By Khadija Azhar and Luisa Wan

Though we were well-aware of Dr. Otto Heim’s reputation as a passionate educator, it was only when we worked with him as teaching assistants that we truly understood the depth of his commitment to the craft. In the past few semesters, we not only had literal front-row seats to Dr. Heim’s fascinating lectures but were also offered a behind-the-scenes view into his devotion to student learning—whether in the painstakingly detailed notes and handouts he wrote to complement his lectures, in the importance that he placed on productive, student-led discussions, or in his spontaneous bursts of energy that permeated the classroom and kept us on the edge of our seats. 

As junior researchers who are fresh out of our MPhil degrees and are facing the uncertain prospects of a career in academia, Dr. Heim’s enthusiasm in the classroom was truly refreshing. Indeed, the conversation between us and Dr. Heim on the afternoon of January 29th unfolded not only out of our curiosity about his views on teaching and research but also a sense of urgency to understand how young academics such as ourselves can stay level-headed amidst the shifting landscape of post-COVID academia.

In this two-part interview, we discuss Dr. Heim’s extensive academic career, his teaching practices, and how he approaches the symbiotic relationship between teaching and research. What you will see in the first part of the interview is not only the story of Dr. Heim’s experience in HKU but also the creativity and consideration that undergirds his teaching practice.

To start, can you talk about how you ended up at HKU, how long you have been here, and what roles you have taken on in your time here?

I came to Hong Kong almost exactly 23 years ago on 1st February 2001. I had just come off a Postdoc position in Switzerland at the University of Zurich; I had a three-year research fellowship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. After that expired, I had to look for a job. Choosing Hong Kong was not random; I’m married to someone from Hong Kong, so when we were looking for places to apply, Hong Kong was one of the priorities. I was keen on having my son spend part of his childhood growing up here.

I came here as a Research Assistant Professor in 2001. It was a very different university and faculty back then, but things always worked out for me from one contract to another. I started off as a Research Assistant Professor and then became an Assistant Professor. That gradually turned into a tenure-track line when the university introduced that system. I stayed on in various roles: I was Head of School briefly during the curriculum reform, and before that, I was the Associate Dean of the Arts Faculty.

How was your experience switching from a research-based position in Switzerland to one that was in Hong Kong?

It was an interesting experience switching from one academic system to another one, especially coming from Switzerland, which is relatively small. In Europe—at least at the time—university academic systems and associations were nationally organized, and in some cases, quite strongly protectionist. You must have the relevant qualifications to enter those markets. To some extent, this was also true of Switzerland, though they always needed to attract professors from outside. For Swiss people like me, studying and getting into the Postdoc stage came with its own advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, we were quite well connected within the German-speaking and European networks. That system had its own sense of a pathway or track, and we had an idea of what everybody did. I got my jobs largely through being referred from one network to another, and so that works quite well up to a certain point and you can gain experience. But it can also become quite limiting in terms of the publications, venues, and conferences to which you’re directed.

Leaving that and coming to Hong Kong required me to rethink my ambitions and aspirations. A lot of what I had planned and was on track to do in Switzerland made no sense here. It required some adjustment, but it was good because it opened me up to an international academic field and a community that there was less incentive to join back when I was in Switzerland.

Also, it was a different time; it was a quarter century ago. It was not the same academic world as it is now. When I came to Hong Kong, what I consider myself fortunate about is that the university was organized and orienting itself differently. At the time, there was an incentive to locate yourself and reach a wider scholarly community. It took some time for me to rethink what my research area was and what I wanted to focus on. I basically returned to the field I was working on for my PhD. In Switzerland, I would have had to do something quite different. Here, it allowed me to go back and continue what I wanted to do, but it took some time to gather the courage to make the switch.

Were you teaching in Switzerland?

Yes. The system that I came from had the equivalent of a Bachelors or Masters, but there was no graduate school. There were PhD programs, but the way in which I and other people I know got into them was that your professor basically invited you. Maybe you’d go and ask if they were open to supervising your thesis. You could also do it in other ways, but in this way, I was hired as an assistant to this Chair. The Chair would have some funding and would always have at least two assistants working there, who were usually then people writing their PhDs with that professor, and at the same time, they would be teaching introductory courses in the department. That was the norm in most of Switzerland.

