Creativity
and listening
in the classroom
by Jan French
I approach teaching with the belief that students learn most effectively when they can see how the subject matter of the course relates to their own quest for answers to life-stage questions, ranging from "why are societies the way they are?" to "what kind of person do I want to be?" As a teacher, I present them with alternative views and methods for analyzing the world and themselves, always asking the following question: What is the explanatory and transformative value of this theory, empirical information, ethnographic representation, or world view? I encourage students to ponder as much why people or groups accept what we see as injustices as why others resist them and provoke change, with an eye toward helping them view themselves as protagonists in their own life narratives.
Before many of the reading assignments, I provide questions and key terms to guide reading. An integral part of reading is the preparation of weekly reading notes whose format is largely left to the students (in the fall semester, one student sometimes began her weekly comments with a poem), but is required to involve an analysis of the reading. After each class, I post my own reading notes on the Web site for an alternative analytical and critical perspectives. I also guide the students through a longer paper-writing process, with deadlines throughout the semester. I believe that the most effective way to encourage students to invest in their writing projects is to have each student choose a different topic. At the end of the semester, students' oral presentations are an integral part of the semester's education process, through which I also participate as a learner. When theory is the subject of the course, I ask the students to research the historical context in which an important book was written, and to examine the book's impact on other theories and empirical work. Sometimes, students interview authors by e-mail and incorporate the results in their papers.
In addition to traditional testing and the grading of papers, I provide feedback to each student. I feel strongly that students' work merits critical dialogue as much as a grade. Therefore, I require outlines and encourage drafts which I then discuss with them. My general philosophy on grading is that it is my job to work with students to give them the best opportunity to get a grade that reflects both absolute standards and individual improvement. I measure the latter in terms of analytical ability and growing facility to express themselves through coherent, persuasive, well-documented arguments, on paper and in class. I believe that successful teaching is dependent upon employing creative strategies, listening to students, and being flexible in adjusting what I have prepared to suit their talents and ideas.
Jan French, a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, is winner this year of the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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Teaching
as a
performative act
by Jessica Blaustein
I think that teaching is a performative act. In other words, I don’t just communicate a pre-packaged content to passive students lined up in front of me. Even if I considered myself to be such a source of pure knowledge, the receivers are bound to transform the transmissions. Because the localized interactions between teachers and students (and between students and students) are what produce knowledge, because the act of teaching makes ideas, it is crucial to consider the discursive and material frames around any given object of study – where, how, and in what form that learning is encountered and subsequently engaged.
For me, the classroom is like a studio or a workshop where meanings are variously put together and taken apart through individual and collaborative projects. Since my work crosses literature, architecture, material culture, and women’s studies, my courses tend to have very strong ties to everyday lives and landscapes. I work from the ground, so to speak, pulling bits and pieces from the worlds around myself and my students to make sense of problems. In this process, I have found it absolutely necessary to acknowledge and confront the different experiences that each student brings with them. The classroom is not a neutral territory populated by abstract subjects who shed their histories and skins when they walk through the door. If my classes are sites for interrogating the ordinary and the familiar, it must be so within the structures of social relations. Each group is singularly composed, and every space takes shape accordingly.
If the classroom isn’t disconnected from life on the ‘outside,’ neither does it unambiguously reflect the social world. I feel very strongly that the radical possibilities of humanities pedagogy lie precisely with the different ways that the teaching space can exist apart from, or at least pause, everyday routines. Unlike most other places, the classroom is an experimental, convertible frame that can be molded in concert with course material. For example, in my freshman Literature seminar a couple years ago, we read early 20th century architect Adolf Loos’s influential attacks on ornament in favor of functional modern architecture, and we put together a dining experience that was consciously “nonfunctional” so that we could really explore the implications of his argument. “Dining in the face of Adolf Loos” allowed us to think carefully about the ever-changing boundaries between “functional” and “nonfunctional” at the very mundane level of food and silverware. Because so many of the objects of study in my most recent course on girl culture existed outside the traditional domain of the text, I designed a course website
(www.duke.edu/~jbb1/girlculture) to be a dynamic resource adjacent to the classroom. There, students could access information about popular media, music and performance cultures, study (and contribute to) the online-zines that are so much a part of adolescent girls’ lives, and find ways to establish connections with communities outside the classroom.
These are just a few of my musings about the multiple realities of the classroom that I have just begun to explore. At the center of all of them are the brave and thoughtful students with wide eyes and open minds that I have had the pleasure of knowing over the years at Duke. As I complete my dissertation project, I look forward to the time when I can more carefully consider and practice the profoundly rewarding social work of pedagogy.
Jessica Blaustein, a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Literature, is winner of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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