realised that I had spent years developing and practising an approach to education that reflected who I was, yet I had eventually changed it to fit more easily within the way others were already working.

I did not need to discover a new way of teaching. I needed to return to the educator I had already spent years becoming.

Being an Educator

Perhaps this is where I see the difference between being a lecturer or tutor and being an educator. A lecturer or tutor is a role that we perform within an educational institution. There are subjects to teach, learning outcomes to achieve, assessments to complete and many other responsibilities that come with the role. Being an educator, for me, is something broader and has developed over a lifetime of learning and teaching.

I believe everyone, even little children, has something to bring to the classroom. Our role as educators is to recognise what is already there and facilitate the learning that follows. Knowledge is everywhere, and it has exploded. Students are no longer interested in sitting through lectures, although I am not convinced they ever were!

Technology has changed, and with the arrival of AI, students have even greater access to knowledge. This makes me think more deeply about what our role as educators should be. If knowledge is available everywhere, simply providing information cannot be enough.

Being an educator, for me, means creating an environment where people can explore, question and apply what they are learning. It means recognising the knowledge, skills and experiences they already have and giving them the opportunity to build on them. It also means recognising that learning does not only move from the lecturer to the student. As educators, we can learn from our students too.

My job title may be Senior Lecturer, Assistant Professor, lecturer, tutor or something else at different stages of my career, but the title itself does not make me an educator. Becoming an educator has been a much longer journey. It has been shaped by being a child who experienced different education systems across Europe and Asia, by studying education, by being taught well, by becoming a teacher and trainer, by working with adults and by years of teaching students in Higher Education across different continents.

For a while, I moved away from the educator I had spent all those years becoming. It was time to go back.