I was teaching in Basel, where I got my PhD, and then in Zurich, and in Bern. Switzerland is small enough—you can commute—so I was teaching 50% here and 50% there. Usually, you start off teaching in an assistant role, where there would be a professor leading a big lecture and then there’d be smaller groups. I started teaching in 1989 —at the same level as a Teaching Assistant. You’re in charge of around 20-25 students. You run lessons and grade assignments. Later, after you get your PhD, you teach your own courses.

Was there any difference between teaching in Switzerland and Hong Kong?

Yes, definitely. Things have changed in Hong Kong too, so it’s difficult to compare. In Switzerland, I had fewer students. Because the University is not an English-speaking one, if you were studying English as a major, you’d take prescribed language courses at various levels. Here in Hong Kong, there was the idea that this was an English-speaking university, so you prescribe only one or two English courses.

Since the system was very different, that made the students very different. There was no limit to the study time in Switzerland; there were no credits, courses were counted in papers, and the lectures were not compulsory—you could just go when you wanted. In the seminars, you were active; you had to do your presentations and you had to write longer papers than what we asked our students in Hong Kong to do. It was more research early on, but you could take your time. You only studied 2-3 subjects, but eventually, you needed to finish a bigger thesis. This created a different mentality in the students.

When I came here, the system was already clearly structured. Initially, people used to say that Hong Kong students are quiet or that they don’t talk. I never really found that to be the case. By comparison, I found that in Hong Kong, there is a certain investment in higher education that you can’t expect in Switzerland, partly because of the system. In Switzerland, it costs almost nothing, and you can do it and see what happens afterward. Whereas I think the pressure and expectations are higher here. That’s something I noticed, that the students’ motivation was different.

Do you have a personal approach to teaching? When you design a course, do you think about specific things that you want your students to take away from your class? Or, do you have a process or motivation behind why you teach the courses you do?

I don’t necessarily think in these terms. I have ideas of why I feel I’d like to teach a course: to bring it to students and to have for myself the opportunity of engaging students in discussions. That’s always an important motivation. I try to organize things in such a way that you can expect interesting discussions, and the topics and texts would fall into place. That always becomes a challenge because there’s never enough time. In order to make the discussion worthwhile, there is so much I must say first. But to create that dialogue is an aspiration I have when I design courses.

I get my ideas for courses by looking at what is around, what interests me, and the topics on which I’d like to hear what the students think. And then, of course, I have certain ideas about what I’d like the students to understand, but that is something that depends on the course topic. At an abstract level, it comes together at a level of abstraction. It’s important the students question the relationships between texts, how they come together, say, the differences between literary and non-literary texts, between fiction and non-fiction, and to think about genres and the importance of reading across them. This is quite fundamental in why we teach literature. It’s not because we have a sanctuary here where we read beautiful texts, but because we must try and find ways of forcing these texts into a space where all the other writing is going on. I try to design courses to implicitly and explicitly stage that, which leads me then to also come up with new course ideas.

For instance, this semester, I’m teaching “Postcolonial Representations” and staging that tension within literature is very much a reason why I am teaching it. It’s particularly important that when we read texts, we don’t obey the way that literature is institutionalized—assumptions like “novels are the most important texts” or “it has to be fictional to be literary.” It’s always fascinating because these ideas still continue to be taught in schools. I looked at the secondary school curriculum when Hong Kong switched from the A-Levels to the DSE system, and I saw that Literature was still taught in a very minimal and conventional way. But it’s actually very interesting to have students arrive with preconceived ideas. The question of teaching then becomes, “What should literature do? Why do people write?”.

I’m always interested in opportunities where you can lay texts alongside each other in ways that don’t conform to the boundaries of how the field is organized. In terms of why we teach and what to aim for and convey, these are interesting questions no matter the subject you look at. You look at science fiction, for instance, it’s exciting because it’s written by people who don’t have anything to do with literature but here they are—they produce. That friction is always interesting.

Connected to the idea of students having preconceived notions about literature because of how their secondary education is organized—there are always things that come up as restrictions in how you teach. When you have a certain vision for your course, or when there is something that you’re particularly eager for your students to engage with, how do you wrestle with those constraints?

