Nearly every December it happens. I find myself frantically running down a hallway in Blake. I’m clutching the final exams, the extra pens and some spare bluebooks, and I’m late because I’ve lost track of the time. My heart is pounding, I’m sweating even though it is in the midst of winter, and then I’m gripped by the realization that I have no idea where my class is. I peer through the door windows into room after room, but my students are nowhere to be found. And then I wake up.
I used to wonder when this repeating anxiety dream would let go of me. But I think I know the answer. Not as long as I’m still teaching. And I’m starting to see that that is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve come to see fear as an integral component of teaching. It permeates our classrooms, and it is not just coming from the student in the back row who freezes when you call on her or the one who comes to you after blowing a midterm and tells you that he really has to have a “B” in your course in order to graduate. It comes out of our own desires as teachers, our years of training as students, and the infuriating experience we have that as we age, our minds and memories are deteriorating. While delivering a lecture, in the midst of hunting vainly for a word in mid-sentence, perhaps a thought has crept into your mind, “What am I doing here in this classroom?” It’s the same question that my dream asks. My feeling is that when I can no longer answer that, it will be time to move on to another occupation. For now, my answer is “I’m trying to learn something new.” So each semester, on the first day of classes when my stomach moves to another time zone, I push past my shyness and look around the room for reactions to the syllabus. I discard my worry that students will move for the door as I explain that this is a new class that has never been taught before and they are the designated guinea pigs. I brace myself for the disappointment that will come from enrollment drops as they perform the calculations about how all this assigned work might fit into their schedules. And through it all I wait to see if there are just a few pairs of eyes that light up, that hold out the possibility of intellectual engagement over the coming months.
Jane Tompkins, an English professor, has written eloquently on fear and the necessity of taking risks in teaching. In an article published in 1990, she detailed the fear she felt after decades of teaching according to what she had imbibed in college and in graduate school. Her constant anxiety over being well-prepared and showing how smart and knowledgeable she was in class led her to critique what she called the “performance model” of teaching, which she found to be “destructive of creativity and self-motivated learning.” Each person comes into a professional situation dragging along behind her a long bag full of desires, fears, expectations, needs, resentments—the list goes on. But the main component is fear. Fear is the driving force of the performance model. Fear of being shown up for what you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a dolt, a sap, a weakling, someone who can’t cut the mustard. In graduate school, especially, fear is prevalent. Thinking about these things, I became aware recently that my own fear of being shown up for what I really am must transmit itself to my students, and insofar as I was afraid to be exposed, they too would be afraid.1 Tompkins’ solution was to radically alter the rules of the game, to give up the mode of the lecture and to allow students to take control of the discussion by reducing her own input in the class to a minimum. Her fear motivated her to innovate, and in the end she felt that both she and her students gained far more from the experience than from the more traditional approach. Also, her fear dissipated.
Teaching is a risk-taking activity. It probably does not seem that way on a weekly basis and certainly not to outsiders. After all, most of us are not saving lives or pushing around millions of dollars of investment capital or anything that looks terribly dramatic when we construct a course or enter a classroom or a studio. But engaged teaching, the stuff that inspires students and might change the direction of their lives, involves using your whole being, not just what you learned in grad school, or read in journals or discovered in the lab or in the archive. What you select to teach and how you present it is a reflection of your life, your personality, and your politics as much as it is where you got your Ph.D. and what your specialty is. In that sense, teaching involves more emotional risk than many other professions and occupations. Parker Palmer, a popular teaching guru, makes this point when he writes:
Here is a secret hidden in plain sight: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood—and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.2
My own teaching is marked by a disdain for hierarchal authority that comes out of going to college on the West Coast during the era of police riots on campus. It also features an egalitarian streak that was fed by working on a newspaper collective in Santa Barbara in the 1970s; a healthy respect for the power of the cinema which comes from my brief experience as a film student; an appreciation of the creativity of workers that comes from both studying labor history and working for years as an offset pressman; and the obsession of a collector of old postcards, which I think is simply a way to order the chaos of the past. I bring all of these aspects of my life into the classroom every week, into the design of my courses and even into the subjects that I elect to teach. Some people would call this “baggage,” but I see it as my work box.
Templates are there to be broken
Breakthroughs like Tompkins’ appear to be accidental and rare rather than a planned part of the university environment. This is strange, since universities often tout themselves as sites of innovation, especially in laboratories and research. Teaching, by contrast, is regularly looked upon as a more conservative endeavor where faculty members are often expected to emulate their professors and hold on to the “tried and true” methods of the last century (or two)—the entertaining lecture, the long term paper, the final exam.
