For most of us, August or September marks the beginning of a new term and our going back to the classroom. Teaching is at the heart of our vocation. What we teach, and to whom, is a key part of our academic identity. Our teaching schedule gives rhythm to our working week. The subjects that we teach dictate the areas where we feel compelled to keep ourselves up to date. Our teaching is where we find the opportunity to share, review, and exchange about our science, within the safety and comfort of a classroom. From the outside, teaching is what most people see as the main if not sole activity of a university professor.

And yet, teaching is very much taken for granted. All good scholars are supposed to be natural born teachers, and should therefore develop their own pedagogical skills based on their experience, peer advice, trial and error and student feedback. The reality of teaching also varies considerably. Lecturing hundreds of entry-level students in a concert-size auditorium is not quite the same experience as leading a seminar with a handful of sophisticated graduate students. Although both fall within the remit of "teaching," they relate to different objectives requiring different skills, different jobs, really. Some of us might do exclusively one or the other or a combination of the two.

The focus of ICA, like that of so many learned societies, is primarily on research with little consideration for teaching. This is consistent with the remit of its purpose as defined ambitiously in the bylaws as "to advance the scholarly study of human communication and to facilitate the implementation of such study so as to be of maximum benefit to human kind" (ICA Bylaws, Article II). Matters related to teaching are not excluded from these aims, but their relevance is merely implicit when seeking to achieve these goals notably by "facilitating the dissemination of research" (Article II).

Meanwhile, ICA has developed a strong culture of service to its membership. Many initiatives are undertaken with the aim of just helping our members, responding to their needs, expectations and requirements. These, I argue, include issues related to teaching, a number of which do require the attention of our community at the moment. For example, technologies are disrupting the ways of teaching, opening up new possibilities, while escalating the expectations of our students and of the institutions that employ us. This is further enhanced by the increased climate of competition and the generalization of an audit culture that formalizes these expectations and uses them as yard sticks to evaluate performance. In a number of countries, the evaluation culture has taken extreme forms sometimes leading to cuts in budgets or staff or even, in some cases, to closing down entire departments. Young colleagues, adjuncts and others, see their workload reach worrying highs while job stability becomes more elusive.

These subjects are a matter of concern or interest for many of our members and I would therefore like to explore the possibilities to develop more activities related to the teaching of media and communication science. The constant conversation between our research and our teaching is a distinctive feature of academic culture and there is no reason why we should refrain from engaging with both sides of our professional identity. Members willing to take initiatives in this area are welcome to contact me. If there is sufficient interest, I will appoint a task force to contemplate the possibilities.