That comes to me as the opportunity or the pressure to have to go and read about new stuff. That’s why I enjoy teaching new courses; I enjoy that kind of research. The motivation always comes from something that already preoccupies me at some level. And then I think that I need to bring this inquiry into the classroom somehow and think about what kind of course that might become. The challenge is always about finding ways to borrow from a large number of texts and materials and to break them down into units and topics, and to organize them in such a way that you can aim for interesting and exciting discussions. It often comes down to breaking things down timewise, and figuring out how much time I’ll need to present the topic. It’s primarily the history that takes time to understand. Theories we can sketch, but you need to understand the material underground.

It’s interesting that in the last few years, I’ve had different experiences teaching different courses. What works for one course may not work for another. Many years ago, I taught a course called “Literary Islands”—it was about poetry and short prose from the Caribbean and the Pacific and a little bit from Hong Kong. That was before Moodle; they had something called WebCT. What I did there was that I wrote out fairly detailed webpages, and instead of lecturing, I posted those online and we met in class to talk. It was a large class, but we were able to sit in a circle and talk.

That didn’t work for other courses. I taught a course on Gothic Literature where I had to organize it differently. But again, it was a matter of finding a way in which discussions could happen. I realized that I couldn’t really do much with PowerPoint. I had to have a different manner of teaching.

Then, I was on sabbatical in 2020 when we had the protests and we had COVID-19. A lot changed in terms of how you thought about teaching. I introduced a couple of new courses after that and had to go through the online teaching experience. At least to me, it seemed that recording lectures helped me organize things a bit better. You lose your voice sometimes but you get everything in. And when we met on Zoom, we had discussions in breakout rooms. That experience has helped me organize other courses as well. It led to these more detailed handouts that I tend to make now. I don’t have to worry too much about keeping an eye on the time in class, and we can still leave some time for discussions.

I still like my lectures to be an interactive experience—even if they’re always unbalanced in that I talk more than the students. I see this with the “Postcolonial Representations” class. Even if students do not all speak, they’re engaged in a conversation. That to me is a different way of learning than just sitting there listening.

On the topic of student engagement, it might be fair to say that there will always be some kind of gap between how much you want the students to take in and how much they can process, especially within the setting of a really short semester. For unexperienced teachers like us, this can be rather disillusioning. What would be your advice for that?

I think it’s good to be aware of this experience. Maybe even plot it on a curve. You invest and you bring enthusiasm to teaching partly because the materials were difficult for you to understand, let alone to try and make them teachable. You feel that you’ve got it, you bring that into a classroom and maybe you sense that it does come across. But later on, there will be a feedback loop where you’re confronted with what actually came across and in what manner. So then, you need to correct.

Unfortunately, that keeps you up. You think and you get up at night to take notes because you have to find out whether it’s serious, or whether it requires an intervention to ensure that something is not misunderstood. Or elsewhere, it helps you rethink the next step or how you proceed from here.

That is actually a reason why I like this; I like teaching more than researching and publishing for myself. I actually enjoy having to think about keeping things evolving within a space between people. When misunderstanding happens, it’s good because it’s often not the case that students did not understand what you said, but it’s something you did not understand when you said it.

It’s good to remind ourselves that certain robust assumptions and conventions are those that take a long time to learn and even to teach, but then must be unlearnt. Some of these things are very firmly locked in. But it’s also important not to give people the impression that what they learnt before was not the right thing. With literature, it’s a matter of forcing things into an irritation with what was already there. I think it’s similar when we think about concepts that we think we already know. Especially with conceptual questions—with the pressure that the students are under timewise, and with the credits and grading system—there is an inclination and perhaps even a training to apply the knowledge you learn. That makes students lean toward reading texts in somewhat mechanical terms. At some point, you have the opportunity to give feedback and engage with that. But otherwise, this has to happen over a longer time, I think.

