Teaching Philosophy

I have been greatly influenced by an author I began studying and came to consider my own teacher: Raimon Vidal de Besalù.  Raimon Vidal was a troubadour around the turn of the century, 12th to 13th that is.  He wrote the first "grammar" book of a Romance language as well as lyrics we have lost and narrative novas in which he included lyrical insertions.  One of the novas can actually be considered an ensenhamen because in it Raimon Vidal is approached by a joglar who seeks instruction from the master troubadour.  When writing my thesis for a D.E.A. at the Sorbonne (Paris IV) I began to notice that Raimon Vidal had a definite set of ideas regarding the value of courtly performance.  As I paid closer attention to the texts and the underlying philosophy that guides all of them a pedagogy came through the oeuvre.  I have attempted to outline this pedagogy of joglaria in an article that will be published soon.  En gros, Raimon Vidal suggests that one learns simply by watching, paying attention, discerning, noticing patterns, and classifying what one sees or deciding if the stimuli fit the norm as it has presented itself up til that point.  All of this will lead to a state of knowing, or saber.  It is a simple plan accessible to everyone, just as is song.  Song is then an opportunity to provide stimuli. Entertainers, singers are teachers according to Raimon Vidal.  They hook their students by starting out with juicy gossip or witty reparté.  Once the audience is listening the subtle introduction of teaching material is inserted.  I think my own teaching has come to follow much of what Raimon Vidal outlines. 

Participating actively in life is to observe what surrounds us, make assessments about what we see, and then act in accordance with the patterns or rules we have observed and discerned, that is, act wisely.  Anyone who walks into my classroom has already been practicing the sort of learning we will be doing in class together.  Education is a process and a collective one at that.  My goal is to bring the practices of observation and discernment to consciousness so as to allow for these practices to be strengthened and refined. 

In order to convey this philosophy to my students I allow them to consider and comment on their own notions of all the elements involved in their education.  This has been particularly invaluable to me as I have taught in a number of different settings in the United States and abroad.  I have learned from time abroad that our assumptions about the classroom play a large role in the workings of a classroom.  While in Europe I found the “banking” model of education is alive and well.  Students actually seem to prefer to sit with heads bowed over the page as they struggle to catch every last word spoken by their all-knowing professor who stands on a raised platform before them.  This implies something about knowledge, about the course material, and about learning itself.  I try to bring these underlying ideas to the fore. 

If I am in a language class I remind them that they have already successfully mastered the acquisition of a language and ask them to reflect on that experience and the similarities and differences they expect to find in learning a language in the classroom.  If I am teaching literature I ask them to define literature on their own, in writing.  It always starts the semester off with a bang; As Augustine says of time, everyone always seems to have an idea of what it is until asked to define it.  As a model for the day I follow the introduction to Terry Eagleton’s book, Literary Theory: An Introduction.  Sometimes I pull quotes from the text; at times I simply have the premise in mind.  The question inevitably draws us into a discussion of language and types of discourse but also questions of cultural identity and values.  In the first day the students have set the general parameters of enquiry for the rest of the semester.  My role is to model how best to pursue the questions that haunt us; to demonstrate the pleasure and satisfying products of rigor; and to point out the network— of which we are all a part—of resources available to one who wants to pursue knowledge.

            Because students are suddenly faced with the fact that they had a literary theory and that their classmates are in some sense challenging their theory, what follows is not only a course in literary figures and periods, but theory as well.  I am not really teaching theory alongside literature, instead the classroom experience is one of “theorized teaching”[1] and a sort of theorized learning.  As John Kucich says, “nothing engages a student more quickly than discovering that they all have latent theoretical assumptions.”[2]  The door has been opened onto the meta plane and we can explore how the theoretical assumptions of language, literature, poetry, etc. plays a significant role in the meaning of the text.  At this stage I try to inspire a bi-partite attack on the text.  We try to figure out the story of Phèdre but at the same time consider the value-system implied by such a fancy as a play written in rhymed alexandrines.  However, the very values implied by couplets can be found in the story being told.  The story makes more sense when we have uncovered the theoretical assumptions of the author by asking what the significance of a couplet might be.  For this reason you will find me using a table of the literary movements with boxes to be filled in with all their quirks and peculiarities.  It is not because I think literature boils down to such a static table, but instead because we can see, discern and categorize material.[3]  The categories are meaningful, not simply confining arbitrary boxes.  In some ways, this watered- down account of a class I taught in the Survey of Western Literature follows the assumptions and mimics the methods proposed by the communicative theory in second language acquisition. 

            My pedagogy and methodology courses at the University of Illinois focused on the importance of the communicative and contextual elements in language learning.  The lessons learned in this area have permeated my teaching of other sorts of discourses.  Reading and speaking about literature is like learning a language; the point is communication.  Learning a language is indeed dependant on communication, but the student can still benefit from the “meta” reflection found in my literature and religion courses.  In fact, I consistently surprise myself as I realize I am employing teaching methods normally used in the teaching of language in my lesson plans on the study of the Hebrew Bible or Montaigne.  When students of the Akedah, or the Sacrifice of Isaac listen to the biblical tale, a tale most know very well, they take in the input but are not expected to produce output.  My research largely focuses on the study of discourse and the appropriation of a discourse by new social groups or cultures.  This is, in a way, the output of different generations from different worlds.  Sometimes I ask the students to “produce output” by having them rewrite the Akedah; sometimes I have them first look at some of the versions produced in Medieval Spain or modern-day Israel.  What do discrepancies in telling the tale mean?  They hear and see the difference.  They sense it is meaningful, just as it is in the language classroom.  They understand that something has happened between the first telling of the tale and subsequent versions.  Literary detail, linguistic variances, crafted imagery signify.

            The days I have walked out of the classroom feeling the most elated have been those days when students have suddenly appropriated the discourse of the text or the discourse about the text in order to explain or mock or criticize the fraternity boy’s pick-up line, their mother’s worn out nagging, or the presidential debates.  In that instant the literature and our discussion of it has provided them with a means to comprehend and communicate the experience of their life; they have decided that literature communicates the human experience.