Schenectady Synecdoche

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April 07, 2005

Another aspect

D said today that she has a little regret about the impending end of the semester: "Just when I'm starting to get it, it's over!" A good point to remember. Even while everyone's dying for the semester to end, there's also the level of quality, both collaborative and individual, that's possible only at the end of the semester.

I started this semester in my grad history class in the belief that I shouldn't just teach the course from my perspective, and I now think it was a mistake. Like some/all of the students, I only start to get it—whatever "it" is—at the end of the semester. Everything up to that point is preliminary. Hence my late decision to add an Afrocentric U.S. history text to a comp history course. And hence my decision today to go the whole way: in our next text-based meeting (next week's class is a project workshop), I'll present my argument for an Afrocentric approach to comp history. (I know Afrocentricity is an antique concept, but I'm an antique theorist, so there's some symmetry.)

I was telling Sandra recently that I've decided that all my courses henceforth, both grad and undergrad, should be "about" the work that I actually do. Heretofore I've avoided that, in the effort to teach core materials, surveys, etc., etc. Teaching one's "own" stuff in a core course is tricky: the students need that survey, that sense of wide perspective, that understanding of shared, received concepts. But they also need to know how one inserts oneself into these discourses, and that's what teaching my own stuff potentially brings. The students don't have to go there themselves in order to benefit from teacher-based teaching.

So this is a principle I'll be applying in all my courses, from FYC to grad seminars. Part of the course will be "about" the work that I actually do. Or the survey-type materials will be contextualized "in" the work I do. Or the work I do will be contextualized in the survey-type materials. Or. But not teaching one's own work when it is pertinent is just another form of the fantasy of ideology-free pedagogy. That's a fantasy I long ago relinquished; I feel comfortable in the classroom, stating my own perspectives and beliefs without imposing them on my students. Well, my work is part of my perspectives and beliefs. So in two weeks the comp history class is going to explore the possibility of Afrocentric composition history. And next fall, my 105 will begin with a unit on plagiarism—including, of course, why one shouldn't do it, yada yada, but also why it matters so much to our culture and why our culture is so hypocritical about it. And my 303 will incorporate substantial work in contemporary information literacy. Work that I do.

Do I sound like I'm making a resolution? I am. It's time for me to teach the work I do. I don't know whether I should've been doing it all along—I rather suspect that I personally have benefitted from not teaching my own work all the time—but at least at this point in my career I think my students stand to benefit most from a change in policy on that issue, and I'm sure I won't suffer from it, myself. I think one of the reasons I've been slow to adopt this stance is that I started my post-doctoral teaching career at a liberal arts college that deliberately assigned all its faculty to teach interdisciplinary courses in which they did not have complete expertise. The underlying principle had to do with a commitment not just to interdisciplinarity but also to teacher/student co-discovery. And it was a remarkable opportunity for me as a teacher: I am much more widely read in Plato's work, for example, than I otherwise would have been, and I know a lot more about nineteenth-century philosophy; medieval architecture; and Impressionist art than I otherwise would have. I've read a boatload of scholarship on W.E.B. DuBois and Homer. Etc. So I've gone through my whole career with a commitment to co-inquiry and co-discovery. I'm not surrendering that; but I am turning to a pedagogy that is teacher-driven—or most accurately, driven by the work that the teacher—moi—does. We'll see how this goes.

Posted by senioritis at April 7, 2005 08:10 PM

Comments

Posted by: TR at April 7, 2005 09:42 PM

Posted by: senioritis at April 7, 2005 09:52 PM