Mr George MacDonald Ross

National Teaching Fellow 2006 George MacDonald Ross is Director of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies (PRS) and a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. In 1984, he founded the National Committee for Philosophy, which was the first organisation to defend and promote philosophy as a discipline. George's credentials as an authority were recognised when he successfully bid for the PRS Subject Centre, based at the University of Leeds, in 2000. Since then he has become, as he says, "an exemplar of the research/teaching nexus" and has initiated a new area of research into the teaching of philosophy in the UK. He aims to provide a challenging, yet supportive, environment to enable his students to grapple with the complexities of philosophy by living the subject. For example, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Philosophy Benchmark Statement states that students should have first-hand experience of primary texts, but this is rarely achieved in practice. George, in his module on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, is possibly the only teacher in the English-speaking world to ensure that all students work from the (translated) text itself: he has even produced his own student-friendly translations. He says "to discourage students from treating my seminars as a lecture, I forbid them to take notes, except for an official minute-taker, who posts them in an electronic discussion room. In order to ensure that students think for themselves, I tell them to treat anything they get from me or fellow students as a secondary source like any other, requiring proper references. I encourage students to criticise my materials if they can." One of his innovations was proctorials for first year students. Proctors are final-year students who do not teach but manage discussion, and are given academic credit for their performance in class and for an essay in which they analyse the system. The system has now been adopted elsewhere at Leeds and at other institutions, and was singled out for particular praise in a QAA subject overview report. George has received an Award of Merit for outstanding leadership and achievement in the teaching of philosophy from the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, the first such award to a non-US academic.