Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Fearless Teaching

 To a large extent, we teach the way we've been taught, or at least the ways that took hold and made us want to learn.  I was lucky as a graduate student: I had a handful of  wonderful instructors who weren't afraid to make their classes a genuine marketplace of ideas, people like Donald Murray, Tom Newkirk, Melody Graulich and many others.  I later learned that this approach was grounded in constructivist theory, especially the idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon--we make meaning together.  At the heart of this an open inquiry into what we think about what is known.   From class to class, we may not know where this will take us.  But the payoff--discovery--is well worth the risks.  This is something I recognize not just as a teacher but as a writer.

In practical terms, this means that in most of my classes I listen more than some of your other instructors.  I take notes on things that students say that I think are particularly insightful or provocative; in a sense, I'm a student, too.  I will guide discussion, certainly, and when appropriate share knowledge that might fill in our understandings of what scholars have said.  But I'm not inclined to lecture.  To students who prefer professors who profess, my teaching style might seem strangely passive, or perhaps even manipulative:  "Why doesn't he just tell us what he thinks or what he knows!"  The simple answer is that I'm convinced that you will learn less if I do.

Some years ago, the literary scholar Jane Tompkins published "Pedagogy of the Distressed," an article on teaching that strongly influenced my thinking. (I've attached it in case you want to take a look).  For many years, Tompkins taught in the conventional way--lecturing, leading, professing, establishing her authority, (which, by the way, is considerable).  At some point she realized that her motives for teaching that way weren't as pure as she thought.  Tompkins wrote that she suddenly understood that "most of the time" she was concerned about  "three things: a) to show the students how smart I was, b) to show them how knowledgeable I was, and c)to show them how well-prepared I was for class. I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to perform before them in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me."  Tompkins called this the "performance model" of teaching, and concluded that what was behind it was fear.  She decided to stop being afraid.

This spoke to me, because like Tompkins, I've always felt a bit like an impostor in front of a college classroom.  On bad days, I feel like the dumbest guy in the room. But I was lucky.  I had the good fortune to have teachers who didn't respond to fear by continually demonstrating how smart they were, and so I could see another way to teach, one that isn't really about me at all.

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