Carl Strikwerda, another historian, wrote in these pages a few years ago that “teaching is a conservative act, in the classic sense of the term” and that it has as its goal “to preserve what is good from the past.”3 While I understand his point, my perspective on where we are and how we got here is somewhat darker. I come from the assumption that a world in which it is possible for a handful of people to destroy the foundations of human society in a matter of minutes is fundamentally untenable. For me, it follows that the role of the historian and the social scientist is to question the wrong turns that have led us to this place of chaos, to tear down this history, to destroy the myths that help perpetuate it and to question its premises. In short, to teach is to profess, to bay at the surrounding darkness (if for no other reason than to remember that it was not always night) and to search for a way out of the tunnel. In order to do that, I find that it is often necessary to diverge from the methods of the past, as well. In an upper-level undergraduate course on the cultural history of Latin America, I started with recent dark events and worked backward in time, in contrast to almost all other courses in our department which work from the past toward the present, a template that is central to our discipline. My idea was to unravel culture as if it were an onion, looking at interrelated layers and eventually at its core foundations in the 19th century. But I also wanted to shock students with a problem at the very beginning: How could a country with one of the most democratic traditions in the hemisphere give rise to a brutal and prolonged military government that routinely tortured its citizens and produced the highest political incarceration rate in the world during the 1970s? To answer this question I had to disorient them, put them into the maelstrom, and then we had to climb backward through the barbaric sludge and the cultural achievements of the 20th century. Interestingly, no student has ever complained about this reverse chronology, though a few have had moments of creative confusion in the middle, and my sense is that they have been able to make the conceptual loop back to the present at the end of the course with an even better understanding of culture than if I had employed a traditional model.
The notion of a template for history courses was first made visible to me a couple of years ago by a graduate teaching assistant who wanted my advice on teaching a world history course, a freshman intro. He had gone to our syllabi file, fashioned his course after the previous one taught, selected a text, and now, several weeks into the semester, was bored out of his mind. Apparently, so were the students. He complained about the strategy of covering three civilizations per week, rendering them so simple as to be incomprehensible. I asked him why he followed this tack, and he replied that he had not wanted to rock the boat and assumed that this was how the faculty wanted the course taught. I freed him of this illusion that he had to reproduce his ancestors’ course, and the next time he taught a survey class, he created it according to larger themes and comparative case studies that let him and the students get into the subject in more depth. There are two points to this story: first, that under the duress of our varied and increasing workloads and a desire to please our superiors, we often have a tendency to follow the path of least resistance in teaching, but this is ultimately not good for the individual or for the institution. This conformity is learned in graduate school, repeated by assistant professors under pressure to produce sufficient amounts of research to attain tenure, and then so well ingrained that absent countervailing forces, it can go on unabated until retirement. All that is necessary is to please students enough that they award good marks for “well prepared and communicated effectively” and “the instructor was generally effective.” As an institution, I think that we have to reexamine the messages that we are communicating to the new professoriate; i.e. that they should not put too much energy or creativity into their teaching because they need to turn out ever increasing amounts of research. This lesson, learned collectively, will render us irrelevant as an agent of change in a very short time.4
Boredom as the mother of invention
My second point is that boredom experienced by a teacher is not the product of some personal failing but a symptom of something in the teaching itself and probably a good impetus to experimentation. Joan Flaherty, in admitting that grading and the repetition of subject matter lead her to a state of “debilitating, mind-numbing” boredom, suggests some defenses that involve reading and writing about teaching, tinkering with the delivery and substance of a course and “lightening up.” Some of these can be useful while others are simply short-term mind games.5 For me, the thing that keeps both boredom and fear of irrelevancy at bay is inventing new courses. I average about one new course each year, discarding old ones after I’ve taught them four or five times. Not everything gets thrown out. It is more like reshuffling the deck, taking segments of older classes and realigning them, with new topics and assignments and different goals. But each time I do it, I engage in some investigation by reading new material, then I perform some creative collage.
The biggest risk I have taken in teaching began a few years ago when I convinced a series of colleagues and administrators to let me teach an occasional course in another discipline. I was hesitant to approach my friends in sociology for permission to play in their sandbox, but something drove me to propose teaching a course that I entitled Deciphering the City, which fell under the existing rubric of urban sociology. The truth is that I had been getting a little bored after achieving tenure, and I wanted to get out of my box as a Latin American historian and investigate something new, with a broader geographical scope and a greater sense of immediacy than what I’d been used to. I was warmly welcomed by the sociology department and allowed to teach the course using an interdisciplinary approach. I spent a few months reading about the topic in unfamiliar journals and books, observing one of my friends teach an introductory sociology class. Then I dove in.
