A Lesson Learned About How to Teach
It took a workshop to help teaching award-winner Naomi Quinn to understand how to be effective in the classroom
When talking about teaching, Naomi Quinn starts with a confession: "I was a really bad teacher for a long time."
These days, students praise the cultural anthropology professor for her inspired teaching, intellectually demanding classroom and for her support and encouragement of the students and their work. But when she came out of Stanford graduate school in 1971, "I didn't know what I was doing in the classroom," Quinn said with a laugh.
How she got from that point to receiving this year's Richard K. Lublin Award, one of Trinity College's awards for distinguished teaching, illustrates what goes into excellent teaching.
Quinn said her problems started with the fact that in graduate school and in her early years at Duke, "I was never taught how to teach."
"I didn't think about teaching much. I backed into it. I got into cultural anthropology because I thought I was going to be Margaret Mead, tromping through fieldwork. I didn't think teaching was my talent. When I did think of teaching, I thought of myself as a dispenser of knowledge, somebody who was in the front of the classroom and instructed the students in what I knew."
That all changed around 1990, when she took part in a Curriculum Transformation Workshop, put together by a group of faculty members that included Jean O'Barr, Wendy Luttrell, Deborah Pope, Mary Boatwright, Mary Wyer, Barbara Dickinson and Kristine Stiles.
"It was valuable on several levels," Quinn said. "It was wonderful just to be able to talk about teaching with these people, for one. But the most important thing was how it transformed my attitude toward teaching. I realized it wasn't about transmitting knowledge, that students aren't just FAX machines receiving information. The point was to get them to think. It might seem like I should have realized that earlier, but there it was.
"I think to be a good teacher is to find some part of yourself that works in the classroom. Some good teachers are performers; I'm not. For me, it's more my mothering style -- permissive and laid back, but listening very hard to them and pulling out from them ideas and questions.
"The workshop also made me realize just how different each class is. Each class has its own chemistry, and it's important for a teacher to find out what that is and work with it. You also have to talk to the students who don't get a chance to speak in class and let them know that what they say matters."
Her undergraduate classes are moderate in size, and Quinn prefers to teach them as if they are seminars. Her specialty is cognitive theories of culture, and she is part of a small group of cultural anthropologists searching for neurobiological explanations to the question, "What is culture?"
Half of her classes focus on the disciplinary work of culture theory; the other half are on specific topics, such as Marriage in America," "Myths and Values in America," "American Individualism" and Gender Inequality." She also offers some smaller seminars that have been popular with students. "Crossing Cultures" had study abroad students write travel memoirs of their foreign experiences. "Campus Culture and Drinking" was one of the first classes at Duke to have students do research on Duke students' drinking practices, experiences and beliefs.
Several students said Quinn's inspiration in the classes has changed their career plans. One recent Duke graduate, Lara Hirsh, said Quinn's teaching led her to seek a career in public service. "I believe she has an extreme devotion to nurturing her students, both intellectually and emotionally," Hirsh said.
Another student, a former high school dropout who returned to college feeling uncertain of her abilities, said Quinn's encouragement gave her the support to continue on in her doctoral program.
"I felt as if Naomi reached out to me to stir up buried talents or potential that I had forgotten I possessed," said Deborah Noel Kaplan, a doctoral student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "She rekindled in me a sense of intellectual excitement and joy in doing research for the sake of discovering things."
Quinn said she enjoys teaching topics that students care about and respond to, such as gender issues in America or American marriage. For many students, thinking about culture raises important personal issues for them, so it's easy to engage them in class.
She's also careful to listen to what her students have to say, which is why she once changed the order of the reading list for her class on marriage. "I had all the pessimistic books listed at the end of the semester and that seemed to affect the students, so I changed it around so now they finish the semester with the books that are optimistic about marriage," she said.
"I love listening to the students," she added. "They're smart and thoughtful. The best compliment I can get is at the end of the semester one will come to me and say, "I'll never think about marriage the same way' or 'I'll never think about American individualism the same way.' That, I realize now, is the point of it all."
Teaching Awards
The David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Award
The Robert B. Cox Award
The Howard D. Johnson Award
The Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching (Graduate School)
Renan Levine, political science
The Duke University Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing