Interview with Mr Adrian Maldonado
Adrian Maldonado
"I came to the University of Glasgow in 2004 with a Bachelors' degree in medieval history, knowing next to nothing about archaeology except that I really liked medieval church ruins. By the end of the programme, I was hooked and decided to come back for more.
"I started my PhD on early medieval Christianity in Scotland in October 2006. I had barely settled into the Postgrad Room before my supervisor, Prof Steve Driscoll, said he needed an extra GTA for the first-year Archaeology of Scotland module; and so my teaching career began with a trip to the Kelvingrove Museum with a dozen or so very underwhelmed undergraduates. Although I would soon undertake other teaching work within the department it is the Archaeology of Scotland module that I was most intimately involved in, helping to remodel it and design new tutorials over the years.
"Thanks to the excellent team of experienced GTAs, I quickly learned the ropes and faced for the first time the fearsome prospect of marking tonnes of essays on a tight deadline. One thing that struck me right away was the variability of writing skills these showed, and I actually wrote a letter to the Senate to see whether there were any plans to institute an academic writing module for undergrads who needed more help writing at university level. The following summer, a message appeared in my inbox advertising the post of GTA for a pilot project, the Academic Writing Support Programme. I jumped at the opportunity, and in 2007, began the first of four years as a tutor with the AWSP, seeing it grow from pilot project to the Arts College-encompassing programme it is today.
"That autumn term, I was also invited by Dr Katherine Forsyth to help tutor the first-year module, Celtic Civilization, which started my four-year involvement with the wonderful community at the Celtic Department. It sounds like a lot of teaching to be getting on with while also doing one's own PhD research, and it certainly felt like it around essay-marking time. But as I became more experienced in teaching, I was increasingly able to add to and develop the existing curriculum based on my research and experience; thus, I was able to apply my experience using classical documents and inscriptions learned in Celtic to new hands-on activities for Archaeology tutorials; introduce archaeological resources into Celtic tutorials; and for both Archaeology and Celtic, I helped develop writing skills using insights gained from working closely with undergraduates in AWSP.
"During this time, the summers were also put to good use as I was involved with teaching archaeological techniques out in the field: first with the department's fieldschool at Forteviot in Perthshire, then with the DACE Certificate in Field Archaeology fieldschool with my collegeague Natasha Ferguson. Teaching adult and continuing education students was a completely different and richly rewarding activity, and I'm looking forward to doing it again this summer!
"I strongly believe that academics have a responsibility not just to further knowledge in their own fields, but to help students get the most out of their short time at university. I told my supervisor all the time spent marking essays instead of writing my thesis would pay off one day!"