On the balance between me and the students in a survey course.
A few years back, I published an
article in the online journal Teaching American
Literature in which I discussed my ongoings efforts to balance
dictatorship and democracy—or, more exactly, teacher-provided contexts and
student-provided analyses—in the American Literature survey classroom. I always
begin my teaching from a student-centered framework, but had found that in my
survey courses in particular I too often felt that we hadn’t had a chance to
engage at all with key contexts, that by leaving things open to where the
students’ responses took us it felt as if we were having at best partial
conversations about our texts, authors, and related histories and issues. So I
had begun to develop strategies for adding such contexts without relying too
much—or ideally even at all—on lecturing and my voice to provide all the
details about them.
La lucha continua, and all of what I said in that article remains present
in my evolving thoughts and work. But I have to admit that this semester I took
things one step further, not throughout but in a certain crucial moment. We had
reached the fourth and last day with Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977),
and as always I wanted to make sure that we discussed the
culminating passage that I consider one of the most beautiful and important
in American literature. But for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t sure how many of
the students had had a chance to get to that point in the book: such
reading questions are always a potential limitation in my courses; we had
missed the important second class with the novel and had lost a good bit of
momentum as a result; our discussion on the third day had suggested to me that
almost no one in the class had managed to get into the novel’s second half, and/or
felt comfortable enough with the book to share their thoughts. And so, rather
than asking for their thoughts, I took our final few minutes of class and simply
read aloud and analyzed that culminating passage myself.
A part of me felt distinctly lousy about having done so, but I have to
admit that the larger part felt one definite and one possible positive thing.
The definite one was that I had made sure that everyone in the room was made
aware of this amazing passage, and of some of the many layers that make it so
complex and powerful. And the possible one was that my own thoughts on the
novel and passage—about which I’ve thought and written multiple times,
including in a chapter of my
next book, so I certainly had a lot to say and share—might have added
another layer to the class conversations and community, one that was as worth
sharing (not more so, but as) as those of my students. That is, I’ve tended to
think about a democratic classroom as one in which student voices provide our
central and structuring element—but perhaps the truest definition is one in
which all our voices, mine as well as
theirs, have a role to play. Given the power dynamics and differential, there’s
more to figure out about how to balance my voice with theirs, but this moment
and course have re-committed me to that process for sure.
Final recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. How was your spring semester?
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