For a while, I clung to what I knew, the historical dimensions of cities. But my students, who were very different from history majors, expected something more than this, and they let me know it. So I pushed into contemporary issues and sociological methods, and the class took off. I had to let go of my fears of how much I did not know, and to trust my students to do the work, offer their insights and make interesting connections between theories, problems and some of their own experiences. In short, my own inexperience led to a collaborative effort. I also had to allow my own ideas, observations and constructions to guide the discussions, even if I considered myself a novice in this new discipline. When I did that, my own learning—the very purpose of this experiment—increased markedly, and I also began to relax in the classroom. In time, the course really did become interdisciplinary, employing ideas and materials from geography, literature, history and sociology. I’ve probably never learned more in my life than I did from teaching this one class, and it has helped me bust through borders in the rest of my teaching repertoire, especially at the graduate level where I now teach a course on The Global City.6
It is customary to open essays like this one with a provocative quotation. In my unorthodox way, I’ve been holding back, waiting to close with something that captures my feelings about teaching more eloquently than I can articulate them. It is from a short story by an Uruguayan author who has spent the last three decades in Spain, having fled the violence and insanity of a military dictatorship in her homeland. The story concerns the Museum of Futile Endeavors, a melancholy repository of unrealized desires located on the edge of an unnamed city. The clerk assures me that only a tiny proportion of useless efforts makes it to the museum. For one thing, the government lacks money, so acquisitions, exchanges, or exhibits in the provinces or abroad are practically impossible. For another, the inordinate number of useless efforts carried out all the time means that a lot of people would have to be willing to work without pay or understanding on the part of the public…
Leafing through one of the volumes, I found a man who spent 10 years trying to make his dog talk. Another spent more than 20 years trying to win a woman’s affections…
There are men who have taken long journeys in pursuit of inexistent places, unrecoverable memories, deceased women, disappeared friends. There are children who undertook impossible tasks with great resolve. Like the ones who would dig a hole periodically washed over by the waves…
Entire sections of the museum are dedicated to voyages. We reconstruct them from the pages of the books. After a time of drifting across various seas, traversing dense forests, discovering cities and marketplaces, crossing bridges, sleeping on trains and station benches, the travelers forget the purpose of the trip yet nevertheless continue traveling. And then one day—lost in a flood, trapped in the subway, asleep forever in a doorway—they disappear without a trace. And no one comes to claim them.7
Those who innovate tend to work on the fringes of hierarchical institutions, hidden away where someone won’t come by and tell them that they cannot continue to do what they are doing. Faculty need to exploit the few spaces they have for experimentation: CTE, the Honors Program, team-teaching and the course development funds made available by the Office of International Programs.8 They also need to take some risks to open new spaces. There is unlikely to be any new initiative coming from above, no grand experiment on the level of the University of Pennsylvania’s alternative core curricula.9 In any case, ambitious students will find these limited and idiosyncratic fringe experiments through their own intelligence networks. But these accidents need to be encouraged, sustained, documented and fully incorporated into the curriculum if the university as a whole does not wish to be rendered irrelevant in its teaching mission.
Endnotes
1Tompkins, J. (1990). Pedagogy of the distressed. College English, 52 (6), 654. For a more detailed analysis of fear in the educational system, see her autobiography, A life in school: What the teacher learned (Cambridge: Perseus, 1996).
2Palmer, P. J. (1997, November/December). The heart of a teacher: Identity and integrity in teaching. Change, 16.
3Strikwerda, C. (2001). Reflections on teaching. Reflections from the Classroom (4), 16.
4For an interesting discussion of conformity and scholarship in academe, see the interview with the historian and activist Howard Zinn. Barsamian, D. (1997, July). Howard Zinn: The Progressive interview. The Progressive, 37-40.
5Flaherty, J. (2000). Teachers get bored, too. The Teaching Professor, 14 (10), 1.
6For an explanation of how this course was designed with the help of a CTE Faculty Seminar, see the CTE web site at www.ku.edu/~cte/gallery.
7Rossi, C. P. (2001). The museum of useless efforts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2-5.
8The case for the creative potential of interdisciplinary team teaching was made by Anton Rosenthal and Fred Rodriguez, (2001), in Interdisciplinary courses and team teaching: Crossing academic borders, Reflections from the Classroom, (4), 1-4. None of the institutional barriers to this type of teaching has been removed. Good arguments for exploring the intersection of history with other disciplines are put forward by Thomas Bender in Expanding the domain of history, an essay commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and available at www.carnegiefoundation.org/cid.
9The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2002, A12.
