On Discussing Teaching

During the academic year, the most consuming element of my professional life is my teaching. However, relatively little of that passion is reflected in these Impressions. Sometimes, I report a new insight or  approach that is the consequence of my class preps or, better yet, classroom discussion (as I note in the footnotes). But while I would be the last person to deny that I teach, in part, to learn new stuff -- and so I often teach material that I am willing to grapple with (anew or for the first time), the great mission and frequent joy of teaching is not just to convey certain material or knowledge, but also, perhaps primarily so, to help others develop themselves as thinkers, writers, reasoners, public speakers, citizens, and human beings. (The order is not necessarily the order of importance and not all of these are the proximate aim of each course.) I don't mean this just in an idealistic sense; except for the few occassions when my salary was de facto covered by a huge endowment or more directly by a research grant -- this covers a lot of my previous academic employment -- it also pays the bills. 

Long before I thought of myself as a would-be-researcher, I knew I wanted to become a college professor. The year after college, my IR teacher, Richard Eichenberg, Ike, (recall) asked me if I wanted TA a section of his Big Intro to IR course. I found it challenging and exhilerating to lead discussion and convey the course material in a way that the students could grasp it. It was not the first time I had to think really about the perspective of another (I had been dating), but it was the first time in which I had to think consciously about the perspective of many others at the same time. In graduate school, I volunteered to TA in my first year, and taught every year of graduate school. So, I have been teaching pretty much without interruption since 1994. It's cliché, but I always say to kids contemplating a career in academia, do try out teaching because while it definitely involves a set of skills and dispositions that can be acquired, if you don't like it you'll be unhappy quite a bit of the time.

Now, before I continue, I don't think of myself as an especially stellar teacher (recall here about my time at Wesleyan; and here my sense of my limitations as a PhD supervisor). And this post is not meant to be one of those let me be sage and share with you my philosophy of education pontifications. To use another cliche, I am still developing as a teacher, and I have, in fact, been confronted with my limitations (my lack of skills in some respects) by returning to a massive political science department after teaching (rather well prepared) philosophy students for most of my adult life. In fact there is no need for me to pontificate about my philosophy of education because there is quite a bit of that in the blogosphere already which relays best practices in teaching (syllabi, class room facilitation, the use of technology, life-long learning, etc.). There is also quite a bit of comraderie with teachers sharing the hilarity and horror that is routine in our jobs (about unread syllabi, mistakes on essays, the excuses for missed deadlines, etc.).

But there is very little, I feel, that does justice to my class room experience with my students  and all the ideosyncratic encounters that I have with them that are, apologies for the jargon, the essence of teaching and being taught as an educator. Because privacy laws and norms have become strict, the only reasonable stance, I feel, is reticence. But this comes at a price: I can't really discuss or write about in depth what I am most passionate about. (Of course, there is an omerta among direct colleagues, so one sometimes shares an annecdote.)

It's not that I think the privacy norms/laws are mistaken, but somewhere there should be a space to develop shared conversations about teaching students, who are not (thereby) reduced to learning outcomes and conversations where one not only focuses on the 'let me tell you what I do that works well [or not] on average with [my] students [or that has been shown to do so in some study]' or on 'how discussing the greats books with kids at selective colleges reinvigorates western civilization.' (All of which also has a place.) And, of course, there should be a place where we all learn from our model-colleagues whose teaching clearly promotes social justice, or combines activism with scholarship, and who we all can admire, but for many of us that's not -- I venture to submit -- really in accord with what we experience.

Now, in the interest of privacy, Freudian analysts disguise key biographical and identifying features of their patients in their case histories. I ignore here how successful they were in doing so; I have long toyed with adopting such a practice in order to discuss some of the more interesting and challenging teaching situations I have faced with friends and peers or in the writing about philosophy of education. But besides seeming pretentious, it also seems false to me -- cause I am not interested in cases or symptology; and, also, I have always had the suspicion that the Freudian move to disguise identifying features, ends up changing the substance of the matter.

Now, because teaching is self-justifying, I am not suggesting that the inability to have a sustained conversation about my particular experiences diminishes the teaching. But it does feel like something is missing that could be worthy.

So, it occurred to me to write this post and ask for suggestions on how you reflect on your experiences of/during/with teaching.

 

 

Comments

[George Gale]

I'm lucky: my wife is also a prof--not a philosopher, but she basically has a minor in philosophy because of her diss and her committee. We frequently talk in exactly the way you indicate, Eric.

Your wife may no be a prof, but surely you two talk over your teaching??

[Eric Schliesser]

Yes, you are right and she offers me invaluable perspective precisely because she is not a philosophy professor. (She was for many years an academic physician so did teach a lot of students.)