Faculty Perspectives on Teaching
Anne Allison
Associate Professor & Chair, Cultural Anthropology
I’m from the Midwest—close to Chicago. I went to University of Denver for one year, dropped out (to travel around the world) for three years, then returned to University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, where I got my BA. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. At the moment, I’m working on the globalization of Japanese kids’ properties—how children’s superheroes, toys, and gameboy games from Japan are faring in the transnational marketplace at this millennial moment. I’ve done fieldwork both in the US and Japan on this and am almost done with the book.
I love teaching. I like preparing and trying to engage the class in material I find interesting and important. Classroom interactions are always surprising because of the input from students. The best classes have a dynamism that surpasses working alone in front of a computer trying to assemble a book. The least enjoyable aspects are when class doesn’t take off for some reason and students seem bored or antsy.
As a novice teacher, I had a number of very large classes that satisfied a curriculum requirement and some of the students were aggressive. This surprised and discouraged me. But equally surprising was how engaging teaching could be and also how challenging.
Prescribing a one-size-fits-all course for teacher preparation is difficult, because teaching requires people to find their own style. Grad students need to have the opportunity to develop this by receiving good guides and feedback. Being a TA often entails handling the grunt work rather than being brought into the creative side of teaching. But if grad students are simply given the opportunity to teach alone, they also are doing so in a situation where often they receive little guidance. I’d suggest a mixture or blend of both: allow a TA situation where a student is given more responsibility for the class and teaching occasions where students are not simply doing it solo—maybe co-teaching situations, for example. Graduate students can help prepare themselves by taking advantage of teaching situations and seeking the advice of teachers they respect (by showing them the syllabus they come up with, for example, or having regular meetings while they teach to go over problems, issues, assignments).
Houston Baker
Susan Fox Beischer & George D. Beischer Arts & Science Professor of English and Professor of African and African-American Studies
I was born and reared in Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended public schools and was one of the first group of Afro-American students in the city to attend racially integrated schools. I did my undergraduate work at Howard University, and received my Ph.D. from UCLA.
This past summer (2002) I was fortunate enough to sell my book, tentatively titled Remembering Race: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Betrayal of Black Intellectuals, to HarperCollins publishers. The book is a critique of black neo-conservative and centrist intellectuals in the United States.
I love teaching. I especially love teaching all types of students—just as long as they are smart and enthusiastic. As long, that is to say, as they bring energy and passion to the classroom. What I enjoy most is a rousing class participation, with students waving their hands in the air for recognition like I used to do when I was in elementary school. That is the passion of idea at work, of minds at work with and on ideas. What I like least is the bureaucracy that has increasingly come to surround teaching—evaluation forms, crunching numbers, coding courses, and attempting to suit the pedagogical “space” to the enrollments in the course. I hate, I suppose, the time-consuming and mechanical “administration” of learning when it takes away from class preparation and enhancement time.
I was overwhelmed by my first good class, when someone actually stayed around after the hour was past and told me it had been a good class. I am still overwhelmed when someone stays around past the hour and tells me it had been a good class! It is easy to assess how much energy I have put into a class, but only feedback and a certain ambience in the class itself—and in the “post season,” as it were—lets you know if the energy paid off. On an amusing note, I was also surprised when I got my first huge set of student papers and realized I was the one who had to grade them!
I believe that both the Teaching Apprentice Program and the Teaching Assistant Program at Duke are wonderful means of preparing graduate students, if there is a real relationship of collaboration between the full-time teacher and the graduate student. One of my best pedagogical experiences in more than thirty years of teaching occurred during the taxing fall semester of 2001 when Vincent Nardizzi—an English department graduate student—and I taught a course titled “Black Literature and the Politics of Liberation.” Vin brought his knowledge and understanding of new theoretical modes to the course, and we combined our wisdom. I had pedagogical strategies that were useful in our endeavors and some specialized knowledge of our field of texts. Students gravitated to Vin not only for his prowess as scholar and teacher, but also because he was nearer their age cohort than I. We made a good team.
Graduate students can begin to prepare for teaching by making themselves familiar with and availing themselves of myriad “presentational modes” of knowledge—from PowerPoint to the complex art of performative lecturing and pedagogical listening. Conference presentations are, I think, helpful for graduate students. And I don’t believe a good apprenticeship can be beat.
