What Completes an Excellent Teacher? Care in Higher Education English Language Teaching

Abstract

The idea of care was, until recently, new to me too. For a long time, as a university writing teacher, I was fixated on how to methodologically develop writing skills in my students and unleash their potential to make them better writers. I kept recalling how my primary 3 nephew, when guided, could solve primary 6 algebraic problems. I was convinced that every student had potential that was limited by the syllabus, and I wanted to remove learning barriers. My teaching goals were thus narrowly but relentlessly focused on improving and maximizing student performance. Thus, I felt a sense of achievement when my undergraduate students managed to develop their papers into full-length research papers for publication (Tao & Wong, 2020; Yee & Wong, 2021). I felt a sense of success when a former student of mine won an international writing competition. However, at that time, I did not realize the full implications of what I was doing. Then one day, my teaching philosophy was challenged when a colleague asked me point blank, “What are you doing about the weaker students?” Embarrassingly, the question caught me off guard and I could not give him a satisfactory answer. The colleague’s reminder subsequently made me reflect and question more deeply my teaching practices at that time.

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