Submitted by Jim Aune on December 5, 2011 - 1:08pm
A handout I made for a teachers on teaching panel at NCA. Anything else you'd add?
Jim Aune, Professor and Head of Communication, Texas A&M
"Teachers on Teaching" panel, NCA, New Orleans, 11/18/11
1. Teaching is a spiritual process. My B'racha for a new year of teaching: Praised are You, Adonai, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has made us holy with commandments and commanded us to engage in the study of Torah. You have told us that the study of the universe and the humans who live in it is a way to worship You. Help us to remember with Rabbi Tarfon, "It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task. Yet, you are not free to desist from it. " Help us to remember with Leo Strauss: "Always imagine that there is at least one student in class who is your superior in heart and mind." Help us to remember with T.H. White: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
2. Unlearn the current cant about classrooms as "safe spaces"--classrooms should be unsafe spaces, and should equally protect academic freedom and student's free speech rights. I put the following statement on all my syllabi: Contemporary trends in higher education notwithstanding, there is no fundamental right of students not to be offended. You may hear or see things in this course that you find disturbing. I presume that students are adult citizens, not victims in need of protection.
3. Teaching is a rhetorical process--most problems I see in observing junior faculty teaching have to do with deficiencies in public speaking skills and audience adaptation.
4. Be ready to argue both sides of controversial issues--another fundamental rhetorical skill. In a "liberal" academic context, argue the "conservative" point of view. In a "conservative" academic context, argue the "liberal" point of view--but make clear that students have rights to hold their fundamental political and religious beliefs. You're better off in both contexts defending what Max Weber called "inconvenient facts" than in appearing to be an advocate of a particular perspective.
5. Be prepared to have your heart broken every day. Every generation of students has its cognitive deficiencies, prejudices, and learned incapacities. The past was never better; other universities are not better. Your current audience is just different. You're not better than them. Get over it.
6. Be a mensch--inflexible rules are for Deans and other bureaucrats. My classroom rule is: everyone gets to mess up once. Professors who ask for documentation for funerals or illness (the first time) are schmucks.
7. Learn names--students are always most surprised when I remember their names. It's a skill. Learn it, using whatever memory tricks you can learn.
8. Be efficient--turn back speech critiques, paper comments, and exams as quickly as possible (under a week). Students appreciate quick "feedback."
9. Talk about yourself occasionally—the professorial life is mysterious to students, so it helps to tell them about your college experiences (good and bad) and your family life (up to a point).
10. Your research and teaching should be seamlessly connected--there is never an excuse for not publishing or engaging in a scholarly conversation. If your research does not occasionally force you to rethink your teaching, you're doing it wrong.
Thanks jim, excellent post.
-J
Indie Music Blog
One thing I'll add:
Know yourself and be yourself. Teach to your strengths and don't try to be someone else, deploy someone else's pedagogy, or adopt someone else's policies. Each teacher brings a different set of skills and contents into the courses and deploying those to teach the course's core learning objectives serves much better than trying to follow a pedagogy not suited to one's persona, disposition, skills, and style (yes, I do believe in having core learning objectives).
That really means first and foremost know yourself -- know what you are and are not good at, the things you do well and the ones you don't. I loathe and am generally terrible about the monitoring and disciplining of things like attendance, so I don't take attendance. Instead I build in other tools to accomplish the same goals as attendance that better suit my own style and attitude. Some colleagues have horror at the fact I never take attendance, even though my average student attendance tends to be over 90%.
The final implication of this is that teaching graduate students how to teach is not only about policies, models, philosophies, practices, etc., but also about a kind of care of the self (you didn't expect me not to go there, did you?). The classroom is a place in which all the parties are engaged in a kind of work on the self, a knowledge and a remaking, a putting oneself at risk (build your syllabus under Vesuvius), which is much in line with the plasticity syntaxfactory mentions and Aune's abandonment of the "safe space". Getting graduate teaching assistants to approach their classrooms as a space of collective experimentation and a place in which they can come to know themselves and work on themselves can empower them, I believe, to bring their strengths into the classroom and not to kowtow to the sacred gods of either "traditional" or "universal" models of pedagogy.
...how first-years are still plastic human beings, subject to immense change, and that first-year MA students, after all, are only three months older than an undergraduate, and so also still plastic human beings, subject to immense change.
The person you are discussion with, arguing with, negotiating with is changing in the very process of argument, discussion, and negotiation. To argue with them in a way that fails to reflect that, and to judge them in a way that fails to reflect that, does you both a disservice.
Great stuff here. I like #5 in particular. So true. Learning to live with, even welcome, the heartbreak seems as vital as anything to teaching.
Thanks, Prof. Aune, for sharing this and so many other things on the Blogora. Congratulations on your award, and for helping me keep the faith. We need it. http://youtu.be/JJpLj02hjB0?t=15s
Tony de Velasco
University of Memphis
you, Jim!
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