Linda George
Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Sociology, and Associate Director, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development
I am originally from rural Ohio. My undergraduate work was done at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. My freshman dorm there housed more people than lived in my hometown! I went to college with the ambition of being a high school English teacher. As the first person in my immediate and extended family to attend college, this seemed like a lofty ambition. It took me less than a semester to become disillusioned with my education classes. They were terrible and the work wasn’t as difficult as that I’d had in my Future Farmers of America-oriented high school. I switched to liberal arts, eventually majoring in sociology. I assumed that I’d said good-bye to my teaching aspirations. I never considered college teaching—indeed, I would never have contemplated graduate school without the consistent (well, really, persistent) message I received from my professors that I should go beyond a bachelor’s degree. Even then, it was three years until I embarked on post-graduate education.
I am usually working on multiple projects at a time—and that is the case now. The intellectual umbrella under which my various projects rest is social factors, aging, and health. I have long-standing research programs focused on how social factors are involved in the onset and outcome of depressive disorder —and, indeed, their effects are very powerful. For several years I have been especially interested in the relationships between religious involvement and health. I expected to find that the widely reported associations between religious participation and health would be explained by social processes such as social support, stress reduction, and behavioral constraints. They aren’t. I’m still working to identify the mechanisms at work. Because the relationships between religion and health are much stronger for measures of religious service attendance than for other dimensions of religious involvement, there is clearly something about the social or communal aspects of religious participation that promote health and longevity.
I absolutely love teaching. I know that this is a research university, but for me, there would be no reason to work at a university if teaching were not a major component of my professional life. I enjoy teaching both undergraduates and graduate students. They are very different, of course—graduate student teaching is incredibly time-consuming and intense, especially when students reach the dissertation stage. There is really nothing that I don’t like about teaching except when the administration schedules my classes in rooms outside of my department—and that’s administration, not teaching. I’ve often thought that teaching brings two kinds of rewards not found in other domains of academic life. First, I am forced to “sell” my intellectual allegiances to a fairly discerning audience. I love the challenge of demonstrating that the area in which I work is an exciting one intellectually and one that offers valuable knowledge. Second, teaching is the part of my professional life that provides me with immediate gratification. It’s a long process to perform research, write it up, and publish it. By the time the article is in print, any excitement I experienced during the research process has long dissipated. But students provide immediate gratification at every class session. It’s hard to describe the joy that I experience when students respond positively and creatively to the material covered in their classes.
What surprised me when I first started teaching is how much fun it is. I was a shy country girl when I first stood up in front of a classroom, finding it difficult to imagine why anyone would want to hear anything that I had to say. But it was largely pure pleasure from the start.
To my mind, the best thing that departments or the Graduate School can do to prepare graduate students to teach is to provide them with effective role models. I’ve been very fortunate in that my classes have been very well received by students. I’ve had junior faculty in my department and other departments attend a few of my classes because they have heard good things about my teaching. As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I had many incredibly effective teachers. I’ve tried not so much to directly model my teaching on theirs as to understand what made them effective teachers and how I can best express those qualities in a way that expresses who I am. Departments and the Graduate School should identify their “master teachers” and expose graduate students to many of them.
As for graduate students facing the challenge of teaching, I think that the key elements of effective teaching are pretty clear. First, as the Boy Scouts say, be prepared. Know your subject matter well—what I know best in my field is what I teach. Organize your material so that it makes sense and stress the organization in your teaching (repeating important points, making effective transitions, etc.). Knowing your material well and having it organized also is a prerequisite for entering the classroom with adequate self-confidence. Be enthusiastic—if you don’t care about your subject matter, why would anyone else? Within the constraints of professional decorum, be yourself —let students see who you are. Don’t overdo the “us vs. them” distinctions between professors and students. Unless you have compelling evidence to the contrary, convey the message that this is a joint enterprise and that their participation is a necessary ingredient if the class is to be all that you want it to be. Get discipline out of the way. The best way that I know to do that is set out the “rules of the course” (e.g., excused absences, penalties, if any, for turning in assignments late) and stick to those rules. Once those issues are fixed, you can concentrate on the enjoyable parts of teaching.
Jo Rae Wright
Professor, Cell Biology
I love to teach. It is one of the reasons I remain in academics. Nothing beats seeing someone “get it”—when that happens people’s eyes actually light up. The amazing thing is that if you explain something one way, some students will understand but others will not. The important thing is to try and keep thinking of ways to explain things from different perspectives. You just can’t predict what will drive the message home to every student.
When I began teaching, the most surprising thing was that I thought I really knew a topic, until I taught it out loud in front of a class. Then I very quickly realized what I did not understand: teaching is in itself the very, very best way to learn.
Departments and the Graduate School need to be creative in creating options for teaching experience—just grading exams and doing tutorials is not the same experience as giving a lecture. Graduate students need to be proactive in seeking teaching experiences and in finding mentors who will be supportive of the desire to teach. Make time to teach. For example, Duke now offers a teaching certificate in biology.
(This article originally appeared in The GRIND, Spring 2003 Issue)