Interview with Professor Robin Millar

Why did I join the Department?

I joined the Department in 1982, when I was appointed to a lectureship in Science Education. This summer I will have been with the Department 32 years. Before I joined the Department I was head of Physics in a comprehensive school near Edinburgh. During this period I started to ask questions about what we were teaching students, and how we were teaching science. I started to think about the role of science in the curriculum.

When I came to York, I was involved with teaching science on the PGCE course. The department was relatively small in those days; we aimed to get around 10 students in each of the three sciences. At the time, the University also offered MSc courses for practicing teachers in Biology, Physics, Chemistry or Mathematics with Education. Students on these courses came to the University for what was used to be called a term where their time was split between Education and the Sciences. This course brought a lot of very interesting people together from many educational backgrounds and it also brought many different departments together within the university. I think it was very good for the Department and was in line with the original conception of Education being central to other disciplines on campus. I was also involved in teaching a science-related module on the undergraduate Education programme and teaching on the MA courses.

What makes the Department special?

I think the Department has always been a supportive and collegial place to work. There have not been tensions between different groups. The Department has grown considerably, over the last 20 or 30 years, but has always been able to maintain this collegial atmosphere. I think that the Department has managed transitions very well, with new courses being introduced to replace others that were no longer recruiting sufficient numbers. It is my feeling that most people come into the Education Department because they want to improve education. The Department offers the opportunity for meaningful and influential research to be carried out in education through its research groups. The scale of the curriculum development research at York is something that makes the Department and the University quite unusual. In Science Education, we have developed and we continue to maintain three A-Level courses in the sciences and a suite of six inter-related GCSE courses called Twenty First Century Science. The design of all of these courses is research-informed. In the case of the GCSE courses, over 100,000 students take these every year, which is a huge practical impact of the Department’s work.

It is easy for the importance of Education to taken for granted. I think there has to be research on major public institutions, like the education system. There have to be people, independent of government, who can step back and monitor what is going on, and comment and carry out research on this. This kind of monitoring can help to highlight areas of concern in education, whether it is the difference between the educational pathways of children from different social and economic backgrounds, or looking at the differences in male and female participation in some subjects. I think it is very important to have studies of Education going on at an academic level.

What does the future hold?

I would like to see the continued growth of the research centres that we have, and to see these recognised at a national level for the work that they do, both in terms of its impact on the practice of education and on wider policy concerns.

I would really like to see more practicing teachers studying, either full time or part time, at masters degree level. I think that having the opportunity to look critically at their own practice and to become better informed about scholarship in the area can significantly enhance the quality of teaching and lead to better practices.

I am now retired but I hope that Science Education here at York will continue to consolidate its position both nationally and internationally. There is still a lot of interest in Science Education and plenty still to be done.