The year is 1987 and the Carrington Polytechnic campus is surrounded by farmland – grazing paddocks for horses, cows and sheep – and stone walls. It’s the year Caroline Malthus started teaching here, well before Unitec received its new name in 1994. A well-respected and much-loved teacher, Caroline has recently retired from the profession she’s given so much to over the past 33 years – a career that she says has given her the opportunity to always keep learning.
Caroline, a specialist in language teaching, has worked across two areas: Language Studies and Learning and Achievement, or ‘Te Tari Awhina Learning Centre’ as it was formerly known. She’s held a number of roles, from lecturer to programme leader to supporting post-graduate students.
“I enjoyed all of it really – it’s all essentially about language,” says Caroline.
“Language in tertiary education is about conveying complex ideas using words – most often when doing assessments. One of the things I’ve enjoyed a lot is working with students on speaking as well as writing.”
A highlight for Caroline was working with a lecturer who supported nursing students on clinical practice. Caroline helped the students to see the importance of language in helping people relax in a hospital setting.
“Nurses use very informal ways of saying things to make people feel at ease, for example: “Just pop up on the bed’, or ‘it’s just a wee jab’. It can make a big difference to the experience the patient has. It really helped the students and staff – they relaxed into their roles. Some of the nurses who had trained overseas told us it would be different in their countries, where the role is to focus on the tasks – sometimes without saying a word. It was a cultural shift for those nurses.”
More recently, Caroline has enjoyed working with lecturers in her role in Learning and Achievement.
“We find out their priorities in student learning, and the challenges for students in their course, so we can work out how we can help. We focus on assessment, be it in a written, group, or spoken form. It’s easy for students to get off track – we guide them to understand the kind of responses lecturers are expecting.”
Caroline has done a lot of work with English language students, including with migrants who were very new to New Zealand. Very early in her career she had a lightbulb moment when asking her students to write a story reflecting their experience so far in New Zealand.
“A student read her story and it shocked me. I said, “that sounds like discrimination”. The class asked me what discrimination was, and once they learnt what it meant, they all wanted to write it down and know how to pronounce it. Some of them shared their experiences and I realised that they had probably all experienced discrimination. It’s not easy to come to a new country and discrimination is a real issue in New Zealand. I learned from them that people appreciate learning language to put feelings into words, so teachers shouldn’t shy away from ideas that they find uncomfortable and difficult – they are often key issues for people. That moment happened in my first year of teaching adults. It meant so much to those students – the atmosphere was electric.”
Those moments with her students have had a lasting impact on Caroline over the years, and have meant she’s had plenty of variety in her work.
“We have new students each year – a new energy; it rejuvenates us again. I could be teaching the same topics but it’s never the same. There are constantly people who open my eyes to the challenges they face, what they find exciting about their subject, where they hope to go, and where they’ve come from – not just their country but their learning. It has never been boring! I haven’t been bored once!”
When asked about her future plans, Caroline is reluctant to use the word ‘retirement’.
“I like what was written on my farewell card: ‘It’s not retiring, it’s rewiring!’. I’m not thinking of it as never working again. I might look at paid or unpaid opportunities, whatever interesting things come along.”
Caroline recently injured her leg, which has put the brakes on most of her plans involving walking.
“It’ll be nine months to a year until I’ll be fully functioning. In the meantime, I’m doing a couple of online courses – Renaissance painting in Spanish and a course on volcanoes. In the volcanoes course they’ve woven in Māori legends – Māori looked and learned then passed on their knowledge. Their legends warn of volcanoes as dangerous or tapu places.
“One of my goals is to study more about the sciences. I decided early on I was an arts person, not science person – and I was encouraged towards the arts by my family and my education.”
Caroline says that’s been an important life lesson – don’t limit your learning.
“You should never tell people they’re not good at this or that – you limit yourself unnecessarily. If I hadn’t decided science was hard, I might have been a good scientist.”
And what will she miss about Unitec?
“I’ll miss the people – my colleagues, the contact with people. All that variety and challenge, the way your brain gets stretched in all different directions. I’ll also miss the beautiful campus – some of the trees I consider my friends. I live quite close by, though so I’ll be back again soon!”
Lovely piece about Caroline and her work here.