In our field, it’s not like economics or, say, any of the other sciences, in that while we teach concepts, ideas, topics, questions, issues—for which there are technical terms—they’re not fenced in too strongly. They have currency in a wider field and it’s important that we are able to look for and push toward that connection. But that also means we need to always take our bearings again by thinking about the terms and concepts that are used by people such as journalists and book reviewers. Ultimately, that general discourse is sturdier than what we are trying to do. It’s good to have that bounce back in your face from time to time. I find that it’s often interesting to address it, as it challenges me to return to it and see it in a different light. We have to keep moving forward, but then we can look back and say, “Do you remember that? You need to see the connection.”—and that helps to dislodge certain things.

In our field especially, we’re eager to train our students to engage with different ways of seeing. At the same time, we also want to be respectful of their backgrounds and their perspectives. How do you process the students’ resistance to what you provide them?

Yes, it can come up individually in ways that I find unpredictable. I haven’t had an experience where students said “why don’t we do this?” or “why don’t we do that?”. But in connection with students’ papers or things that they write, that comes up of course.

However, I do often encourage students to find something that interests them. There can be occasions where I have to say “use this” and be met with resistance. That resistance is focused on a particular work—not so much my own but the students’ work. Otherwise, I try to ask students to lead group discussions based on certain articles. I choose those articles because I find them interesting, but it’s also interesting for me to see how they might be read quite differently or even make me question why I had put them in the syllabus in the first place. I tend not to interfere and certainly not dictate. I participate in the discussions myself to make sure important observations, maybe sideways glances or insights, are not overheard or overlooked, and not allow a particular view to dominate in discussions.

I devise this arrangement partly because I am the one selecting the texts. By the time the course starts, the syllabus has to be there. I’m quite aware that it is not easy for me to select those texts, and I don’t want to just summarize or have a list of references, but to put into the classroom something that we will all read together. And in that space, I find that it’s interesting to see how the texts I have selected perform. Sometimes that prompts me to also bring in other things as well. There’s an interesting perspective or way of reading this interaction that I hadn’t spelled out for myself. So, in that sense, resistance can happen—which is good, I think.

As an academic, I think it’s fair to assume that you don’t always get to teach what is most interesting or relevant to your field. However, at the same time, the teacher’s enthusiasm is pivotal to student learning. How do you sustain enthusiasm for subjects that are not in your immediate field of expertise?

One way is to give up or shed courses that you’ve grown out of, and to start developing new courses. I need to teach a course several times to feel that it is in the shape it should be, so I spend quite a lot of time working on my courses. Normally, I like to teach a course maybe at least three times before switching it. After three times, it’s time to shelve it for a bit, but you may find that when you come back to it, it’s no longer relevant.

At least for me—in the way I’ve been designing my courses lately—I find that I need something that is preoccupying, or something that I hope students are interested in. So right now, everything I teach is pretty new. What’s nice about it is that there is an opportunity to rethink things that have been part of your baggage for so long that you now have the chance to readjust them and resituate them in the context of new materials. That for me is the interesting thing: to keep learning, and to reread all the texts that I know and am relatively familiar with. There are always different discussions that make these texts relevant and interesting in new ways, so I learn a lot in that process. That does translate a bit into how I engage a class because I don’t know how else to teach unless to demonstrate that it matters and that it’s exciting stuff. That doesn’t mean students all need to agree, but it is important for them to see that this is at least alive.

In our kind of teaching, there’s the textual, which is maybe more stable. But then you don’t want to get stuck on that as well because very often, after a while, you’re not happy with what’s there. With teaching, it’s a performance. It’s a live event or act—without making it false in any way. When you go into a classroom, you’re exposed, and there is a certain unpredictability in that. So it must be scripted—you’re not just going into it randomly. At the same time, it requires a different kind of focus and attention to be effective. That means being able not to be stuck too much with the script.

Overtime, I find that teaching comes with practice and experience. As long as you can still trust your memory, you will remember the right things, but you will never remember everything. Most times, I don’t remember where I put down my handouts or my notes, and then I have to go around the room and find where I put them. But because you can talk and engage, you don’t actually have to read the notes—that’s because of the dynamic that is there. In the classroom, I find that there needs to be priority in the way I teach. At the same time, that keeps it from being boring. That always means it’s kept stressful—which you know, is a privilege.

The second part of the interview will focus on Dr. Heim’s approach to the relationship between research and pedagogy. It will be published in the March issue of the Alumni Magazine. Stay tuned!