University research often works well when there is a critical mass in some area. University degrees usually aim to give a balanced coverage of the different topics within the subject. This is usually seen as a problem—how can a set of staff with narrow research specialities deliver such a broad programme of studies?
One solution to this is to encourage staff to develop teaching specialities. That is, to develop a decent knowledge of some syllabus topic that is (perhaps) completely contrasted with their research interests.
One problem is that we are apologetic with staff about asking them to teach outside of their research area. Perhaps a little bit of first year stuff? Okay, but teaching something elsewhere in the syllabus? We tend to say to people “would you possibly, in extenuating circumstances, just for this year, pretty, pretty, please teach this second year module”. This is completely the wrong attitude to be taking. By making it sound like an exception, we are encouraging those staff to treat it superficially. A better approach would be to be honest about the teaching needs in the department, and to say something more like “this is an important part of the syllabus, no-one does research in this area, but if you are prepared to teach this area then we will (1) give you time in the workload allocation to prepare materials and get up to a high level of knowledge in the subject and (2) commit, as much as is practical, to making this topic a major part of your teaching for the next five years or more”.
In practice, this just makes honest the practice that ends up happening anyway. You take a new job, and, as much as the university would like to offer you your perfect teaching, you end up taking over exactly what the person who retired/died/got a research fellowship/moved somewhere else/got promoted to pro vice chancellor/whatever was doing a few weeks earlier. Teaching is, amongst other things, a pragmatic activity, and being able to teach anything on the core syllabus seems a reasonable expectation for someone with pretensions to being a university lecturer in a subject.
Is this an unreasonable burden? Hell no! Let’s work out what the “burden” of learning material for half a module is. Let’s assume—super-conservatively—that the person hasn’t any knowledge of the subject; e.g. they have changed disciplines between undergraduate studies and their teaching career, or didn’t study it as an option in their degree, or it is a new topic since their studies. We expect students, who are coming at this with no background, and (compared to a lecturer) comparatively weak study skills, to be able to get to grips with four modules each term. So, half a module represents around a week-and-a-half of study. Even that probably exaggerates the amount of time a typical student spends on the module; a recent study has shown that students put about 900 hours each year into their studies, a contrast with university assertions that 1200 hours is a sensible number of hours. So, we are closer to that half-module representing around a week’s worth of full-time work.
Would it take someone who was really steeped in the subject that long to get to grips with it? Probably not; we could probably halve that figure. On the other hand, we are expecting a level of mastery considerably higher than the student, so let’s double the figure. We are still at around a week of work; amortised over five years, around a day per year. Put this way, this approach seems very reasonable, and readily incorporable into workload allocation models.